If the telecom industry had not been regulated, people who lived in rural areas would have have gotten phone service. One might rationally argue along the lines of "Too damned bad. Move to town, ya hick.", but most people would not. The phone service is a utility, a vital one. As such the phone company was granted certain benefits (rights of way for the stringing and later, burying, of cable, for example). In exchange it agreed to wire rural areas. There's more involved than just that, but you get the idea. Without regulation, things would have been a mess, with consumers held hostage. Regulation can fix this scenario too. It's complicated though. You can't just telll the LD carriers "you must complete this call" if doing so costs them more than they charge. Likewise, the small rural phone companies must receive enough revenue to maintain their operation. And of course, wireless muddies things even further. The only way this is going to get fixed is if sane regulation is brought to bear.
...that 99.99% of/. readers don't get sarcasm unless it's tagged for them. This group would include, apparently, the submitter and editors. Oh, wait. She was actually serious...
And..., if one bother's to RTFA, one realizes that she's talking about the visuals. We are all agreed that the movie was a turd, but the visual art within it is not without merit. Too bad most of it was actually created by artists whose names only appear in the smallest print in the closing credits, but hey, she's an art critic and knows dick about how motion pictures like that are actually made.
Troll? Really? The payments Issa has taken from the telecom industry are a matter of public record, as are his votes on issues affecting that industry. How is it that observing these facts is "flagrant trolling"? Or are you in the habit of making unsubstantiated posts, e.g. trolls?
Is that why Fox news doesn't have liberals most of the time? They are considered so out of touch with reality that there isn't a need for their viewpoint anymore?
Funny how when I said the same thing it suddendly doesn't sound as great as when you said it? I guess censorship either way should be considered bad.
But we are not talking about "censorship", at all. No...., we do not have the "right" to say anything, at any time, anywhere. Arguments based on religion have no place in scientific discourse, nor in public policy deliberations. You may rant about The Flying Spaghetti Monster in the public square all you want, but you don't have the right to disrupt the business of others (scientists, policy makers, etc.) with your unrelated noise.
...because you are being misdirected. Issa is as slimy as they come and a paid whore for the telecom industry. Among the many disservices he's done for his constituents was voting for retroactive immunity for the phone companies (all of them, save QWest) who held the bag while various agencies violated our rights and spied on us without judicial supervision. If he's putting something as radical as this in place, there's a reason and you can bet that it's not something that is good for us.
Where are all these mysterious veterans at, and why can't I work with them? I know I'm young and experienced, that's why I *want* to learn from the *real* veterans.
In our experience, they are hard to find. Very hard. I suspect that they tend to find a place that appreciates their value and settle in. Another trait seldom found in younger workers, regardless of the level of their talent. The market place then, is made up of what's left.
One word - STFU. Want more? How about "no real world value". Don't believe us? Try paying your taxes with BitCoin. Try buying much of anything with it, for that matter. Yes, yes, we can all dig up a few sites that, for now, will exchange things of value for BitCoin, but to consider that number anything but a statistically meaningless fraction is a fool's errand.
Done to death. Move on.
If you consider their decision to not waste time (ours and theirs) with nonsense like giving air to "opposing viewpoints" as "alarmist", I suppose we could say that's the case. Most of us, however, don't consider the rantings of superstitious fools (or those of a particular political ax to grind) as "opposing viewpoints" in the arena of science. There are rules to that game, and "...because the Bible says..." does not qualify as "research". So, no. Your attempt to divert the discussion into a questioning of the BBC's credibility fails, this time. Nice try. Thanks for playing.
...Republican hypocrisy. They're all about "smaller government" until they want government to control this that group of people. And they wonder why they're being marginalized among people who actually appreciate the value of our civil rights.
But an incompetent Linux admin can cause far worse damage than an incompetent windows one.
[citation needed]
I have mod points but such a mindless blanket statement deserves more derision than just "-1 Flamebait" can convey. The potential for damage is more related to the depth and complexity of the systems, and to the administrator's skill, than the OS on which the systems are built? No?
If you seriously think it's unprovoked, you really need to read a history book. The conflict in the middle east goes back before written history, and all sides have been responsible for atrocities committed against the other. In recent memory, Israel has started as many wars as not.
It's not going to end until somebody decides that enough's enough and puts down the fucking gun. And since you seem to think that rational thought doesn't exist among the Palestinians, doesn't the onus lie on Israel?
I am well aware of the history. I am also well aware of current events. Millenia-old tribal beefs are something that those people, the whole fucking lot, need to put behind them. We agree on that, I suspect. Now tell me what justifies firing rockets at innocent civilians. See? Unprovoked and barbaric. A military response to such an act is not unprovoked. Get that part right.
Thousands have been launched towards Israel. Dozens have been hurt.
This kind of says it all, really... I wish I could find the reference at the moment, but I read somewhere a couple of years ago that most of the rockets that are being fired into Israel don't even have a payload, and are just empty shells.
So so do we, because until you do, you're arguments are bullshit. No, wait. They're bullshit anyway. Firing deadly missiles into civilian areas, unprovoked, is an inexcusable act of barbarism. The government of a proper civilized government would do what is necessary to stop such actions. Since none seems to exist in Gaza, Israel is left with little choice but to take on that responsibility.
A small group of terrorist scum ruined the lives of many on 9/11. A larger group of elected scum is making every last citizen a victim of that event, destroying not a few buildings, but an entire country.
It would be sad enough to have been a victim of 9/11. Hopefully those victim's don't know their deaths have been used to make everyone a victim of 9/11.
...but apparently the term "scientists" is now a weasel word. As in...
I think that after 10 years of debate, we can show that that there are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who have come over to being skeptics...
Well, which is it? Hundreds or thousands? Oh, you don't actually have any real evidence. It's "just a feeling", right? Whatever. Let's just, for the sake of argument, say that there are actually more than 1,199 "scientists" who are now skeptics. The last time someone cited some "scientist" skeptic as an authority on climate change, it was a geologist... (wait, it gets even better)...who works for the petroleum industry. Piss off, you little oil-industry whore.
On/.
How the hell is anything about Oprah news for nerds? And no, "news" about what tablet she may, or may not, use is not "stuff that matters". Millions of people use various different tablets. Which one Oprah uses means dick. Jesus wept.
Your glee is... misplaced. Since the paranoid responses to September 11 over a decade ago, both sides of the aisle can hang their heads in shame. The elected officials of both parties have pushed the power of government to interfere with our personal liberties on the promise of "keeping us safe". It's bullshit, of course, but to suggest that it is being shoveled by one party more than another is to ignore plain facts.
Finally - having just gone through a project with 3 oldsters pushing 50+ & three young guns just out of school (one a PHD & the other two youngsters Masters degree holders) I can tell you with certainty that the company took over a year recovering from the mistakes made by the newbies.
BS to the whole thing.
Precisely. Our shop is small, but I can tell you with certainty that most valuable developers are the oldest. Certainly, that's not a hard an fast rule - there are poor coders in all age groups, but the best young ones can't hold a candle to the best veterans. Not even close. Wisdom and knowledge are two different things. If I had a nickle for every time our most senior developer smiled wryly and shook his head when someone offered up some unworkable approach to this or that problem, I'd have a lot of nickles. The insight that allows him to immediately identify dead-ends is something that is born only from long experience. Sure, we'd all reach the same conclusion, eventually, but he's able to jump over the time-wasters because he's been down there.
Then there's the actual quality of his work. Generally speaking, he can to in n lines of well-documented and easy to follow code what it might take the new guys 1.5n, or more. That ability has value that doesn't show up well in most metrics.
...exactly like Texas, where we require textbook publishers to present as fact all kinds of religious nonsense and revisionist bullshit. Nice to see that other parts of the world are headed back to The Dark Ages too. I don't feel so alone now..
You apparently missed the bit where I said: it's on the government to make sure their contracts properly spell out their requirements
Didn't miss that part at all. You apparently missed the part where I said that the expertise to do exactly that will not come cheaply. It must be bought.
Quite right. Thanks for clarifying what I should have. Big legislation is driven by those who buy it, and those buyers have their whores on both sides of the aisle. It has always worked that way, pretty much, so don't look for that to change until the electorate wakes up and insists on instant run-off elections, public campaign financing and a Constitutional amendment that reverses "Citizens United". Meanwhile, the best we can hope for is that such dangerous legislation is argued over long and hard, so the media is forced to cover and more importantly, understand it, and the issues are made clear to the citizenry. It happened that way with SOPA. Let's hope it happens that way again.
While the internet had its roots in DARPA, the reality is that the "public infrastructure" is privately owned. Critical government systems should not be on it. Critical privately owned and operated services (power, telecom, etc.) should be hardened to the extent that the provider desires or the contracts that they signed with various municipalities require.
I've worked contract gigs with the armed services and I have a lot of respect for the technical skills they have, but that's irrelevant. Companies and businesses should be able to make their own decisions and benefit from their good decision making or suffer from their poor decision making. Anywhere that government intersects with private industry, it's on the government to make sure their contracts properly spell out their requirements. End of story.
While your reasoning is seductive, it is fundamentally flawed. The reality is that "government" buys a lot of it's services from private companies. That includes utilities like electricity and water, as well as networking services. While there a few three-letter federal agencies who can justify the expense and complexity of laying their own fiber/copper from place to place. Most can do no such thing, not even close, so they buy what they need from the carriers. Yes, yes, we all all know about the ways that networking over leased media, even over the public Internet, can be made reasonably secure. We also know that "secure" is a not a state, but rather a process. Lastly, we know that many, many of the "moving parts" on the Internet are not kept as secure as they might be.
All that said, I don't expect the federal government, much less Congress, to "get it right" when it comes to regulations regarding "cyber security". And I am seriously loathe to let those bastards write a blank check to their favorite campaign donors from the "cyber security" industry, but at some point we are going to have to spend serious money to make sure that the lights stay on, the cell towers still work, and that emergency services communications still function. The expertise to "properly spell out their requirements" does not come cheaply. It will have to be bought. The Republicans are blocking this because the right barrels aren't going to get enough pork, not because they don't appreciate the problem. Nor do they give a shit about our privacy. I just hope like hell that the debate is vigorous and involves people who actually know what they're talking about. Yeah, I know. I'm a dreamer.
Y'all are just a bunch of socialists. OooOOOoo! It's so cool to "share" Well that gravy train is pulling into the station, once and for all, comrade. RedHat may not be a good capitalist company like Microsoft, but at least they make you pay for their operating system. Yes sir, by gawd. It's great to see that some true-blue Amurican hardware companies are doing their patriotic duty to save American jobs in Redmond and... where is that they write that Linux thing again? Oh..., wait.
Slashdot Mirror
If the telecom industry had not been regulated, people who lived in rural areas would have have gotten phone service. One might rationally argue along the lines of "Too damned bad. Move to town, ya hick.", but most people would not. The phone service is a utility, a vital one. As such the phone company was granted certain benefits (rights of way for the stringing and later, burying, of cable, for example). In exchange it agreed to wire rural areas. There's more involved than just that, but you get the idea. Without regulation, things would have been a mess, with consumers held hostage. Regulation can fix this scenario too. It's complicated though. You can't just telll the LD carriers "you must complete this call" if doing so costs them more than they charge. Likewise, the small rural phone companies must receive enough revenue to maintain their operation. And of course, wireless muddies things even further. The only way this is going to get fixed is if sane regulation is brought to bear.
...that 99.99% of /. readers don't get sarcasm unless it's tagged for them. This group would include, apparently, the submitter and editors. Oh, wait. She was actually serious...
And..., if one bother's to RTFA, one realizes that she's talking about the visuals. We are all agreed that the movie was a turd, but the visual art within it is not without merit. Too bad most of it was actually created by artists whose names only appear in the smallest print in the closing credits, but hey, she's an art critic and knows dick about how motion pictures like that are actually made.
Troll? Really? The payments Issa has taken from the telecom industry are a matter of public record, as are his votes on issues affecting that industry. How is it that observing these facts is "flagrant trolling"? Or are you in the habit of making unsubstantiated posts, e.g. trolls?
Is that why Fox news doesn't have liberals most of the time? They are considered so out of touch with reality that there isn't a need for their viewpoint anymore?
Funny how when I said the same thing it suddendly doesn't sound as great as when you said it? I guess censorship either way should be considered bad.
But we are not talking about "censorship", at all. No...., we do not have the "right" to say anything, at any time, anywhere. Arguments based on religion have no place in scientific discourse, nor in public policy deliberations. You may rant about The Flying Spaghetti Monster in the public square all you want, but you don't have the right to disrupt the business of others (scientists, policy makers, etc.) with your unrelated noise.
If Issa is behind it, it's good for the telecom industry players who pull his strings.
...because you are being misdirected. Issa is as slimy as they come and a paid whore for the telecom industry. Among the many disservices he's done for his constituents was voting for retroactive immunity for the phone companies (all of them, save QWest) who held the bag while various agencies violated our rights and spied on us without judicial supervision. If he's putting something as radical as this in place, there's a reason and you can bet that it's not something that is good for us.
Right. And.... the terrorists win. Again. God damn it. When will we stop being such fearful little pussies?
Where are all these mysterious veterans at, and why can't I work with them? I know I'm young and experienced, that's why I *want* to learn from the *real* veterans.
In our experience, they are hard to find. Very hard. I suspect that they tend to find a place that appreciates their value and settle in. Another trait seldom found in younger workers, regardless of the level of their talent. The market place then, is made up of what's left.
One word - STFU. Want more? How about "no real world value". Don't believe us? Try paying your taxes with BitCoin. Try buying much of anything with it, for that matter. Yes, yes, we can all dig up a few sites that, for now, will exchange things of value for BitCoin, but to consider that number anything but a statistically meaningless fraction is a fool's errand.
Done to death. Move on.
If you consider their decision to not waste time (ours and theirs) with nonsense like giving air to "opposing viewpoints" as "alarmist", I suppose we could say that's the case. Most of us, however, don't consider the rantings of superstitious fools (or those of a particular political ax to grind) as "opposing viewpoints" in the arena of science. There are rules to that game, and "...because the Bible says..." does not qualify as "research". So, no. Your attempt to divert the discussion into a questioning of the BBC's credibility fails, this time. Nice try. Thanks for playing.
...Republican hypocrisy. They're all about "smaller government" until they want government to control this that group of people. And they wonder why they're being marginalized among people who actually appreciate the value of our civil rights.
But an incompetent Linux admin can cause far worse damage than an incompetent windows one.
[citation needed]
I have mod points but such a mindless blanket statement deserves more derision than just "-1 Flamebait" can convey. The potential for damage is more related to the depth and complexity of the systems, and to the administrator's skill, than the OS on which the systems are built? No?
If you seriously think it's unprovoked, you really need to read a history book. The conflict in the middle east goes back before written history, and all sides have been responsible for atrocities committed against the other. In recent memory, Israel has started as many wars as not.
It's not going to end until somebody decides that enough's enough and puts down the fucking gun. And since you seem to think that rational thought doesn't exist among the Palestinians, doesn't the onus lie on Israel?
I am well aware of the history. I am also well aware of current events. Millenia-old tribal beefs are something that those people, the whole fucking lot, need to put behind them. We agree on that, I suspect. Now tell me what justifies firing rockets at innocent civilians. See? Unprovoked and barbaric. A military response to such an act is not unprovoked. Get that part right.
Thousands have been launched towards Israel. Dozens have been hurt.
This kind of says it all, really... I wish I could find the reference at the moment, but I read somewhere a couple of years ago that most of the rockets that are being fired into Israel don't even have a payload, and are just empty shells.
So so do we, because until you do, you're arguments are bullshit. No, wait. They're bullshit anyway. Firing deadly missiles into civilian areas, unprovoked, is an inexcusable act of barbarism. The government of a proper civilized government would do what is necessary to stop such actions. Since none seems to exist in Gaza, Israel is left with little choice but to take on that responsibility.
A small group of terrorist scum ruined the lives of many on 9/11. A larger group of elected scum is making every last citizen a victim of that event, destroying not a few buildings, but an entire country.
It would be sad enough to have been a victim of 9/11. Hopefully those victim's don't know their deaths have been used to make everyone a victim of 9/11.
Well said. The terrorists have won.
...but apparently the term "scientists" is now a weasel word. As in... ...who works for the petroleum industry. Piss off, you little oil-industry whore.
I think that after 10 years of debate, we can show that that there are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who have come over to being skeptics...
Well, which is it? Hundreds or thousands? Oh, you don't actually have any real evidence. It's "just a feeling", right? Whatever. Let's just, for the sake of argument, say that there are actually more than 1,199 "scientists" who are now skeptics. The last time someone cited some "scientist" skeptic as an authority on climate change, it was a geologist... (wait, it gets even better)
On /.
How the hell is anything about Oprah news for nerds? And no, "news" about what tablet she may, or may not, use is not "stuff that matters". Millions of people use various different tablets. Which one Oprah uses means dick.
Jesus wept.
Your glee is... misplaced. Since the paranoid responses to September 11 over a decade ago, both sides of the aisle can hang their heads in shame. The elected officials of both parties have pushed the power of government to interfere with our personal liberties on the promise of "keeping us safe". It's bullshit, of course, but to suggest that it is being shoveled by one party more than another is to ignore plain facts.
...can it make popcorn?
Finally - having just gone through a project with 3 oldsters pushing 50+ & three young guns just out of school (one a PHD & the other two youngsters Masters degree holders) I can tell you with certainty that the company took over a year recovering from the mistakes made by the newbies.
BS to the whole thing.
Precisely. Our shop is small, but I can tell you with certainty that most valuable developers are the oldest. Certainly, that's not a hard an fast rule - there are poor coders in all age groups, but the best young ones can't hold a candle to the best veterans. Not even close. Wisdom and knowledge are two different things. If I had a nickle for every time our most senior developer smiled wryly and shook his head when someone offered up some unworkable approach to this or that problem, I'd have a lot of nickles. The insight that allows him to immediately identify dead-ends is something that is born only from long experience. Sure, we'd all reach the same conclusion, eventually, but he's able to jump over the time-wasters because he's been down there.
Then there's the actual quality of his work. Generally speaking, he can to in n lines of well-documented and easy to follow code what it might take the new guys 1.5n, or more. That ability has value that doesn't show up well in most metrics.
...exactly like Texas, where we require textbook publishers to present as fact all kinds of religious nonsense and revisionist bullshit. Nice to see that other parts of the world are headed back to The Dark Ages too. I don't feel so alone now..
You apparently missed the bit where I said: it's on the government to make sure their contracts properly spell out their requirements
Didn't miss that part at all. You apparently missed the part where I said that the expertise to do exactly that will not come cheaply. It must be bought.
Quite right. Thanks for clarifying what I should have. Big legislation is driven by those who buy it, and those buyers have their whores on both sides of the aisle. It has always worked that way, pretty much, so don't look for that to change until the electorate wakes up and insists on instant run-off elections, public campaign financing and a Constitutional amendment that reverses "Citizens United". Meanwhile, the best we can hope for is that such dangerous legislation is argued over long and hard, so the media is forced to cover and more importantly, understand it, and the issues are made clear to the citizenry. It happened that way with SOPA. Let's hope it happens that way again.
While the internet had its roots in DARPA, the reality is that the "public infrastructure" is privately owned. Critical government systems should not be on it. Critical privately owned and operated services (power, telecom, etc.) should be hardened to the extent that the provider desires or the contracts that they signed with various municipalities require.
I've worked contract gigs with the armed services and I have a lot of respect for the technical skills they have, but that's irrelevant. Companies and businesses should be able to make their own decisions and benefit from their good decision making or suffer from their poor decision making. Anywhere that government intersects with private industry, it's on the government to make sure their contracts properly spell out their requirements. End of story.
While your reasoning is seductive, it is fundamentally flawed. The reality is that "government" buys a lot of it's services from private companies. That includes utilities like electricity and water, as well as networking services. While there a few three-letter federal agencies who can justify the expense and complexity of laying their own fiber/copper from place to place. Most can do no such thing, not even close, so they buy what they need from the carriers. Yes, yes, we all all know about the ways that networking over leased media, even over the public Internet, can be made reasonably secure. We also know that "secure" is a not a state, but rather a process. Lastly, we know that many, many of the "moving parts" on the Internet are not kept as secure as they might be.
All that said, I don't expect the federal government, much less Congress, to "get it right" when it comes to regulations regarding "cyber security". And I am seriously loathe to let those bastards write a blank check to their favorite campaign donors from the "cyber security" industry, but at some point we are going to have to spend serious money to make sure that the lights stay on, the cell towers still work, and that emergency services communications still function. The expertise to "properly spell out their requirements" does not come cheaply. It will have to be bought. The Republicans are blocking this because the right barrels aren't going to get enough pork, not because they don't appreciate the problem. Nor do they give a shit about our privacy. I just hope like hell that the debate is vigorous and involves people who actually know what they're talking about. Yeah, I know. I'm a dreamer.
Y'all are just a bunch of socialists. OooOOOoo! It's so cool to "share" Well that gravy train is pulling into the station, once and for all, comrade. RedHat may not be a good capitalist company like Microsoft, but at least they make you pay for their operating system. Yes sir, by gawd. It's great to see that some true-blue Amurican hardware companies are doing their patriotic duty to save American jobs in Redmond and... where is that they write that Linux thing again? Oh..., wait.