If you're not familiar with it, Everclear seems like strange stuff. It's not even universally available in the U.S. as some jurisdictions effectively outlaw it.
However, almost nobody (I say "almost" because I'm sure there's one crazy idiot out there) drinks it straight. It's always mixed.
When I was in high school, the fun party drink involved cutting a hole in a watermelon, pouring in a bottle of Everclear, then refrigerating the whole thing for a few hours to let it soak. Then you bring it out at the party, poke in a few straws, and people take turns sucking down the intoxicating slush inside.
Yeah, changing passwords frequently just makes for lower-quality passwords.
My solution on systems I admin (that's my home stuff, basically) is to use a ridiculously high-quality password and never change it. I think people can memorize anything as long as they know they're not going to have to throw it away in 2 or 6 months and do it all again.
I've used the same password for my last 5 systems at home. With over 60 characters (including lowercase and caps; various punctuation; selections from the extended ASCII character set; and no words from the dictionary), it looks like total gobbledygook. Yet I'll know it forever.
On his blog, Ken Rockwell decried the lack of serious photographic hobbyists who actually take pictures. Most of them just buy equipment and geek out over it. He referred to photography as just something that, to paraphrase, "guys do on their computers in between porn sessions."
True that.
How many guys go looking for porn from time to time? A *very* high percentage. And does the search for porn lead to the dangerous back alleys of the 'net? Yep. The relatively lower number of viruses and other malware targeted at all flavors of Linux is a *major* selling point.
If I were setting up a computer for someone who even occasionally looks for porn online, I'd choose Ubuntu over Windows in a heartbeat.
Now, seriously, what percentage of the population do you think falls into that "occasionally looks for porn" demographic? Linux should have at least that big a market share.
It's a clumsy reference but I think the GGP (or is it GGGP? I've lost track...) makes a valid point.
He's saying that a child could be born and grow to an age where s/he could procreate before a patent runs out. It's like saying "Once in a blue moon" to indicate that something happens rarely or only after a long time.
Then the thought occurred to him that a person could be a parent at some ridiculously young age that's far shorter than the amount of time for a patent to run out. Thus, he threw in that "legally" word to indicate that the span of time he's referencing is even longer.
As I said, it was a clumsy reference. However, it seemed pretty clear to me from the outset.
If I pay money to post, am I allowed to post whatever I want?
Presumably, everyone who can qualify via cc is an adult, so will there be any moderation for language or general douchebaggery? After all, if you pay to be there, shouldn't you be able to say whatever you want?
I'm sure some people would love to have a forum where they don't have to watch their language and can speak as strongly as they wish, knowing that only people committed enough to pay money are able to involve themselves in the conversation.
Either this newspaper has a workable idea or they've found a way to remove from their posters everyone except the few who are totally dedicated to being jerks and will go so far as to pay for the privilege. And they'll probably pay via anonymous gift card with a plausible but entirely fake name and address.:-)
An Aggie* comes home to find his wife in bed with another man. He pulls out a pistol and points it at his own head. His wife screams "No, don't do it!" The Aggie replies "Just wait; you're next."
* - Footnote for people not from Texas - Students at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M) University are called Aggies and are the subject of endless jokes insulting their intelligence.
The root causes of World War II can be found with the policies enacted by the governments involved with World War I,...
I'm not going to say you're flat wrong. There were lots of factors.
Do not discount, however, the biggest one. IMO, the main reason Germany was willing to start up WWII is that they never lost WWI. The Treaty of Versailles wasn't all that bad but the Germans chafed mightily under it. They came to feel they were oppressed and needed to push back against the world. Why?
For the same reason that Afghanistan is the "graveyard of empires". The enemey, whoever they are, will keep coming back until you defeat them. You defeat the enemy by...errr...DEFEATING them. You lay waste to their homes. You destroy their way of life. And you do so in such a complete fashion that the enemy comes to believe that it's all their fault. The enemy must be convinced that they are not only defeated but that they brought it upon themselves. They have to learn, collectively and deeply, that *they* screwed up when they started hostilities. Once you do that, those people, those former enemies, will realize down deep in their hearts that starting another war is a bad thing.
Has anyone ever defeated Afghan forces? Hell, no. They just melt away into the mountains and live to fight another day. Because their infrastructure is never destroyed and their homeland never fully raped, they never feel they've lost. They never learn their lesson.
The same thing was true of Germany at the end of WWI. The French, British and Americans never chased the Germans all the way home, never broke up the place, never taught the Germans what it was to lose. In fact, at the end of hostilities no Allied soldiers had yet set foot in the German homeland.
That's not a defeat. That's a time-out. The German people felt humiliated. They felt like they'd been stabbed in the back. But they never felt they'd been defeated. They never felt they'd screwed up. They never had the will to fight beaten out of them.
After a couple of decades of timeout, the game started again. Only the true defeat that was finally imposed on Germany at the end of WWII made it a reasonable bet that hostilities won't be starting up again anytime soon.
Don' you in the US have some laws that prevent your authorities from randomly seizing property?
Theoretically, yes.
Practically, no.
Actually, in a previous career I seized quite a bit of property. The bar to get over, depending on the particular laws in play and the agency you work for, is usually pretty darn low.
I can understand the history of ticket distribution. I liked it back in the 1970s when I could go to a record store before it opened in the morning and score third row tickets for face value. Those times are long gone. And they weren't perfect, either. Shenanigans happened in the old days, too. I'll never forget being first in line, circa 1980, at the Astrodome to buy tickets to a Heart concert at the Summit. (Things were weird during the transition to centralized sales.) Tickets went on sale at the Dome an hour before anywhere else. As I approached the line, there were already two people in line who had somehow been allowed inside before the gate opened to the public. They bought every single floor ticket, every single ticket in the first tier. I literally had to run out of there before I gave in to an overpowering urge to (I'm serious, here) kill the broker who turned to me with hundreds of tickets under his arm and offered to sell me one.
Nowadays, though, online sales have the potential to make scalpers obsolete. Why don't venues scalp their own tickets?
Set the face value of the ticket at USD$10K. Put them on sale at that price 6 weeks before the event. Then discount the price a bit more each day as the event draws nigh. Finally, when the event starts, price the rest at next-to-nothing.
All the tickets will sell at the prices people are willing to pay. There's no artificial scarcity created by the fact that brokers have bought up every single ticket in less than a minute after they went on sale. The tickets dribble out at maximum profit with minimal negative impact on the fans. The potential for the venue to under-report sales and rip off the record companies/artists should be minimal if some form of third-party oversight can be agreed upon.
If you do that at my workplace, a couple of very serious men with badges, guns, and a laptop running Red Hat will momentarily be walking around your work area. They'll find it in short order. I'd rather not throw away my career, thank you.
Do you get so misty-eyed for his car's license plate?
No, I don't. License plates are ubiquitous. They're so common, they've lost their "specialness."
Early call signs, though, were issued to pioneers who had a huge impact on society. Yet, hams have never become so common that we've lost all notion of them as a pioneering lot to the masses who came after them.
It's not just govt-issued, IDs, either. If you've got a low-number Peter Lugar charge card, you expect a bit more respect. Until they started becoming fungible, 4-digit Slashdot IDs were considered something special. If your IHMSA member number is 39 (Hi, Clyde!) and you're still competing, you can expect that your fellow competitors will show you a bit of deference. (My IHMSA number is just under 5000. When I sign in at a match, it's not unusual to be greated with a low "Oh, wow!" from the person taking my registration. You can imagine the sort of deference we show Clyde.)
This is a common phenomenon. I wouldn't call it "misty-eyed" so much as "sensitive to history" and "perfectly understandable".
...call sign is assigned when they get their licence...
Yes, but.
It bugs me that call signs are re-used. Olaf Pearson (I will not vouch for the spelling) was a friend of my fathers. He was actually employed, as a kid, in Marconi's workshop. His house in Mobile, Alabama had a room that might as well have been a radio museum when I met him some 35 or 40 years ago. He was absolutely ancient even then but it was a delight to watch him light up as he demonstrated a radio he'd built using a 5-gallon Leyden jar; the discharge of that oversized capacitor (just a burst of static, really) was used to send morse. (After a short demo, he let loose an ominous chuckle and said "We probably just knocked out TV and radio reception for a 5-mile radius!")
His call sign was W4NU; I still have one of his cards. Olaf is long since dead and someone else now has that call sign.
It always felt wrong to me that those early call signs weren't retired as the pioneers passed on.
Two caveats - The referenced study was done in 2006 and I'm sure the number has gone up since then. Also, when you add in the countries like India, China, and muslim states where all porn is illegal, then it's true that for the majority of people in the world, child porn is illegal.
However, it's completely erroneous to say that "nations have mostly decided...child porn...(is) not to be allowed". Child porn is more or less legal in most nations.
...if there truly was a creator-being, it would encompass all that is science, and wouldn't require the Earth to be only 6000 years old.
That creator would fall into the realm of completely unknowable... I'm not sure the human brain could wrap itself around what that would really imply...
...I've known people with degrees in astrophysics who were quite religious,... For them, there existed no dichotomy between god and science.
I'm the grandson of a hardshell Baptist evangelist, a tent-meeting, laying-on-of-hands, speaking-in-tongues, rural Mississippi backwoods preacher. His son, my dad, believed as he was taught by his father. And I believe as I was taught by that legacy.
I was probably 30 years old before I first heard (and was completely shocked by) someone who said that Bible teachings trumped science.
Man, I tell you, I was floored. I had come from a tradition completely lacking in formal education that, nevertheless, accepted the notion that God gave us brains to figure things out and that if we found some sort of conflict between the Bible and the way the universe worked, it was our perception that was screwed up. Not the Bible. Not the science. The problem must lay with our inability to understand how the two are *never* in conflict. It's our perception that's the problem. We may mis-read the Bible. We may screw up an experiment and theorize in a faulty way. But we can learn to overcome those mistakes and, when we do, we will always find that the Bible and science never contradict each other.
In fact, to the folks who raised me, a "miracle of God" and an "amazing scientific discovery" were, often, pretty much the same thing.
In recent years, I've come to understand that some folks use their faith in God to justify anti-science attitudes. Some folks user their faith to justify spouting irrational, politically-motivated and all-too-often hateful rhetoric. And I've learned that such folks are far more common than I would have believed as a youth.
I'd apologize on their behalf, but I fear they might burn me at the stake.
I don't write code so I would have never thought of those things. You're right; those are nice bits of useful functionality (as long as we don't pay too high a price in speed or security - but that's another discussion).
If you still see websites as just online magazines then I guess you're somewhat stuck in the 1990's.
I am, I suppose, well behind the times. Some years ago, websites were able to publish information and update the databases they sat in front of (to do things like take orders for merchandise or carry on a conversation), all over secure connections. Thus, in the beginning the web established usefulness as a publishing medium. Then it was a tool to get things done.
Since then, pretty much everything I've seen in various "WebX.0" applications has done the same stuff in different ways.
So...beyond what we had years ago, what sorts of "interactivity" actually serve a useful purpose?
I'm not trying to be an obtuse old man. Seriously, I'd like to know. Maybe there's some really useful thing that I should be doing via the web that I'm not doing now. But I can't really think of what that might be and I'd like some help to figure it out. What new interactivity justifies the visual pollution and system crud that are (apparently) required to make use of it?
Note - "Mobile" apps don't count. I can understand why I might need some specialized program when I'm trying to get something done while moving around. I haven't bought into the "I live through my smartphone" lifestyle, though. I'm asking about things that are useful to me when I sit down at my desktop computer.
There are a few countries out there (small ones with governments designed to be ineffective) where it is possible to exist (for brief periods of time) in a legally guilt-free state.
Cite, please.
I'm serious; I'm retiring soon and I'd put such countries on my list of residence options.
Furthermore, what are rapists/pedophiles/molesters/gang members doing on the streets after being arrested for a crime?
Maybe it's because half of the four things you cite aren't crimes and thus shouldn't bear on the question of whether someone who has been arrested for a crime, any crime, should be denied bail or parole.
Rapists and molesters have harmed someone and broken a law (presumably) and should go to jail for a long time.
Pedophiles are people that think inappropriate dirty thoughts about little kids. Until they actually become molesters, they haven't hurt anybody. Their status as creeps shouldn't bear on the grant of bail or parole.
And gang members? That's not a crime and shouldn't be considered, either. To quote a city councilman in Houston when the city was debating an anti-gang ordinance: "Show me a definition of 'gang' that doesn't apply to the Boy Scouts and I'll consider voting aye."
Not new, but certainly different nowadays
on
Employee Monitoring
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· Score: 1
Sysadmins should not be asked to take on the responsibility of watching employees; that is a manager's responsibility.
I disagree. It's the function of a security professional. It's the function of someone who has no axe to grind with the employee, who can be impartial, and who, at best, moves in an entirely different world from the employee. Las Vegas casino security employees don't, for example, fraternize with the frontline employees.
Monitoring needs to be fair for a whole bunch of reasons that should be obvious and don't bear wasting time on in this post. Fairness, however, is difficult to achieve when the person doing the monitoring is known to or works with the employee.
If the manager is not technically competent to monitor computer use, then there is a question of why that person is managing people who use computers for their work -- the manager should be competent with the equipment.
Again, I disagree, and not just with the notion that the manager is doing the monitoring. Fair monitoring requires a statistically valid sample of data (something most managers can't figure out) to be reviewed by someone who doesn't know anything about the employee (again, removing managers from consideration) and this is best done with some rather esoteric sampling and reviewing tools. Asking a manager to learn such tools is a silly distraction from their core duties.
If the monitoring function turns up something interesting, then and only then should managers become involved. At that point, managers consult with monitors and provide their feedback on whether the situation is a harmless part of the job, worth more extensive monitoring, or cause for action. Making judgements like that is what managers do; not staring at a terminal trying to decide if a sample of web pages accessed is part of their employees valid duties.
Of course, managers also monitor job performance. If an employee is performing suboptimally and the manager suspects computer misuse, then that manager should be able to drop a note to the security function and request heightened monitoring. Actually *doing* the monitoring, however, should still remain a task done by someone outside the regular work-process loop.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not familiar with it, Everclear seems like strange stuff. It's not even universally available in the U.S. as some jurisdictions effectively outlaw it.
However, almost nobody (I say "almost" because I'm sure there's one crazy idiot out there) drinks it straight. It's always mixed.
When I was in high school, the fun party drink involved cutting a hole in a watermelon, pouring in a bottle of Everclear, then refrigerating the whole thing for a few hours to let it soak. Then you bring it out at the party, poke in a few straws, and people take turns sucking down the intoxicating slush inside.
My solution on systems I admin (that's my home stuff, basically) is to use a ridiculously high-quality password and never change it. I think people can memorize anything as long as they know they're not going to have to throw it away in 2 or 6 months and do it all again.
I've used the same password for my last 5 systems at home. With over 60 characters (including lowercase and caps; various punctuation; selections from the extended ASCII character set; and no words from the dictionary), it looks like total gobbledygook. Yet I'll know it forever.
On his blog, Ken Rockwell decried the lack of serious photographic hobbyists who actually take pictures. Most of them just buy equipment and geek out over it. He referred to photography as just something that, to paraphrase, "guys do on their computers in between porn sessions."
True that.
How many guys go looking for porn from time to time? A *very* high percentage. And does the search for porn lead to the dangerous back alleys of the 'net? Yep. The relatively lower number of viruses and other malware targeted at all flavors of Linux is a *major* selling point.
If I were setting up a computer for someone who even occasionally looks for porn online, I'd choose Ubuntu over Windows in a heartbeat.
Now, seriously, what percentage of the population do you think falls into that "occasionally looks for porn" demographic? Linux should have at least that big a market share.
It's a clumsy reference but I think the GGP (or is it GGGP? I've lost track...) makes a valid point.
He's saying that a child could be born and grow to an age where s/he could procreate before a patent runs out. It's like saying "Once in a blue moon" to indicate that something happens rarely or only after a long time.
Then the thought occurred to him that a person could be a parent at some ridiculously young age that's far shorter than the amount of time for a patent to run out. Thus, he threw in that "legally" word to indicate that the span of time he's referencing is even longer.
As I said, it was a clumsy reference. However, it seemed pretty clear to me from the outset.
If I pay money to post, am I allowed to post whatever I want?
Presumably, everyone who can qualify via cc is an adult, so will there be any moderation for language or general douchebaggery? After all, if you pay to be there, shouldn't you be able to say whatever you want?
I'm sure some people would love to have a forum where they don't have to watch their language and can speak as strongly as they wish, knowing that only people committed enough to pay money are able to involve themselves in the conversation.
Either this newspaper has a workable idea or they've found a way to remove from their posters everyone except the few who are totally dedicated to being jerks and will go so far as to pay for the privilege. And they'll probably pay via anonymous gift card with a plausible but entirely fake name and address. :-)
An Aggie* comes home to find his wife in bed with another man. He pulls out a pistol and points it at his own head. His wife screams "No, don't do it!" The Aggie replies "Just wait; you're next."
* - Footnote for people not from Texas - Students at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M) University are called Aggies and are the subject of endless jokes insulting their intelligence.
Here's a story about a video card and I don't see any posts on how it works with Linux.
And the number of "new, weird and/or funky Linux distro" stories has fallen to less than one per week. There used to be two a day.
My, how times have changed.
I'm not going to say you're flat wrong. There were lots of factors.
Do not discount, however, the biggest one. IMO, the main reason Germany was willing to start up WWII is that they never lost WWI. The Treaty of Versailles wasn't all that bad but the Germans chafed mightily under it. They came to feel they were oppressed and needed to push back against the world. Why?
For the same reason that Afghanistan is the "graveyard of empires". The enemey, whoever they are, will keep coming back until you defeat them. You defeat the enemy by...errr...DEFEATING them. You lay waste to their homes. You destroy their way of life. And you do so in such a complete fashion that the enemy comes to believe that it's all their fault. The enemy must be convinced that they are not only defeated but that they brought it upon themselves. They have to learn, collectively and deeply, that *they* screwed up when they started hostilities. Once you do that, those people, those former enemies, will realize down deep in their hearts that starting another war is a bad thing.
Has anyone ever defeated Afghan forces? Hell, no. They just melt away into the mountains and live to fight another day. Because their infrastructure is never destroyed and their homeland never fully raped, they never feel they've lost. They never learn their lesson.
The same thing was true of Germany at the end of WWI. The French, British and Americans never chased the Germans all the way home, never broke up the place, never taught the Germans what it was to lose. In fact, at the end of hostilities no Allied soldiers had yet set foot in the German homeland.
That's not a defeat. That's a time-out. The German people felt humiliated. They felt like they'd been stabbed in the back. But they never felt they'd been defeated. They never felt they'd screwed up. They never had the will to fight beaten out of them.
After a couple of decades of timeout, the game started again. Only the true defeat that was finally imposed on Germany at the end of WWII made it a reasonable bet that hostilities won't be starting up again anytime soon.
Theoretically, yes.
Practically, no.
Actually, in a previous career I seized quite a bit of property. The bar to get over, depending on the particular laws in play and the agency you work for, is usually pretty darn low.
I can understand the history of ticket distribution. I liked it back in the 1970s when I could go to a record store before it opened in the morning and score third row tickets for face value. Those times are long gone. And they weren't perfect, either. Shenanigans happened in the old days, too. I'll never forget being first in line, circa 1980, at the Astrodome to buy tickets to a Heart concert at the Summit. (Things were weird during the transition to centralized sales.) Tickets went on sale at the Dome an hour before anywhere else. As I approached the line, there were already two people in line who had somehow been allowed inside before the gate opened to the public. They bought every single floor ticket, every single ticket in the first tier. I literally had to run out of there before I gave in to an overpowering urge to (I'm serious, here) kill the broker who turned to me with hundreds of tickets under his arm and offered to sell me one.
Nowadays, though, online sales have the potential to make scalpers obsolete. Why don't venues scalp their own tickets?
Set the face value of the ticket at USD$10K. Put them on sale at that price 6 weeks before the event. Then discount the price a bit more each day as the event draws nigh. Finally, when the event starts, price the rest at next-to-nothing.
All the tickets will sell at the prices people are willing to pay. There's no artificial scarcity created by the fact that brokers have bought up every single ticket in less than a minute after they went on sale. The tickets dribble out at maximum profit with minimal negative impact on the fans. The potential for the venue to under-report sales and rip off the record companies/artists should be minimal if some form of third-party oversight can be agreed upon.
What's not to love?
Peruse this for an idea of what you might be getting yourself into.
If you do that at my workplace, a couple of very serious men with badges, guns, and a laptop running Red Hat will momentarily be walking around your work area. They'll find it in short order. I'd rather not throw away my career, thank you.
No, I don't. License plates are ubiquitous. They're so common, they've lost their "specialness."
Early call signs, though, were issued to pioneers who had a huge impact on society. Yet, hams have never become so common that we've lost all notion of them as a pioneering lot to the masses who came after them.
It's not just govt-issued, IDs, either. If you've got a low-number Peter Lugar charge card, you expect a bit more respect. Until they started becoming fungible, 4-digit Slashdot IDs were considered something special. If your IHMSA member number is 39 (Hi, Clyde!) and you're still competing, you can expect that your fellow competitors will show you a bit of deference. (My IHMSA number is just under 5000. When I sign in at a match, it's not unusual to be greated with a low "Oh, wow!" from the person taking my registration. You can imagine the sort of deference we show Clyde.)
This is a common phenomenon. I wouldn't call it "misty-eyed" so much as "sensitive to history" and "perfectly understandable".
Yes, but.
It bugs me that call signs are re-used. Olaf Pearson (I will not vouch for the spelling) was a friend of my fathers. He was actually employed, as a kid, in Marconi's workshop. His house in Mobile, Alabama had a room that might as well have been a radio museum when I met him some 35 or 40 years ago. He was absolutely ancient even then but it was a delight to watch him light up as he demonstrated a radio he'd built using a 5-gallon Leyden jar; the discharge of that oversized capacitor (just a burst of static, really) was used to send morse. (After a short demo, he let loose an ominous chuckle and said "We probably just knocked out TV and radio reception for a 5-mile radius!")
His call sign was W4NU; I still have one of his cards. Olaf is long since dead and someone else now has that call sign.
It always felt wrong to me that those early call signs weren't retired as the pioneers passed on.
"...lawmakers of various nations have mostly decided that ... child porn... (is) not to be allowed..."
No.
According to the only NGO that does any serious research on the subject, The International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, only 5 nations in the world specifically and completely outlaw child porn.
Two caveats - The referenced study was done in 2006 and I'm sure the number has gone up since then. Also, when you add in the countries like India, China, and muslim states where all porn is illegal, then it's true that for the majority of people in the world, child porn is illegal.
However, it's completely erroneous to say that "nations have mostly decided...child porn...(is) not to be allowed". Child porn is more or less legal in most nations.
I'm the grandson of a hardshell Baptist evangelist, a tent-meeting, laying-on-of-hands, speaking-in-tongues, rural Mississippi backwoods preacher. His son, my dad, believed as he was taught by his father. And I believe as I was taught by that legacy.
I was probably 30 years old before I first heard (and was completely shocked by) someone who said that Bible teachings trumped science.
Man, I tell you, I was floored. I had come from a tradition completely lacking in formal education that, nevertheless, accepted the notion that God gave us brains to figure things out and that if we found some sort of conflict between the Bible and the way the universe worked, it was our perception that was screwed up. Not the Bible. Not the science. The problem must lay with our inability to understand how the two are *never* in conflict. It's our perception that's the problem. We may mis-read the Bible. We may screw up an experiment and theorize in a faulty way. But we can learn to overcome those mistakes and, when we do, we will always find that the Bible and science never contradict each other.
In fact, to the folks who raised me, a "miracle of God" and an "amazing scientific discovery" were, often, pretty much the same thing.
In recent years, I've come to understand that some folks use their faith in God to justify anti-science attitudes. Some folks user their faith to justify spouting irrational, politically-motivated and all-too-often hateful rhetoric. And I've learned that such folks are far more common than I would have believed as a youth.
I'd apologize on their behalf, but I fear they might burn me at the stake.
I don't write code so I would have never thought of those things. You're right; those are nice bits of useful functionality (as long as we don't pay too high a price in speed or security - but that's another discussion).
Thanks. I appreciate the response.
In Texas, you can carry rifles while you protest outside a Republican state convention where Laura Bush is speaking and no one questions you.
Interesting contrast.
Here are a couple of links.
I am, I suppose, well behind the times. Some years ago, websites were able to publish information and update the databases they sat in front of (to do things like take orders for merchandise or carry on a conversation), all over secure connections. Thus, in the beginning the web established usefulness as a publishing medium. Then it was a tool to get things done.
Since then, pretty much everything I've seen in various "WebX.0" applications has done the same stuff in different ways.
So...beyond what we had years ago, what sorts of "interactivity" actually serve a useful purpose?
I'm not trying to be an obtuse old man. Seriously, I'd like to know. Maybe there's some really useful thing that I should be doing via the web that I'm not doing now. But I can't really think of what that might be and I'd like some help to figure it out. What new interactivity justifies the visual pollution and system crud that are (apparently) required to make use of it?
Note - "Mobile" apps don't count. I can understand why I might need some specialized program when I'm trying to get something done while moving around. I haven't bought into the "I live through my smartphone" lifestyle, though. I'm asking about things that are useful to me when I sit down at my desktop computer.
Back when I typically had USD$1K-$3K in my bank they couldn't remember my name.
Now that there's about a hundred times that much in my accounts, the bank managers greet me by name the second I walk in the door.
The difference in treatment is jarring. I don't think I'll ever become fully accustomed to it.
Thank you. I'll (seriously) look into it.
Cite, please.
I'm serious; I'm retiring soon and I'd put such countries on my list of residence options.
...that you've got dumbasses over there, too.
Maybe it's because half of the four things you cite aren't crimes and thus shouldn't bear on the question of whether someone who has been arrested for a crime, any crime, should be denied bail or parole.
Rapists and molesters have harmed someone and broken a law (presumably) and should go to jail for a long time.
Pedophiles are people that think inappropriate dirty thoughts about little kids. Until they actually become molesters, they haven't hurt anybody. Their status as creeps shouldn't bear on the grant of bail or parole.
And gang members? That's not a crime and shouldn't be considered, either. To quote a city councilman in Houston when the city was debating an anti-gang ordinance: "Show me a definition of 'gang' that doesn't apply to the Boy Scouts and I'll consider voting aye."
I disagree. It's the function of a security professional. It's the function of someone who has no axe to grind with the employee, who can be impartial, and who, at best, moves in an entirely different world from the employee. Las Vegas casino security employees don't, for example, fraternize with the frontline employees.
Monitoring needs to be fair for a whole bunch of reasons that should be obvious and don't bear wasting time on in this post. Fairness, however, is difficult to achieve when the person doing the monitoring is known to or works with the employee.
Again, I disagree, and not just with the notion that the manager is doing the monitoring. Fair monitoring requires a statistically valid sample of data (something most managers can't figure out) to be reviewed by someone who doesn't know anything about the employee (again, removing managers from consideration) and this is best done with some rather esoteric sampling and reviewing tools. Asking a manager to learn such tools is a silly distraction from their core duties.
If the monitoring function turns up something interesting, then and only then should managers become involved. At that point, managers consult with monitors and provide their feedback on whether the situation is a harmless part of the job, worth more extensive monitoring, or cause for action. Making judgements like that is what managers do; not staring at a terminal trying to decide if a sample of web pages accessed is part of their employees valid duties.
Of course, managers also monitor job performance. If an employee is performing suboptimally and the manager suspects computer misuse, then that manager should be able to drop a note to the security function and request heightened monitoring. Actually *doing* the monitoring, however, should still remain a task done by someone outside the regular work-process loop.