...mainstream video games, even those seemingly void of political statement, are implicitly political.
OK. I understand that people feel that way. But the people that feel that "the way things are" is pretty much always "implicitly political" are the people who find political meaning in Every. Fucking. Thing.
To some people, the color of shirt you put on in the morning is political. The toothpaste you use is political. Everything is political because somewhere, somehow, sometime during the creation of that thing or state of being some person or entity involved had some political leaning that in some subtle way influenced the way they contributed to the process.
People who think like this believe the way I take a dump is political. (Seriously - find somebody who's gone off-grid and uses a composting toilet. Ask them about it. They'd have you believe that the way you urinate and defecate is a political statement.)
I don't buy it.
"Politics is a component of everything" may be true but it's also meaningless. Any statement so broad is meaningless because it has no real, practical impact on anything.
Folks who think like this need to take a big dose of practical pills. There's a political slant to every issue but that doesn't mean it's worthy of note. I suspect games change based on technology and human desires. We want distraction. We want to interact with others. Technology now enables that and some people have figured out how to make a buck meeting those needs by putting out games with a heightened co-op element. Big frikkin deal. Unless you can't win a game without calling your congressmen and demanding action on a bill currently before the House (or some such other real-world, practical political action) then a game isn't political.
One of the reasons I refer to the agency at which I work as a "family business" is that there are so many multi-generation family members and spouses in the place. Why is that? Because it takes an act of unselfish love to guide someone through the horrific maze of federal hiring. When you look at your emails from USAJobs, you may think you're seeing entry-level positions. You're not.
(By "entry-level" I mean "enter into your first job with the federal government" not "suitable only for beginners." Keep that in mind.)
Go to USAJOBS right now and search for 2210 series jobs with "security" somewhere in the title. You'll find 67 current openings. Arrange them in salary order (I don't see an easy way to export them to a spreadsheet, which would make this a lot easier) and scan down the list. The first ones you'll see are Territory Managers, project managers, senior technical leads and the like. Salaries can start as high as $120K and some are actually considered "executive" positions, a designation that has a real definition with the federal government. Mostly it means you get to drag an entourage around with you.
Those decidedly non-entry-level positions take up the first 25 positions.
The next 25 positions are (approximately) GS 11 techs of various sorts. If you actually click through to the Qualifications tab and then click through to the agency qualifications documents, you find that GS 11 positions typically can be entry level positions if you have a PhD. If you don't have a PhD, you have to have had a year of experience as a GS 9. To get that job, you need a year as a GS 7. To get that job, you need a year as a GS 5. That's the typical upgrade path. If you have a masters, you can insert yourself into the career path at the GS 9 level... (wait for it...)... if you also have a year as a GS 7.
Counting down the list, we come to the lowest level. The last group of real, entry level jobs can be gotten if you have a bachelor's degree with superior academic achievement (GPA 3.0, which doesn't sound all that superior to me, but whatever) and a year of qualifying experience. No one has a year of qualifying experience right out of college. Ranking panels take great pride in thinking that their positions are somehow special and no matter what you did on the outside, it doesn't qualify for this particular job. These positions are GS 7 and the only for-sure qualifying experience is a year at GS 5. Still, if you have a bachelors, some graduate-level time in a related field, and a year or two of related experience, you can probably score a GS 7 job. That's the last 8 positions on the list. The best pay of any of them is just over $44K a year.
(The numbers don't add up to 67 because there are too many errors on the list for it to add up properly. My search for "2210 security" managed to snag 5 pharmacists, 2 amendment documents making corrections to previous announcements, 1 military test plans analyst, and 1 HR analyst.)
All of this isn't to imply that there aren't some fun jobs out there. The Army is hiring interdisciplinary IT and Intelligence specialists. Starting pay is only $33K a year but you could get up to over $90K...eventually. In the meantime, you must speak a foreign language, put up with military culture, sign a mobility agreement (meaning you have no idea where in the world you'll work until they tell you to go, which they can do at any time with a week's notice) and you are (lemme quote this one, cuz I just love it) "...subject to extended... worldwide deployments during crisis situations... as determined by management." Nice deal for $33K a year, huh?
So - I stand by my previous statement. You're off base. Your email from USAJobs may have been originally spec'd by you to a minimum salary level, in which case you wouldn't see the entry level jobs, just the "fake" entry levels that require a PhD; or you limited yourself to Washington DC, where all jo
You're way off base. IA and IT positions with the government usually start at GS 5 or 7. Most reach full grade at 12. Getting to a 13 generally requires going into management. Of course, all this assumes you're somewhere other than DC. In DC, nearly every job is inflated by one or two grades.
In the rest of the country, an IT tech or entry-level security wonk will be a 7, making a touch over $33K to start. Support techs are dual-tracked in many agencies with most topping out at GS 9.
And the days of good retirement are long past. It's been 25 years since new employees were placed under the Civil Service Retirement System, the high-quality retirement scheme for long-term employees that most people think of when they think of federal retirement. The new Federal Employees Retirement System is significantly more chancy and requires the employee to pay lots more attention to their investments over the years. It's no longer a case of "put in your time, get your dime."
Retirement from federal service is better than most places in some ways and worse in others. A career fed is likely to retire with better life and health insurance than most folks and no danger that it'll be taken away when the company goes belly up. But a career fed is also likely to retire with a much smaller pension and lower net worth than his private industry counterparts.
I like those tradeoffs and have stayed with federal service even though I routinely (that is, at least once a quarter) turned down job offers during the dotcom boom that would have quadrupled my salary. I valued the good work rules and long term stability of my employer. Others place very little value on stability. For those folks, government service is definitely not the way to go.
I have no sense of direction. Here's an illustration - Back in my teens, my dad was driving and we were lost in the middle of nowhere in that maze of dirt roads that criscrosses the east Texas piney woods. We were looking for a shooting range where I was scheduled to participate in a pistol competition.
We pulled up to a T-intersection where we had to turn either left or right. My dad took his hands off the wheel, turned to me and asked "Which way should we go, son?"
"Well, dad, we've been through this intersection from a different direction before. I recognize it. I'm sure that if you turn right, we'll be headed the right way."
My dad didn't say a word. He just put his hands back on the wheel, pulled into the intersection, and turned left.
He knew, absolutely knew that whatever I told him was going to be wrong.
We arrived at the range in less than 5 minutes.
So, I'm not lazy. I've honestly tried to keep track of where I am. I've studied dead reckoning and orienteering. Back in the day, I kept a compass on my dashboard. None of it worked. I could still get lost in my own closet.
Today, I welcome any technology that helps me get where I want to go. Over the years I've gotten *really* good at reading and following maps so Google maps is enough for me. But before Google (and Mapquest before that), I was quite literally lost. I would never attribute a willingness to use technology to find my way to simple laziness. Some of us are just hopeless in this arena.
A 500 mile range would be great since it would probably translate into a usable real world range.
I currently average 22-23 mpg in my full-size, V8, rear drive Mercury Marquis. I calculate my mileage every time I fill up and I've broken 25 mpg once or twice and dropped below 20 roughly the same number of times over the last 10 years.
My commute is 90 miles a day. That 90 miles is across the insanity that is Houston rush-hour traffic in the "just before it slows to a crawl" time window. That means I have multiple drag-strip starts, multiple full-throttle accelerations to 80 miles per hour, and I cruise at anywhere between 65 and 85 if I leave the house early enough. (Yes, for Houston residents who want confirmation, that means I spend most of my time on the Sam Houston tollway.) Full-time, full-blast air conditioning is an absolute must.
Most electric vehicles quote range stats based on gentle starts and low, steady cruising speeds that are completely unrealistic in my commuting environment. A while back, for example, I looked at an electric motorcycle that quoted a range over 100 miles. Then I dug deep into the specs and found that the published specs assumed some ridiculously slow steady cruising speed for the entire range. When I plugged in the way I must drive just to get to work without being run over in traffic, the range of that particular vehicle would drop to less than 10 miles.
So I figure if somebody quotes me a 500 mile range the vehicle just might get me to work and back. We'll see.
The difference between the way our public-facing site is run and the way our intranet is run is attributable to a variety of factors, some of them political. I know too much about it to post on this site and I know too little about it to fully understand it and explain it. Let's just say there's a different set of operators and a different set of ideas about what constitutes "best practices".
Just one question though; what does surfing and posting to/. get you working for the IRS?
Good question!
We have a "limited personal use" policy that allows us to do some surfing and send some personal email. We can't abuse it. If you sit and watch YouTube all day, you'll get in hot water pretty quick. But checking tech-related forums (the ones I used to visit in the *.ru and *.cjb.net domains are now blocked, I might add) is OK as long as it doesn't cause a noticable impact on productivity.
Slashdot gets pretty much a free pass from me, anyway, since it was from/. that I picked up on a need for a critical security upgrade to our SCO OSR servers (long since gone) a number of years ago. My boss actually referred directly to/. in my appraisal that year as an example of my ability to keep abreast of developments in my area of responsibility. Since then, I've kept a copy of that evaluation for cya purposes in case someone says I'm spending too much time on here.
Good working definition of a dweeb: Someone who responds to a joke with a couple of paragraphs of dry, procedural explication.:-)
That's interesting. Where I work, inserting a personally-owned pen drive to a computer on the network that gets caught in a scan results in a suspension. Inserting a personally-owned pen drive that pushes malware out onto the network gets you fired. Inadverdently attaching a spreadsheet with customer data to an email and sending it outside the organization gets you fired, everyone in your area subjected to additional training, and an executive or two dragged before a congressional subcommittee to fall on their swords. Deliberately accessing customer data to which you have no right gets you all of the above, plus you go to jail.
Yea, right. As witness to countless abuses by cops who only get suspended, I'll have to call complete bullshit to your theory (and that's what it is, just a theory).
Please re-read. I said "federal" several times. My statements concerned the federal government, only.
Local cops are a whole 'nother story. In that matter, I tend to agree with you.
This is what happens when a fed gets caught doing something that seriously compromises security. They get fired, prosecuted, and punished. We can argue about the degree of punishment later.
What happens in private industry? I'm sure people get fired but do they get publicly prosecuted? Or is there a huge motivation to cover up the story so that stock prices/reputation/business in general doesn't take a hit?
Say what you will about government corruption and incompetence but I firmly believe that U.S. federal employees who exhibit this level of stupidity and/or corruption are distinctly more likely to be punished appropriately than are the employees of non-government business entities.
It's a mistake to think that the government is always wrong, always incompetent, and always crooked. It happens too often but such is not the default state of the government. I like seeing cases like this that show the government will catch and prosecute wrong-doers from among its own ranks.
I work at a huge, universally hated TLA in the U.S. The next time someone tells me the way we do things is lousy because complete idiots at the highest level must have set up our business processes and private industry would never do anything that stupid - I'll have another good counter-example.
Maybe I'm taking this a little personally because I'm an IT guy. I dunno. But I do know I'd rather not work in IT for a large, tech-based company where the CTO is quoted publicly as saying: "I don't let my IT department near my laptop".
Anybody else have a WTF moment when they saw that? Or is it only me?
Funny you should list those facts. "The end of the world is coming" fundamentalist Christians point to the same set of facts as partial justification for some of their beliefs about how the battle between good and evil will play out. Everyone who believes there will be a battle of Armageddon agrees that it will be a huge battle. But, depending on who you read, how do you get the 200 million-plus troops for the invasion? The only way to put that many foot soldiers on the battlefield is to get a big commitment from China. China may not be able to project much power very far across the Pacific, but they could start marching westward.
Of course, I get a little tired by people who let such thoughts keep them up at night. But I did find your post interesting in that context.
Just because you can communicate on a certain level (and I do for the benefit of/.ers who don't come from north of Berwick) doesn't mean that the way I can and do write in other contexts is any less valid
And that's exactly my point. You can speak and write any way you wish. We can all communicate quite successfully by doing so as long as we know who we're communicating with and we know that they will understand us.
However, I was also pointing out that anyone who writes:
Weel ma man. Fit dae ye dae gin ye're nae fasht aboot aebody at cannae spik yer leid? Dae A hiv tae scrib yer "right" English jist fir yir notion o purity?
and insists that the entire English-speaking world should be able to easily digest such text is, I am quite unashamed to say, wrong.
I have no right (no one has a right) to insist you write English in a way I consider pure. Impure or regional language variations are wonderful things, the very nutrients from which an evolving language grows new, strong branches. But I do have a right to say you're wrong if you expect regional dialects to be universally understood. And I have a right to dismiss you as a crank if you get offended by the notion that there is (an arguable, in the specifics) standard English that should be employed when the intended audience is general.
Thanks. It took me a moment after reading your post to realize my mistake. This is the sort of thing that makes me treasure the good editors I've had in the past.
Whether it warrants an overall "FAIL" is up to each reader to decide; I hope the majority are a tad more forgiving.
...they communicate better to each other by speaking a comfortable dialect...
I'm sorry I wasn't clear.
First, the phrase "murdering English" wasn't mine. I was by the author of the cited book.
Second, please note that I only conclude that a manner of communication is "wrong" when it doesn't communicate. I'm willing to cut people a great deal of slack when it comes to the spoken word. I live in a world full of spoken acronyms that would be incomprehensible to an outsider. My daily speech isn't wrong in the context of my job. It would, however, be wrong if I tried to use it to speak to members of the general public.
In each case where I say something is "wrong" I tried to make it clear that the language, whether spoken or written, was only wrong if it was understandable only by a few but being foisted off on the general public.
If someone wants to speak an incomprehensible slang to their friends who understand it, I say more power to them. They may wind up enriching our common language. If someone wants to write those same friends with some sort of meme-shorthand designed to exclude everyone else, that's just fine. It works in context.
But if someone writes something for consumption by the general public (or even in a more limited context where universal clarity is a requirement, such as preparing assignments in school) and insists on doing so in a way that deviates so far from standard English that it's comprehensible only with significant effort, then I have no problem saying that their use of the language is "wrong".
Do you agree that our positions are basically the same? It seems that way to me.
Interesting question. When I first stumbled on 4chan, I was curious and looked at all the chans I could find until I gave up. (There are just too many.) 12chan seemed to use a subset of the dialect that was reasonably accessible. Memes as shorthand for whole paragraphs of text were present but they didn't change so fast that I couldn't keep track of them. Thus I conclude that 12chan is my limit of adaptability.
It may be that 12chan holds back on the linguistic gymnastics because they are more concerned about other goals, specifically the one you cite.
12chan is, however, a good example of a chan that uses English in a way that can be understood only with some effort, more than should be reasonbly expected of a casual reader. Thus, it's a valid example in my previous post. I could probably have used 1024chan just as reasonably.
As an aside, I'm also familiar with 12chan (and a host of other distasteful sites, both visual and political) because I'm dedicated to free-speech issues. Anyone who wants to understand the attacks currently being launched against the whole notion of free speech needs to understand the boogeymen most often cited by the control freaks who want more power. Back in the 1950s, it was the commies. 10+ years ago, it was the fundy and racial separatists and especially their militias. Today, it's the terrorists and the pedos. There's always another boogeyman for the anti-speech crowd to parade as a reason to restrict freedom. Those of us who believe in free speech must understand and be able to debunk those boogeymen if we're going to win hearts and minds, if we're going to preserve freedom.
Those of us who support these guys have asked the same thing. The only thing I can come up with is that my agency is paranoid about individuals having more than one computer. We have loaner machines, for example, but they're kept at a central location and mailed around the country when someone needs one. We keep almost no spares on hand.
This whole "cut hardware expenditures to the bone" attitude causes lots of problems. Not the least of those problems is the time lost when people travel abroad. One note, though - our full-disk encryption method absolutely requires the user of the machine to be present at installation, making it impossible to set up a laptop for someone before they arrive. We're changing encryption products in the future and it won't be such a problem then, but the "no more than one laptop per user, period" attitude will probably remain until long after I'm retired.
...do they seriously catch any significant number of criminals this way?
RTFA.
The searches, which predate the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, have uncovered everything from martyrdom videos and other violent jihadist materials to child pornography and stolen intellectual property, according to the government.
One successful search the government cites from recent years: In 2006, a man arriving from the Netherlands at the Minneapolis airport had digital pictures of high-level al-Qaida officials, video clips of improvised explosive devices being detonated and of the man reading his will. The man was convicted of visa fraud and removed from the country.
Between Oct. 1, 2008, and Aug. 11 of this year, Customs and Border Protection officers processed more than 221 million travelers at U.S. borders and searched about 1,000 laptops, of which 46 were "in-depth"
So they do about 50 serious searches a year, have caught some violent videos and jihadist materials (protected speech, probably, if it was already in this country), caught some kiddie porn (but not enough to trot out an example worth illustrating their success, meaning they've probably found next to nothing), caught some IP theft (without explaining it, so I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit; it was probably just a pirated video or two) and not much else.
The short answer to your question is, no, they don't catch much of anything. They certainly don't catch enough to justify the bad impression they make on visitors and the loss of respect for the U.S. they foster.
Our employees have no problems going in or out of the U.S. with laptops even though we require all laptops with data on them to be fully encrypted. When an employee is, say, going to France (worst case; it's illegal to enter France with an encrypted device) we copy all their data to the network, take it off the network, wipe it clean, and install a base image. When the user gets to France, they are met by one of our techs who installs full disk encryption, joins the machine to our network, sets up a VPN, and copies their data from our U.S. servers to the laptop in France.
When it's time to return home, the tech in France copies all data to our servers, takes the laptop off the network, wipes it clean, and installs a base image. When the user gets back into the U.S., a local tech fully encypts the machine, puts it on the network, and copies the user data from our servers to the laptop.
Now, this seems like lot of trouble to me. But it prevents our employees from having any problems with customs in either France or the U.S.
I have mod points that I wanted to use on other posts but this one forces me to reply.
I'm glad you enjoy English. I love it, myself. Unfortunately, I think you're a bit too generous with your praise of the beauty of dialects. Most to the point, you say:
Language is most exciting when it is adulterated, compromised, and infused with the particulars of its speakers.
I must disagree in the strongest terms. Language that incorporates seemingly random variations is exciting only to the extent that you enjoy solving puzzles over clear communication. On the contrary, to me language is most exciting when it communicates.
It can do so in many ways. Beautiful poetry can be hard to read but well worth it. Ebonics might be the only way to talk to some people. 4chan-isms may work on 4chan. (Personally, the learning curve is too steep for me; 12chan was my limit for understanding such things.) But none of these is useful outside their niche.
"Good English" does, in fact, exist. It changes and is influenced by all the things you mention but it is not rendered incomprehensible by them. It evolves slowly enough that it can be used as a common communications channel between *all* readers without regard to generation or lifestyle. When new words or ways of using the language are accepted into "Good English", they may sound a bit funny to an older generation but they don't prevent that older generation from understanding. Context should be sufficient to suss out the meaning.
When a new form of speech is sufficiently radical that it can't be understood by everyone (perhaps with a little effort) and when the author insists on using it anyway out of some misguided belief that their way of doing things is ordained by the universe as their right, then these wonderful, poetic, profane strains of the language become, to be blunt, wrong.
If someone speaks a strong flavor of cajun or ebonics or what-have-you, that's just fine. If they create written works where those flavors are so strong as to hinder understanding then offer up their works for the world to read, then they just don't write well.
For people who share my hobbies that mostly involve shooting, I often cite the example of Zediker's Handloading for Competition, a technical book concerning how to make ammunition. In the forward, the writer says he has a degree in English from Ole Miss and that this gives him permission to murder the language because he actually knows better. He then proceeds to murder the language repeatedly in the book, putting into print deep-south faux-regionalisms so thick as to be occasionally incomprehensible. If the book hadn't contained so much wonderful technical insight, I would have thrown it away after reading the first chapter.
Nobody has permission to murder the language if they want to communicate broadly. In limited circumstances, feel free to go nuts. Good things often result. But don't forget that, yes, there is such a thing as "Good English" and, most of the time, it's the preferred method of communication hereabouts. "Good English" is not merely "writing English in a way that I can relate to", it's writing English in a way we can all relate to.
It does not advise shouting. That's dramatic editorializing on the submitter's part.
Thank you so much. I thought I was being obvious but an apparently large number of folks don't seem to recognize the editorializing.
The explained risks are pertinent and correct. The material does not take into account legal free music, but the main point is to protect the networks from threats due to using P2P software,...
The training material starts with a question of downloading and then immediately assumes that any download will be via P2P software. For the most part, it's impossible for our employees to install their own software. To see the act of downloading music so solidly and unthinkingly conflated with the unauthorized installation of potentially harmful software just floored me. Completely different issues are involved and I know that in regards to the specific issues portrayed in this question my users came out of this briefing more confused and more ignorant than when they went in. That's really sad and it's the bulk of what prompted me to make the original submission.
Thanks for the big laugh I just enjoyed. I got it, mind you, not from your statement but from the fact that you felt it necessary to do the entire thing in bold.
Slashdot Mirror
So Lee Bradley says:
OK. I understand that people feel that way. But the people that feel that "the way things are" is pretty much always "implicitly political" are the people who find political meaning in Every. Fucking. Thing.
To some people, the color of shirt you put on in the morning is political. The toothpaste you use is political. Everything is political because somewhere, somehow, sometime during the creation of that thing or state of being some person or entity involved had some political leaning that in some subtle way influenced the way they contributed to the process.
People who think like this believe the way I take a dump is political. (Seriously - find somebody who's gone off-grid and uses a composting toilet. Ask them about it. They'd have you believe that the way you urinate and defecate is a political statement.)
I don't buy it.
"Politics is a component of everything" may be true but it's also meaningless. Any statement so broad is meaningless because it has no real, practical impact on anything.
Folks who think like this need to take a big dose of practical pills. There's a political slant to every issue but that doesn't mean it's worthy of note. I suspect games change based on technology and human desires. We want distraction. We want to interact with others. Technology now enables that and some people have figured out how to make a buck meeting those needs by putting out games with a heightened co-op element. Big frikkin deal. Unless you can't win a game without calling your congressmen and demanding action on a bill currently before the House (or some such other real-world, practical political action) then a game isn't political.
It's just a game.
One of the reasons I refer to the agency at which I work as a "family business" is that there are so many multi-generation family members and spouses in the place. Why is that? Because it takes an act of unselfish love to guide someone through the horrific maze of federal hiring. When you look at your emails from USAJobs, you may think you're seeing entry-level positions. You're not.
(By "entry-level" I mean "enter into your first job with the federal government" not "suitable only for beginners." Keep that in mind.)
Go to USAJOBS right now and search for 2210 series jobs with "security" somewhere in the title. You'll find 67 current openings. Arrange them in salary order (I don't see an easy way to export them to a spreadsheet, which would make this a lot easier) and scan down the list. The first ones you'll see are Territory Managers, project managers, senior technical leads and the like. Salaries can start as high as $120K and some are actually considered "executive" positions, a designation that has a real definition with the federal government. Mostly it means you get to drag an entourage around with you.
Those decidedly non-entry-level positions take up the first 25 positions.
The next 25 positions are (approximately) GS 11 techs of various sorts. If you actually click through to the Qualifications tab and then click through to the agency qualifications documents, you find that GS 11 positions typically can be entry level positions if you have a PhD. If you don't have a PhD, you have to have had a year of experience as a GS 9. To get that job, you need a year as a GS 7. To get that job, you need a year as a GS 5. That's the typical upgrade path. If you have a masters, you can insert yourself into the career path at the GS 9 level ... (wait for it...) ... if you also have a year as a GS 7.
Counting down the list, we come to the lowest level. The last group of real, entry level jobs can be gotten if you have a bachelor's degree with superior academic achievement (GPA 3.0, which doesn't sound all that superior to me, but whatever) and a year of qualifying experience. No one has a year of qualifying experience right out of college. Ranking panels take great pride in thinking that their positions are somehow special and no matter what you did on the outside, it doesn't qualify for this particular job. These positions are GS 7 and the only for-sure qualifying experience is a year at GS 5. Still, if you have a bachelors, some graduate-level time in a related field, and a year or two of related experience, you can probably score a GS 7 job. That's the last 8 positions on the list. The best pay of any of them is just over $44K a year.
(The numbers don't add up to 67 because there are too many errors on the list for it to add up properly. My search for "2210 security" managed to snag 5 pharmacists, 2 amendment documents making corrections to previous announcements, 1 military test plans analyst, and 1 HR analyst.)
All of this isn't to imply that there aren't some fun jobs out there. The Army is hiring interdisciplinary IT and Intelligence specialists. Starting pay is only $33K a year but you could get up to over $90K...eventually. In the meantime, you must speak a foreign language, put up with military culture, sign a mobility agreement (meaning you have no idea where in the world you'll work until they tell you to go, which they can do at any time with a week's notice) and you are (lemme quote this one, cuz I just love it) "...subject to extended ... worldwide deployments during crisis situations ... as determined by management." Nice deal for $33K a year, huh?
So - I stand by my previous statement. You're off base. Your email from USAJobs may have been originally spec'd by you to a minimum salary level, in which case you wouldn't see the entry level jobs, just the "fake" entry levels that require a PhD; or you limited yourself to Washington DC, where all jo
You're way off base. IA and IT positions with the government usually start at GS 5 or 7. Most reach full grade at 12. Getting to a 13 generally requires going into management. Of course, all this assumes you're somewhere other than DC. In DC, nearly every job is inflated by one or two grades.
In the rest of the country, an IT tech or entry-level security wonk will be a 7, making a touch over $33K to start. Support techs are dual-tracked in many agencies with most topping out at GS 9.
And the days of good retirement are long past. It's been 25 years since new employees were placed under the Civil Service Retirement System, the high-quality retirement scheme for long-term employees that most people think of when they think of federal retirement. The new Federal Employees Retirement System is significantly more chancy and requires the employee to pay lots more attention to their investments over the years. It's no longer a case of "put in your time, get your dime."
Retirement from federal service is better than most places in some ways and worse in others. A career fed is likely to retire with better life and health insurance than most folks and no danger that it'll be taken away when the company goes belly up. But a career fed is also likely to retire with a much smaller pension and lower net worth than his private industry counterparts.
I like those tradeoffs and have stayed with federal service even though I routinely (that is, at least once a quarter) turned down job offers during the dotcom boom that would have quadrupled my salary. I valued the good work rules and long term stability of my employer. Others place very little value on stability. For those folks, government service is definitely not the way to go.
Not always.
I have no sense of direction. Here's an illustration - Back in my teens, my dad was driving and we were lost in the middle of nowhere in that maze of dirt roads that criscrosses the east Texas piney woods. We were looking for a shooting range where I was scheduled to participate in a pistol competition.
We pulled up to a T-intersection where we had to turn either left or right. My dad took his hands off the wheel, turned to me and asked "Which way should we go, son?"
"Well, dad, we've been through this intersection from a different direction before. I recognize it. I'm sure that if you turn right, we'll be headed the right way."
My dad didn't say a word. He just put his hands back on the wheel, pulled into the intersection, and turned left.
He knew, absolutely knew that whatever I told him was going to be wrong.
We arrived at the range in less than 5 minutes.
So, I'm not lazy. I've honestly tried to keep track of where I am. I've studied dead reckoning and orienteering. Back in the day, I kept a compass on my dashboard. None of it worked. I could still get lost in my own closet.
Today, I welcome any technology that helps me get where I want to go. Over the years I've gotten *really* good at reading and following maps so Google maps is enough for me. But before Google (and Mapquest before that), I was quite literally lost. I would never attribute a willingness to use technology to find my way to simple laziness. Some of us are just hopeless in this arena.
A 500 mile range would be great since it would probably translate into a usable real world range.
I currently average 22-23 mpg in my full-size, V8, rear drive Mercury Marquis. I calculate my mileage every time I fill up and I've broken 25 mpg once or twice and dropped below 20 roughly the same number of times over the last 10 years.
My commute is 90 miles a day. That 90 miles is across the insanity that is Houston rush-hour traffic in the "just before it slows to a crawl" time window. That means I have multiple drag-strip starts, multiple full-throttle accelerations to 80 miles per hour, and I cruise at anywhere between 65 and 85 if I leave the house early enough. (Yes, for Houston residents who want confirmation, that means I spend most of my time on the Sam Houston tollway.) Full-time, full-blast air conditioning is an absolute must.
Most electric vehicles quote range stats based on gentle starts and low, steady cruising speeds that are completely unrealistic in my commuting environment. A while back, for example, I looked at an electric motorcycle that quoted a range over 100 miles. Then I dug deep into the specs and found that the published specs assumed some ridiculously slow steady cruising speed for the entire range. When I plugged in the way I must drive just to get to work without being run over in traffic, the range of that particular vehicle would drop to less than 10 miles.
So I figure if somebody quotes me a 500 mile range the vehicle just might get me to work and back. We'll see.
The difference between the way our public-facing site is run and the way our intranet is run is attributable to a variety of factors, some of them political. I know too much about it to post on this site and I know too little about it to fully understand it and explain it. Let's just say there's a different set of operators and a different set of ideas about what constitutes "best practices".
Good question!
We have a "limited personal use" policy that allows us to do some surfing and send some personal email. We can't abuse it. If you sit and watch YouTube all day, you'll get in hot water pretty quick. But checking tech-related forums (the ones I used to visit in the *.ru and *.cjb.net domains are now blocked, I might add) is OK as long as it doesn't cause a noticable impact on productivity.
Slashdot gets pretty much a free pass from me, anyway, since it was from /. that I picked up on a need for a critical security upgrade to our SCO OSR servers (long since gone) a number of years ago. My boss actually referred directly to /. in my appraisal that year as an example of my ability to keep abreast of developments in my area of responsibility. Since then, I've kept a copy of that evaluation for cya purposes in case someone says I'm spending too much time on here.
Good working definition of a dweeb: Someone who responds to a joke with a couple of paragraphs of dry, procedural explication. :-)
That's interesting. Where I work, inserting a personally-owned pen drive to a computer on the network that gets caught in a scan results in a suspension. Inserting a personally-owned pen drive that pushes malware out onto the network gets you fired. Inadverdently attaching a spreadsheet with customer data to an email and sending it outside the organization gets you fired, everyone in your area subjected to additional training, and an executive or two dragged before a congressional subcommittee to fall on their swords. Deliberately accessing customer data to which you have no right gets you all of the above, plus you go to jail.
Other places don't take security as seriously?
Please re-read. I said "federal" several times. My statements concerned the federal government, only.
Local cops are a whole 'nother story. In that matter, I tend to agree with you.
This is what happens when a fed gets caught doing something that seriously compromises security. They get fired, prosecuted, and punished. We can argue about the degree of punishment later.
What happens in private industry? I'm sure people get fired but do they get publicly prosecuted? Or is there a huge motivation to cover up the story so that stock prices/reputation/business in general doesn't take a hit?
Say what you will about government corruption and incompetence but I firmly believe that U.S. federal employees who exhibit this level of stupidity and/or corruption are distinctly more likely to be punished appropriately than are the employees of non-government business entities.
It's a mistake to think that the government is always wrong, always incompetent, and always crooked. It happens too often but such is not the default state of the government. I like seeing cases like this that show the government will catch and prosecute wrong-doers from among its own ranks.
Now, that's funny. Thanks. I needed a laugh this afternoon.
I work at a huge, universally hated TLA in the U.S. The next time someone tells me the way we do things is lousy because complete idiots at the highest level must have set up our business processes and private industry would never do anything that stupid - I'll have another good counter-example.
Thanks. I really appreciate the insight.
Maybe I'm taking this a little personally because I'm an IT guy. I dunno. But I do know I'd rather not work in IT for a large, tech-based company where the CTO is quoted publicly as saying: "I don't let my IT department near my laptop".
Anybody else have a WTF moment when they saw that? Or is it only me?
Funny you should list those facts. "The end of the world is coming" fundamentalist Christians point to the same set of facts as partial justification for some of their beliefs about how the battle between good and evil will play out. Everyone who believes there will be a battle of Armageddon agrees that it will be a huge battle. But, depending on who you read, how do you get the 200 million-plus troops for the invasion? The only way to put that many foot soldiers on the battlefield is to get a big commitment from China. China may not be able to project much power very far across the Pacific, but they could start marching westward.
Of course, I get a little tired by people who let such thoughts keep them up at night. But I did find your post interesting in that context.
And that's exactly my point. You can speak and write any way you wish. We can all communicate quite successfully by doing so as long as we know who we're communicating with and we know that they will understand us.
However, I was also pointing out that anyone who writes:
and insists that the entire English-speaking world should be able to easily digest such text is, I am quite unashamed to say, wrong.
I have no right (no one has a right) to insist you write English in a way I consider pure. Impure or regional language variations are wonderful things, the very nutrients from which an evolving language grows new, strong branches. But I do have a right to say you're wrong if you expect regional dialects to be universally understood. And I have a right to dismiss you as a crank if you get offended by the notion that there is (an arguable, in the specifics) standard English that should be employed when the intended audience is general.
Agreed? Or not?
Thanks. It took me a moment after reading your post to realize my mistake. This is the sort of thing that makes me treasure the good editors I've had in the past.
Whether it warrants an overall "FAIL" is up to each reader to decide; I hope the majority are a tad more forgiving.
I'm sorry I wasn't clear.
First, the phrase "murdering English" wasn't mine. I was by the author of the cited book.
Second, please note that I only conclude that a manner of communication is "wrong" when it doesn't communicate. I'm willing to cut people a great deal of slack when it comes to the spoken word. I live in a world full of spoken acronyms that would be incomprehensible to an outsider. My daily speech isn't wrong in the context of my job. It would, however, be wrong if I tried to use it to speak to members of the general public.
In each case where I say something is "wrong" I tried to make it clear that the language, whether spoken or written, was only wrong if it was understandable only by a few but being foisted off on the general public.
If someone wants to speak an incomprehensible slang to their friends who understand it, I say more power to them. They may wind up enriching our common language. If someone wants to write those same friends with some sort of meme-shorthand designed to exclude everyone else, that's just fine. It works in context.
But if someone writes something for consumption by the general public (or even in a more limited context where universal clarity is a requirement, such as preparing assignments in school) and insists on doing so in a way that deviates so far from standard English that it's comprehensible only with significant effort, then I have no problem saying that their use of the language is "wrong".
Do you agree that our positions are basically the same? It seems that way to me.
Interesting question. When I first stumbled on 4chan, I was curious and looked at all the chans I could find until I gave up. (There are just too many.) 12chan seemed to use a subset of the dialect that was reasonably accessible. Memes as shorthand for whole paragraphs of text were present but they didn't change so fast that I couldn't keep track of them. Thus I conclude that 12chan is my limit of adaptability.
It may be that 12chan holds back on the linguistic gymnastics because they are more concerned about other goals, specifically the one you cite.
12chan is, however, a good example of a chan that uses English in a way that can be understood only with some effort, more than should be reasonbly expected of a casual reader. Thus, it's a valid example in my previous post. I could probably have used 1024chan just as reasonably.
As an aside, I'm also familiar with 12chan (and a host of other distasteful sites, both visual and political) because I'm dedicated to free-speech issues. Anyone who wants to understand the attacks currently being launched against the whole notion of free speech needs to understand the boogeymen most often cited by the control freaks who want more power. Back in the 1950s, it was the commies. 10+ years ago, it was the fundy and racial separatists and especially their militias. Today, it's the terrorists and the pedos. There's always another boogeyman for the anti-speech crowd to parade as a reason to restrict freedom. Those of us who believe in free speech must understand and be able to debunk those boogeymen if we're going to win hearts and minds, if we're going to preserve freedom.
Those of us who support these guys have asked the same thing. The only thing I can come up with is that my agency is paranoid about individuals having more than one computer. We have loaner machines, for example, but they're kept at a central location and mailed around the country when someone needs one. We keep almost no spares on hand.
This whole "cut hardware expenditures to the bone" attitude causes lots of problems. Not the least of those problems is the time lost when people travel abroad. One note, though - our full-disk encryption method absolutely requires the user of the machine to be present at installation, making it impossible to set up a laptop for someone before they arrive. We're changing encryption products in the future and it won't be such a problem then, but the "no more than one laptop per user, period" attitude will probably remain until long after I'm retired.
RTFA.
So they do about 50 serious searches a year, have caught some violent videos and jihadist materials (protected speech, probably, if it was already in this country), caught some kiddie porn (but not enough to trot out an example worth illustrating their success, meaning they've probably found next to nothing), caught some IP theft (without explaining it, so I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit; it was probably just a pirated video or two) and not much else.
The short answer to your question is, no, they don't catch much of anything. They certainly don't catch enough to justify the bad impression they make on visitors and the loss of respect for the U.S. they foster.
Our employees have no problems going in or out of the U.S. with laptops even though we require all laptops with data on them to be fully encrypted. When an employee is, say, going to France (worst case; it's illegal to enter France with an encrypted device) we copy all their data to the network, take it off the network, wipe it clean, and install a base image. When the user gets to France, they are met by one of our techs who installs full disk encryption, joins the machine to our network, sets up a VPN, and copies their data from our U.S. servers to the laptop in France.
When it's time to return home, the tech in France copies all data to our servers, takes the laptop off the network, wipes it clean, and installs a base image. When the user gets back into the U.S., a local tech fully encypts the machine, puts it on the network, and copies the user data from our servers to the laptop.
Now, this seems like lot of trouble to me. But it prevents our employees from having any problems with customs in either France or the U.S.
I have mod points that I wanted to use on other posts but this one forces me to reply.
I'm glad you enjoy English. I love it, myself. Unfortunately, I think you're a bit too generous with your praise of the beauty of dialects. Most to the point, you say:
I must disagree in the strongest terms. Language that incorporates seemingly random variations is exciting only to the extent that you enjoy solving puzzles over clear communication. On the contrary, to me language is most exciting when it communicates.
It can do so in many ways. Beautiful poetry can be hard to read but well worth it. Ebonics might be the only way to talk to some people. 4chan-isms may work on 4chan. (Personally, the learning curve is too steep for me; 12chan was my limit for understanding such things.) But none of these is useful outside their niche.
"Good English" does, in fact, exist. It changes and is influenced by all the things you mention but it is not rendered incomprehensible by them. It evolves slowly enough that it can be used as a common communications channel between *all* readers without regard to generation or lifestyle. When new words or ways of using the language are accepted into "Good English", they may sound a bit funny to an older generation but they don't prevent that older generation from understanding. Context should be sufficient to suss out the meaning.
When a new form of speech is sufficiently radical that it can't be understood by everyone (perhaps with a little effort) and when the author insists on using it anyway out of some misguided belief that their way of doing things is ordained by the universe as their right, then these wonderful, poetic, profane strains of the language become, to be blunt, wrong.
If someone speaks a strong flavor of cajun or ebonics or what-have-you, that's just fine. If they create written works where those flavors are so strong as to hinder understanding then offer up their works for the world to read, then they just don't write well.
For people who share my hobbies that mostly involve shooting, I often cite the example of Zediker's Handloading for Competition, a technical book concerning how to make ammunition. In the forward, the writer says he has a degree in English from Ole Miss and that this gives him permission to murder the language because he actually knows better. He then proceeds to murder the language repeatedly in the book, putting into print deep-south faux-regionalisms so thick as to be occasionally incomprehensible. If the book hadn't contained so much wonderful technical insight, I would have thrown it away after reading the first chapter.
Nobody has permission to murder the language if they want to communicate broadly. In limited circumstances, feel free to go nuts. Good things often result. But don't forget that, yes, there is such a thing as "Good English" and, most of the time, it's the preferred method of communication hereabouts. "Good English" is not merely "writing English in a way that I can relate to", it's writing English in a way we can all relate to.
Unless you don't speak English. :-)
Are you kidding?
If I wanted to guarantee that a found USB key would be plugged in somewhere, I'd label it "porn".
Thank you so much. I thought I was being obvious but an apparently large number of folks don't seem to recognize the editorializing.
The training material starts with a question of downloading and then immediately assumes that any download will be via P2P software. For the most part, it's impossible for our employees to install their own software. To see the act of downloading music so solidly and unthinkingly conflated with the unauthorized installation of potentially harmful software just floored me. Completely different issues are involved and I know that in regards to the specific issues portrayed in this question my users came out of this briefing more confused and more ignorant than when they went in. That's really sad and it's the bulk of what prompted me to make the original submission.
Thanks for the big laugh I just enjoyed. I got it, mind you, not from your statement but from the fact that you felt it necessary to do the entire thing in bold.