Well as the AG of the US, Ashcroft is in charge of the Justice Department and along with his boss, Dubya, is ultimately responsible for the policies that drive such decisions. So it's perfectly fair to bring up his name in an article relating to the actions of DoJ.
Alaska since you ask. But (unfortunatly) I live in Texas right now. Though the beer and weapons theme still applies. And I think that a lot of the people down here think that the metric system is part of some sort of Satanic plot to make baby jesus cry.
Houston? Just give me some advanced warning so I can get out. I check the disused storage closet labeled "beware of the leopard" on a weekly basis so leaving the notice there will be fine:)
Not true. I still buy my beer by the pint and it's easy to find liquor sold by the pint or quart as well.
Also ammunition comes in a mishmash of metric and English units. The caliber (as in 45 caliber) of a round is based on it's size in inches. For example the bore of a 45 caliber handgun is.45" inches wide.
They're unhappy with their lives and want everyone else to be too. Also ignore the eternal optimists, following their advice will leave you unprepared for a colder, harsher world than they describe. Above all else, ignore me I don't know what the hell I'm talking about either. Though I would also suggest reading what we all have to say and evaluating it's merit as only you can.
Ok so now I'm going to make a few statements and offer some suggestions that I expect you to ignore because even if hadn't told you to ignore me you'd do you're own thing anyway. First off you're situation isn't all that unique. There are plenty of bright young people that didn't like HS who now find themselves wondering what to do with their lives. There are also plenty of bright not-so-young-anymore people who went through the exact same thing you're going through. I count myself a member of the latter group and I imagine that a lot/. readers fit into one or another catagory as well. Don't worry, this is a good thing, if you and your circumstances were truely unique you'd have no peers to support you and no 'elders' with experience for you to draw on. So as one of your 'elders' let me offer a few suggestions for you to ignore that might be of some use.
Go to University. Not because it's good for you, or because "it will help you get a job" but because it's fun. If you love to learn as much as you claim to you'll have a blast at Uni and can diversify your education as much as you like (or until you run out of money) If you haven't already given it some thought you may want to consider majoring in business management (*disclaimer: this is what my degree is in.) If your attention span is fickle as you say you'll probably enjoy this degree. You do one or two class from each of the major areas of the business program and move on. The focus is on giving the student a working knowledge of many different areas, plus there are a lot of elective credits to play with, I took a lot CS and extra Econ courses with mine.
Don't get stuck in the paradigm of living a "normal" life. If you so chose you can abandon the concepts of "career" and "permanent residence." At 25 I'm on my third post-college job and second career-track. I've also put in one cross country move and I'm starting to think of doing another in 12-18 months. This has worked well for me because I do bore easilly and am somewhat less risk-averse than average I think. I like exploring new cities, mastering new jobs and adding to my portfolio of skills. There are downsides to being a white-collar vagabond however. It's hard to say goodbye to close friends and family, retirement accounts don't grow as fast and there are long worrying spells when you have no health insurance. Also you'll probably never make as much money as someone who choses a more staid and serious life. You'll also never be a true expert in any feild, where others aquire great depth of knowledge, you'll aquire great breadth, and may just be a lot happier for it. I'm not saying this is the way for you to live or even that it's a permanent deal for me either but it's an idea to keep in mind should you find yourself feeling bored and trapped a year or two into first "real" job outta college.
Diversify your hobbies and live outside of your head some -or- don't forget you have a body attached to that big monkey brain of yours. If you get bored of specific projects or hobbies easilly diversifying and adding some physical ones can really help. It's nice to get a break from thinky stuff on a regular basis. To break up the monotany of my day jobs and thinky hobbies I also cycle, run, hike, backpack, lift weights, brew (and drink) beer and have plans to start moonshining. These are all activities that require me to manipulate the real world or my own body, not just bits on the computer screen or words in my head.
To close I'll borrow from the great Bard himself, remember "to thine own self be true." Do whatever it is that you think will make you happy and keep doing it until your not happy with it anymore, then find something else.
The only thing that really bothers me about offshore outsourcing is that a signifcant portion of the savings comes from US Companies dodging hard won labor rights/laws and payroll taxes. Remove all tax benefits from outsourcing and require US companies that offshore jobs to obey a core subset of the most fundamental US Labor laws. This wouldn't be an unprecedented extension of jurisdiction, the "Corrupt Foreign Practices Act" already extends us bribery/corruption laws to overseas operations of US companies.
To be honest my views on this are partially influenced by self interest and morality. Self interest because I don't want to lose my job to an outsource provider that has an unfair tax and working conditions advantage. From a moral point of view, laborers in the West suffered greatly during the Industrial Revolution and the rights and protections we enjoy today are the direct result of the (often bloody) battles they fought and I don't think it's right for workers in the third world to have to fight those same battles when working for Western companies.
That's already the case here in Houston. There are RFID readers embedded all over the highways that use to monitor traffic condidtions. They use the EZTags people have for the tollways to monitor traffic flow since tollway users also use the freeways. Look at the pretty map here
This system is run by TxDOT, not law enforcement so AFAIK currently no data is stored any longer than is necessary to track speed from reader to reader. However this system would be very easy to repurpose if RFID license plates become required. Then what's the incentive not to store the data on everyone's travel? I for one don't relish the idea of being pulled over because according the database lookup some traffic cop performed as a matter of routine indictates that I'm well outside of my normal 'area of travel'. Or get singled out for scrutiny because the same look up indicated that my average highway speed is over the limit so I get stuck with a cop tailgating me for 10 miles hoping to catch me speeding even though nothing he witnessed me do would give him any reason to suspect me.
Before you start crying about my tin-foil beanie being on too tight, similar things have already happened. Not because of RFID of course, but I have been pulled over or otherwise harassed for nothing other than "out of state license plate syndrom" multiple times. One of included being tailgated by a cruiser with his brights + spot light on for 15 minutes on highway 101 in Oregon one night on a road trip and being follow through NH for about 15 minutes by troopers blasting us with their radar gun the whole time before finally being pulled over and detained while they searched the vehical. Their reason? "We don't see a lot of plates from your state over here" Since we weren't breaking any laws whatsoever they couldn't ticket us. So excuse me for not wanting to make their jobs any easier.
Well actually no, bloat is bloat. Personally I think Gnome and KDE are bloated as hell, so I don't use them, I prefer GNUStep (nee WindowMaker) for my WM. It's fast, sleek, customizable and has, IMO, just the right amount of eye candy. My servers never get any GUI tools whatsoever so there's even less bloat on them. On windows I don't have any real say in how much bloat is installed but on Linux I have total control. Some distros are shipping with a lot of crufty bloat turned on by default, others aren't, but still no matter what the defaults are no distro forces you to use the amount of bloat they think is acceptable. Unlike windows.
It's not that bloat doesn't exist in Linux, it's that there's a fundamental difference between Linux bloat and windows bloat: I can choose how much bloat I want in Linux, I can't under Windows.
(how many business majors know that you can make a screenshot in windows?)
/me raises hand
Ahem. I happen to have a BBA in Management. I know how to take screen shots under Windows. You just hit "printscreen" and paste, though I prefer to use a nifty little utility called "ScreenHunter" Of course the only time I need to take screenshots in windows is at work, since that's the only time I ever use windows. I'm typing this message in Mozilla, on a Linux box, running GNUStep (nee Window Maker) for my window manager, with xinerama running for dual displays. If someone sent me email through didtheyreadit it wouldn't track me because I use PINE as my MUA, running directly on the FreeBSD server that runs my domain, acerbic.org. The last time I took a screenshot on this setup I used The Gimp to capture VNC screens on an XP box I'd setup for a client to digitize images pulled off an analog MRI unit. I was documenting the system for him.
Don't assume that every business major out there is some noob that couldn't hack it in CS. I chose to major in business because I knew I could learn the tech stuff I wanted to on my own, but for the finer points of business and economics I wanted a formal education in. In fact my first job out of college was as a Unix SysAdmin for an ISP, after that I worked as IT manager for a cancer clinic. A couple of months ago I got out of hands on tech work to take a job as an account manager at an ASP - I wanted a change of pace.
Just like the mythical geek girls and liberty defending geek lawyers there exist geek 'suits' as well, some with more techie experience than most of the posters on/. I get sick of hearing the standard lines reffering to business majors as technological retards spouted off by slashdotters whose only claim to geeks status is using kazaa-lite to download bad music off the 'net. Not that I'm implying that you fall into this catagory, or that you were specifically attacking me or anything, I'm just tired of hearing how dumb business majors are.
Once upon time during a slow week at work I scavanged a broken CD-ROM drive from our pile of dead hardware and installed it in my PC, since the motor still worked I plugged into the the powersupply. I kept an IE CD in the tray and whenever I happened to be drinking a beverage at my desk I would open the tray and use it as a cupholder. It was funny for about 5 minutes. But it was a very effective cupholder.
Except for the fact that the authorities would likely turn the blasted things ON during a disaster they suspect may be somehow connected with terrorism.
Speaking for myself I'd that the reason why so many slashdotters are wary of such technologies is because we know technology well enough to know that it's not a panacea to all (or really any) social problems and we understand the potential for abuse that comes with any complex, secretive technology controlled by a group or agency that operate de facto without public oversight/control. We're also, as a group, less prone to take sweeping promises about what a new technology can and will do for us at face value mostly because we've heard so many that proved to be damn lies when the dust settled: "Face recognition cameras will only spot terrorists!"; "The new bomb scanners will make air travel safer and more convientent, and no false positives!"; "Peoplesoft is an easy to use and cost effective solution to your HR needs"; "The speed sensors are for your own protection citizen" etc...
Also, speficically regard objections to automated traffic enforcement scams such as this a lot of object because we know that the stated objective, "increased safety", and promised benefits, "lower insurance rates" are total bullshit. If increased road safety were the goal then stealth enforcement wouldn't be seen as a benefit, bright red flags and flashing lights would mark the intersections dangergous enough to warrant traffic spy-cams and people would slow down, thus saving lives. That and having traffic engineers set the speed limit to a speed that the road can safely handle, or better yet pump the money being tossed into spy-cams into smart roads with adaptive speed limits. So yeah I'm afriad of any revenue generating, control increasing technology marketed as a safety device.
What the hell is wrong with "Ya'll"? English is lacking a proper plural pronoun in the what is it, second person direct or something like that? "You" is to ambiguous as without non-verbal clues it's impossible to tell if it's directed at the group or an individual in the group. What would you prefer he use "Youze Guys"?
Your hospital can't just lose a few CAT scans and think oh well, he'll be in for another scan eventually.
You've never worked in a medical field have you? You'd think that that would be a big deal and in theory data integrity is a very high priority but in reality...
I used to work as the IT Manager for a diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment center (and still do contract work with them because my replacement is kind of a noob) While loosing studies isn't exactly a "no big deal" situation it's still far more common than patients will ever realize. The server that stores and processes all of the digital images from the scanning equipment is a single CPU home rolled P4 using some shitty onboard IDE raid controller (doesn't even do RAID5!) running Windows 2K. The most money I could get for setting up a backup solution was the $200 an external firewire drive cost. Somehow we never managed to loose a study once it reached my network in the 9 months I worked there but I know three or four were deleted from the cameras themselves before being sent properly so whoops it's gone, gotta reschedule (and bill their insurance or Medicare again!) Two weeks ago one of the drives in that 0+1 array failed and despite my pleadings they still haven't ordered a replacement yet...
Now it's tempting to think that this place is just a special case of cheapness and sloppiness but from talking to the diagnostic techs (the people that operate the cameras) that's not so. That clinic is a little worse than average in terms of loosing patient information but by no means the worst some of them at seen/heard of/worked at in their careers. It's worse in general at small facilities but even large hospitals often suffer from the same unprofessionalism.
Your bank and the phone company keep much better track of your calls or your ATM transactions than most hospitals do with your CT or MRI scans...
I concur. Even worse, IT people are often intimidated into exacerbating this problem. I've been in situations before when I knew I had to let "the boss" bypass security rules that applied to everyone else because he had an attention span of about 10 seconds, any explination longer than that and he assumed you were lying to him to cover up the fact that you couldn't do your job. So when he said "Make my password 'drmark' for everything and make it never expire" any answer other than "OK" would've been cut off after ten seconds and parsed as "The incompetant arse in charge of IT can't fill a simple request and is trying to snow me under with BS, time to look for another one. He can't fool me, I'm an M.D.!" Substitute MBA/C*O/etc... for MD and that statement I'm afraid could apply to anyone in senior management for a company of any size.
Waaaay to often I think IT people, even IT Managers, end up in a similar situation when faced with irritable, ignorant senior management who refuse to listen to any explination of "the technical mumbo-jumbo" or learn how to use the most basic functions of it and instead expect it work as if by magic. So to keep management happy (and thus keep ourselves employeed) we turn off half their access security so things "just work" for them. Then cross our fingers and pray...
Oh hell I'm doing this without even trying right now. I quit my old company (a cancer clinic and diagnostic imaging center) where I worked as IT Manager because they were paying jackshit for the work I was doing and were general assholes. Before I left I already had a new job lined up, not in IT and without taking a pay cut, so I was in a good mood about things when I left. Because I knew I'd be hard to replace I offered to consult part-time until they found a replacement and then train him nights and weekends until he was up to speed. After three weeks w/out any IT support they finally found someone, for half my old wage and with less than half my experience.
Sooo I'm trying my hardest to train him, but I just keep overwhelming the poor guy, he has no Unix exp of any kind which between the Linux servers and the Unix based medical workstations leaves him unqualified for about half of the "standardized" portion of job. On top of that we have many, many speciality apps that only apply to Oncology or to Radiology that I wouldn't expect any IT worker off the street to know. He's in over his head and knows it, but doesn't have a choice because even at $12/hr it's better than nothing. It's proving near impossible to train him, important operational detials are getting left out while we cover the basics, and because of the steep learning curve it's taking a lot of work to get those to sink in. In the meantime he's making a lot of mistakes.
As a result my workload has roughly doubled since they hired him, tripled if you count the time spent training him. At fat contractor wages too. Naturally one expects these hours to go down over time as he learns the ropes but there is also the very real possibility that he'll be fired or will quit over the stress of it all and we'll have to start all over agian. Meanwhile I still to get play with all neat Med IT toys I had to give up when I left, but with none of the stress all while making money hand over fist. Plus I get to watch the bosses that pissed me off enough to quit in the first place squirm and kiss my ass daily....;->
Around here we have weekly[1] "managers" meetings which sadly encompass 10 of our 30 employees. Since the general manager (or COO as he likes to call himself) is always late to his own damn meeting we end up having a pre-meeting meeting about how useless the upcoming meeting is going to be. Then people get bored and wander off leading to another pre-meeting meeting once the general manager arrives in which we discuss who left, why and who is going to go fetch them.
Then of course there is the post-meeting meething when the meeting victims discuss what a useless tool our general manager is. Though at this point that's just the preferred recreational activity of the whole company...
----- [1] unless we effectivly demoralize the general manager enough to cancle it, which happens with surprising frequency
Exactly. It seems that an increasing number of employers treat their salaried employees like wireless minutes: free on nights and weekends. I know the owner of the place I work at feels that way, and not just about the IT staff and not just about work for the company. For the past two months our facility maintinence staff have been working 12 hour days rennovating his new house. He's of the opinion that if you're salaried you work for his business from 8-5 and are then available to work at his house until 8 the next morning. Weekends are an unkown concept to him.
Yes I, along with nearly everyone else that works there, am actively looking for another job. Just that those job things are kinda difficult to come by right now.
That must a dream, I hate running new cable drops. The boss has never seen the value in having professional cable contractors come out and wire up the place right, which he should've done a couple years ago when he had this place built. Instead he just had the IT guys (at the time)run it all, they were somewhat less than qualified and didn't even know enough to realize how badly they were doing things. I woudln't mind running new drops from time to time if we had any sort of sane organization up there but the whole ceiling is just a rats nest of ethernet, phone, audio, alarm and bog knows what else all running every which way. Oh and the fiberglass insulation is just laying on top of the tiles so it's always an itchy, messy adventure.
Actually your coal plants produce more nuclear waste than nuclear plants do. Coal contains a lot of impurities including radioactive heavy metals such as uranium-235, thorium and potasium-40. Then there's all the CO2 and SO2 (acid rain) and other goodies that make for really pretty sunsets in industrial towns. In fact coal fired plants release more energy in the form of wasted nuclear fuel than the create by burning the coal! We could actually produce more energy by extracting the fissionable materials from coal than by burning it, while reducing the level of radioactive waste that enters the eviroment. Neat huh?.
See this paper at the Oak Ridge lab for more info on the radioactive waste found in coal ash.
Ok I'm the IT Manager at an oncology/diagnostic imaging clinic and holy shit is my boss, the general manager (COO if you ask him) an idiot. Some examples include:
Asking a patient out on a date.
The patient he asked out didn't want to date him but did set him up with a friend of hers who just left her husband a few weeks prior, who also happened to be a patient at our other clinic across town. After going out with her he decided to hire her as our new receptionist. Ten minutes after the Doctor saw one of his other patients working the phones she was gone and Frank got an ass chewing.
He reportedly said, in the middle of a meeting with the doctor and a female employ: "Sometimes when I get home after a day like this it's just brain masturbation." There's nothing I can say to put this in context because there was no context, he apparently just blurted it out for no apparent reason.
He's a verbal train wreck in general. Last week he interupted a group us working by the MRI desk (not together, just happened that a lot us needed something from that area at the same time) and shouted "Hey if none of you have any work to do maybe I should dock your pay, har har har!" He then proceeded to hold us hostage for about 20 minutes while he told stupid stories about being a self made man, tried to sell my assistant some old suits he couldn't wear anymore and then told us all the story of how his father died of a heart attack at 52.
Fortunatly he didn't hire me and can't fire me. The Doctor/owner of the clinic hired me directly a few months ago and loves me because I'm finishing projects my predecessor spent the better part of a year fucking up.
I used to get cases like that all the time when I was working in the labs at my Uni many moons ago. Most of the time it was just undergrads losing some generic paper but one time I had a guy who lost a month's worth of work on his Masters thesis that was stored on the floppy he'd had since he was an undergrad... He handled it surprisingly well. When he first came into my office (the lab in the library actually had an office for the support dweeb, cool huh? That's the only time I've ever had an office at any job...) he was all pale looking and panicy when he explained what happened and what was on the disk. I calmly took the disk and told him to sit down and I'd see what I could do. The disk was toast of course all his data was gone. He sorta got this blank shell-shocked look on his face and just wandered out of the lab.
I also had one girl come in who broke down and started sobbing uncontrollably when I told her her disk was a goner. She just started balling and didn't stop for five or ten minutes I had to shut the office door and try to comfort her (I was all of 18 at the time and had virtually no experience dealing with girls at all, much less crying ones) I had to stand there while she held on to me and cried for a bit. Sadly at this point I was still too much of an awkward geek-boy to take advantage of this opportunity, I probably could've gotten at least a date that weekend if I'd asked.
The absolute worst data-loss reaction in the labs I ever saw was also one I exacerbated by not reacting well. This older guy (40's) was having problems saving his paper to his disk and came into the office and asked for my help. I grabbed a new floppy from my desk and went out to help him get it saved to the new disk. At the time our lab had a mix of macs and pc's. I don't remember the model but one particular series of powermac at the time ('96) had it's power button right where the floppy eject button is on a PC. When we got to the machine this dude was working on I asked him to eject his disk and before I could stop him he hit the power button and of course lost everything he'd done that day! I made the mistake of laughing when he did this. I caught myself quickly but it was too late he'd heard and was PISSED. He started screaming and ranting about computers, the Uni in general, me, Macs etc... Then demmanded that I get his disk out of the fucking computer for him, which I did, and as soon as I gave it to him he crushed it in hand and threw it against the wall and stormed out.
At the Peinemunde (sp?) facility where most of the work on the V2 was done there were thousands of Jewish and POW slave laborers doing much of the manufactoring work. Not as bad as Aushtwitz but no walk in the park either. Werner von Braun and others presided over these workforces knowing full well that they were using slave labor, kept in brutal conditions. That makes them war criminals. IIRC when von Braun came over full immunity for him and his research team was part of the deal for him to work on the US space/missle program.
They were far from the worst offenders in Nazi Germany during WWII but their hands were far from clean.
Did you actually read the story? Quoting the second paragraph:
"In assembling this list of exemplary technological disasters, we've omitted the most familiar--those whose names have entered into the language, like Bhopal, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Titanic and Challenger--in favor of some with fresher tales to tell and lessons to impart."
What a shameless and pathetic attempt at karma whoring...
Slashdot Mirror
Well as the AG of the US, Ashcroft is in charge of the Justice Department and along with his boss, Dubya, is ultimately responsible for the policies that drive such decisions. So it's perfectly fair to bring up his name in an article relating to the actions of DoJ.
Fine I won't make fun of the fact that he believes in Jesus, but can I still make fun of his fear of calico cats, fear of the breast of Justice , the ritual annoiting in cooking oil for every office he takes or for his musical stylings?
Alaska since you ask. But (unfortunatly) I live in Texas right now. Though the beer and weapons theme still applies. And I think that a lot of the people down here think that the metric system is part of some sort of Satanic plot to make baby jesus cry.
Houston? Just give me some advanced warning so I can get out. I check the disused storage closet labeled "beware of the leopard" on a weekly basis so leaving the notice there will be fine :)
Not true. I still buy my beer by the pint and it's easy to find liquor sold by the pint or quart as well.
.45" inches wide.
Also ammunition comes in a mishmash of metric and English units. The caliber (as in 45 caliber) of a round is based on it's size in inches. For example the bore of a 45 caliber handgun is
So what was your point again?
They're unhappy with their lives and want everyone else to be too. Also ignore the eternal optimists, following their advice will leave you unprepared for a colder, harsher world than they describe. Above all else, ignore me I don't know what the hell I'm talking about either. Though I would also suggest reading what we all have to say and evaluating it's merit as only you can.
/. readers fit into one or another catagory as well. Don't worry, this is a good thing, if you and your circumstances were truely unique you'd have no peers to support you and no 'elders' with experience for you to draw on. So as one of your 'elders' let me offer a few suggestions for you to ignore that might be of some use.
Ok so now I'm going to make a few statements and offer some suggestions that I expect you to ignore because even if hadn't told you to ignore me you'd do you're own thing anyway. First off you're situation isn't all that unique. There are plenty of bright young people that didn't like HS who now find themselves wondering what to do with their lives. There are also plenty of bright not-so-young-anymore people who went through the exact same thing you're going through. I count myself a member of the latter group and I imagine that a lot
Go to University. Not because it's good for you, or because "it will help you get a job" but because it's fun. If you love to learn as much as you claim to you'll have a blast at Uni and can diversify your education as much as you like (or until you run out of money) If you haven't already given it some thought you may want to consider majoring in business management (*disclaimer: this is what my degree is in.) If your attention span is fickle as you say you'll probably enjoy this degree. You do one or two class from each of the major areas of the business program and move on. The focus is on giving the student a working knowledge of many different areas, plus there are a lot of elective credits to play with, I took a lot CS and extra Econ courses with mine.
Don't get stuck in the paradigm of living a "normal" life. If you so chose you can abandon the concepts of "career" and "permanent residence." At 25 I'm on my third post-college job and second career-track. I've also put in one cross country move and I'm starting to think of doing another in 12-18 months. This has worked well for me because I do bore easilly and am somewhat less risk-averse than average I think. I like exploring new cities, mastering new jobs and adding to my portfolio of skills. There are downsides to being a white-collar vagabond however. It's hard to say goodbye to close friends and family, retirement accounts don't grow as fast and there are long worrying spells when you have no health insurance. Also you'll probably never make as much money as someone who choses a more staid and serious life. You'll also never be a true expert in any feild, where others aquire great depth of knowledge, you'll aquire great breadth, and may just be a lot happier for it. I'm not saying this is the way for you to live or even that it's a permanent deal for me either but it's an idea to keep in mind should you find yourself feeling bored and trapped a year or two into first "real" job outta college.
Diversify your hobbies and live outside of your head some -or- don't forget you have a body attached to that big monkey brain of yours. If you get bored of specific projects or hobbies easilly diversifying and adding some physical ones can really help. It's nice to get a break from thinky stuff on a regular basis. To break up the monotany of my day jobs and thinky hobbies I also cycle, run, hike, backpack, lift weights, brew (and drink) beer and have plans to start moonshining. These are all activities that require me to manipulate the real world or my own body, not just bits on the computer screen or words in my head.
To close I'll borrow from the great Bard himself, remember "to thine own self be true." Do whatever it is that you think will make you happy and keep doing it until your not happy with it anymore, then find something else.
The only thing that really bothers me about offshore outsourcing is that a signifcant portion of the savings comes from US Companies dodging hard won labor rights/laws and payroll taxes. Remove all tax benefits from outsourcing and require US companies that offshore jobs to obey a core subset of the most fundamental US Labor laws. This wouldn't be an unprecedented extension of jurisdiction, the "Corrupt Foreign Practices Act" already extends us bribery/corruption laws to overseas operations of US companies.
To be honest my views on this are partially influenced by self interest and morality. Self interest because I don't want to lose my job to an outsource provider that has an unfair tax and working conditions advantage. From a moral point of view, laborers in the West suffered greatly during the Industrial Revolution and the rights and protections we enjoy today are the direct result of the (often bloody) battles they fought and I don't think it's right for workers in the third world to have to fight those same battles when working for Western companies.
That's already the case here in Houston. There are RFID readers embedded all over the highways that use to monitor traffic condidtions. They use the EZTags people have for the tollways to monitor traffic flow since tollway users also use the freeways. Look at the pretty map here
This system is run by TxDOT, not law enforcement so AFAIK currently no data is stored any longer than is necessary to track speed from reader to reader. However this system would be very easy to repurpose if RFID license plates become required. Then what's the incentive not to store the data on everyone's travel? I for one don't relish the idea of being pulled over because according the database lookup some traffic cop performed as a matter of routine indictates that I'm well outside of my normal 'area of travel'. Or get singled out for scrutiny because the same look up indicated that my average highway speed is over the limit so I get stuck with a cop tailgating me for 10 miles hoping to catch me speeding even though nothing he witnessed me do would give him any reason to suspect me.
Before you start crying about my tin-foil beanie being on too tight, similar things have already happened. Not because of RFID of course, but I have been pulled over or otherwise harassed for nothing other than "out of state license plate syndrom" multiple times. One of included being tailgated by a cruiser with his brights + spot light on for 15 minutes on highway 101 in Oregon one night on a road trip and being follow through NH for about 15 minutes by troopers blasting us with their radar gun the whole time before finally being pulled over and detained while they searched the vehical. Their reason? "We don't see a lot of plates from your state over here" Since we weren't breaking any laws whatsoever they couldn't ticket us. So excuse me for not wanting to make their jobs any easier.
Well actually no, bloat is bloat. Personally I think Gnome and KDE are bloated as hell, so I don't use them, I prefer GNUStep (nee WindowMaker) for my WM. It's fast, sleek, customizable and has, IMO, just the right amount of eye candy. My servers never get any GUI tools whatsoever so there's even less bloat on them. On windows I don't have any real say in how much bloat is installed but on Linux I have total control. Some distros are shipping with a lot of crufty bloat turned on by default, others aren't, but still no matter what the defaults are no distro forces you to use the amount of bloat they think is acceptable. Unlike windows.
It's not that bloat doesn't exist in Linux, it's that there's a fundamental difference between Linux bloat and windows bloat: I can choose how much bloat I want in Linux, I can't under Windows.
(how many business majors know that you can make a screenshot in windows?)
/me raises hand
/. I get sick of hearing the standard lines reffering to business majors as technological retards spouted off by slashdotters whose only claim to geeks status is using kazaa-lite to download bad music off the 'net. Not that I'm implying that you fall into this catagory, or that you were specifically attacking me or anything, I'm just tired of hearing how dumb business majors are.
Ahem. I happen to have a BBA in Management. I know how to take screen shots under Windows. You just hit "printscreen" and paste, though I prefer to use a nifty little utility called "ScreenHunter" Of course the only time I need to take screenshots in windows is at work, since that's the only time I ever use windows. I'm typing this message in Mozilla, on a Linux box, running GNUStep (nee Window Maker) for my window manager, with xinerama running for dual displays. If someone sent me email through didtheyreadit it wouldn't track me because I use PINE as my MUA, running directly on the FreeBSD server that runs my domain, acerbic.org. The last time I took a screenshot on this setup I used The Gimp to capture VNC screens on an XP box I'd setup for a client to digitize images pulled off an analog MRI unit. I was documenting the system for him.
Don't assume that every business major out there is some noob that couldn't hack it in CS. I chose to major in business because I knew I could learn the tech stuff I wanted to on my own, but for the finer points of business and economics I wanted a formal education in. In fact my first job out of college was as a Unix SysAdmin for an ISP, after that I worked as IT manager for a cancer clinic. A couple of months ago I got out of hands on tech work to take a job as an account manager at an ASP - I wanted a change of pace.
Just like the mythical geek girls and liberty defending geek lawyers there exist geek 'suits' as well, some with more techie experience than most of the posters on
Once upon time during a slow week at work I scavanged a broken CD-ROM drive from our pile of dead hardware and installed it in my PC, since the motor still worked I plugged into the the powersupply. I kept an IE CD in the tray and whenever I happened to be drinking a beverage at my desk I would open the tray and use it as a cupholder. It was funny for about 5 minutes. But it was a very effective cupholder.
Except for the fact that the authorities would likely turn the blasted things ON during a disaster they suspect may be somehow connected with terrorism.
Speaking for myself I'd that the reason why so many slashdotters are wary of such technologies is because we know technology well enough to know that it's not a panacea to all (or really any) social problems and we understand the potential for abuse that comes with any complex, secretive technology controlled by a group or agency that operate de facto without public oversight/control. We're also, as a group, less prone to take sweeping promises about what a new technology can and will do for us at face value mostly because we've heard so many that proved to be damn lies when the dust settled: "Face recognition cameras will only spot terrorists!"; "The new bomb scanners will make air travel safer and more convientent, and no false positives!"; "Peoplesoft is an easy to use and cost effective solution to your HR needs"; "The speed sensors are for your own protection citizen" etc...
Also, speficically regard objections to automated traffic enforcement scams such as this a lot of object because we know that the stated objective, "increased safety", and promised benefits, "lower insurance rates" are total bullshit. If increased road safety were the goal then stealth enforcement wouldn't be seen as a benefit, bright red flags and flashing lights would mark the intersections dangergous enough to warrant traffic spy-cams and people would slow down, thus saving lives. That and having traffic engineers set the speed limit to a speed that the road can safely handle, or better yet pump the money being tossed into spy-cams into smart roads with adaptive speed limits. So yeah I'm afriad of any revenue generating, control increasing technology marketed as a safety device.
What the hell is wrong with "Ya'll"? English is lacking a proper plural pronoun in the what is it, second person direct or something like that? "You" is to ambiguous as without non-verbal clues it's impossible to tell if it's directed at the group or an individual in the group. What would you prefer he use "Youze Guys"?
Your hospital can't just lose a few CAT scans and think oh well, he'll be in for another scan eventually.
You've never worked in a medical field have you? You'd think that that would be a big deal and in theory data integrity is a very high priority but in reality...
I used to work as the IT Manager for a diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment center (and still do contract work with them because my replacement is kind of a noob) While loosing studies isn't exactly a "no big deal" situation it's still far more common than patients will ever realize. The server that stores and processes all of the digital images from the scanning equipment is a single CPU home rolled P4 using some shitty onboard IDE raid controller (doesn't even do RAID5!) running Windows 2K. The most money I could get for setting up a backup solution was the $200 an external firewire drive cost. Somehow we never managed to loose a study once it reached my network in the 9 months I worked there but I know three or four were deleted from the cameras themselves before being sent properly so whoops it's gone, gotta reschedule (and bill their insurance or Medicare again!) Two weeks ago one of the drives in that 0+1 array failed and despite my pleadings they still haven't ordered a replacement yet...
Now it's tempting to think that this place is just a special case of cheapness and sloppiness but from talking to the diagnostic techs (the people that operate the cameras) that's not so. That clinic is a little worse than average in terms of loosing patient information but by no means the worst some of them at seen/heard of/worked at in their careers. It's worse in general at small facilities but even large hospitals often suffer from the same unprofessionalism.
Your bank and the phone company keep much better track of your calls or your ATM transactions than most hospitals do with your CT or MRI scans...
I concur. Even worse, IT people are often intimidated into exacerbating this problem. I've been in situations before when I knew I had to let "the boss" bypass security rules that applied to everyone else because he had an attention span of about 10 seconds, any explination longer than that and he assumed you were lying to him to cover up the fact that you couldn't do your job. So when he said "Make my password 'drmark' for everything and make it never expire" any answer other than "OK" would've been cut off after ten seconds and parsed as "The incompetant arse in charge of IT can't fill a simple request and is trying to snow me under with BS, time to look for another one. He can't fool me, I'm an M.D.!" Substitute MBA/C*O/etc... for MD and that statement I'm afraid could apply to anyone in senior management for a company of any size.
Waaaay to often I think IT people, even IT Managers, end up in a similar situation when faced with irritable, ignorant senior management who refuse to listen to any explination of "the technical mumbo-jumbo" or learn how to use the most basic functions of it and instead expect it work as if by magic. So to keep management happy (and thus keep ourselves employeed) we turn off half their access security so things "just work" for them. Then cross our fingers and pray...
Oh hell I'm doing this without even trying right now. I quit my old company (a cancer clinic and diagnostic imaging center) where I worked as IT Manager because they were paying jackshit for the work I was doing and were general assholes. Before I left I already had a new job lined up, not in IT and without taking a pay cut, so I was in a good mood about things when I left. Because I knew I'd be hard to replace I offered to consult part-time until they found a replacement and then train him nights and weekends until he was up to speed. After three weeks w/out any IT support they finally found someone, for half my old wage and with less than half my experience.
;->
Sooo I'm trying my hardest to train him, but I just keep overwhelming the poor guy, he has no Unix exp of any kind which between the Linux servers and the Unix based medical workstations leaves him unqualified for about half of the "standardized" portion of job. On top of that we have many, many speciality apps that only apply to Oncology or to Radiology that I wouldn't expect any IT worker off the street to know. He's in over his head and knows it, but doesn't have a choice because even at $12/hr it's better than nothing.
It's proving near impossible to train him, important operational detials are getting left out while we cover the basics, and because of the steep learning curve it's taking a lot of work to get those to sink in. In the meantime he's making a lot of mistakes.
As a result my workload has roughly doubled since they hired him, tripled if you count the time spent training him. At fat contractor wages too. Naturally one expects these hours to go down over time as he learns the ropes but there is also the very real possibility that he'll be fired or will quit over the stress of it all and we'll have to start all over agian. Meanwhile I still to get play with all neat Med IT toys I had to give up when I left, but with none of the stress all while making money hand over fist. Plus I get to watch the bosses that pissed me off enough to quit in the first place squirm and kiss my ass daily....
Around here we have weekly[1] "managers" meetings which sadly encompass 10 of our 30 employees. Since the general manager (or COO as he likes to call himself) is always late to his own damn meeting we end up having a pre-meeting meeting about how useless the upcoming meeting is going to be. Then people get bored and wander off leading to another pre-meeting meeting once the general manager arrives in which we discuss who left, why and who is going to go fetch them.
Then of course there is the post-meeting meething when the meeting victims discuss what a useless tool our general manager is. Though at this point that's just the preferred recreational activity of the whole company...
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[1] unless we effectivly demoralize the general manager enough to cancle it, which happens with surprising frequency
Exactly. It seems that an increasing number of employers treat their salaried employees like wireless minutes: free on nights and weekends. I know the owner of the place I work at feels that way, and not just about the IT staff and not just about work for the company. For the past two months our facility maintinence staff have been working 12 hour days rennovating his new house. He's of the opinion that if you're salaried you work for his business from 8-5 and are then available to work at his house until 8 the next morning. Weekends are an unkown concept to him.
Yes I, along with nearly everyone else that works there, am actively looking for another job. Just that those job things are kinda difficult to come by right now.
That must a dream, I hate running new cable drops. The boss has never seen the value in having professional cable contractors come out and wire up the place right, which he should've done a couple years ago when he had this place built. Instead he just had the IT guys (at the time)run it all, they were somewhat less than qualified and didn't even know enough to realize how badly they were doing things. I woudln't mind running new drops from time to time if we had any sort of sane organization up there but the whole ceiling is just a rats nest of ethernet, phone, audio, alarm and bog knows what else all running every which way. Oh and the fiberglass insulation is just laying on top of the tiles so it's always an itchy, messy adventure.
Actually your coal plants produce more nuclear waste than nuclear plants do. Coal contains a lot of impurities including radioactive heavy metals such as uranium-235, thorium and potasium-40. Then there's all the CO2 and SO2 (acid rain) and other goodies that make for really pretty sunsets in industrial towns. In fact coal fired plants release more energy in the form of wasted nuclear fuel than the create by burning the coal! We could actually produce more energy by extracting the fissionable materials from coal than by burning it, while reducing the level of radioactive waste that enters the eviroment. Neat huh? .
See this paper at the Oak Ridge lab for more info on the radioactive waste found in coal ash.
Ok I'm the IT Manager at an oncology/diagnostic imaging clinic and holy shit is my boss, the general manager (COO if you ask him) an idiot. Some examples include:
Asking a patient out on a date.
The patient he asked out didn't want to date him but did set him up with a friend of hers who just left her husband a few weeks prior, who also happened to be a patient at our other clinic across town. After going out with her he decided to hire her as our new receptionist. Ten minutes after the Doctor saw one of his other patients working the phones she was gone and Frank got an ass chewing.
He reportedly said, in the middle of a meeting with the doctor and a female employ: "Sometimes when I get home after a day like this it's just brain masturbation." There's nothing I can say to put this in context because there was no context, he apparently just blurted it out for no apparent reason.
He's a verbal train wreck in general. Last week he interupted a group us working by the MRI desk (not together, just happened that a lot us needed something from that area at the same time) and shouted "Hey if none of you have any work to do maybe I should dock your pay, har har har!" He then proceeded to hold us hostage for about 20 minutes while he told stupid stories about being a self made man, tried to sell my assistant some old suits he couldn't wear anymore and then told us all the story of how his father died of a heart attack at 52.
Fortunatly he didn't hire me and can't fire me. The Doctor/owner of the clinic hired me directly a few months ago and loves me because I'm finishing projects my predecessor spent the better part of a year fucking up.
I used to get cases like that all the time when I was working in the labs at my Uni many moons ago. Most of the time it was just undergrads losing some generic paper but one time I had a guy who lost a month's worth of work on his Masters thesis that was stored on the floppy he'd had since he was an undergrad... He handled it surprisingly well. When he first came into my office (the lab in the library actually had an office for the support dweeb, cool huh? That's the only time I've ever had an office at any job...) he was all pale looking and panicy when he explained what happened and what was on the disk. I calmly took the disk and told him to sit down and I'd see what I could do. The disk was toast of course all his data was gone. He sorta got this blank shell-shocked look on his face and just wandered out of the lab.
:)
I also had one girl come in who broke down and started sobbing uncontrollably when I told her her disk was a goner. She just started balling and didn't stop for five or ten minutes I had to shut the office door and try to comfort her (I was all of 18 at the time and had virtually no experience dealing with girls at all, much less crying ones) I had to stand there while she held on to me and cried for a bit. Sadly at this point I was still too much of an awkward geek-boy to take advantage of this opportunity, I probably could've gotten at least a date that weekend if I'd asked.
The absolute worst data-loss reaction in the labs I ever saw was also one I exacerbated by not reacting well. This older guy (40's) was having problems saving his paper to his disk and came into the office and asked for my help. I grabbed a new floppy from my desk and went out to help him get it saved to the new disk. At the time our lab had a mix of macs and pc's. I don't remember the model but one particular series of powermac at the time ('96) had it's power button right where the floppy eject button is on a PC. When we got to the machine this dude was working on I asked him to eject his disk and before I could stop him he hit the power button and of course lost everything he'd done that day! I made the mistake of laughing when he did this. I caught myself quickly but it was too late he'd heard and was PISSED. He started screaming and ranting about computers, the Uni in general, me, Macs etc... Then demmanded that I get his disk out of the fucking computer for him, which I did, and as soon as I gave it to him he crushed it in hand and threw it against the wall and stormed out.
On the whole I liked the crying girl the best
this song by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie
At the Peinemunde (sp?) facility where most of the work on the V2 was done there were thousands of Jewish and POW slave laborers doing much of the manufactoring work. Not as bad as Aushtwitz but no walk in the park either. Werner von Braun and others presided over these workforces knowing full well that they were using slave labor, kept in brutal conditions. That makes them war criminals. IIRC when von Braun came over full immunity for him and his research team was part of the deal for him to work on the US space/missle program.
They were far from the worst offenders in Nazi Germany during WWII but their hands were far from clean.
Did you actually read the story? Quoting the second paragraph:
"In assembling this list of exemplary technological disasters, we've omitted the most familiar--those whose names have entered into the language, like Bhopal, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Titanic and Challenger--in favor of some with fresher tales to tell and lessons to impart."
What a shameless and pathetic attempt at karma whoring...