In the planning two years ago, we were told that the reason for shutting off servers was that we coudn't patch them while we were out... and if they got hacked, we weren't allowed to go and fix them (or monitor to discover it happened)... so it'd potentially leave someone with access during the length of the shutdown.
The resulting cleanup would be horrible for everyone involved, depending on the agency's security policies. (our are a wipe, and reinstall the OS from original media (which is much trickier these days due to how software gets distributed)... then reinstall the software (can't simply install from a previous image).)
In my opinion, leaving servers on with a message is an absolutely horrible thing to do. GSA gave out bad advice in my opinion, as it's going to start getting cached by search engines the way they told people to do it. (302 redirections, not serve a 503 message).
And they just gave people a PNG to include... which if people put it up directly without re-copying it all in alt-text, is a section 508 violation.
They *should* have done this with a static server per agency (or network), and some rules at the firewalls to redirect all port 80 traffic to it, other than those who had exemptions to keep running for whatever reason.
Adobe must be the one company in the world to have a worse track record at security than Microsoft, Oracle or Mozilla.
At my work, they require us to take annual security training... and this year, I flat out refused to take it from any of my systems... because I had to install flash & turn on java in my web browser. I had to go to the 'training center' to take it from one of the machines there.
... not a week later, the first of the 2013 Flash vulnerabilities was announced... then a couple of weeks later, another one... then the Java one...
Then I was told that I had to take the 'advanced security' training... what was the recommendation? to turn off flash & java in your web browser.
I don't know the field, or the paper... but supposedly this guy gave talks at other places.
*If* thhe said enough that would've let someone write this paper (ie, didn't require knowledge that he didn't aldeady leak), then I'd put the odds on some other company doing it, rather than a disgruntled employee.
PURLs and the like assume that there's going to be someone around to maintain the content, and maintain the linkage to the content.
If a document is officially 'published' and given some sort of persistant ID (eg, DOI, ARK, Handle, whatever), then citing documents *should* use those over URLs.
If however, you're just citing an example that's just some web site on the internet... then you're SOL. They have no reason to never change their materials, keep a given version around 'til the end of time, or inform you if it's been moved elsewhere.
eg, say that there's a complaint about some process, they cite Montgomery Ward's website as an example where it was done previously... of course, the company doesn't exist any more. This is much different than someone locking up an article from a paywall -- they *want* you to find the item, so they can then try to get $30 or whatever out of you.
I know this is hard to believe, but public libraries don't care about books if they're not circulating.** If no one's come and checked out the book in a year or two, then it goes to make space for books that people are actually reading. It's no different than when people get all pissed off because of some great literary classic gets mulched -- if people aren't reading it, it's a waste of shelf space.
Academic and research libraries have different rules for maintaining their collections. Typically, before 'deaccessioning', they'll check to see if copies are available through other libraries via ILL (inter-library loan). If they've got the last copy, they're more likely to hang onto it than if there are still 20 copies in their local system.
So... if you care about a book, check it out, then return it. The library won't love you messing up their statistics, but every 'circ' (circulation) helps them to justify their budget.
** with some exception for their intentionally non-circulating materials.
(disclaimer : I volunteer at our local branch to deal with the book cart / sales until they're banned next week. Most programming & textbooks I sent to Books for International Goodwill)
I've been in airports, and had people w/ just a USB cable ask me if they could plug into my laptop to charge...
Luckily, as I usually fly southwest, the two times it's happened I was able to point out that there was USB charging available from their power points.
(when people think I'm mean for not sharing power in other situations, I'll break out the 'It's not how many USB sticks you plug into your laptop' PSA reference)... I'd love for USB sticks to bring back the hardware write-only switch.
Personally, I wouldn't need one of these 'til my current phone dies -- WebOS will assume charging only unless you specifically enter your passcode to allow it to function as a USB disk when you plug it in.
Back in the early 1990s, I had a high school math teacher who would assign the homework *before* she taught the lesson.
You were expected to read the chapter, try to do the homework, and then she'd answer any questions that you might have the next day in class.
You then had another night to correct whatever you needed before the homework was due. (and then start your reading for the next day's class).
It was 20+ years ago, but I seem to recall she'd hit us with quizzes as least once a week... I just can't remember if they were at the beginning of the class, or the end. (and if they were at the beginning, were they on the reading from the night before, or two nights before?)
There are a lot of fields where the adjuncts are retired or semi-retired practitioners.
When I was in civil engineering, my concrete professor was middle aged, but was still working part time. (I have no idea if he was scouting for talent for his company or not). The adjunct who taught environmental engineering (mostly water treatment) was younger, but actually working in the field. My dad taught law school after he retired 20+ years in the military, and he wasn't tenure track. (which is why he was okay with the joke, 'there are two types of teachers, good ones and tenured'.)
When I went to grad school for Operations Research (engineering management), I had an adjunct professor who worked at AARP (middle aged), and retired NASA (well past middle aged).
During my master's in Information Management, I had mostly tenured and tenure-track professors, and the tenure-track were younger than the adjuncts (who were teaching evening classes while working some other job... including another from AARP)
All that being said... there might still be some correlation to age -- even if they don't necessarily teach better, they might be considered more approachable than an older professor that the student have difficulty relating to.
My problem with tenured professors has been the ones with no current practical experience. I remember some of my co-workers during undergrad (we worked at the unversity's computing center) complaining about a Comp. Sci professor teaching computer security and showing slides obviously 10-20 years old, and insisting things hadn't changed at all.
Whereas, I took computer security from someone who was well past his 60s, and he had only gotten out of the field a year or two before... and when some of the students complained that he wasn't teaching the latest tools, he explained that he didn't teach tools at all, because they're just going to change in 2-3 years, and you're better off knowing how they work so you can evaluate if they work for your needs.
See a family member's installed game that you want to play? Send them a request to authorize the computer. Once authorized, the lender's library of Steam games become available for others on the machine to access, download and play.
There are some games that my neighbor plays that he won't even let his kids watch, much less play on their own. I remember that there was one where the (at the time) 9 year old was able to download the demo for free, which he only knew about because his dad & uncle played the game.
If this were truly a 'family' plan, you'd be able to set which games a specific account is allowed to have access to.
This was my first thought when I saw the summary -- it's been done before; by librarians. (I just couldn't remember the name and/or library system that started it).
You're thinking of Feist v. Rural, in which the courts held that collections *might* be copyrightable, if there were originality in the selection, order or presentation of the list. (and well, everyone in a given area, in alphabetical order, as a standard phone book didn't qualify).
So, if this is just a '20 best songs', by some well known metric, it's not an original selection. They *might* have done some work to deal with the ordering... many DJs will consider the tempo of the outro / intro of songs so that they flow well from one to another. (but in that case, they also sync them up and overlap them).
Oh... and most bookstores use BISAC, not alphabetical order. They might use alpha within give sections.
You simply missed the comment period. The problem is, they get posted in the Federal Register, which the general public never reads.
If *that* had been posted to Slashdot, it might've been more useful. As it was, there were 6 people who submitted something as individuals who potentially will have some influence... out of hundreds who might've otherwise taken some time to make sure that decision makers knew the voters cared enough to take a bit of time to write a letter.
Generally, I hear about these things way too late to be useful.... for that one,I tried to find out what the process would be for a professional society that I was a member of to submit an response... and it turns out they already knew about it, and submitted something the exact opposite of what I thought was important, and only served to piss me off.
I couple of months back, I picked up an unlocked GSM Pre3, and I haven't had a chance yet to really dig into which of the pre-paid companies offer good terms for smartphones for my usage pattern.
I know that Phone Scoop has a list, but it doesn't mention the 4 virtual carriers mentioned in the article summary.
Yes, she admits to using Google... but how do we know it wasn't Amazon, or some product review site that was giving the NSA the information? Or even Facebook, with all of the sites that end up linking back to them so you can 'like' their page.
Honestly, if I worked for the NSA, I'd start up my own ad network... I assume the existing ones are profitable (or they wouldn't exist), so you can undercut them to get lots of sites to use your service, and randomly inject code into people's web browsers. Or just buy them outright. Or just usurp their business and have them do your dirty work for you without having to pay them.
The NSA clearly has a different definition of 'wiretap' than how Snowden used it, which is how they can argue 'no, we don't do that'. I assume that Snowden meant 'I can retrieve large amounts of data on you given your e-mail address' while to NSA it meant 'we can set up an individualized 100% reliable sniffer given your e-mail address'.
Next, we should discuss what the definition of 'is' is.
You're assuming that each item only has one natural parent -- which may be true in most taxonomies, but more complex systems (thesaurii*, ontologies), allow for more complex parent-type relationships.
What you're dealing with is even simpler -- facets. You have a bunch of items with two attributes (application, type of file), and each attribute has a limited set of mutually exclusive options. Some file systems can store extended attributes, but they're not always that efficient (as it's not something in high demand). BFS was the only file system that I know of that really pushed it as a main feature.
* Roget's Thesaurus is a synonym ring, not a thesaurus.
I refuse to call it a list of 'data centers', because of their changing definition of what a 'data center' is, but you used to be able to get lists from data.gov... unfortunately, they've now got so much stuff in there that it's hard to find much of anything. The project to shut everything down goes by the name FDCCI:
It might be that individual countries still have laws that apply (eg, the US does, but they still might not've been in full compliance), but we don't yet have an international treaty for doing it. My suggestion would be to host the website in Antigua.
At a meeting a couple of years back, I was talking to someone that I think was the head of the British Library (I remember 'head of' and 'British' even though he was an American) We talked about some of my work in trying to come up with definitions that different communities can agree on, and he said that he had been at a meeting of archivists and they were having trouble defining 'permenant preservation'.
He said they came up with a definition that was effectively 'make sure we can understand it tomorrow, then do the same thing tomorrow'
One of my former co-workers managed to make it 6 months back in the mid-1990s... he said they'd give you a function to write, tell you what the inputs and outputs were, and what language it was to be written in... and that was it... no clue if it could be written better because you weren't allowed to know what interacted with it. He quit.
Another person I knew went to work for one of the three letter agencies, and said that after 2001 he realized they were just out to get all brown people, and being a brown person himself, he didn't feel comfortable working there anymore.
Unfortunately, for most of the code monkeys doing this sort of stuff, you can't just reprogram the guidance system to make the world's largest jiffy-pop.
Slashdot Mirror
In the planning two years ago, we were told that the reason for shutting off servers was that we coudn't patch them while we were out ... and if they got hacked, we weren't allowed to go and fix them (or monitor to discover it happened) ... so it'd potentially leave someone with access during the length of the shutdown.
The resulting cleanup would be horrible for everyone involved, depending on the agency's security policies. (our are a wipe, and reinstall the OS from original media (which is much trickier these days due to how software gets distributed) ... then reinstall the software (can't simply install from a previous image).)
In my opinion, leaving servers on with a message is an absolutely horrible thing to do. GSA gave out bad advice in my opinion, as it's going to start getting cached by search engines the way they told people to do it. (302 redirections, not serve a 503 message).
And they just gave people a PNG to include ... which if people put it up directly without re-copying it all in alt-text, is a section 508 violation.
They *should* have done this with a static server per agency (or network), and some rules at the firewalls to redirect all port 80 traffic to it, other than those who had exemptions to keep running for whatever reason.
At my work, they require us to take annual security training ... and this year, I flat out refused to take it from any of my systems ... because I had to install flash & turn on java in my web browser. I had to go to the 'training center' to take it from one of the machines there.
... not a week later, the first of the 2013 Flash vulnerabilities was announced ... then a couple of weeks later, another one ... then the Java one ...
Then I was told that I had to take the 'advanced security' training ... what was the recommendation? to turn off flash & java in your web browser.
ah, the irony.
There's a project on Kickstarter aimed for ages 3+that ends in a few hours:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danshapiro/robot-turtles-the-board-game-for-little-programmer?ref=live
(Robot Turtles: The Board Game for Little Programmers)
I don't know the field, or the paper ... but supposedly this guy gave talks at other places.
*If* thhe said enough that would've let someone write this paper (ie, didn't require knowledge that he didn't aldeady leak), then I'd put the odds on some other company doing it, rather than a disgruntled employee.
PURLs and the like assume that there's going to be someone around to maintain the content, and maintain the linkage to the content.
If a document is officially 'published' and given some sort of persistant ID (eg, DOI, ARK, Handle, whatever), then citing documents *should* use those over URLs.
If however, you're just citing an example that's just some web site on the internet ... then you're SOL. They have no reason to never change their materials, keep a given version around 'til the end of time, or inform you if it's been moved elsewhere.
eg, say that there's a complaint about some process, they cite Montgomery Ward's website as an example where it was done previously ... of course, the company doesn't exist any more. This is much different than someone locking up an article from a paywall -- they *want* you to find the item, so they can then try to get $30 or whatever out of you.
(of course, I've just spent the last week talking about all of these issues, between meetings of DataCite, Research Data Alliance and Force 11)
I know this is hard to believe, but public libraries don't care about books if they're not circulating.** If no one's come and checked out the book in a year or two, then it goes to make space for books that people are actually reading. It's no different than when people get all pissed off because of some great literary classic gets mulched -- if people aren't reading it, it's a waste of shelf space.
Academic and research libraries have different rules for maintaining their collections. Typically, before 'deaccessioning', they'll check to see if copies are available through other libraries via ILL (inter-library loan). If they've got the last copy, they're more likely to hang onto it than if there are still 20 copies in their local system.
So ... if you care about a book, check it out, then return it. The library won't love you messing up their statistics, but every 'circ' (circulation) helps them to justify their budget.
** with some exception for their intentionally non-circulating materials.
(disclaimer : I volunteer at our local branch to deal with the book cart / sales until they're banned next week. Most programming & textbooks I sent to Books for International Goodwill)
I've been in airports, and had people w/ just a USB cable ask me if they could plug into my laptop to charge ...
Luckily, as I usually fly southwest, the two times it's happened I was able to point out that there was USB charging available from their power points.
(when people think I'm mean for not sharing power in other situations, I'll break out the 'It's not how many USB sticks you plug into your laptop' PSA reference) ... I'd love for USB sticks to bring back the hardware write-only switch.
Personally, I wouldn't need one of these 'til my current phone dies -- WebOS will assume charging only unless you specifically enter your passcode to allow it to function as a USB disk when you plug it in.
Back in the early 1990s, I had a high school math teacher who would assign the homework *before* she taught the lesson.
You were expected to read the chapter, try to do the homework, and then she'd answer any questions that you might have the next day in class.
You then had another night to correct whatever you needed before the homework was due. (and then start your reading for the next day's class).
It was 20+ years ago, but I seem to recall she'd hit us with quizzes as least once a week ... I just can't remember if they were at the beginning of the class, or the end. (and if they were at the beginning, were they on the reading from the night before, or two nights before?)
There are a lot of fields where the adjuncts are retired or semi-retired practitioners.
When I was in civil engineering, my concrete professor was middle aged, but was still working part time. (I have no idea if he was scouting for talent for his company or not). The adjunct who taught environmental engineering (mostly water treatment) was younger, but actually working in the field. My dad taught law school after he retired 20+ years in the military, and he wasn't tenure track. (which is why he was okay with the joke, 'there are two types of teachers, good ones and tenured'.)
When I went to grad school for Operations Research (engineering management), I had an adjunct professor who worked at AARP (middle aged), and retired NASA (well past middle aged).
During my master's in Information Management, I had mostly tenured and tenure-track professors, and the tenure-track were younger than the adjuncts (who were teaching evening classes while working some other job ... including another from AARP)
All that being said ... there might still be some correlation to age -- even if they don't necessarily teach better, they might be considered more approachable than an older professor that the student have difficulty relating to.
My problem with tenured professors has been the ones with no current practical experience. I remember some of my co-workers during undergrad (we worked at the unversity's computing center) complaining about a Comp. Sci professor teaching computer security and showing slides obviously 10-20 years old, and insisting things hadn't changed at all.
Whereas, I took computer security from someone who was well past his 60s, and he had only gotten out of the field a year or two before ... and when some of the students complained that he wasn't teaching the latest tools, he explained that he didn't teach tools at all, because they're just going to change in 2-3 years, and you're better off knowing how they work so you can evaluate if they work for your needs.
I never did any WebOS programming, but I loved my Palm Pre -- anyone know if it's scriptable?
and before you say it's dead ... remember, HP released it into the wild, and then sold it to LG:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/08/31/2032236/hp-launches-beta-of-open-webos
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/13/02/25/1747201/lg-acquires-webos-source-code-and-patents-from-hp
There are some games that my neighbor plays that he won't even let his kids watch, much less play on their own. I remember that there was one where the (at the time) 9 year old was able to download the demo for free, which he only knew about because his dad & uncle played the game.
If this were truly a 'family' plan, you'd be able to set which games a specific account is allowed to have access to.
This was my first thought when I saw the summary -- it's been done before; by librarians. (I just couldn't remember the name and/or library system that started it).
You're thinking of Feist v. Rural, in which the courts held that collections *might* be copyrightable, if there were originality in the selection, order or presentation of the list. (and well, everyone in a given area, in alphabetical order, as a standard phone book didn't qualify).
So, if this is just a '20 best songs', by some well known metric, it's not an original selection. They *might* have done some work to deal with the ordering ... many DJs will consider the tempo of the outro / intro of songs so that they flow well from one to another. (but in that case, they also sync them up and overlap them).
Oh ... and most bookstores use BISAC, not alphabetical order. They might use alpha within give sections.
You simply missed the comment period. The problem is, they get posted in the Federal Register, which the general public never reads.
If *that* had been posted to Slashdot, it might've been more useful. As it was, there were 6 people who submitted something as individuals who potentially will have some influence ... out of hundreds who might've otherwise taken some time to make sure that decision makers knew the voters cared enough to take a bit of time to write a letter.
Generally, I hear about these things way too late to be useful. ... for that one,I tried to find out what the process would be for a professional society that I was a member of to submit an response ... and it turns out they already knew about it, and submitted something the exact opposite of what I thought was important, and only served to piss me off.
I couple of months back, I picked up an unlocked GSM Pre3, and I haven't had a chance yet to really dig into which of the pre-paid companies offer good terms for smartphones for my usage pattern.
I know that Phone Scoop has a list, but it doesn't mention the 4 virtual carriers mentioned in the article summary.
But it's already taken ...
There's companies in both California and Hawaii, likely others.
Yes, she admits to using Google ... but how do we know it wasn't Amazon, or some product review site that was giving the NSA the information? Or even Facebook, with all of the sites that end up linking back to them so you can 'like' their page.
Honestly, if I worked for the NSA, I'd start up my own ad network ... I assume the existing ones are profitable (or they wouldn't exist), so you can undercut them to get lots of sites to use your service, and randomly inject code into people's web browsers. Or just buy them outright. Or just usurp their business and have them do your dirty work for you without having to pay them.
We're starting to argue over semantics.
The NSA clearly has a different definition of 'wiretap' than how Snowden used it, which is how they can argue 'no, we don't do that'. I assume that Snowden meant 'I can retrieve large amounts of data on you given your e-mail address' while to NSA it meant 'we can set up an individualized 100% reliable sniffer given your e-mail address'.
Next, we should discuss what the definition of 'is' is.
You're assuming that each item only has one natural parent -- which may be true in most taxonomies, but more complex systems (thesaurii*, ontologies), allow for more complex parent-type relationships.
What you're dealing with is even simpler -- facets. You have a bunch of items with two attributes (application, type of file), and each attribute has a limited set of mutually exclusive options. Some file systems can store extended attributes, but they're not always that efficient (as it's not something in high demand). BFS was the only file system that I know of that really pushed it as a main feature.
* Roget's Thesaurus is a synonym ring, not a thesaurus.
I refuse to call it a list of 'data centers', because of their changing definition of what a 'data center' is, but you used to be able to get lists from data.gov ... unfortunately, they've now got so much stuff in there that it's hard to find much of anything. The project to shut everything down goes by the name FDCCI:
http://www.data.gov/search/node/FDCCI
Carrington Event : ~ August 28, 1859 to ~Sept 2, 1869
Bastile Day Event : ~July 14, 2000 to ~July 16, 2000
Halloween Storms : ~October 19th, 2003 to ~Nov 7, 2003
Of course, when someone says they 'studied the Halloween Storm', they might've only studied 7 days instead of the full 3 weeks.
(disclaimer: I've been pushing for better data citation in the solar physics community for years ... this is one of my pet peeves)
A week or two ago, a bunch of countries signed an treaty that allowed for publishing materials for the disabled.
So now various groups like HathiTrust (who won their lawsuit by The Authors Guild) can now share their work with groups from other countries. Unfortunately, the treaty had been modified to exclude audio visual works.
It might be that individual countries still have laws that apply (eg, the US does, but they still might not've been in full compliance), but we don't yet have an international treaty for doing it. My suggestion would be to host the website in Antigua.
'a' G-switch ?
*all* of them were installed upside down. (although 'all' might have only been two)
You'd be surprised.
At a meeting a couple of years back, I was talking to someone that I think was the head of the British Library (I remember 'head of' and 'British' even though he was an American) We talked about some of my work in trying to come up with definitions that different communities can agree on, and he said that he had been at a meeting of archivists and they were having trouble defining 'permenant preservation'.
He said they came up with a definition that was effectively 'make sure we can understand it tomorrow, then do the same thing tomorrow'
One of my former co-workers managed to make it 6 months back in the mid-1990s ... he said they'd give you a function to write, tell you what the inputs and outputs were, and what language it was to be written in ... and that was it ... no clue if it could be written better because you weren't allowed to know what interacted with it. He quit.
Another person I knew went to work for one of the three letter agencies, and said that after 2001 he realized they were just out to get all brown people, and being a brown person himself, he didn't feel comfortable working there anymore.
Unfortunately, for most of the code monkeys doing this sort of stuff, you can't just reprogram the guidance system to make the world's largest jiffy-pop.