What is the purpose of this? To engender fear or something? Or just a bit of idle fantasy in the summer heat?
Whatever the reason, a nuclear war doesn't just happen out of the blue; it is highly unlikely that there wouldn't be a long time before where the tensions were constantly rising, and it isn't very believably that that would happen either. The missiles don't start firing because El Presidente regrettably puts his coffee cup in the wrong place and pushes the red button.
Savvy users of both Linux and XP know that tweeked XP is much snappier and far more convenient than tweeked Linux if both run the same features and don't do anything stupid.
If you were as 'savvy' as all that, you'd know that where UNIX, and Linux among them, starts up most of it's services before you even reach the graphical logon, Windows defers much until after the user logs on - which is why I can log on to KDE in about 5 secs, but it takes me almost a full minute to reach a workable desktop in Windows, because of all the things that have to start after authentication.
And convenience is a matter of what you are used to. To me a command line in a proper shell like ksh is far more convenient than an overloaded IDE or a word processor that has once again changed beyond recognition. I honestly don't understand how anyone can put up with Windows - to me it is a never ending pain to use - but we are all different, I suppose.
However, some editors have cited the American Psychological Association's statement that exposure of the images to the public is an unethical act, since prior exposure to the images could render them ineffective as a psychological test. Is the censorship of material appropriate, when the public exposure to that material may render it useless?
It seems to me that this is a fight over superstitions; the strength of the Rorschach test is not that here we have a set of carefully constructed, magical devices such as mankind has never seen before. The basic idea, if I'm not mistaken, is to get the subject to look at them and talk about whatever thoughts are inspired by them. The precise shapes are not important, and you can use any other device in the same way, eg. Tarot cards.
This is incidentally the way Tarot cards make it possible to "see the future" - everybody can predict things, it is just a matter of remembering and thinking about all the facts; by looking at a number of Tarot cards and trying to relate the symbols to your circumstances, you force yourself to think out of the box, thus bringing more of the things you already know into your conscious awareness, which gives you a better basis from which to predict things. Nothing magical about it.
The party's goals are fairly simple. People should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit.
Much as I agree with the sentiment, I feel it is too little to form a political party on; a proper party program should address all or most aspects of running a society, possibly based on a shared worldview. What is copying movies going to do about the army, social security or the war in Iraq, just to mention a few thing? In my view one shouldn't start with the right to copy music files and then add the rest as an afterthought; one should start with some more general principles, like equality under the law and whatever, and then derive the right to make copies from that, along with all the other issues out in the real world.
But it is fully understandable that people feel nothing but loathing for politics and political parties as things are. I think at the bottom of it is not just the general, selfserving smarminess amongst politicians, but also the fact that they don't even seem to make an honest effort; so many of them are just narrow minded, incompetent windbags who are in it for the money and nothing else. I personally would vote for anybody that can convince me that he or she is going to simply do a good job in the interest of the country and the people; never mind whether they are God-fearing family people or promiscuous Satanists, staunch Capitalists or Communists, as long as they are honest and competent.
How many times have we now had somebody announcing "the end of" something? COBOL, FORTRAN, C, mainframes, UNIX - and now SQL. All these things are still around because they serve a useful purpose. It is well possible that this "No-SQL" concept can serve a purpose other than hype, but that largely remains to be seen.
The big, fundamental advantage of SQL databases, as far as I can see, is not that they are transactional or scalable or fast, but that you can organise your data in a way that fits fairly naturally with your data, and then you can analyse things in ways that you hadn't thought of when you designed the database using the select statement, even if it isn't always the most efficient of tasks. This is one thing that is hard to build in to hierarchical or networked databases, and of course even more so in simple, indexed files. And that is why RDBMSes are going to be the most important kind of databases for a long time yet.
That is not to say that simpler mechanisms don't have their place; few things beat a simple ISAM file when it comes to whipping up a program that can quickly look up and organise a simple dataset.
You have a choice to make: do you work to live or live to work? Working like that and staying healthy is just not realistic.
I have always thought myself that life should be worth living - why bother, otherwise? I would expect any reasonable employer to accept that they get the best out of their employees if they are thriving and in good health, so they ought to be willing to adjust your workload. But maybe you just aren't ready to make the adjustments in your life that are necessary? Anyway, it's your call.
I'm not sure I know what the fuss is about - I have been on Linux only for 10 years or so, and I don't think there is anything I feel is missing. In fact, I think there is lot of functionality I'd rather not have, which gets installed by default, but fortunately, this being Linux, I can just remove it again.
I think FOSS is more or less where it should be, now. We have the functionality that matters, and while thre are still things that could be improved, I don't see much of a problem. The only nuisance I have come across in the last several years is the fact that there is still no way of ensuring that all desktop programs use the same file dialog, but that really is a small issue.
And what is wrong with the design of open source? All software and open source more so, gets used or not depending on whether the users like it - the design is part of that, and probably often a major part, so in the end the designs that are still in there are the one that were good enough to survive. Pure evolution at work.
Do you genuinely think that this has primarily to do with scientific discourse? The whole subject of climate change has been obfuscated by the insincere, politically motivated waflle of the so-called 'climate sceptics' for decades, resulting in foot-dragging and endless delays, and it is very difficult not to see this report as yet another attempt to muddy the waters.
True, there no degree in "climate science", and so what? You become an expert by working seriously with the subject for a long time and by demonstrating genuine competence in the subjects it entails. Having a "background physics and economics" doesn't sound like he has much competence in climatology - maybe he only has a bachelor's degree, who knows? I imagine if he was a PhD in areas of study relevant to climatology, we would have heard about it.
All things considered, I think there is no real reason to spend resources on dismissing his claims in any detail; the debate about climate change is already over as far as the causality goes, and it is high time we moved on to what we should do about it, rather than wasting time trying to convince somebody who has decided that is not going to be convinced.
Finally, is it censorship to tell him to shut his face? I don't think so - he is not an official representative of the EPA, so if he goes public with a viewpoint that is not in line with their official policies, then he is misrepresenting them. This is no different from if he was working for any other organisation or a private company; they all have official spokespersons, who are the only ones that are allowed to communicate on behalf of their organisation.
Surprisingly this has yet to pick up major coverage in the press.
Major coverage? In mainstream press? When Michael Jackson has just died?
Not that I am a great fan, but let's face it, a lot more people know and care about MJ than about whether China blocks one or more aspects of Google. And even without big news stories and things happening in the world, a story about a minor, technical upset in a foreign country is hardly Earth shattering any way.
As for the poor Chinese, who can now no longer access Google's mixture of real search results with undisclosed, sponsored ones and propaganda - they have other ways of getting news from around the world. Foreigners travel to China, Chinese travel abroad; they are hardly left without contact to the rest of the planet, and of course they hear news from abroad at least that way.
It's a tempest in a teacup, frankly - some people seriously need to take off their blinkers and shake off the cold-war thinking. The world has changed while you were spaced out.
There's ample room for conspiracy in the murky world of health care, but I don't think it is in IT - instead, look at medical companies and the way medicine is prescribed and used, if you are looking fopr conspiracies.
There are many good reasons why computers aren't used universally in health care. Two of the biggest are education and resources - doctors and nurses aren't really taught to use computers in their work. And while having a well designed computer system can be a huge advantage in any line of work, that is actually only true once everybody is fully trained; until that has been done, it is actually less efficient. And the situation in most countries is that there are too few medical staff anywhere, so where would one find the resources to make it happen?
On top of that comes concerns with incompatible, existing systems, privacy issues etc. Not to mention the fact that nearly all public IT projects so far have been hugely over budget and behind schedule. I think that perhaps the only realistic way this can be solved is by creating a good, open source health care system and let it mature and grow into general use from the grassroot up.
Of course we can - it is technically feasible. The question is if it is the right thing to do, morally and politically.
Morals first: Does any nation have the moral right to go and interfere in the affairs of another? Well, of course, if they attack us we have to defend ourselves, which certainly amounts to "interference", but for all their hostile rhetorics, Iran are not actually attacking any western country or threatening to do so. In fact, all their signals are that they have no intentions to do so. I don't know what it is that gives certain Americans the idea that they have a right to go and dictate what is right or not - after all, you guys don't certainly like having others tell you what you should do.
Apart from that, the political effect of doing so would not be to help the Iranian opposition; on the contrary. It would play into the hands of Ahmadinejad, giving him a clear example of what a threat the US are to the people of Iran, and it would once again make the rest of world lose confidence in America's fitness as a top-player in international politics. I mean, after nearly a century of idiotic, bungled attempts at interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, you still don't get it? How many Vietnams and Iraqs does it take?
The best way I can think of is, buy a NAS and put your homedir on it. They aren't all that expensive any more, and it lets the whole family share things.
The other way, which I use to allow me to work on my projects both from home and the office, is to use a revision control system, like svn, cvs or perforce. Check things in every time you finish working.
Honestly, how much more life can one beat out of a dead horse?
So, there is a number of CCTV cameras somewhere and a group of volunteers spend time looking at them? Big deal. And it really doesn't have anything to do with privacy that I can spot. These cameras are put up in public spaces - if people move out into public space, they can't expect to be private.
Don't get me wrong - I can see why it would worry people that e.g. the police record everything on cameras, because you can't go and check out the material to see if you are in there looking like you might be doing something you shouldn't, but that can be amended - don't you have a Freedom of Information Act in the US? Or better - put it all on a public server, so everybody can go and see what goes on.
I don't buy that nonsense about "If you are innocent..." either; there are too many examples to the contrary, but there are hardly any circumstances that are only bad, it's just a matter of finding the good side of things. Couldn't it actually be quite cool if it was possible to check out what was going on downtown via live cameras? So perhaps instead of just crappy CCTV, what is really needed is good quality cameras?
Do you believe that the public relation damage to these companies can persuade them from selling this kind of technology to other dictatorial regimes?
Of course not.
And once again it is time for people to make up their minds - isn't it a basic tenet of Capitalism that the only thing that should concern the employees of a company is to maximize profit? That, in a word, if selling drugs to teenagers, weapons to mercenaries or technology to dictators gives the best profit, then it is your moral duty to do so?
Ok, ok, so maybe I exaggerate a bit, but I do get tired of hearing these so called "freedom advocates" on one hand tell us how they hate government, any and all government, while on the other hand they feel compelled to tell others off for not being "moral".
There are many advantages to buying an actual, printed newspaper. There is nothing like an old newspaper to light a fire or for polishing windows, and of course, you can take it with you to the loo and read it or use it when the loo-paper has run out; I challenge anybody to do that with their netbook or iPhone.
I don't know about that. To me art is - or ought to be - something one or two steps up from routine artisanship, sonething that is somehow above and beyond the ordinary. In most cases a video game doesn't qualify as art any more than the latest album by any of the trivial boy-bands, however well-crafted it may be.
The problem I see with modern games is not that they are too radical, but that they are too trivial and that they trivialise subjects like war, violence and suffering. A lot of games are in that respect nothing more than a kind of "pornography" and utterly insignificant. The first version of Doom may have broken some boundaries and counted as "art", despite its clumsy graphics, but I think the Nth remake of the same theme in stunningly crisp detail and completely naturalistic movements is simply nothing more than cheap and trivial pornography; there is certainly nothing "art" about it any more.
People are a lot more openminded than you give them credit for - which is why there are so many people who are willing to go to Tate Modern in London. I'm not saying whether there should be censorship on video games or not, only that if we're talking art, there is some way to go still.
I'm not sure why or even if the Chinese have a particular problem with skeletons; Having been married to a Chinese for 10 years and lived in Beijing, I have never come across this. If they have an issue with skeletons, I'm not sure we have to invent intricate explanations - all cultures have some things they consider particularly unclean and unacceptable. One thing I found surprising was that in Japanese Shinto the penis is apparently revered, even to the extent that they will carry a huge, vividly painted model of one round in the streets during religious festivals, but they are very prudish when it comes to the female counterpart. It's just one of those things, and even if we can't always understand it, we can still respect it.
But I think your attempt at interpreting this in the light of the Chinese as a wildly repressive, fascistic regime is plagued by a number of factual errors. Communists and socialists are traditionally anti-religious, not because they hate God, but because they have observed how religion, and Christian religion in particular, has usually been employed to uphold oppressive and unjust regimes.
But as far as I can see, the Chinese government has never been simply anti-religious; the problem they can see with religion, however, is that certain religions require the undivided loyalty of their followers, often in opposition to the society of which they are citizens. I don't anyone who knows anything about Chinese history can blame them if they tend to a bit sceptical about the influence of, say, Americans evangelists, who demand that their followers are blindly loyal only to their McJesus and fiercely opposed to anything that smacks of non-American values.
I think it is sad, really, and not so much something to laugh at. The guy is clearly intelligent, but deluded, is my guess - the other option being that he is simply a fraud, of course. I can't help wondering what makes a gifted person lose contact with relity like that; a large part of it is probably social isolation.
Samba shared over a VPN? Man, you are asking for no end of painful trouble. There are many good ways of sharing docs, but putting MS docs in a filesystem shared over a VPN is not one of them. A simple way to improve things would be to drop all the filesystem sharing and create some sort of searchable index on a web server. If you want more sophistication and have money to burn (who hasn't these days?), go and talk to Oracle, they have some very good software for this very purpose.
I don't know why companies always do it this way - it is the worst possible way of organizing your documents. When you put them in a filesystem, people have to try to remember how to find the one they need; a directory is like a hiearchical database, badly implemented. Sharing it via a networked filesystem makes it even worse, because now you have a huge network overhead and the risk of undetectable corruption when the network stumbles. And the VPN means that your network traffic is something like 10 times as heavy because of the encryption.
Clever, knowledgeable, whatever. Even very creative accounting is rarely as complex as managing a medium sized computer network, so IOW, it takes more knowledge or "cleverness" to administrate a computer network, especially if you want to do it well. I don't feel that I disrespect those in non-technical jobs, but since the original question was about how to get respect as an IT worker - indeed as the only IT worker in the company - I felt it relevant to relate my experiences rather than some opinion about how it ought to be.
And in my experience, the main obstacle to a good relationship with my non-technical coworkers is that you don't speak their language. When you talk to your colleagues as The IT Guy, you will be talking about subjects where you are supposed to be the most knowledgeable by several orders of magnitude - that is your job, I would say - so you have to learn to translate your knowledge to their language.
But you are right - I probably wouldn't understand too much of what accountants talk about; but that is hardly relevant in this context.
The current best value for the Hubble Constant is 74.2 ± 3.6 (km/s)/Mpc according to recent conventional methods and the recently restored Hubble Telescope. Most astronomers agree that that's within 10% of its actual value.
10% of 74 is 7.4, corresponding to ± 3.7; meaning that in the very worst case, where the true value is at one end of the interval, we can only get about 10% away. What the astronomers agree on is that the estimate of the uncertainty on the measurements is something like ± 3.6. This is not as trivial a matter as it would seem - it can be quite complex to calculate and is a source of many of the more embarrasing errors in science.
Well, it sounds like you are already trying it, but without success. Sorry if my subject line sounds flippant; I have been through something similar to you, I think. What I found is that one of the cornerstones in good relations to non-technical staff is clear communication on THEIR terms - you have to remember that even if you strive to modest about it, you are in fact far cleverer than the rest of them, and they feel that keenly. It is a natural defence, I suppose, that they try to dismiss you as a nerd or something; so you have to avoid things that underlines this impression: no nerdy jokes and learn to explain things without jargon. Another good tip is to try to take a genuine interest in people's smalltalk; that one is particularly hard, I find.
The other thing about clear communication is that you should take control of people's expectations - try to avoid things like "Well, I'll try" or "I have a lot to do, but...". Simply say no - or yes, as the case might be - or something like "I can do it when I have finished , which I expect will be on Monday". People implicitly want you to take leadership - even that bullying boss - so they will accept when you say "This is the way we will do it" better than "Do you think we should do like this?"
I hope you can use what I said - to me it has been gold, believe me.
Can whoever modded my comment "flamebait" explain why, please? As far as I can see I made a thoughtful and balanced comment. Is it now "Flamebait" to point out facts in a sober way?
No private corporation in China does anything without the express blessing of the Chinese government.
For a statement as sweeping as that I think you should provide some solid sources; in my experience what you say is not true. Of course, if one were to take your words to the extreme, they would imply that people in private corporations in China need to get explicit permission to go and get a new piece of paper or go to toilet. But even if we read more permissively it just doesn't add up to what I have experienced. I would say in some cases private companies actually have more freedom than in Europe or America - it certainly seems to be easier to go and build a new factory in China than in most places in Europe. In other cases there are more restrictions, but all in all it isn't all that different from the West - the usual picture of the Chinese state having total and direct control over everything is just silly, 'cos they don't.
You raise a number of very valid concerns, which I will try to address.
Much like the dodgy connection between violent video games and real life violence (anecdotal evidence non-withstanding), I don't really buy it.
Dodgy connection? Well, if it seems dodgy, is it not a good idea to find out for a fact?
If all you know about this issue is what you see through media like/., then you don't really know what you are talking about. The real message here is not that "violent games are bad for you and must be banned", but that we all need to address this issue seriously and with open minds, which is what the researchers are doing. Having two sides yelling at each other from opposite corners is not going to make things better, because all it achieves is to drown out the quest for factual knowledge, which only plays into the hands of those that want to ban - it is so much easier to ban something than learning to handle whatever the real problem might be.
The fact of the matter is that it is not all that far fetched to think that there may be a connection between violent entertainment and violence in children. Now if people on both sides weren't simply idiots, they would be interested in knowing whether this is actually the case or not. I mean, if you are concerned that it might be true, then you should be interested in learning that it isn't, because then you don't have to worry; and if you are convinced that it is not true - why should you worry about scientific research brings to light? Their only concern is to find the facts, which will of course support your view; or if not, then I would have thought it valuable to be warned of a real problem, so you can consider how to handle it.
Especially since each individual culture seems to have entirely different responses to various social laws. As a good example, banning guns in the US causes violent crime rates to rise (see: Washington DC), but Japan has far less of an issue, where guns have more or less been illegal for civilians since WWII
I don't think so - as all modern research has shown, the similarities between all societies far outweigh the differences; human culture is fundamentally the same thing with little differences in some of the surface features. However, it should come as no surprise that if you take a society like the US, which is hyper-saturated with firearms, and ban guns then you will see a significant rise in gun-related crime simply because the law-abiding part of the population will hand in their guns, however reluctantly, whereas the criminals won't - so gun related crime will increase and then go down as the illegal weapons are seized. Perhaps the best way to go about it would be to ban the trading in guns, but allow people to keep the ones they already legally own.
> But, politicians aren't arguing this, because they don't actually care about freedom
I can't speak for all politicians everywhere, but I don't think you are right - it is just yet another of the smugly ignorant fallacies that the more polarised part of the media has been hammering out for decades. There is no real reason to expect politicians to be other than fairly average people; they are on the whole doing what you yourself would have done in the same situation, more or less. Anyone who has worked with trying to get any sort of big project to move according to a plan will know how it is - people pull in ten different directions and you are disturbed all the time with unrelated things, and to be quite honest, the issue of personal freedom in connection with video games that you personally have never even offered a thought, can seem quite trivial, whereas the worry about something that might threaten your children is something that never goes away if you are a parent.
His point was, if this pornographic material spreads the ideology that women are sexual objects existing only for men's pleasure, which causes
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What is the purpose of this? To engender fear or something? Or just a bit of idle fantasy in the summer heat?
Whatever the reason, a nuclear war doesn't just happen out of the blue; it is highly unlikely that there wouldn't be a long time before where the tensions were constantly rising, and it isn't very believably that that would happen either. The missiles don't start firing because El Presidente regrettably puts his coffee cup in the wrong place and pushes the red button.
Savvy users of both Linux and XP know that tweeked XP is much snappier and far more convenient than tweeked Linux if both run the same features and don't do anything stupid.
If you were as 'savvy' as all that, you'd know that where UNIX, and Linux among them, starts up most of it's services before you even reach the graphical logon, Windows defers much until after the user logs on - which is why I can log on to KDE in about 5 secs, but it takes me almost a full minute to reach a workable desktop in Windows, because of all the things that have to start after authentication.
And convenience is a matter of what you are used to. To me a command line in a proper shell like ksh is far more convenient than an overloaded IDE or a word processor that has once again changed beyond recognition. I honestly don't understand how anyone can put up with Windows - to me it is a never ending pain to use - but we are all different, I suppose.
However, some editors have cited the American Psychological Association's statement that exposure of the images to the public is an unethical act, since prior exposure to the images could render them ineffective as a psychological test. Is the censorship of material appropriate, when the public exposure to that material may render it useless?
It seems to me that this is a fight over superstitions; the strength of the Rorschach test is not that here we have a set of carefully constructed, magical devices such as mankind has never seen before. The basic idea, if I'm not mistaken, is to get the subject to look at them and talk about whatever thoughts are inspired by them. The precise shapes are not important, and you can use any other device in the same way, eg. Tarot cards.
This is incidentally the way Tarot cards make it possible to "see the future" - everybody can predict things, it is just a matter of remembering and thinking about all the facts; by looking at a number of Tarot cards and trying to relate the symbols to your circumstances, you force yourself to think out of the box, thus bringing more of the things you already know into your conscious awareness, which gives you a better basis from which to predict things. Nothing magical about it.
The party's goals are fairly simple. People should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit.
Much as I agree with the sentiment, I feel it is too little to form a political party on; a proper party program should address all or most aspects of running a society, possibly based on a shared worldview. What is copying movies going to do about the army, social security or the war in Iraq, just to mention a few thing? In my view one shouldn't start with the right to copy music files and then add the rest as an afterthought; one should start with some more general principles, like equality under the law and whatever, and then derive the right to make copies from that, along with all the other issues out in the real world.
But it is fully understandable that people feel nothing but loathing for politics and political parties as things are. I think at the bottom of it is not just the general, selfserving smarminess amongst politicians, but also the fact that they don't even seem to make an honest effort; so many of them are just narrow minded, incompetent windbags who are in it for the money and nothing else. I personally would vote for anybody that can convince me that he or she is going to simply do a good job in the interest of the country and the people; never mind whether they are God-fearing family people or promiscuous Satanists, staunch Capitalists or Communists, as long as they are honest and competent.
How many times have we now had somebody announcing "the end of" something? COBOL, FORTRAN, C, mainframes, UNIX - and now SQL. All these things are still around because they serve a useful purpose. It is well possible that this "No-SQL" concept can serve a purpose other than hype, but that largely remains to be seen.
The big, fundamental advantage of SQL databases, as far as I can see, is not that they are transactional or scalable or fast, but that you can organise your data in a way that fits fairly naturally with your data, and then you can analyse things in ways that you hadn't thought of when you designed the database using the select statement, even if it isn't always the most efficient of tasks. This is one thing that is hard to build in to hierarchical or networked databases, and of course even more so in simple, indexed files. And that is why RDBMSes are going to be the most important kind of databases for a long time yet.
That is not to say that simpler mechanisms don't have their place; few things beat a simple ISAM file when it comes to whipping up a program that can quickly look up and organise a simple dataset.
You have a choice to make: do you work to live or live to work? Working like that and staying healthy is just not realistic.
I have always thought myself that life should be worth living - why bother, otherwise? I would expect any reasonable employer to accept that they get the best out of their employees if they are thriving and in good health, so they ought to be willing to adjust your workload. But maybe you just aren't ready to make the adjustments in your life that are necessary? Anyway, it's your call.
I'm not sure I know what the fuss is about - I have been on Linux only for 10 years or so, and I don't think there is anything I feel is missing. In fact, I think there is lot of functionality I'd rather not have, which gets installed by default, but fortunately, this being Linux, I can just remove it again.
I think FOSS is more or less where it should be, now. We have the functionality that matters, and while thre are still things that could be improved, I don't see much of a problem. The only nuisance I have come across in the last several years is the fact that there is still no way of ensuring that all desktop programs use the same file dialog, but that really is a small issue.
And what is wrong with the design of open source? All software and open source more so, gets used or not depending on whether the users like it - the design is part of that, and probably often a major part, so in the end the designs that are still in there are the one that were good enough to survive. Pure evolution at work.
Do you genuinely think that this has primarily to do with scientific discourse? The whole subject of climate change has been obfuscated by the insincere, politically motivated waflle of the so-called 'climate sceptics' for decades, resulting in foot-dragging and endless delays, and it is very difficult not to see this report as yet another attempt to muddy the waters.
True, there no degree in "climate science", and so what? You become an expert by working seriously with the subject for a long time and by demonstrating genuine competence in the subjects it entails. Having a "background physics and economics" doesn't sound like he has much competence in climatology - maybe he only has a bachelor's degree, who knows? I imagine if he was a PhD in areas of study relevant to climatology, we would have heard about it.
All things considered, I think there is no real reason to spend resources on dismissing his claims in any detail; the debate about climate change is already over as far as the causality goes, and it is high time we moved on to what we should do about it, rather than wasting time trying to convince somebody who has decided that is not going to be convinced.
Finally, is it censorship to tell him to shut his face? I don't think so - he is not an official representative of the EPA, so if he goes public with a viewpoint that is not in line with their official policies, then he is misrepresenting them. This is no different from if he was working for any other organisation or a private company; they all have official spokespersons, who are the only ones that are allowed to communicate on behalf of their organisation.
Surprisingly this has yet to pick up major coverage in the press.
Major coverage? In mainstream press? When Michael Jackson has just died?
Not that I am a great fan, but let's face it, a lot more people know and care about MJ than about whether China blocks one or more aspects of Google. And even without big news stories and things happening in the world, a story about a minor, technical upset in a foreign country is hardly Earth shattering any way.
As for the poor Chinese, who can now no longer access Google's mixture of real search results with undisclosed, sponsored ones and propaganda - they have other ways of getting news from around the world. Foreigners travel to China, Chinese travel abroad; they are hardly left without contact to the rest of the planet, and of course they hear news from abroad at least that way.
It's a tempest in a teacup, frankly - some people seriously need to take off their blinkers and shake off the cold-war thinking. The world has changed while you were spaced out.
There's ample room for conspiracy in the murky world of health care, but I don't think it is in IT - instead, look at medical companies and the way medicine is prescribed and used, if you are looking fopr conspiracies.
There are many good reasons why computers aren't used universally in health care. Two of the biggest are education and resources - doctors and nurses aren't really taught to use computers in their work. And while having a well designed computer system can be a huge advantage in any line of work, that is actually only true once everybody is fully trained; until that has been done, it is actually less efficient. And the situation in most countries is that there are too few medical staff anywhere, so where would one find the resources to make it happen?
On top of that comes concerns with incompatible, existing systems, privacy issues etc. Not to mention the fact that nearly all public IT projects so far have been hugely over budget and behind schedule. I think that perhaps the only realistic way this can be solved is by creating a good, open source health care system and let it mature and grow into general use from the grassroot up.
Of course we can - it is technically feasible. The question is if it is the right thing to do, morally and politically.
Morals first: Does any nation have the moral right to go and interfere in the affairs of another? Well, of course, if they attack us we have to defend ourselves, which certainly amounts to "interference", but for all their hostile rhetorics, Iran are not actually attacking any western country or threatening to do so. In fact, all their signals are that they have no intentions to do so. I don't know what it is that gives certain Americans the idea that they have a right to go and dictate what is right or not - after all, you guys don't certainly like having others tell you what you should do.
Apart from that, the political effect of doing so would not be to help the Iranian opposition; on the contrary. It would play into the hands of Ahmadinejad, giving him a clear example of what a threat the US are to the people of Iran, and it would once again make the rest of world lose confidence in America's fitness as a top-player in international politics. I mean, after nearly a century of idiotic, bungled attempts at interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, you still don't get it? How many Vietnams and Iraqs does it take?
The best way I can think of is, buy a NAS and put your homedir on it. They aren't all that expensive any more, and it lets the whole family share things.
The other way, which I use to allow me to work on my projects both from home and the office, is to use a revision control system, like svn, cvs or perforce. Check things in every time you finish working.
Honestly, how much more life can one beat out of a dead horse?
So, there is a number of CCTV cameras somewhere and a group of volunteers spend time looking at them? Big deal. And it really doesn't have anything to do with privacy that I can spot. These cameras are put up in public spaces - if people move out into public space, they can't expect to be private.
Don't get me wrong - I can see why it would worry people that e.g. the police record everything on cameras, because you can't go and check out the material to see if you are in there looking like you might be doing something you shouldn't, but that can be amended - don't you have a Freedom of Information Act in the US? Or better - put it all on a public server, so everybody can go and see what goes on.
I don't buy that nonsense about "If you are innocent ..." either; there are too many examples to the contrary, but there are hardly any circumstances that are only bad, it's just a matter of finding the good side of things. Couldn't it actually be quite cool if it was possible to check out what was going on downtown via live cameras? So perhaps instead of just crappy CCTV, what is really needed is good quality cameras?
Do you believe that the public relation damage to these companies can persuade them from selling this kind of technology to other dictatorial regimes?
Of course not.
And once again it is time for people to make up their minds - isn't it a basic tenet of Capitalism that the only thing that should concern the employees of a company is to maximize profit? That, in a word, if selling drugs to teenagers, weapons to mercenaries or technology to dictators gives the best profit, then it is your moral duty to do so?
Ok, ok, so maybe I exaggerate a bit, but I do get tired of hearing these so called "freedom advocates" on one hand tell us how they hate government, any and all government, while on the other hand they feel compelled to tell others off for not being "moral".
There are many advantages to buying an actual, printed newspaper. There is nothing like an old newspaper to light a fire or for polishing windows, and of course, you can take it with you to the loo and read it or use it when the loo-paper has run out; I challenge anybody to do that with their netbook or iPhone.
I don't know about that. To me art is - or ought to be - something one or two steps up from routine artisanship, sonething that is somehow above and beyond the ordinary. In most cases a video game doesn't qualify as art any more than the latest album by any of the trivial boy-bands, however well-crafted it may be.
The problem I see with modern games is not that they are too radical, but that they are too trivial and that they trivialise subjects like war, violence and suffering. A lot of games are in that respect nothing more than a kind of "pornography" and utterly insignificant. The first version of Doom may have broken some boundaries and counted as "art", despite its clumsy graphics, but I think the Nth remake of the same theme in stunningly crisp detail and completely naturalistic movements is simply nothing more than cheap and trivial pornography; there is certainly nothing "art" about it any more.
People are a lot more openminded than you give them credit for - which is why there are so many people who are willing to go to Tate Modern in London. I'm not saying whether there should be censorship on video games or not, only that if we're talking art, there is some way to go still.
I'm not sure why or even if the Chinese have a particular problem with skeletons; Having been married to a Chinese for 10 years and lived in Beijing, I have never come across this. If they have an issue with skeletons, I'm not sure we have to invent intricate explanations - all cultures have some things they consider particularly unclean and unacceptable. One thing I found surprising was that in Japanese Shinto the penis is apparently revered, even to the extent that they will carry a huge, vividly painted model of one round in the streets during religious festivals, but they are very prudish when it comes to the female counterpart. It's just one of those things, and even if we can't always understand it, we can still respect it.
But I think your attempt at interpreting this in the light of the Chinese as a wildly repressive, fascistic regime is plagued by a number of factual errors. Communists and socialists are traditionally anti-religious, not because they hate God, but because they have observed how religion, and Christian religion in particular, has usually been employed to uphold oppressive and unjust regimes.
But as far as I can see, the Chinese government has never been simply anti-religious; the problem they can see with religion, however, is that certain religions require the undivided loyalty of their followers, often in opposition to the society of which they are citizens. I don't anyone who knows anything about Chinese history can blame them if they tend to a bit sceptical about the influence of, say, Americans evangelists, who demand that their followers are blindly loyal only to their McJesus and fiercely opposed to anything that smacks of non-American values.
I think it is sad, really, and not so much something to laugh at. The guy is clearly intelligent, but deluded, is my guess - the other option being that he is simply a fraud, of course. I can't help wondering what makes a gifted person lose contact with relity like that; a large part of it is probably social isolation.
Samba shared over a VPN? Man, you are asking for no end of painful trouble. There are many good ways of sharing docs, but putting MS docs in a filesystem shared over a VPN is not one of them. A simple way to improve things would be to drop all the filesystem sharing and create some sort of searchable index on a web server. If you want more sophistication and have money to burn (who hasn't these days?), go and talk to Oracle, they have some very good software for this very purpose.
I don't know why companies always do it this way - it is the worst possible way of organizing your documents. When you put them in a filesystem, people have to try to remember how to find the one they need; a directory is like a hiearchical database, badly implemented. Sharing it via a networked filesystem makes it even worse, because now you have a huge network overhead and the risk of undetectable corruption when the network stumbles. And the VPN means that your network traffic is something like 10 times as heavy because of the encryption.
Clever, knowledgeable, whatever. Even very creative accounting is rarely as complex as managing a medium sized computer network, so IOW, it takes more knowledge or "cleverness" to administrate a computer network, especially if you want to do it well. I don't feel that I disrespect those in non-technical jobs, but since the original question was about how to get respect as an IT worker - indeed as the only IT worker in the company - I felt it relevant to relate my experiences rather than some opinion about how it ought to be.
And in my experience, the main obstacle to a good relationship with my non-technical coworkers is that you don't speak their language. When you talk to your colleagues as The IT Guy, you will be talking about subjects where you are supposed to be the most knowledgeable by several orders of magnitude - that is your job, I would say - so you have to learn to translate your knowledge to their language.
But you are right - I probably wouldn't understand too much of what accountants talk about; but that is hardly relevant in this context.
The current best value for the Hubble Constant is 74.2 ± 3.6 (km/s)/Mpc according to recent conventional methods and the recently restored Hubble Telescope. Most astronomers agree that that's within 10% of its actual value.
10% of 74 is 7.4, corresponding to ± 3.7; meaning that in the very worst case, where the true value is at one end of the interval, we can only get about 10% away. What the astronomers agree on is that the estimate of the uncertainty on the measurements is something like ± 3.6. This is not as trivial a matter as it would seem - it can be quite complex to calculate and is a source of many of the more embarrasing errors in science.
Well, it sounds like you are already trying it, but without success. Sorry if my subject line sounds flippant; I have been through something similar to you, I think. What I found is that one of the cornerstones in good relations to non-technical staff is clear communication on THEIR terms - you have to remember that even if you strive to modest about it, you are in fact far cleverer than the rest of them, and they feel that keenly. It is a natural defence, I suppose, that they try to dismiss you as a nerd or something; so you have to avoid things that underlines this impression: no nerdy jokes and learn to explain things without jargon. Another good tip is to try to take a genuine interest in people's smalltalk; that one is particularly hard, I find.
The other thing about clear communication is that you should take control of people's expectations - try to avoid things like "Well, I'll try" or "I have a lot to do, but ...". Simply say no - or yes, as the case might be - or something like "I can do it when I have finished , which I expect will be on Monday". People implicitly want you to take leadership - even that bullying boss - so they will accept when you say "This is the way we will do it" better than "Do you think we should do like this?"
I hope you can use what I said - to me it has been gold, believe me.
Can whoever modded my comment "flamebait" explain why, please? As far as I can see I made a thoughtful and balanced comment. Is it now "Flamebait" to point out facts in a sober way?
No private corporation in China does anything without the express blessing of the Chinese government.
For a statement as sweeping as that I think you should provide some solid sources; in my experience what you say is not true. Of course, if one were to take your words to the extreme, they would imply that people in private corporations in China need to get explicit permission to go and get a new piece of paper or go to toilet. But even if we read more permissively it just doesn't add up to what I have experienced. I would say in some cases private companies actually have more freedom than in Europe or America - it certainly seems to be easier to go and build a new factory in China than in most places in Europe. In other cases there are more restrictions, but all in all it isn't all that different from the West - the usual picture of the Chinese state having total and direct control over everything is just silly, 'cos they don't.
You raise a number of very valid concerns, which I will try to address.
Much like the dodgy connection between violent video games and real life violence (anecdotal evidence non-withstanding), I don't really buy it.
Dodgy connection? Well, if it seems dodgy, is it not a good idea to find out for a fact?
If all you know about this issue is what you see through media like /., then you don't really know what you are talking about. The real message here is not that "violent games are bad for you and must be banned", but that we all need to address this issue seriously and with open minds, which is what the researchers are doing. Having two sides yelling at each other from opposite corners is not going to make things better, because all it achieves is to drown out the quest for factual knowledge, which only plays into the hands of those that want to ban - it is so much easier to ban something than learning to handle whatever the real problem might be.
The fact of the matter is that it is not all that far fetched to think that there may be a connection between violent entertainment and violence in children. Now if people on both sides weren't simply idiots, they would be interested in knowing whether this is actually the case or not. I mean, if you are concerned that it might be true, then you should be interested in learning that it isn't, because then you don't have to worry; and if you are convinced that it is not true - why should you worry about scientific research brings to light? Their only concern is to find the facts, which will of course support your view; or if not, then I would have thought it valuable to be warned of a real problem, so you can consider how to handle it.
Especially since each individual culture seems to have entirely different responses to various social laws. As a good example, banning guns in the US causes violent crime rates to rise (see: Washington DC), but Japan has far less of an issue, where guns have more or less been illegal for civilians since WWII
I don't think so - as all modern research has shown, the similarities between all societies far outweigh the differences; human culture is fundamentally the same thing with little differences in some of the surface features. However, it should come as no surprise that if you take a society like the US, which is hyper-saturated with firearms, and ban guns then you will see a significant rise in gun-related crime simply because the law-abiding part of the population will hand in their guns, however reluctantly, whereas the criminals won't - so gun related crime will increase and then go down as the illegal weapons are seized. Perhaps the best way to go about it would be to ban the trading in guns, but allow people to keep the ones they already legally own.
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But, politicians aren't arguing this, because they don't actually care about freedom
I can't speak for all politicians everywhere, but I don't think you are right - it is just yet another of the smugly ignorant fallacies that the more polarised part of the media has been hammering out for decades. There is no real reason to expect politicians to be other than fairly average people; they are on the whole doing what you yourself would have done in the same situation, more or less. Anyone who has worked with trying to get any sort of big project to move according to a plan will know how it is - people pull in ten different directions and you are disturbed all the time with unrelated things, and to be quite honest, the issue of personal freedom in connection with video games that you personally have never even offered a thought, can seem quite trivial, whereas the worry about something that might threaten your children is something that never goes away if you are a parent.
His point was, if this pornographic material spreads the ideology that women are sexual objects existing only for men's pleasure, which causes