What if the implemented hardware has conviently located logic circuits from the UI keyboard/touchscreen. Ahhh...just tweak those votes 132 pixels upward...okay the Dems get 63% and 34% goes to "Press here for help"?!?
It strikes me as incredible that the "technical" people writing these emails are engaged in such Mickey Mouse chatter, and so interested in just cranking out something, anything that will work.
Welcome to the world of "Software Engineering". Yes, the year really is 2003.
It's ironic that the insecure voting system's database is called "Access." Kinda funny...or not. I guess it depends on who you voted for...15,000 times.
because, done poorly, will create immense pain and suffering for your employees. A system that is slow, first of all, and then requires logging in and several mouse clicks before you can enter a single hour is pure hell, especially when the management wants it filled in daily.
I know of a very large contractor that threw away a slick as spit single-page web form for time reporting in favor of a behemoth three-tier "web application" that did everything from time reporting to expense reporting to management audits. Pure hell. It is extremely complex, does down all the time, doesn't scale for peak times of the day, and is very frequently undergoing "emergency maintenance". Not only that, but they managed to screw up everyone's withholding statuses causing everyone to get smaller paychecks until they figured the damn thing out. The icing on the cake is that the UI looks like college sophomores put it together as a semester project (this is a commercial product, an expensive one).
I've even heard director-level management say how much the system sucks, but "we're stuck with it."
1) China is a sovereign nation. 2) They can do what they damn well please. 3) Just as long as they don't blow us up in the process. 4) Everyone is better off for it. 5) Gee, maybe Intel will have to forfeit their near-monopoly on commodity CPUs. Oh well.
You can also thank our government for this. They have let it happen. But it is after all the government bought by the corperations, of the corperations and for the corperations.
A very knee-jerk response about the economy. Of course we have the goverment to thank, in part, for the economic problems we are seeing. However, we are also in the midst of a natural business cycle.
1) Government taxation and regulations increase the costs of operating a business in the USA to unsustainable levels relative to other parts of the world. Tarriffs only postpone the inevitable consequences of this imbalance, during which the inevitable outcome of this fantasy gets only more severe. So, companies are jumping ship, and I cannot blame them. If the federal government wants to screw businesses and their employees to futher its own means and ends, then the government is doing a truly terrible disservice to its citizens. This is why a Democrat/Green administration is not a good thing for the USA.
2) Subtle and not-so-subtle corruption in the government has created unnatural and unsustainable business models, such as pork-barrel contracting, that funnel money away from important projects into dubious politically-motivated projects. Other projects, such as social security, create pots of gold that are too tempting for the government to manage properly. The people in the USA are way overtaxed--by at least 15%. Republicans and Democrats are both very good at perpetuating these things.
You know there really aren't many political parties left...but it is fairly clear that someone else needs to take the reins. This is very important for the long-term sustainability of not only the USA's economy but also the sustainability of Freedom in the USA. Most every time the government takes control, the People lose opportunity and freedom of choice. They lose the very things that brought us from log cabins in the 1700s to three-bedroom homes with central AC in the last few decades.
3) The late 1990's saw an overwhelming surge surrounding the Internet and IT industry that overshot itself and now needs to rest for a while. This is perfectly normal and not unexpected. While difficult, it forces people to recognize that the fat days of the Internet boom were good while they lasted but it is time to move on to other things. This may even mean moving onto things outside the IT industry (god forbid) or creating new opportunities within the IT industry leveraging the bruises from a couple years back.
So, no politician will save us from the last few years. Get over it, and, in the meantime, you can enjoy ubiquitous connectivity to the WWW using your 2.4GHz PC with RAM that you bought for pennies/megabyte.
intel processors are PROPRIETARY. They are not a published, open standard, like SPARC and MIPS.
Very true. If/when the DRM smackdown occurs, I see SPARC and MIPS as being an architectural safe-haven, where fifteen years' worth of hardware is available and widely supported by OSS systems. There also is nothing to stop a startup company or a foreign company from manufacturing SPARC chips and a commodity motherboard for PCs, if there is a market for them. If the US imposes tarrifs or bans on non-DRM processors, then that will be a pretty clear indication that the US' best days are over and that "lady liberty" has been demoted to "assistant crack whore".
we don't know is how many jobs would have been created had they not used their monopoly position to lay utter waste to any potential competition
We will find out as ubiquitous open documentation formats are the foundation of the next computer revolution. Microsoft Office is a cage in which most people don't realize they are imprisoned until they experience the free alternative first-hand. Electronically-speaking, Microsoft is the North Korea of software, but only for the next few years, IMO.
Oh yes, because I'm sure that all the loyal music pirates will dutifully convert all of their existing mp3s into a DRM-enabled music format.
Actually putting DRM into practice would be an interesting experiment, to compare the average success of DRM-only artists with the average success of "we don't want to be asses to our fanbase" artists.
Art is very emotional, and DRM can be the social equivalent of a big middle finger to potential fans.
If that "for now" ever ends on a large scale, I think we'll see a dramatic and tragic death of electronic art almost overnight. There's something about creativity following freedom, I think.
If the data is already out there, and its already retrieveable once they get a warrant/subpoena. What is wrong here?
I hope you answered your own question. The government wants to do away with those pesky warrants. The Bill of Rights just gets in the way. Stupid Bill of Rights trying to protect the People from a tyrannical government. How silly.
Think of reputation management systems. Think of journalists: professional reputation managers, to some extent.
Professionalism places different requirements on us regarding privacy, and most people are able to distinguish their private life from their public life.
...data as a weapon of oppression and exploitation for those with sufficient money and power.
Add that the data is for those who have the power to make things illegal to suppress people with political differences of opinion.
When personal data is public, even corrupt officials will be forced to behave.
But the data isn't public. In fact it is classified. What's to stop those corrupt officials from changing your data? Remember, it's a national database...it need only happen once.
Another interesting conflict: how many Slashdotters support both the WWW and TIA? How can you cope with yourselves?!? (hint: the "soul" of the WWW is its highly distributed architecture, where no one organization can control the flow of data--it's a haven for free speech and corroboration of facts; the "soul" of TIA is centralization and absolute control, where flaws can become reality)
Yeah, right. Society is much less forgiving than you would like to imagine.
Social conflicts arise everywhere and will never fit your idealistic and naive "nothing to hide" attitude. There is a good reason why some stores use unlabelled brown bags. There is a good reason why some companies put unassuming names on their credit card transactions. There is a good reason why hotel movie pay-per-view systems don't list the titles on the bill.
None of these things are illegal and most of them are not immoral, but, by chance, if a cop or public official somewhere has access to your data and abides by his "mission" to defend the world from the devil, he can make your life very difficult. Or, worse, a jury, like other posters have mentioned, need only *think* you were the criminial, which can be strongly supported by an electronic paper trail. You just might end up in prison for life!
Data, especially in the context of religion or political bias, is very very dangerous. Another likely scenario: I bet you will wait in gleeful anticipation as those politically-motivated policies start rolling out of govermnet based on data mining the TIA database! It'll be worse than trying to micromanage the world via income taxes. Every four years our nation will get jerked even harder into different directions until it collapses under a quadrillion tons of bureaucratic legacy. This is perhaps the most destructive and tangible aspect of TIA to come.
Re:Even weirder - when both are minors...
on
RFID Hell
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· Score: 1
It's interesting how we don't grant children equal rights until they are old enough to have had the full opportunity to be brainwashed by their parents.
Re:They are criminals, so how is this abuse?
on
RFID Hell
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· Score: 1
What if it was a 19yo having consentual sex with a 15yo? Now they are stuck with that reputation for the rest of their lives?
Yes, because data never goes away, and, of course, the data never lies.
This person will never be able to enter politics as a career or even become a prominent local businessman if this information got out. This person would be condemned to work third-shift at a gas station no matter what their potential. All because of an arbitrary law putting 18 years to the day the barrier to entry into adulthood.
Pedophiles *aren't* in control of their actions. Think repeat offender drunk drivers - they just *can't* control their behavior.
It seems there is a more fundamental aspect to these people: They care so little about other people that they are, simply, not worth being a part of society. Saying "but I just can't control myself" is a pretty damn poor excuse, IMO. So, if a drunk driver who wiped out a family out for a walk gets all teary eyed and clutches his teddy bear in a court room, that makes it a discipline problem instead of a fundamentally broken human mind?
Re:Is this really the solution ?
on
RFID Hell
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· Score: 1
Is it the oversexed society we live in? The furstration of men (it allways seems to be men) who can not deal with grown up relationships? Or is it our reduced tolerance towards such things?
It probably really began when the legal "adult" age was set a full four to six years from the natural "adult" age. It seems much of the crime we see is a side-effect of an arbitrary limit set in stone by legislation. Remember, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
This argument applies when there was no intention of victimizing someone. The true crime, much fuzzier to define, is when someone--of any age, really--is targetted by a person with a perverse sense of sexuality--again somewhat fuzzy. Mainly, it seems to boil down to whether there was mutual consent. So, it really could be simple: consent, no crime; no consent, crime. The zealous laws muck it all up, unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution is simple: use open source software.
What if the implemented hardware has conviently located logic circuits from the UI keyboard/touchscreen. Ahhh...just tweak those votes 132 pixels upward...okay the Dems get 63% and 34% goes to "Press here for help"?!?
not unlike a particularly dysfunctional religious cult
Once something becomes a religion, isn't it already dysfunctional, by definition?
It strikes me as incredible that the "technical" people writing these emails are engaged in such Mickey Mouse chatter, and so interested in just cranking out something, anything that will work.
Welcome to the world of "Software Engineering". Yes, the year really is 2003.
In a voting system?
It's ironic that the insecure voting system's database is called "Access." Kinda funny...or not. I guess it depends on who you voted for...15,000 times.
Do employers trust employees anymore?
They don't, when they know they aren't providing meaningful and interesting work for their employees.
because, done poorly, will create immense pain and suffering for your employees. A system that is slow, first of all, and then requires logging in and several mouse clicks before you can enter a single hour is pure hell, especially when the management wants it filled in daily.
I know of a very large contractor that threw away a slick as spit single-page web form for time reporting in favor of a behemoth three-tier "web application" that did everything from time reporting to expense reporting to management audits. Pure hell. It is extremely complex, does down all the time, doesn't scale for peak times of the day, and is very frequently undergoing "emergency maintenance". Not only that, but they managed to screw up everyone's withholding statuses causing everyone to get smaller paychecks until they figured the damn thing out. The icing on the cake is that the UI looks like college sophomores put it together as a semester project (this is a commercial product, an expensive one).
I've even heard director-level management say how much the system sucks, but "we're stuck with it."
Ask again in three.
1) China is a sovereign nation.
2) They can do what they damn well please.
3) Just as long as they don't blow us up in the process.
4) Everyone is better off for it.
5) Gee, maybe Intel will have to forfeit their near-monopoly on commodity CPUs. Oh well.
You can also thank our government for this. They have let it happen. But it is after all the government bought by the corperations, of the corperations and for the corperations.
A very knee-jerk response about the economy. Of course we have the goverment to thank, in part, for the economic problems we are seeing. However, we are also in the midst of a natural business cycle.
1) Government taxation and regulations increase the costs of operating a business in the USA to unsustainable levels relative to other parts of the world. Tarriffs only postpone the inevitable consequences of this imbalance, during which the inevitable outcome of this fantasy gets only more severe. So, companies are jumping ship, and I cannot blame them. If the federal government wants to screw businesses and their employees to futher its own means and ends, then the government is doing a truly terrible disservice to its citizens. This is why a Democrat/Green administration is not a good thing for the USA.
2) Subtle and not-so-subtle corruption in the government has created unnatural and unsustainable business models, such as pork-barrel contracting, that funnel money away from important projects into dubious politically-motivated projects. Other projects, such as social security, create pots of gold that are too tempting for the government to manage properly. The people in the USA are way overtaxed--by at least 15%. Republicans and Democrats are both very good at perpetuating these things.
You know there really aren't many political parties left...but it is fairly clear that someone else needs to take the reins. This is very important for the long-term sustainability of not only the USA's economy but also the sustainability of Freedom in the USA. Most every time the government takes control, the People lose opportunity and freedom of choice. They lose the very things that brought us from log cabins in the 1700s to three-bedroom homes with central AC in the last few decades.
3) The late 1990's saw an overwhelming surge surrounding the Internet and IT industry that overshot itself and now needs to rest for a while. This is perfectly normal and not unexpected. While difficult, it forces people to recognize that the fat days of the Internet boom were good while they lasted but it is time to move on to other things. This may even mean moving onto things outside the IT industry (god forbid) or creating new opportunities within the IT industry leveraging the bruises from a couple years back.
So, no politician will save us from the last few years. Get over it, and, in the meantime, you can enjoy ubiquitous connectivity to the WWW using your 2.4GHz PC with RAM that you bought for pennies/megabyte.
intel processors are PROPRIETARY. They are not a published, open standard, like SPARC and MIPS.
Very true. If/when the DRM smackdown occurs, I see SPARC and MIPS as being an architectural safe-haven, where fifteen years' worth of hardware is available and widely supported by OSS systems. There also is nothing to stop a startup company or a foreign company from manufacturing SPARC chips and a commodity motherboard for PCs, if there is a market for them. If the US imposes tarrifs or bans on non-DRM processors, then that will be a pretty clear indication that the US' best days are over and that "lady liberty" has been demoted to "assistant crack whore".
The "problem", if there is one, with Tcl is that it is not fashionable.
I thought the problem was Tcl's lack of error reporting and tendancy to make large scripts a hair-pulling exersize of futility.
...what percentage of his net worth it represents?
Bill Gates could buy a brand new PC--a nice one--for every human living in California.
we don't know is how many jobs would have been created had they not used their monopoly position to lay utter waste to any potential competition
We will find out as ubiquitous open documentation formats are the foundation of the next computer revolution. Microsoft Office is a cage in which most people don't realize they are imprisoned until they experience the free alternative first-hand. Electronically-speaking, Microsoft is the North Korea of software, but only for the next few years, IMO.
Consider additionally that this is money in excess of what he could ever spend, the actual amount donated becomes even more irrelevant.
This is one reason why excessive wealth is a necessary evil in society. A thousand dollars is like a two-day-old booger to some people.
How many universities, for example, would still be teaching out of log cabins if it weren't for wealthy alumni?
Oh yes, because I'm sure that all the loyal music pirates will dutifully convert all of their existing mp3s into a DRM-enabled music format.
Actually putting DRM into practice would be an interesting experiment, to compare the average success of DRM-only artists with the average success of "we don't want to be asses to our fanbase" artists.
Art is very emotional, and DRM can be the social equivalent of a big middle finger to potential fans.
(for now)
If that "for now" ever ends on a large scale, I think we'll see a dramatic and tragic death of electronic art almost overnight. There's something about creativity following freedom, I think.
If the data is already out there, and its already retrieveable once they get a warrant/subpoena. What is wrong here?
I hope you answered your own question. The government wants to do away with those pesky warrants. The Bill of Rights just gets in the way.
Stupid Bill of Rights trying to protect the People from a tyrannical government. How silly.
Think of reputation management systems. Think of journalists: professional reputation managers, to some extent.
...data as a weapon of oppression and exploitation for those with sufficient money and power.
Professionalism places different requirements on us regarding privacy, and most people are able to distinguish their private life from their public life.
Add that the data is for those who have the power to make things illegal to suppress people with political differences of opinion.
When personal data is public, even corrupt officials will be forced to behave.
But the data isn't public. In fact it is classified. What's to stop those corrupt officials from changing your data? Remember, it's a national database...it need only happen once.
Another interesting conflict: how many Slashdotters support both the WWW and TIA? How can you cope with yourselves?!? (hint: the "soul" of the WWW is its highly distributed architecture, where no one organization can control the flow of data--it's a haven for free speech and corroboration of facts; the "soul" of TIA is centralization and absolute control, where flaws can become reality)
I have nothing to hide.
Yeah, right. Society is much less forgiving than you would like to imagine.
Social conflicts arise everywhere and will never fit your idealistic and naive "nothing to hide" attitude. There is a good reason why some stores use unlabelled brown bags. There is a good reason why some companies put unassuming names on their credit card transactions. There is a good reason why hotel movie pay-per-view systems don't list the titles on the bill.
None of these things are illegal and most of them are not immoral, but, by chance, if a cop or public official somewhere has access to your data and abides by his "mission" to defend the world from the devil, he can make your life very difficult. Or, worse, a jury, like other posters have mentioned, need only *think* you were the criminial, which can be strongly supported by an electronic paper trail. You just might end up in prison for life!
Data, especially in the context of religion or political bias, is very very dangerous. Another likely scenario: I bet you will wait in gleeful anticipation as those politically-motivated policies start rolling out of govermnet based on data mining the TIA database! It'll be worse than trying to micromanage the world via income taxes. Every four years our nation will get jerked even harder into different directions until it collapses under a quadrillion tons of bureaucratic legacy. This is perhaps the most destructive and tangible aspect of TIA to come.
It's interesting how we don't grant children equal rights until they are old enough to have had the full opportunity to be brainwashed by their parents.
The problem seems to be that humans are not.
The problem is that humans are not.
What if it was a 19yo having consentual sex with a 15yo? Now they are stuck with that reputation for the rest of their lives?
Yes, because data never goes away, and, of course, the data never lies.
This person will never be able to enter politics as a career or even become a prominent local businessman if this information got out. This person would be condemned to work third-shift at a gas station no matter what their potential. All because of an arbitrary law putting 18 years to the day the barrier to entry into adulthood.
Pedophiles *aren't* in control of their actions. Think repeat offender drunk drivers - they just *can't* control their behavior.
It seems there is a more fundamental aspect to these people: They care so little about other people that they are, simply, not worth being a part of society. Saying "but I just can't control myself" is a pretty damn poor excuse, IMO. So, if a drunk driver who wiped out a family out for a walk gets all teary eyed and clutches his teddy bear in a court room, that makes it a discipline problem instead of a fundamentally broken human mind?
Is it the oversexed society we live in? The furstration of men (it allways seems to be men) who can not deal with grown up relationships? Or is it our reduced tolerance towards such things?
It probably really began when the legal "adult" age was set a full four to six years from the natural "adult" age. It seems much of the crime we see is a side-effect of an arbitrary limit set in stone by legislation. Remember, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
This argument applies when there was no intention of victimizing someone. The true crime, much fuzzier to define, is when someone--of any age, really--is targetted by a person with a perverse sense of sexuality--again somewhat fuzzy. Mainly, it seems to boil down to whether there was mutual consent. So, it really could be simple: consent, no crime; no consent, crime. The zealous laws muck it all up, unfortunately.