Answer the question that lawmakers want
on
Spam Meeting Wrap-up
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Nothing will be done until someone answers the question that lawmakers always ask:
What's in it for me?
No matter what you present to a politician, no matter how good the cause or important the problem, laws get introduced and passed for only one reason, and that reason is that someone was able to answer that question. Sure, it's possible that the answer was "you'll advance your career if you save mankind with this bill", but that almost never happens. There's always a payoff somewhere, and what I can't figure out is a way to tell a Congressman what's the benefit to him for putting in the effort to fix the spam problem. And getting a bill passed is a hell of a lot of work.
I say: "There's these people who make money by sending a deluge of annoying fradulent emails that..." All the politician hears is "There's these people who make money" and wonders "How can I get some of it?"
If every spam victim donated a dollar to support congressmen (IE, campaign funding) to do something about spam, then it'll get done. I for one am ready to help. Just put your name at the bottom of the list, and send $5 to the person at the top of the list. Now send the list to five of your friends and soon, real soon, we'll have enough money to buy a whole session of Congress. This is completely legitimate, a lawyer looked it over, but you mustn't break the chain.
You're right about the number of Redhat patches for security concerns growing and growing, but it doesn't seem right to compare the 98 updates on Redhat to the W2k 12 hotfixes and 3 SP's. I say this because each SP represents hundreds of patches. Admittedly most of those SP patches are _not_ for security problems and many are simply enhancements, but it's still an apple and oranges comparision. I don't know which is worse, the weekly/daily flood of patches or waiting a year for a service pack.
Generally speaking technology has raised the standards of living, lifespan, comfort level, and freedoms of the societies that use it. But what about the lost opportunities, the times we fail to use technology to make the world a better place. Suppose I have used my technological advantage to create a vastly superior military force. Wouldn't it be wrong for me to just sit back and not use it to wipe out inferior societies such as those that insist on remaining in medevial times? By killing them off, I have raised the standard of living of the whole world and increased prosperity for all our decendants and whatever few that survived the cleansing. You probably think I'm talking about the war in Iraq, Nazis, or even Commies. Actually I'm talking about the workplace. Industry introduces technological changes that obsoletes a segment of the workforce in such a way that those people's lives are lost as productive citizens. I't better than murdering them sure, but not much. Seldom, if ever are changes introduced in any other way than to give the regular guy a kick-in-the-butt. I suspect that those running the show even prefer to ambush the "Joe" - it makes the elite feel feel elite. Technology has and will improve the lot of humanity, but it doesn't have to be a tool of the Social Darwinists.
considering that the only people who sit down and read science textbooks are teachers. If I were king, I would make the introductory science class be taught like an English lit class. They should read books every week from authors like S J Gould, Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes", maybe Feynman later, and explain what they read about. Any of the quantum mechanics "what a fking screwy world this is" genre and some good hard-science fiction. After they learn what the world is made out of and how it works, the interested ones can can put it to numbers. Physics first, Chemistry second, Biology last. Then Physics again. Leave equation solving till later and for algebra class until they're grown up enough to understand what the concept of a model is. In lab class, just make things happen - you figure out why if you're interested.
RE: Girls do not like doing anything that involves concentrating on one single thing for long periods. They like to switch from one thought to another, and keep many balls up in the air at one time.
This has not been my experience in the industry (20 years) or as a physics teacher (8 yrs). It appears ot me that women are better than men at staying on task and completing it especially if it's tedious. They are also good at juggling many things. Men are better at focusing completely on something they find interesting to the exclusion of everything else.
I believe the reason this appears is that in general women feel duty and responsibility much more strongly than men and most especially when they are young. I don't know anything about "girls" in the workplace.
Give a group of men and women 6 things to do at once, and the women will try to do them all and the men will pick the most interesting (or profitable) and stick with that one. The result is that the guys finish "something" first and that's what is noticed while the women plug away in the background finshing the rest.
These are generalities. I have seen those favored women non-completers who drifted from project to project, getting the "idea" credit, and then moving on to something new before the project got to the grunt work and doomed reality phase. And they also appeared to have the combination of ample breasts and excessive friendliness. I know guys who are exactly the same way, but their attributes are good golf scores, good-ol-boy networking, and tireless agression towards those not in the group.
Furthermore, I'd like to state that it's mostly a matter of perception. That while generalities are often based upon common observation, small differences get exaggerated into labels. The differences in ability to focus and multitask among the group of all women goes from women who can easily do both to women who can do neither. The point is the the variation among the members of the group "women" is much greater than the difference between women-as-a-group and men-as-a-group.
What about perception? Those people who think women are useless will only notice the 1/100 who is the drifting fluff and never see the 99 who are grinding away in the background. Those who think all men are are agressive baboons and good-ol-boys (good-ol-baboons?) will only notice those guys to the exclusion of the others. When people get to be the boss, they assign people to tasks according to their perception and thus increase the appearance of the generalization to others.
By-the-way, this idea: observation-> generalization-> selective perception-> strengthened belief in generalization-> enforce generalization onto others
is a general problem in science, politics, race relations, religious conflicts, and family disputes.
he had spent those 96 hours doing "one-handed typing"; using the Internet as it was intended to used as a vehicle for healthful physical activity and not frozen in some endless game.
Borrowed from John McL. : Originally, proletaries were the class of inhabitants of the Roman Empire who did not serve the Impirium by creative works or by other service, but through their careless reproductive habits. The word derives from the Latin _proles_, offspring, and the word proletariat literally means "those with many offspring."
Ancient Rome was a slave society with three slaves to every citizen, according to the Tiberian Census of CE 30 or so, depending upon the calendar you prefer. The machinery of the Empire was literally activated by human muscle, the battleships of the Roman Navy being powered by slaves and the very skeins of hair that stored energy for the imperial _ballistae_ (artillery) grown on slaves fed for the purpose. The slaves powering the Empire were derived from conquered peoples and especially from the nameless proletary class.
In modern times, the nearest equivalent would be those who serve the corporate State not through creative works, but through the consumption of things they are instructed to purchase by the media of public information, and by their exposure of their children to the advertisers of such things.
Actually, it turns out none of these actors can fly. It's done with wires attached to the actor. So Christopher Reeve can still do the job and fly as well as any of the others. They can leave the wires on to do other things, such as walking, and he would still be a better actor than almost anyone in those Batman movies (other than Keaton) Remember Christopher Reeve doing the "Hey Superman is drunk!" sequence?
To Keanu's credit is his work in "The Gift", he was spot on in that role and not a "Whoa" in sight.
I really don't know, having never owned one, so I looked it up on google (Diesel gph) and got this:
http://www.northerndiesel.com/aggreko/specs.html
The web is a wonderful thing for finding stuff.
It looks like 60kW would use ~6-7 gallons per hour, somewhat more than my present electrical bill as a 60 kilowatt hour unit would cost about $4.00 from the local powerco. Maybe you could open a used oil/cooking oil "recycling" center and make people pay you to burn it.
The election aside, this is one of those things that bugs me. It sort of makes sense to not allow felons the right to vote, at least for a while, but what bugs me is that almost _everything_ is a felony now-a-days. It just isn't right that dumb teenage stuff gets you a felony record for the rest of your life and lumps you in the same class with murderers, rapists, and armed robbers. And it especially bugs me that writing a bad check can take away your 2nd amendment rights for life.
That is, unless your mom can buy you a good lawyer.
I'm don't think I'm being cynical when I say the reason black males are disproportionately represented among the set of all felons is simply because they can't afford the lawyer. In the US, you're either guilty or rich.
I wish for a paper ballot system where the ballots are handed out ahead of time. Post offices, grocery stores, mailed to your home, etc. Everyone fills out the ballot ahead of time. You go to your local polling place where your identity is verified. You go into a booth and run your ballot through a scanner that has a display that shows you how you have voted so that you can double-check your ability to make circles. The scanner/display checks the ballot for consistency (multi-candidate markings for example) and alerts you that your ballot may be invalid. Then you go to the box where the poll workers view your placing a single ballot into the box to be counted. If yours doesn't scan, you get out of line, drop it into a shredder and fill out another. 90% of the people will simply walk through and drop their ballots which would reduce the multi-hour waits that plague some cities voting.
If the machines screw up, the ballots can be counted by hand. Where I used to live (small town) they had mechanical machines that would sometimes screw up and lose all the votes, particularly in the neighborhoods thought to be leaning toward the non-incumbent candidate. Do you suppose the malfunctions get reported in the newspaper?
This is exactly what will happen with the electronic ones. Consider this scenario: Left Wing Joe is running against Neo-Nazi Bob A neighborhood occupied by relatives of Joe is expected to go 85% for Joe. At about 1 hour before the polls close, an unknown workman accidently shorts the power line's 14Kv into the buildings 110 circuit and all the pads are smoked. All stored votes are lost from that precinct. Or acid is poured into the keyboards of three of the devices so that you now have to wait three hours to vote so many people just go home. Things may get awkward later between the two groups.
So the votes get modemed out as the votes are made? same scenario, just downtown.
There MUST be a physical ballot in the US.
I come from a place where the dead rise from their graves on election day to vote in alphabetical order and no one seems to be bothered by it. Introducing the complexity of electronic devices is just asking for trouble.
So? Thin and fat geeks are at the bottom of the food chain in any organization of over 5,000 employees that's not a geek enterprise. They may get paid well, or often very well, but they're at the bottom. Don't believe me? Call the CEO and ask him/her to meet you for lunch to "just wanted to see how you're doing".
Noodling is illegal in many states. You should be ashamed to be misleading the youth of America into thinking noodling is a fun sport when actually it is a criminal activity.
Re:Researching more efficient ways to kill people.
on
Electric Armor
·
· Score: 1
True, except that the Russians did all the heavy lifting in fighting the Nazis in WWII. Not that they had any choice, though.
It would be worth it to me to have political spam exempted if it meant that Congress would pass an anti-spam law that actually did something about the rest of the spam.
But that's not going to happen. They'll pass a law exempting political spam, sure, but then structure the law so that large corporations can spam, spam, spam until the cows come home, and only the minor players will be at risk for some spam penalty.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing will be done until someone answers the question that lawmakers always ask:
..." All the politician hears is "There's these people who make money" and wonders "How can I get some of it?"
What's in it for me?
No matter what you present to a politician, no matter how good the cause or important the problem, laws get introduced and passed for only one reason, and that reason is that someone was able to answer that question.
Sure, it's possible that the answer was "you'll advance your career if you save mankind with this bill", but that almost never happens. There's always a payoff somewhere, and what I can't figure out is a way to tell a Congressman what's the benefit to him for putting in the effort to fix the spam problem. And getting a bill passed is a hell of a lot of work.
I say: "There's these people who make money by sending a deluge of annoying fradulent emails
that
If every spam victim donated a dollar to support congressmen (IE, campaign funding) to do something about spam, then it'll get done. I for one am ready to help.
Just put your name at the bottom of the list, and send $5 to the person at the top of the list. Now send the list to five of your friends and soon, real soon, we'll have enough money to buy a whole session of Congress. This is completely legitimate, a lawyer looked it over, but you mustn't break the chain.
You're right about the number of Redhat patches for security concerns growing and growing, but it doesn't seem right to compare the 98 updates on Redhat to the W2k 12 hotfixes and 3 SP's. I say this because each SP represents hundreds of patches. Admittedly most of those SP patches are _not_ for security problems and many are simply enhancements, but it's still an apple and oranges comparision. I don't know which is worse, the weekly/daily flood of patches or waiting a year for a service pack.
Generally speaking technology has raised the standards of living, lifespan, comfort level, and freedoms of the societies that use it.
But what about the lost opportunities, the times we fail to use technology to make the world a better place.
Suppose I have used my technological advantage to create a vastly superior military force. Wouldn't it be wrong for me to just sit back and not use it to wipe out inferior societies such as those that insist on remaining in medevial times? By killing them off, I have raised the standard of living of the whole world and increased prosperity for all our decendants and whatever few that survived the cleansing.
You probably think I'm talking about the war in Iraq, Nazis, or even Commies. Actually I'm talking about the workplace. Industry introduces technological changes that obsoletes a segment of the workforce in such a way that those people's lives are lost as productive citizens. I't better than murdering them sure, but not much. Seldom, if ever are changes introduced in any other way than to give the regular guy a kick-in-the-butt. I suspect that those running the show even prefer to ambush the "Joe" - it makes the elite feel feel elite. Technology has and will improve the lot of humanity, but it doesn't have to be a tool of the Social Darwinists.
considering that the only people who sit down and read science textbooks are teachers.
If I were king, I would make the introductory science class be taught like an English lit class. They should read books every week from authors like S J Gould, Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes", maybe Feynman later, and explain what they read about. Any of the quantum mechanics "what a fking screwy world this is" genre and some good hard-science fiction. After they learn what the world is made out of and how it works, the interested ones can can put it to numbers.
Physics first, Chemistry second, Biology last. Then Physics again.
Leave equation solving till later and for algebra class until they're grown up enough to understand what the concept of a model is.
In lab class, just make things happen - you figure out why if you're interested.
Apparently it's a common problem at Dell:
http://nypost.com/news/regionalnews/68896.htm
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff
RE:
Girls do not like doing anything that involves concentrating on one single thing for long periods. They like to switch from one thought to another, and keep many balls up in the air at one time.
This has not been my experience in the industry (20 years) or as a physics teacher (8 yrs). It appears ot me that women are better than men at staying on task and completing it especially if it's tedious. They are also good at juggling many things. Men are better at focusing completely on something they find interesting to the exclusion of everything else.
I believe the reason this appears is that in general women feel duty and responsibility much more strongly than men and most especially when they are young. I don't know anything about "girls" in the workplace.
Give a group of men and women 6 things to do at once, and the women will try to do them all and the men will pick the most interesting (or profitable) and stick with that one. The result is that the guys finish "something" first and that's what is noticed while the women plug away in the background finshing the rest.
These are generalities. I have seen those favored women non-completers who drifted from project to project, getting the "idea" credit, and then moving on to something new before the project got to the grunt work and doomed reality phase. And they also appeared to have the combination of ample breasts and excessive friendliness. I know guys who are exactly the same way, but their attributes are good golf scores, good-ol-boy networking, and tireless agression towards those not in the group.
Furthermore, I'd like to state that it's mostly a matter of perception. That while generalities are often based upon common observation, small differences get exaggerated into labels. The differences in ability to focus and multitask among the group of all women goes from women who can easily do both to women who can do neither. The point is the the variation among the members of the group "women" is much greater than the difference between women-as-a-group and men-as-a-group.
What about perception? Those people who think women are useless will only notice the 1/100 who is the drifting fluff and never see the 99 who are grinding away in the background. Those who think all men are are agressive baboons and good-ol-boys (good-ol-baboons?) will only notice those guys to the exclusion of the others.
When people get to be the boss, they assign people to tasks according to their perception and thus increase the appearance of the generalization to others.
By-the-way, this idea:
observation->
generalization->
selective perception->
strengthened belief in generalization->
enforce generalization onto others
is a general problem in science, politics, race relations, religious conflicts, and family disputes.
The no-call list is old stuff. Welcome to the 20th century, Massachusetts. Even Georgia had it back in 1998, and you can sign up for it on the web.
OK, so here you go:
Canada is Axis of Evil! Axis of Evil!
all your feet are belong to us
Yup, and last time I checked, half the Federal Reserve banks were on Unisys mainframes as well as some of the mega-banks.
Another reason to resume testing of our supply of nuclear weapons (aside from the cool pictures they make).
he had spent those 96 hours doing "one-handed typing"; using the Internet as it was intended to used as a vehicle for healthful physical activity and not frozen in some endless game.
Borrowed from John McL.
:
Originally, proletaries were the class of
inhabitants of the Roman Empire
who did not serve the Impirium by
creative works or by other service,
but through their careless reproductive
habits. The word derives from the
Latin _proles_, offspring, and the word
proletariat literally means
"those with many offspring."
Ancient Rome was a slave society with
three slaves to every citizen, according to the
Tiberian Census of CE 30 or so, depending
upon the calendar you prefer.
The machinery of the Empire was literally
activated by human muscle, the battleships
of the Roman Navy being powered
by slaves and the very skeins of hair that
stored energy for the imperial _ballistae_
(artillery) grown on slaves fed for the purpose.
The slaves powering the Empire were derived from
conquered peoples and especially from the
nameless proletary class.
In modern times, the nearest equivalent
would be those who serve the corporate State
not through creative works, but through
the consumption of things they are
instructed to purchase by the media of
public information, and by their exposure of
their children to the advertisers of such things.
Um, I think IE was not the first popular browser, so IE is the one with the "wrong" layout.
Actually, it turns out none of these actors can fly. It's done with wires attached to the actor. So Christopher Reeve can still do the job and fly as well as any of the others. They can leave the wires on to do other things, such as walking, and he would still be a better actor than almost anyone in those Batman movies (other than Keaton)
Remember Christopher Reeve doing the "Hey Superman is drunk!" sequence?
To Keanu's credit is his work in "The Gift", he was spot on in that role and not a "Whoa" in sight.
I really don't know, having never owned one, so I looked it up on google (Diesel gph) and got this:
l
http://www.northerndiesel.com/aggreko/specs.htm
The web is a wonderful thing for finding stuff.
It looks like 60kW would use ~6-7 gallons per hour, somewhat more than my present electrical bill as a 60 kilowatt hour unit would cost about $4.00 from the local powerco. Maybe you could open a used oil/cooking oil "recycling" center and make people pay you to burn it.
with tower and generator for my Tesla coil experiments.
The election aside, this is one of those things that bugs me. It sort of makes sense to not allow felons the right to vote, at least for a while, but what bugs me is that almost _everything_ is a felony now-a-days. It just isn't right that dumb teenage stuff gets you a felony record for the rest of your life and lumps you in the same class with murderers, rapists, and armed robbers. And it especially bugs me that writing a bad check can take away your 2nd amendment rights for life.
That is, unless your mom can buy you a good lawyer.
I'm don't think I'm being cynical when I say the reason black males are disproportionately represented among the set of all felons is simply because they can't afford the lawyer. In the US, you're either guilty or rich.
I wish for a paper ballot system where the ballots are handed out ahead of time. Post offices, grocery stores, mailed to your home, etc. Everyone fills out the ballot ahead of time. You go to your local polling place where your identity is verified. You go into a booth and run your ballot through a scanner that has a display that shows you how you have voted so that you can double-check your ability to make circles. The scanner/display checks the ballot for consistency (multi-candidate markings for example) and alerts you that your ballot may be invalid. Then you go to the box where the poll workers view your placing a single ballot into the box to be counted. If yours doesn't scan, you get out of line, drop it into a shredder and fill out another. 90% of the people will simply walk through and drop their ballots which would reduce the multi-hour waits that plague some cities voting.
If the machines screw up, the ballots can be counted by hand. Where I used to live (small town) they had mechanical machines that would sometimes screw up and lose all the votes, particularly in the neighborhoods thought to be leaning toward the non-incumbent candidate. Do you suppose the malfunctions get reported in the newspaper?
This is exactly what will happen with the electronic ones.
Consider this scenario:
Left Wing Joe is running against Neo-Nazi Bob
A neighborhood occupied by relatives of Joe is expected to go 85% for Joe. At about 1 hour before the polls close, an unknown workman accidently shorts the power line's 14Kv into the buildings 110 circuit and all the pads are smoked. All stored votes are lost from that precinct. Or acid is poured into the keyboards of three of the devices so that you now have to wait three hours to vote so many people just go home. Things may get awkward later between the two groups.
So the votes get modemed out as the votes are made?
same scenario, just downtown.
There MUST be a physical ballot in the US.
I come from a place where the dead rise from their graves on election day to vote in alphabetical order and no one seems to be bothered by it. Introducing the complexity of electronic devices is just asking for trouble.
So? Thin and fat geeks are at the bottom of the food chain in any organization of over 5,000 employees that's not a geek enterprise. They may get paid well, or often very well, but they're at the bottom.
Don't believe me? Call the CEO and ask him/her to meet you for lunch to "just wanted to see how you're doing".
Noodling is illegal in many states. You should be ashamed to be misleading the youth of America into thinking noodling is a fun sport when actually it is a criminal activity.
True, except that the Russians did all the heavy lifting in fighting the Nazis in WWII. Not that they had any choice, though.
It would be worth it to me to have political spam exempted if it meant that Congress would pass an anti-spam law that actually did something about the rest of the spam.
But that's not going to happen. They'll pass a law exempting political spam, sure, but then structure the law so that large corporations can spam, spam, spam until the cows come home, and only the minor players will be at risk for some spam penalty.
Does this mean I can't use yellow highlighters on the textbooks I purchased in college?