... what the answer here is -- I'm not entirely convinced that access to a censored internet will somehow eventually blossom into a democratic China, nor am I entirely convinced that it is possible (or impossible) to effectively censor the internet.
But I AM convinced that if the Chinese were to completely block outside content, creating a Chinese intranet with only government-approved content, it would be a stable system, and would satisfy the Chinese people's need for contact and communications... and would also be a horrible thing to have happen.
So I reluctantly support the western net services doing business in China under Chinese totalitarian rules.
But I do wonder how the Chinese authorities are going to deal with the influx of lots of tourists at the Olympic games, many of whom will want to photograph Tianamem Square and will inevitably ask a lot of awkward questions. If the Chinese want to interact with the West, they cannot avoid these things.
Interestingly enough, Douglas Adams penned this comparison of the Encyclopedia Galactica to The Hitchhiker's Guide in the BBC radio script for the origian radio broadcast of it in 1978, long before the existence of the public internet, portable computers or the WWW.
Whoda thunk that The Encyclopedia Britannica would be compared to Wikipedia in such an eerily similar manner, almost 30 years later?
... that the light saber worked by creating a localized field that suppressed the electromagnetic interaction, with the glow being a result of leakage of released photons as the protons and electrons combine with a ginormous release of energy.
It isn't so much the steel/wood/flesh/whatever being "vaporized" as whatever matter is within the localized field.
The resulting release of energy would blow the wielder of the light saber into nothingness, except for a second localized field that collects the energy and feeds it back into the mechanism to power the interior suppression field. It is leakage through the outer field that provides the visible "glow".
Somewhere between 99.999% and 99.99999999% of the terrorists (call it an educated guess, based on the number of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks that have occurred in this country since 9-11) are outside this country -- probably in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran -- and we're spending serious effort on domestic surveillance?
What this says to me is that the Bush administration is fscking terrified that the tall grass is full of terrorists, and that we have zero resources capable of dealing with them in their own space (the CIA having been preoccupied with telling the boss what he wants to hear), and have so pissed off our former friends who might actually have some field intelligence, but would now prefer to see us twist in the wind, making an excellent target to draw out the terrorists.
Actually, that last bit doesn't hold water, 'cause plenty of European nations have been hit since 9-11. If anyone had any field intelligence, it would be used.
But why aren't we deploying surveillance drones over Saudi Arabia, or at least Pakistan? And we certainly ought to have every pile of rubble with a roof over it in Afghanistan bugged.
But this continued insistence on domestic surveillance looks for all the world as if the Bush administration is on the side of the terrorists, or is at least gearing up to declare martial law and replace our broken, wobbly charicature of a representative democracy with a theocratic monarchy.
Either that, or they're just incredibly, unbelievably inept.
... of code being rewritten, the symptoms are crystal clear to me -- pulling bodies from other projects does not bode well for Vista.
At least, in all the software projects at all the companies I've ever seen where they resorted to "throwing bodies" at the problem, the most noteworthy result was ALWAYS to make the product even later and of lower quality.
I count (at least) FreeBSd, OpenBSD, NetBSD -- and I suppose one could count OS X as being a BSD derivative system.
Each of these competes in some manner or other for user acceptance -- against each other as well as Windows, and the horde of Linux variants.
Maybe there's more BSD variants than the world needs?
I would expect that when financial support is needed, the folks carrying the banner for any OS would look around for additional financing, or beg for funds, or sell advertising, or charge for distributing the products -- charging for distribution costs is within the purview of most open source licenses, so starting with the next version of OpenSSH, OpenBSD, etc, charge for each download an amount equal to the costs of maintaining the server. If only one person downloads something in a given month, then that person will pay for the server hosting charges for that month. A better way would be to use a rolling average of the number of downloads over the previous 3 months to calculate the per-download charges for the current month. That will probably not solve all the problems, but it would at least keep the code available, as well as give a real indication of just how many users rely on it.
To keep someone else from paying the distribution costs for a single copy and re-distributing it for free, they would probably need to fork the code and distribute the updated fork under a different licensing scheme that disallowed redistribution. That would REALLY show whether the code is regarded as essential or not. In such a case, he might as well make it a commercial license and fold in development costs.
Of course, this will necessitate audits of where the money goes, and publicly accessible statements of same. But such details are probably already required to maintain one's standing as a not-for-profit organization, anyhow.
... a tearful Sam Palmisano announced that IBM was immediately directing its vast army of Indian developers to begin rewriting zOS as a.Net client.
"When I woke up this morning and saw my kid's pony's severed head in bed next to me, I just knew it was Balmer. When I went down for breakfast and found all my coffee dumped on the floor, I knew he meant business."
At least he didn't threaten with chairs and profanity.
Seriously, after IBM exited the desktop PC hardware business, any usefulness they had to Microsoft vanished, and they became just another competitor -- one with considerable corporate influence and a bigger source of Java legitimacy in the corporate world than Sun (who is on a short leash to Microsoft in any event), AND the biggest legitimizer of Linux for corporate use around.
The miracle is that Balmer wasn't throwing chairs and spewing profanities during the interview.
... I wonder if this would be happening if "Without a Trace" ran on Fox instead of CBS.
A little payback, for the Dan Rather/CBS News faux pax? Or maybe just some gratuitous CBS bashing?
I know this seems ridiculously silly, but we do have the "ridiculously silly" administration calling the shots. An outa control FCC would be right in keeping with the rest of the circus.
There's simply no way that the accusations or the size of the fine makes any rational sense. It would be interesting to see exactly how many complaints there were from the viewing public.
... will keep us from pumping DARPA funds into creating Spiderman.
But WAIT! Nobody ever said anything about arachnid-human hybrids!
I'll bet that deep in the underground bunkers beneath the White House, thousands of abducted homeless are being subjected to radioactive spiders' bites.
But it certainly seems that the ManBat is outa the running...
You cannot stop natural selection, you can only change the selection criteria.
So how do we change the selection criteria so as to favor thoughtful action?
So far as I can see, the general level of thoughtful action in society as a whole has been on a distinct decline for quite a while now.
Consider the likelihood of a group of individuals as capable as the American Founding Fathers ever achieving prominence and influence in America today. Or look around for instances of corporate "thought factories" like Bell Labs. Or even the amount of genuine innovation taking place today in Silicon Valley, as compared to that of thirty years ago.
What kind of Darwinian Scythe could winnow out the dullards among us? Clearly, if intelligence is a favored trait, it is only a minor one. Good health and good looks would seem to be of much greater value to the discerning genome.
Is there any reason why nuclear waste cannot be recycled?
Just encase it in leaded glass, and insert that into a subduction zone, where it will safely be heating the planet's magma along with lots of naturally occurring radioactive material. In a few hundred thousand years it will reappear, diffused to the weaker levels that we see in volcanic lava, or as part of a plate edge upwelling from the planetary interior.
In any event, it will be well away from contact with the biosphere for a length of time suitable for it to become reasonably neutral. No problems with constructing a repository that must securely contain it for the hundred thousand years needed for it to radiate itself down to tolerable levels.
Of course, it's no small feat to plant nuclear waste in a subduction zone -- but neither is it impossible, either. Look at the depths we drill of oil at. Surely a platform above a subduction zone trench that guides the packages downward and plants them (via a teleoperated digging machine) deep enough into the ocean floor to launch them on their way without posing a severe threat to the environment can be devised.
And once "planted", the radioactive waste should be pretty much unreachable by terrorists. Seems like a winning plan to me. Anybody see anything wrong with it?
as has already been pointed out, any flash drive or external hard drive could be used.
Or a thieving employee could burn a CD or DVD.
Or use a cellphone to store sensitive info, transferred from a PC via the Bluetooth connection used to support a wireless mouse.
The only real defense against employee theft is restricting access to sensitive data and minimizing the number of untrustworthy employees. That's the best that can be done.
It may be as simple as Google is not on trial. The fourth amendment prevents you from saying anything to incriminate yourself.
Actually, it's the 5th Amendment that does what you said -- hence the expression "taking the fifth".
The 4th amendment is as I quoted: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The 4th is the "unreasonable search and seizure" one. You can check out all of the first ten "amendments" -- which are not really changes, but things the founders felt needed to be emphasized, so they repeated them as the "Bill of Rights", which became the first ten amendments to the Constitution. All of the points they restate explicitly were present in either explicit or implicict form in the Constitution.
If you want to know what the founders really intended, you could do worse than studying the Bill of Rights.
Or are they saving that for the eventual appeal to the Supreme Court?
"Article 4. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Is this because Google, being a corporation, is not regarded as a Person? Certainly the "papers and effects" portion would apply to those citizens whose data Google houses.
Or is it being stipulated that the data in Google's keeping has no portion of ownership by the people? Or that "my" Gmail is not really mine, or that "my" search histories have no relation to me, that they would not constitute "my papers"? Perhaps this is an area into which Google does not wish to venture.
IANAL, but this seems pretty cut & dried to me.
Will someone (who IS a lawyer, please) point out the error in my thinking?
Having the US do an effective job of censorship rather than letting the Chinese enforce an ineffective form of censorship seems counter-productive to me.
Having many channels of communication between the Chinese population and the outside world -- even "censored" ones -- increases the odds that ways will be found to circumvent the censors.
Even schemes like the one spotlighted ("Freegate") in today's WSJ (subscription reqd) would fail if there were no channels of communication through the so-called "Great Firewall of China".
Of course, reasoned thought has long ago been abandoned by the US Congress (if indeed it was EVER present in the House of Representatives) in favor of more lucrative means of constructing legislation. Is the Chinese government acting as the lobbyist for this rumored legislation?
As I see things, Google is merely trying to do business in China and the United States according to the local laws.
In the United States, we have the Constitution as the bedrock of our legal system. The most important provisions of the Constitution were emphasized in the Bill of Rights.
Article (or Amendment) 4 of the Bill of Rights says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
That seems frighteningly clear to me, and is at least as relevant today as it was when it was written. Throughout our Constitution, the point is made over and over that individual rights are paramount, followed by States' rights, and lowest on the hierarchy of "Rights" are those reserved for the Federal government.
In fact, in the United States, individual rights are so revered that when they come into conflict with criminal prosecutions, except for a restricted set of situtations, INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS TRUMP CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS. This is, so far as I am able to determine, unique among nations of the world and has served to keep us free these past 200+ years.
In China, the situation is reversed. The national government has all the rights, and the individual none. Whatever the government says, goes.
It depends upon the age and technical sophistication of the homeowner. If my parents were to receive a bill like this, they would expire before reading to the end of the statement.
... will never listen to anyone beneath them in the corporate food chain.
Making a lot of obstructionist noise will only paint a bulls-eye on yourself, as a malcontent and troublemaker -- probably a security risk as well.
How to distinguish between ignorant top management and the clued-in variety
Good top management would have asked down the org chart to the IT group whether there was anything to the issues raised in those articles, and would have done so off-line rather than during a conference call. After all, they should have confidence in the abilities of their IT staff, and should reasonably expect them to know more about this area than they do. Ignorant doofus top managers assume that they are the ultimate in every regard, and have no need to consult anyone -- after all, that's why they're paid the "Big Buck$".
In the words of Roy Schieder (Chief Brodie in Jaws), "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
Go and get an IBM marketeer (or a pack of them) to educate your top management about the virtues of Linux in the corporate environment. They have credibility that you will simply never possess, and are well-trained in the fine art of "Account Control". Just ask your top management for an opportunity to bring in a representative from a Fortune 50 company to put on a small presentation about Linux, in order to get a "business perspective" on the matter.
The downside is that you will give up any voice in what kind of hardware you run. But that's not such a big downside, as IBM makes good stuff. And with the sort of management you have, any thoughts you might have about your influence is an illusion, anyhow.
I expect that some sales minions have already managed an end run up the org chart, and the source of all the anti-Linux FUD propaganda is either Microsoft, or some Microsoft-oriented consulting firm plotting to seize a firm grasp on your company's IT budget.
You need to fight fire with nuclear weapons. Bring in IBM.
... is that it tends to degenerate to the "lowest common denominator", or the most widely-used language for everything, regardless of applicability and common sense.
Nonsense such as COBOL in the desktop environment, or perl in an IBM mainframe environment. Neither makes much sense, as the supporting codebases that might make COBOL in an IBM mainframe environment do not exist in a desktop environment (without extensive (and expensive) porting) and similarly, the large pre-existing codebases for perl do not exist (or again require substantial porting) in the mainframe environment, not to mention perl's targeted UI of a unix shell or console is not what one is presented with in mainframe environments. REXX makes for a much better choice of a scripting language on the mainframe.
Yes, you CAN use COBOL for everything. Or Java. Or C/C++. Or perl. Or assembler.
That old saying, "To the man with only a hammer in the toolbox, every problem looks like a nail", applies here.
Having a toolbox with a reasonable assortment of versatile tools is a sign of a craftsman. Having a toolbox with every tool known is a sign of a rich dilettante playing at being a craftsman. Having a toolbox containing a single tool is a sign of an idiot playing at being a craftsman.
Slashdot Mirror
... what the answer here is -- I'm not entirely convinced that access to a censored internet will somehow eventually blossom into a democratic China, nor am I entirely convinced that it is possible (or impossible) to effectively censor the internet.
But I AM convinced that if the Chinese were to completely block outside content, creating a Chinese intranet with only government-approved content, it would be a stable system, and would satisfy the Chinese people's need for contact and communications... and would also be a horrible thing to have happen.
So I reluctantly support the western net services doing business in China under Chinese totalitarian rules.
But I do wonder how the Chinese authorities are going to deal with the influx of lots of tourists at the Olympic games, many of whom will want to photograph Tianamem Square and will inevitably ask a lot of awkward questions. If the Chinese want to interact with the West, they cannot avoid these things.
So do they use email, or IM?
Or do they communicate using discussion forums?
Whoda thunk that The Encyclopedia Britannica would be compared to Wikipedia in such an eerily similar manner, almost 30 years later?
And for a final bit of recursive irony, I discovered that nugget of information by searching the Wikipedia for "The HitchHicker's Guide to the Galaxy".
Just try to extract the same information from Britannica Online.
It isn't so much the steel/wood/flesh/whatever being "vaporized" as whatever matter is within the localized field.
The resulting release of energy would blow the wielder of the light saber into nothingness, except for a second localized field that collects the energy and feeds it back into the mechanism to power the interior suppression field. It is leakage through the outer field that provides the visible "glow".
But I suppose I could be wrong.
Somewhere between 99.999% and 99.99999999% of the terrorists (call it an educated guess, based on the number of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks that have occurred in this country since 9-11) are outside this country -- probably in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran -- and we're spending serious effort on domestic surveillance?
What this says to me is that the Bush administration is fscking terrified that the tall grass is full of terrorists, and that we have zero resources capable of dealing with them in their own space (the CIA having been preoccupied with telling the boss what he wants to hear), and have so pissed off our former friends who might actually have some field intelligence, but would now prefer to see us twist in the wind, making an excellent target to draw out the terrorists.
Actually, that last bit doesn't hold water, 'cause plenty of European nations have been hit since 9-11. If anyone had any field intelligence, it would be used.
But why aren't we deploying surveillance drones over Saudi Arabia, or at least Pakistan? And we certainly ought to have every pile of rubble with a roof over it in Afghanistan bugged.
But this continued insistence on domestic surveillance looks for all the world as if the Bush administration is on the side of the terrorists, or is at least gearing up to declare martial law and replace our broken, wobbly charicature of a representative democracy with a theocratic monarchy.
Either that, or they're just incredibly, unbelievably inept.
... of code being rewritten, the symptoms are crystal clear to me -- pulling bodies from other projects does not bode well for Vista.
At least, in all the software projects at all the companies I've ever seen where they resorted to "throwing bodies" at the problem, the most noteworthy result was ALWAYS to make the product even later and of lower quality.
It will be no different this time.
I count (at least) FreeBSd, OpenBSD, NetBSD -- and I suppose one could count OS X as being a BSD derivative system.
Each of these competes in some manner or other for user acceptance -- against each other as well as Windows, and the horde of Linux variants.
Maybe there's more BSD variants than the world needs?
I would expect that when financial support is needed, the folks carrying the banner for any OS would look around for additional financing, or beg for funds, or sell advertising, or charge for distributing the products -- charging for distribution costs is within the purview of most open source licenses, so starting with the next version of OpenSSH, OpenBSD, etc, charge for each download an amount equal to the costs of maintaining the server. If only one person downloads something in a given month, then that person will pay for the server hosting charges for that month. A better way would be to use a rolling average of the number of downloads over the previous 3 months to calculate the per-download charges for the current month. That will probably not solve all the problems, but it would at least keep the code available, as well as give a real indication of just how many users rely on it.
To keep someone else from paying the distribution costs for a single copy and re-distributing it for free, they would probably need to fork the code and distribute the updated fork under a different licensing scheme that disallowed redistribution. That would REALLY show whether the code is regarded as essential or not. In such a case, he might as well make it a commercial license and fold in development costs.
Of course, this will necessitate audits of where the money goes, and publicly accessible statements of same. But such details are probably already required to maintain one's standing as a not-for-profit organization, anyhow.
There's a lot of alternatives.
... that Jack Bauer's not in the FBI!
... a tearful Sam Palmisano announced that IBM was immediately directing its vast army of Indian developers to begin rewriting zOS as a .Net client.
"When I woke up this morning and saw my kid's pony's severed head in bed next to me, I just knew it was Balmer. When I went down for breakfast and found all my coffee dumped on the floor, I knew he meant business."
At least he didn't threaten with chairs and profanity.
Seriously, after IBM exited the desktop PC hardware business, any usefulness they had to Microsoft vanished, and they became just another competitor -- one with considerable corporate influence and a bigger source of Java legitimacy in the corporate world than Sun (who is on a short leash to Microsoft in any event), AND the biggest legitimizer of Linux for corporate use around.
The miracle is that Balmer wasn't throwing chairs and spewing profanities during the interview.
... I wonder if this would be happening if "Without a Trace" ran on Fox instead of CBS.
A little payback, for the Dan Rather/CBS News faux pax? Or maybe just some gratuitous CBS bashing?
I know this seems ridiculously silly, but we do have the "ridiculously silly" administration calling the shots. An outa control FCC would be right in keeping with the rest of the circus.
There's simply no way that the accusations or the size of the fine makes any rational sense. It would be interesting to see exactly how many complaints there were from the viewing public.
... will keep us from pumping DARPA funds into creating Spiderman.
...
But WAIT! Nobody ever said anything about arachnid-human hybrids!
I'll bet that deep in the underground bunkers beneath the White House, thousands of abducted homeless are being subjected to radioactive spiders' bites.
But it certainly seems that the ManBat is outa the running
... only a clarification of a gaping flaw in the Laws themselves.
All that is required to be "compliant" is to define "human" as anything wearing a preoperly-encrypted set of dogtags. All others are inhuman infidels.
De-humanization of the enemy has been a part of military preparedness going back as far as the concept of "military" has existed.
You failed to mention the banner over the Speaking Dais, reading "Mission Accomplished!"
So how do we change the selection criteria so as to favor thoughtful action?
So far as I can see, the general level of thoughtful action in society as a whole has been on a distinct decline for quite a while now.
Consider the likelihood of a group of individuals as capable as the American Founding Fathers ever achieving prominence and influence in America today. Or look around for instances of corporate "thought factories" like Bell Labs. Or even the amount of genuine innovation taking place today in Silicon Valley, as compared to that of thirty years ago.
What kind of Darwinian Scythe could winnow out the dullards among us?
Clearly, if intelligence is a favored trait, it is only a minor one. Good health and good looks would seem to be of much greater value to the discerning genome.
... and other unrestricted automated translators.
Restricting the syntax to the domain of medical terms makes the job a whole lot easier, and would eliminate oodles of ambiguities.
Not so scary.
Is there any reason why nuclear waste cannot be recycled?
Just encase it in leaded glass, and insert that into a subduction zone, where it will safely be heating the planet's magma along with lots of naturally occurring radioactive material. In a few hundred thousand years it will reappear, diffused to the weaker levels that we see in volcanic lava, or as part of a plate edge upwelling from the planetary interior.
In any event, it will be well away from contact with the biosphere for a length of time suitable for it to become reasonably neutral. No problems with constructing a repository that must securely contain it for the hundred thousand years needed for it to radiate itself down to tolerable levels.
Of course, it's no small feat to plant nuclear waste in a subduction zone -- but neither is it impossible, either. Look at the depths we drill of oil at. Surely a platform above a subduction zone trench that guides the packages downward and plants them (via a teleoperated digging machine) deep enough into the ocean floor to launch them on their way without posing a severe threat to the environment can be devised.
And once "planted", the radioactive waste should be pretty much unreachable by terrorists. Seems like a winning plan to me. Anybody see anything wrong with it?
as has already been pointed out, any flash drive or external hard drive could be used.
Or a thieving employee could burn a CD or DVD.
Or use a cellphone to store sensitive info, transferred from a PC via the Bluetooth connection used to support a wireless mouse.
The only real defense against employee theft is restricting access to sensitive data and minimizing the number of untrustworthy employees. That's the best that can be done.
Actually, it's the 5th Amendment that does what you said -- hence the expression "taking the fifth".
The 4th amendment is as I quoted:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The 4th is the "unreasonable search and seizure" one. You can check out all of the first ten "amendments" -- which are not really changes, but things the founders felt needed to be emphasized, so they repeated them as the "Bill of Rights", which became the first ten amendments to the Constitution. All of the points they restate explicitly were present in either explicit or implicict form in the Constitution.
If you want to know what the founders really intended, you could do worse than studying the Bill of Rights.
Or are they saving that for the eventual appeal to the Supreme Court?
"Article 4. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Is this because Google, being a corporation, is not regarded as a Person? Certainly the "papers and effects" portion would apply to those citizens whose data Google houses.
Or is it being stipulated that the data in Google's keeping has no portion of ownership by the people? Or that "my" Gmail is not really mine, or that "my" search histories have no relation to me, that they would not constitute "my papers"?
Perhaps this is an area into which Google does not wish to venture.
IANAL, but this seems pretty cut & dried to me.
Will someone (who IS a lawyer, please) point out the error in my thinking?
Having many channels of communication between the Chinese population and the outside world -- even "censored" ones -- increases the odds that ways will be found to circumvent the censors.
Even schemes like the one spotlighted ("Freegate") in today's WSJ (subscription reqd) would fail if there were no channels of communication through the so-called "Great Firewall of China".
Of course, reasoned thought has long ago been abandoned by the US Congress (if indeed it was EVER present in the House of Representatives) in favor of more lucrative means of constructing legislation. Is the Chinese government acting as the lobbyist for this rumored legislation?
In the United States, we have the Constitution as the bedrock of our legal system. The most important provisions of the Constitution were emphasized in the Bill of Rights.
Article (or Amendment) 4 of the Bill of Rights says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
That seems frighteningly clear to me, and is at least as relevant today as it was when it was written. Throughout our Constitution, the point is made over and over that individual rights are paramount, followed by States' rights, and lowest on the hierarchy of "Rights" are those reserved for the Federal government.
In fact, in the United States, individual rights are so revered that when they come into conflict with criminal prosecutions, except for a restricted set of situtations, INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS TRUMP CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS. This is, so far as I am able to determine, unique among nations of the world and has served to keep us free these past 200+ years.
In China, the situation is reversed. The national government has all the rights, and the individual none. Whatever the government says, goes.
A good summary of the censorship situation in China is presented in the 2/27/2006 issue of Forbes (reg. reqd.) -- be sure to check out the editor's remarks.
It depends upon the age and technical sophistication of the homeowner. If my parents were to receive a bill like this, they would expire before reading to the end of the statement.
... what kind of job pays $27K per year in NYC?
... ... or slept in the office.
Can a person even LIVE on that?
I was under the impression that it was kinda expensive to live in the Big Apple.
But maybe he commuted in from Westchester or Connecticut
... will never listen to anyone beneath them in the corporate food chain.
Making a lot of obstructionist noise will only paint a bulls-eye on yourself, as a malcontent and troublemaker -- probably a security risk as well.
How to distinguish between ignorant top management and the clued-in variety
Good top management would have asked down the org chart to the IT group whether there was anything to the issues raised in those articles, and would have done so off-line rather than during a conference call. After all, they should have confidence in the abilities of their IT staff, and should reasonably expect them to know more about this area than they do. Ignorant doofus top managers assume that they are the ultimate in every regard, and have no need to consult anyone -- after all, that's why they're paid the "Big Buck$".
In the words of Roy Schieder (Chief Brodie in Jaws), "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
Go and get an IBM marketeer (or a pack of them) to educate your top management about the virtues of Linux in the corporate environment. They have credibility that you will simply never possess, and are well-trained in the fine art of "Account Control". Just ask your top management for an opportunity to bring in a representative from a Fortune 50 company to put on a small presentation about Linux, in order to get a "business perspective" on the matter.
The downside is that you will give up any voice in what kind of hardware you run. But that's not such a big downside, as IBM makes good stuff. And with the sort of management you have, any thoughts you might have about your influence is an illusion, anyhow.
I expect that some sales minions have already managed an end run up the org chart, and the source of all the anti-Linux FUD propaganda is either Microsoft, or some Microsoft-oriented consulting firm plotting to seize a firm grasp on your company's IT budget.
You need to fight fire with nuclear weapons. Bring in IBM.
... is that it tends to degenerate to the "lowest common denominator", or the most widely-used language for everything, regardless of applicability and common sense.
Nonsense such as COBOL in the desktop environment, or perl in an IBM mainframe environment. Neither makes much sense, as the supporting codebases that might make COBOL in an IBM mainframe environment do not exist in a desktop environment (without extensive (and expensive) porting) and similarly, the large pre-existing codebases for perl do not exist (or again require substantial porting) in the mainframe environment, not to mention perl's targeted UI of a unix shell or console is not what one is presented with in mainframe environments. REXX makes for a much better choice of a scripting language on the mainframe.
Yes, you CAN use COBOL for everything. Or Java. Or C/C++. Or perl. Or assembler.
That old saying, "To the man with only a hammer in the toolbox, every problem looks like a nail", applies here.
Having a toolbox with a reasonable assortment of versatile tools is a sign of a craftsman. Having a toolbox with every tool known is a sign of a rich dilettante playing at being a craftsman. Having a toolbox containing a single tool is a sign of an idiot playing at being a craftsman.