I suspect the number of people who know anything about large scale disaster planning in the media or who post on slashdot (as an alternative media outlet) are diminishingly small. Hence, we have a lot of people speaking to matters they know Sweet FA about.
I have served some time in the Army and have lots of friends in the Coast Gaurd and the US Army. The Coast Gaurd, especially, was making a full court press (as my friend put it) in the rescue efforts, getting 29 cutters and 52 aircraft into action fairly quickly.
Part of the problem is we (in the Western World) have become the 'now now now' Internet generation. We expect everything to happen post haste. My mother, who survived the Blitz and WW2 in Britain, finds the people getting all worked up over the US response to be ridiculous. I have to admit, I agree with her.
Let's look at the response. New Orleans didn't use its city and school buses to evacuate the city. Why not? People didn't leave the city when they were told to. What were they thinking? The levees weren't upgraded, even though this problem has been known about for many decades. Sure you can blame the Feds, but I'm thinking the state and NO taxpayers themselves had better go thinking about their part in that failure.
As for the Fed's response, they've put in (in about a week), more troops than are in the entire Canadian Army. They've deployed what I assume must be hundreds of helicopters on rescue duties. Now, yes, the helicopters picked people off of flooding housing and dropped them on overpasses and at the superdome. Those pilots did what they were told and are only first-line responders. Where was the NOPD, city gov't and state organization at the Superdome and the Convention Center? Not too visible, was it?
As far as getting rescue supplies in and second stage rescue operations setup - yes, it could have been done better I feel sure. Yet at the same time, in order to have a chopper operating to do rescue, you need to setup a FARP where the chopper can fuel up. You need base facilities for routine maintenance and mechanical failures to be handled (we've seen remarkably few catastrophic failures given the number of rescue sorties and presumably pilot duty schedules). Pilots need to sleep and be fed as do mechanics and SAR techs. All in a secure area. That takes a lot of logistics, just to get these sorts of FARPs setup. And it takes time. It takes time for an Aircraft Carrier or Amphibious Assault ship to steam to the area. It takes time for the army engineers to clear roads to let larger relief vehicles in. NO wasn't the only place hit, many of the roads into new orleans would be absolutely impassable.
This process all takes time. Did it take too much time? Maybe. BUT THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN ASSESS THAT ARE DISASTER RELIEF EXPERTS WITH ALL THE DATA IN THEIR POSSESSION.
This is clearly an analysis that cannot be meaninfully conducted until well after the fact. I saw a piece in the UK Gaurdian talking about how most of the claims of murders and rapes and dead babies and such in the Superdome just cannot be substantiated or firsthand witnesses located. Rumour works like a wildfire in these situations. I'm not saying crappy stuff didn't happen and crimes didn't happen (I'm not an idiot). But it may well be that as bad as it was, the media hype and the rumour (how many times did the media talk to actual eyewitnesses? how many times did they tell you the unsubstantiated stories could not be confirmed? how many people, hearing these unsubstantiated tales, just took them as gospel?) probably did as much damage as anything and it shaped our perceptions.
We don't have the expertise to do anything more than say "It seems like more might have been done, maybe" or "The response didn't seem fast enough for the requirements... even if it was the fastest possible". We need to let experts on the subject collect data on the response, analyse that data, talk to the various institutions involved, talk to various first responders and organizers, and figure out what
One good reason it'll cost you something. If these people are left unemployed and unhoused in other places (having been evacuated), you'll just end up with more crime, more social support issues (and corresponding expenses), a more tightly stretched local and state tax base, and probably an economic recession.
Though it costs money, the rebuilding will lead to a mini-boom of sorts to help compensate for the flood, will get people back to work, encourage people to flow back out of the heavily refugee-laden states (whose own state planning is going to have troubles handling the population influx), etc.
It looks like money burnt, but in reality, much of the rebuilding and reconstruction money and accompanying programs to encourage industry will result in jobs, new opportunities, etc. and it will help turn people who are destitute now back into (in many cases) rate-payers.
So, you could be short-sighted and give them short shrift, but the people you'd really be screwing are the states they evacuated to and the nation as a whole.
And no, it is not a redundancy. First, there are many types of gamers (RPG gamers, LARP gamers, computer gamers, etc). Second, RPG is role-playing game, not role playing gamer. So RPG gamer is a perfectly valid construction. RP gamer might sound better, I concede.
Forgot Space Opera.
And of course, I have a pile of Aftermath stuff too.
SFB - Yes. Kzinti? You must be joking. KDSF or Hydrans please!
Road Striker? Never even heard of it! Sounds interesting.
Cyberpunk should be on the list, I agree.
Car Wars, despite having character rules, probably wouldn't qualify being more boardgame.
Star Frontiers & Knight Hawks? Apocalypse? Morrow Project? Twilight 2K? (Not quite sci-fi...) Star Trek, the RPG? Star Wars, from WEG? Star Ace? Freedom in the Galaxy? Timelords? Original Paranoia?
That's all from memory. I know I'm missing a bunch....:)
Traveller has a very dedicated following, on the Traveller mailing list, on the Citizens of the Imperium web-forum and other places. With a number of generations (Classic Traveller, still incredibly popular, MegaTraveller, T4, T20, GURPS Traveller, Traveller:The New Era, and soon T5), it is probably one of the longest lived RPGs. The setting is what keeps it alive - the setting spans the rulesets and lives on. MegaTrav itself had a very easy to run yet functionally complete skill system and thus is a popular system with those of us that played it. I myself own all of the generations of Trav, but play MT rules (mostly). My players don't care much about the ruleset, but they know MT lets us tell good stories with minimal overhead.
So part of the passion for Traveller is a universe of 30 million sophonts, 11,000 worlds, several well developed major races, tens or hundreds of minor races, huge mapping projects, vast historical analysis, pirates, etc.
Classic Traveller and its reprints have enjoyed vast popularity because of their simplicity and open-endedness (they were less tied to setting than the subsequent rulesets).
It won't die because there haven't been many good hard sci fi RPGs to come down the pike since, and none that gave the scope of adventure that CT and its successors offered as a setting - Dune, Honor Harrington, Star Wars, Star Trek, Merchanters, all of these sorts are represented in the setting. It also gives you The Great Game of Nations, espionage, diplomacy, real-politik, psionics, jump-space, a vast history, and reaslistic seeming NPCs and major setting characters, flawed and imperfect. And it remembers what makes for a fun game for players.
Yes, it is my second favorite game (after AD&D which is my favorite simply for historical reasons, and some of which may be apocryphal by now).
Visit http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/ Citizens of the Imperium or take a Jaunt over to the Steve Jackson's site for info on GURPS Traveller.:)
I've been gaming (and no, that doesn't require a computer) since 1980. I've made and kept many wonderful friends as a consequence. Engineers, Soldiers, Sailors, Police Officers, Computer Programmers, Chefs, Theater folks, Teachers... you name it. Not one of them comes up short on intelligence (at least in the raw...) or personal hygiene. Most have a university education and a broad interest in history, culture, and technology. Most also have an imagination. Most are married and quite a few have kids. Their kids are getting to enjoy their hobbies with them.
If that's the kind of folks I get lumped in with, I'm more than happy with the designation.
If you feel compelled to snipe at RGP gamers because of one or two outliers on the social curve, you're in some pretty dangerous territory on this forum. I've probably seen as many socially disfunctional computer/technology geeks as I ever did disfunctional gamers. Something about glass houses and bricks comes to mind here.
Not all drugs that have the same active ingredients use the same dyes or fillers and whatnot. That difference can be important. Sometimes the brand name (or lack thereof) actually does matter.
And I think there is some US law prohibiting the advertising of the name and manufacturer of a drug in the same commercial as a discussion of its abilities. So you get viagra adds that don't refer to a particular manufacturer, and you get other adds from manufacturers that show happy scenes and suggest you visit their website or call your doctor for info about their products.
And I imagine some doctors get kickbacks (over or under the table) from drug company marketing teams.
So, I have to say, that whole pharamceutical advertising thing is insane. It probably should not go on. Yet, at the same time, sometimes you have to tell your GP about some new drug, then they investigate it and it actually helps you. So maybe banning advertising would be a two edged sword. It's a tough question, I think.
It seems to be that the "defensive patent" argument owes a lot to arms race analogies. You know: "We need patents to defend ourselves from the evil patents of our enemies". That sort of thing.
Oddly, this reminds me of a Strangelove moment and my great urge is to throw up my arm in salute while complaining about our mine shaft gap... (or software patent gap).
I understand where you are going and where you are coming from in your commentary. However, I submit that exploits *are* going to be released in public in less than ten months and Cisco and Co. had better develop a method to cope with this.
If the Corvette can't stop, Darwin will notify the next of kin.
And simply saying that researchers releasing exploits like this is childish won't even come close to addressing the problem, in addition to which the situation might have a bit more depth than that in many cases.
I didn't ask the question about how long one should wait because I don't have a good answer. I've read arguments from the 'out at once' and the 'let them fix it (or hide it)' school. The reality is sometimes companies try to hide problems rather than fix them and just get all 'lawyeresque' with anyone who then talks about disclosure - the only workable disclosure then becomes immediate disclosure. If you give them time, they may resort to lawyers and after that, disclosure has a price you may not be willing to pay.
So I don't have an answer - both sides have valid points. But I think the larger point is some folks *are* going to continue to instantly divulge, so you'd better (if you are Cisco or the like) get yourself into a mode to handle things like this.
Better late than never doesn't apply in many cases. The Hiroshima Evacuation Plan, The decision/admission their were no WMDs, UN intervention in Rwanda, etc. Better late than never doesn't cut it in many cases. Now certainly I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect, but not all that much, if you consider the context. Cisco underpins the Internet. Vulnerabilities thus become *very* significant. Better late than never is not an acceptable policy. Period.
If Cisco can't or won't adapt and arrive at a better solution, one day, it and the networks it serves will regret it in a big way. And then the market will punish them. And maybe their successor will be more responsive.
As to getting router code, I'd imagine all you can get is binary code which you can decompile, as opposed to commented source, out of a router. And depending on the nature and degree of arcana in the code, that lack of comments and supporting documentation and designs could be quite significant. Yes, getting the code is a first step, but it isn't the full deal. Still, this is an aside in the larger discussion.
You're talking about a bus, plane or train. If the transportation device was a Corvette, it could brake much harder. If everyone were strapped in to proper multi-point harnesses with SRS systems, you could take a minor hit much better too.
I'd argue this is a good reason not to opt for monolithic solutions. I'd also argue this is a good reason why companies in as pivotal of a role as Cisco need to be *more* agile. More agile than they are now and more agile than the bad guys.
It might take you eighteen months to develop a solution. Want to bet that it won't take a blackhat 18 months to develop and release an exploit? I wouldn't and Cisco shouldn't.
We now live on Internet time. Things happen *fast*. Companies have to react quickly and well and have to structure their operations (from support through development) with that in mind. If they aren't doing that, they need a kick in the teeth until they see the wisdom of doing so.
Don't get me wrong... I understand where you are coming from (I'm a software developer...) but I think vulnerabilities have to be able to be dealt with faster and if we can't do that, then we're doing something wrong - our whole methodology needs ot change or our whole paradigm of thinking about development of software.
Time, and blackhats, wait for no man. And certainly not for one showing up eighteen months later....
One of the issues here is that spam is a vector for various virii, trojans, spyware and other fun payloads.
Also, spam does cost you money by eating up storage space, bandwidth, etc. That's not quite equivalent to a barking dog or someone talking on a cellphone.
I think lawmakers have to be involved enough to make sure that sufficient protections exist for the individual to be free from harassment. It's a slippery slope, I give you, but you can stake out a basecamp somewhere on it usefully.
The situation you are likening things to probably doesn't work as you suspect.
Do you think the West was tamed by vigilante gangs, citizen lynchings, and the like? Do you believe this is what civilized the West?
Or rather, was it the coming of the railroad, the influx of honest people, the extension of the hands of law enforcement, the implementation of new laws and their enforcement, etc.
I submit that the Wild West was a place of murderers, vigilante gangs (murderers), hired guns (ditto), the precursor of the corporate army (likewise sometimes), and citizens who were sometimes willing to backshoot a dangerous stranger or lynch him without due process.
Now, all I'm getting at is reverting to the same type of action as the spammers is sort of like admitting you can't come up with anything better, more civilized, or more effective. That smacks of giving up, of throwing up your hands and saying "we can't beat 'em, better join 'em".
There are any number of existent laws and if the agencies that enforced them were a bit better funded and there was better international cooperation, we'd see a fairly marked decrease in some of this sort of traffic. Fighting spam is as much an international diplomatic/legal/bureaucratic issue as it is a technical one.
I mean, think of it in another way. You've got a dark room and you have a door onto it. You know the dark room has some nasty critters in it, and one might wander into your lighted door and try to eat you. I don't think the solution is releasing alternate strains of nasty critter. That's just magnifying the problem. Instead, you'd put a door on with a peep hole, you'd install a mantrap or two, and you might find out which other room is popping monsters out and send a group of people to that room to speak with them about it.
I figure we can win this war another way, we just have to decide to spend the money and put it as a priority for our law makers, law enforcers, and budget allocators for same. And of course, arm-twist some offshore havens into rethinking their policies.
Wrong. As I have stated before, the universe and everything within it exists due to absolute and definable laws. The universe is not capricious and there is no evidence whatsoever to prove otherwise.
You can't prove their is an objective reality/universe (versus a consensus reality or a subjective reality). Cannot be done. And whether you 'stated before' or not, doesn't make your conclusion necessarily true or valuable.
On the other hand, just asserting that something is true because it is true is a historical rhetorical technique which has worked a few times, if the listeners weren't paying attention.
The world is a big place. You might understand it better if you had a more scientific and logical mind. My perspective of the universe and everything within it is perfectly correct.
... in your mind. And perhaps only there. Your final statement would be familiar to any religious fundamentalist.
I find it funny that pro-science zealots constantly attempt to stipulate that their model of an objective reality that is entirely describable and understandable by science (which seems to be a process which has as a necessary precursor the genesis of the reality in question and which is encompassed by that reality). You can trot that out, you can play it with a marching band, and you can claim your perspective is perfectly correct (and ego-enhanced! It's SUPER!), but that doesn't make it either true or universally valid.
Snipe if you will. I guess some of us might not be convinced that we understand reality in such detail and perfection as you do. Similarly, some of us may still retain an open mind and an ability to question the nature of reality, not having reached a priori judgements in advance of sufficient data.
The lack of any sort of open mind automatically makes me wonder about your dedication to science - the root cause of all science is an open mind, a willingness not to form foregone conclusions and not to extrapolate data into areas that cannot yet be proven while claiming them as factual certainties.
You cling to your Science, as if it was a religion, believing in its certainties as any other religions person believes in theirs, while sniping away at other different perceptions, beliefs and conclusions. And of course, not acknowledging the validity of anyone else's religions while saying "But mine isn't a religion, its a fact!" in essence.
I agree with your description, but keep in mind the following: You retain the responsibility. You delegate the authority. If your decision to delegate the authority was bad, you'll get thumped for it.
Beyond the el-tee, some of whom actually are fairly actively involved, you're right about officers largely becoming high level decision makers and the NCOs being the implementors (or mid level directors, if you will).
But the point is, if my Pvt does something wrong, his section commander should know about it. If he doesn't, he probably isn't doing his job well enough. If he does, he should deal with it. If he doesn't, then he isn't doing his job well. If I've delegated power to him and trusted him to do the job and he isn't doing it well, that screw up is my fault as the LT along with *my responsibility*.
People often confuse blame and responsibility.
Blame is about saying 'who did X' after the fact. It is used to find witches to burn and to develop harsh lesson 'pour encourager les autres'.
Responsibility is about who has to fix or make right X during the event or stand up and account for why X was not fixed after the event.
In this sense, anything that goes wrong below you, you're responsible for. You have to account for why you didn't deal with it, if it is not dealt with correctly. Sure, you may have delegated the task, but then you have to account for your poor choice of delegate.
Interestingly, in the example in question, the Sergeant and Lieutenant are both *responsible*. The Sergeant is responsible to know what his section staff are doing, and the Lt. is responsible to know what his platoon folks are doing (or that someone who does know what they are doing is trustworthy to act as his proxy). If the ball is dropped, everyone is responsible - the ball dropper, and those who were supposed to see to it he was supervised.
Authority can be delegated, Responsibility cannot (but it can be assigned at multiple layers - not truly shared, but multiplied).
What should never happen, and the original military-example did try to capture this I think, is understand that responsibility should never be assigned without authority. That is, if you are responsible for X, you better have the authority to change X. Now, you can delegate your authority and retain your responsibility, but you should never be given responsibility without authority (and should not take it if someone tries to dump it on you).
1. One should not accept responsibility without commensurate power. One is setting oneself up to fall on a sword then. Because if something you are responsible for screws up, it *is* your arse they should be hunting. Hence the word "RESPONSIBLE".
2. "...used to have a culture where management never took the heat for anything..." - I submit that we still do largely have this culture, especially in the middle and upper management (not so much as team leaders and the like). CEOs can pile-drive their company or rape it for good looking financial markets and bad long term value and then what do they get? A nice big multi-million dollar severance cheque. Not exactly sure why you figure this is 'used to' versus 'currently'?
You should never accept responsibility (which means you *should* be called to account in the event of a bad outcome) if you don't have the power to go with it, to control and influence the situation sufficient to give you every opportunity to avoid the bad outcome. Because then, if it happens, either you were lazy, had bad judgement, or otherwise failed to take appropriate steps.
I agree you shouldn't hold powerless people to account for things they could not know nor could not control. Yet at the same time, when I hear Gagliano up in front of the public saying he couldn't reasonably have known about the millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars being illegally spent in his department, when he *is* SUPPOSED to be the RESPONSIBLE person, I can't help but say 'why did you take the job under those circumstances?'. Crown Ministers, CEOs, etc. should never accept a slot that assigns them more responsibility than power to change things and direct them - responsibility should be exactly commensurate with your ability to control things. Where you haven't got that control, you shouldn't accept the responsibility. The fact that you do so should not mean you are immune to consequences - maybe you'll know better next time!
At the same time, manager who try to foist responsibility for deadlines, etc. off onto their employees who had nothing to do with creating the timelines, should not reasonably expect the employees to accept that responsibility. If the company management had actually wanted buy-in and acceptance of responsibility (you can't, in my view, be forced into responsibility - you must accept it willingly), they would have involved those who they wished to make responsible in the decision making process.
It is just this confusion about responsibility (and the attempt to disclaim it or assign it without commensurate powers) that has led to the nightmares in the private and public sector which we see grace the evening news of late.
The irony of some of those critiques and sidewise shots coming from someone whose handle is IgnoramusMaximus is not lost on me....
I would, however, draw this to your attention:
We hardly know all there is to know about Medicine. Many 'scientific' conclusions of medicine are based on a very restrictive scope of experimentation. How many times have we been told "Take this, its good for X" and then years later we're told "Okay, that wasn't such a good idea because of A, B and C"? Medical Science (and biochemistry and pharmacology) all come up short from time to time.
Oddly, Homeopathic medicine and other traditional forms of medicine are found to have some merit *in particular situations* and *for treating particular conditions*. Sure, Homeopathy has many bogus theories and recommendations. Yet, at the same time, conventional science can verify that some aspects of it have beneficial outcomes in particular situations. So writing it off with one broad stroke would seem a bit premature and perhaps willfully ignorant.
As to leeching, I understand you are probably criticizing the earlier tendency to prescribe leeching for just about anything (sometimes to the very great detriment of the patient). Yet here again, leeching can be *very* effective (as can using maggots) in the treatment of particular conditions or situations, even perhaps more effective than conventional medication-based treatments. My mother, with 4 university nursing degrees, was trained in the use of leeches in the UK and still maintains they performed better than many of their replacements for certain conditions. To blandly write off leeching in its entirety as some form of quackery is also rather dubious.
I share a certain skepticism when it comes to sociology and psychology, though perhaps not as virulent or vitriolic as yours appears to be. But at the same time, I'm not about to come out and write off ever bit of research or every conclusion that psychologists and sociologists have arrived at over the years. Some of them are probably quite sound.
And depending on 'science' to solve all problems is a bit ludicrious as well. We all know that science is only as good as the scientist and the methods he uses. In many instances, science can be perverted or the scientist can be sloppy. Even good science can be operating on a very limited scope, thus making inference beyond the available data problematic (thus the problem with many conclusions) or such conclusions can be correct, but incomplete when taken in the whole. The tendency to study body subsystems as if they were utterly independent and not mutually interconnected (a frequent homeopathic theme) is questionable from the start.
Science, as a discipline, is a tool we humans derived to help interpret our universe. It is therefore preforce smaller than and incapable of fully encompassing the entirety of that universe. Imagining that science or logic is the route to all answers or that the current implementation of either is of necessity either correct or adequate is quite a problematic approach. Science is a tool and, like all tools, has a place in the toolbox of man. It can help to increase our understanding. But just writing off the vast bulk of human knowledge that has been derived experientially because we have yet to evolve the science to show why it was a good idea (even though generations have discovered it to be so) is both unwise and lacking in comprehension.
The world is a big place. You might discover something useful if you widened your perspective slightly.
I have to admit I'd been wondering about buying the product. Let's just say I own every preceding generation of the product and was wondering what they'd offer me now that might be worthy of prying some more gold from my purse.
It seems that this is a little less mechanistic and a bit more process oriented. That's a good thing, for many folks.
And I have to admit, I loved the original Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (Module U1) as a starter adventure. My current 15-16 year old campaign ran the series U1 to U3 about 14 years ago as part of the starting game. It took many of the PCs through a couple of levels and the fight vs. the Shahuagin is well remembered. So to see Saltmarsh reprised as a town with some detail is quite a fun idea!
So, thanks for the review, even if the slashgeeks do take an opportunity to poke at the rpggeeks (where the two won't admit to crossing over).:)
This still more or less presumes that if you work for someone, by virtue of them paying you a fee, they own you for a time period. This is not necessarily the only possible model of employee-employer relationships. Even saying 'well, they own the computer' is fine, but not really germaine. The question really should be 'what do I do for my employer' and in return 'what do they do for me' - the answer in my case is I write worthwhile code and solve the problems of their customers in such a manner as to hopefully generate repeat business. The answer from their side is 'pay me a decent salary, not be particular about the hours I keep or whether I surf the net once and while on the company computer, etc'. This relationship exists and works because both sides treat the other side with respect - I respect the deadlines they have to meet and their requirements for quality work and good customer interface perceptions, and they in return let me work at my own schedule most of the time and don't worry too much about a few minutes spent checking my gmail account or whatever.
Essentially, we treat each other with some sense of respect and understanding. When keylogging and other such technologies appear, it is a sign that this respect has gone the way of the mythical Dodo and that's a very bad step in the employee-employer relationship. I'd call it bad enough to think about working somewhere else. I mean, I've seen people fight to keep a job when their employer wants them out - that strikes me as silly too because the relationship is already poisoned.
An employer that would keylog or think this is a useful way to analyze employees is both shortsighted and one who is destructive to the significant aspects (trust and respect) of any relationship, including the employee-employer one. Once the perception of trust and good faith is gone, even if there wasn't bad faith and attempts to cheat the system beforehand, you'll pretty much gaurantee you get them afterwards. So it is just a bad management approach.
Sure, on some level, suicide bombers and the like are obviously (in one sense, since they are willing to die) imbalanced.
Yet, to conceive of terrorism as solely the result of mental imbalance is... riciculous.
Let me put it to you another way and perhaps you can think about this:
Assume we have two forces, one large and well armed and trained, another smaller and less well supported. Assume that something the larger one has done has annoyed or threatened the smaller one (or that they percieve it is so, which is really all that matters).
Think of this strictly as a tactical problem. You are the smaller power, you are vehemently opposed to the larger power and its stance (whichever one you don't like very very much). You are at a point where you feel you have to fight back. So, how do you do it?
Do you: A) Take your primitive tools, limited resources, and probably dubiously trained manpower into the field against modern professional armies with state of the art technology (planes, tanks, satellites, etc) and great training, pretty much knowing you're going to get your ass kicked? Or do you B) Take your primitive tools, limited resources, and dubiously trained manpower (and because of their dubious training, some of them may be well suited to certain 'special actions') and find a way to strike at your opposition which will: a) cause them great pain and upset and which *may* (maybe) lead to them changing their policies and b) strike at them in such a way as to not risk your organization or your ability to continue the fight and c) do so in such a way as you can afford and reasonably manage?
Strictly on a tactical level, going after the soft targets in a democritized society is a good decision for a small irregular force with some zealots handy.
No mental imbalance is required, except perhaps on the behalf of a couple of the zealots. Mostly, calm cool decision making is required from those who authorize, plan and order these actions. No mental imbalance there, just a real desire to take the fight to the enemy in a way that will really hurt them and do so in a cost effective way for the attacker.
Now, it remains to be seen if these tactics will force the changes in attitude or policy that the terrorists want. History tells us governments sometimes can be bloodied enough to back away from unpopular stances (sometimes at the behest of their own bloodied citizenry). Similarly, these ops may not be setup to play to a G8 crowd (other than to say 'you tried to take us out, we're not gone, now we're kicking you in the nads to remind you we ain't dead'), but may be playing to the recruiting areas where the terrorists look for a power base and economic support and recruits. They are saying to those people 'look, the little guy really *can* hurt the big guy' and 'our resistance is not ineffective' and 'we're willing to die for our beliefs' (or to order some brainwashed folks to do so for us, but that isn't stated in the PR).
I personally wore the uniform of my nation and would never like to think of myself as waging war on civilians. I'm not happy when I hear of civilians being hurt in exchanges between the UN and people using them as human shields. But the truth is, I was trained and acculturated into that view by the institution of my military.
If, OTOH, I'd grown up in a spot fraught with troubles, economic destitution, and guided by those who had a particular worldview and were gearing up for the final religious war or who were feeling religiously persecuted or somehow tainted or abused by a far off rich power (who are obviously corrupt because they're rich and we're not and we're morally pure so they must... not be?), then I'd probably look at the assets my side has (small amounts of money, having to work from the shadows, no B-2s, no F117s, no M1s, no satellites, etc) and I'd understand if they had to fight a bit dirty or hit at the soft targets. That's just how you have to fight when you're that outgunned. Or so I can ima
I think the only counter-example that someone might be able to come up with would be that employers probably shouldn't be able to install surveillance cameras in bathrooms, but that's something of a special case; everyone has to go to the bathroom from time to time, but it's seldom necessary for someone to use their work computer for personal purposes. Also, it's universally accepted that you have a right to privacy while in the bathroom
Maybe it isn't unreasonable to attach a universal right to not have your every moment watched and logged. Maybe the fundamental right to privacy should, assuming you aren't breaking a law, be the right that trumps the ownership issue.
Let me put it to you another way: They can't log phones at their whim, even though it is a corporate owned system. Why should email or even web browsing be any different?
Taken from a further standpoint, I do a lot of things for my company on my own time and outside of normal hours. In exchange, as long as the work gets done, they pretty much let me do things at my own pace or schedule, assuming their is no pressing need for me to be around for a meeting or something. And they don't monitor what I do, unless and until something suspicious were to come up. That, to me, is about the most sane approach.
And most importantly, though few have mentioned this, if you think keylogging = productivity, you've got a big problem. This remind's me of Dilbert's Wally character, when they put a $10 bounty on each bug they found and fixed, and he was writing the code and said "I'm gonna code me an RV!". Heck, if this was the case, I'd install my own keyboard buffer stuffing app! (Or just quit and go somewhere that treated me with some human dignity...)
The truth is, productivity can't be easily measured by such crass metrics. Is the customer service rep who deals with 8 customers an hour instead of 10 less productive? Well, if the faster rep leaves customers wanting to sue or not willing to do repeat business, then probably the 8 customer-per-hour rep is more productive *in the larger picture*. This is why many such metrics such - many aspects of doing business, and I do mean almost any sort of business, cannot be easily broken down to some hard numbers easily calculated. SLOC production measurement for coders isn't necessarily a great metric, for another instance. An elegant, bug free design may take some time. Or, you could bang out 5000 lines of code that sort of works and has all sorts of defects-in-waiting.
For all of you that want the company to have all the rights and the employees to have none, I'm guessing most of you have never been on the recieving end of being screwed by someone using corporate power in an unscrupulous way. I'm also guessing some of you have a bit of a naive faith in the profit motive as some sort of wonderful control on corporations. A little bit of observation shows us that corporations, left unchecked, will pretty much do whatever they want (a lot like governments). This is ther reason why corporations have checks (by the legal and executive branches of governments). Governments have checks in the legal system and in the electoral systems. Neither are lily-white paladins out for the good of every employee or taxpayer. Neither are inherently the source of all evil. Both are simply potentially beneficial or potentially harmful components of the modern economic engines that power our countries. We aren't doing away with them, so we'd better learn to live with them and the Courts serve a big part in keeping the powers of either relatively limited and in enforcing basic rights and freedom for the little guy (the employee or citizen). Or at least, that's the way it is supposed to work.
Having spent a fair bit of time talking with one of the world's best population modellers for Marine populations, I've seen some of the types of models she works with and I'd surely not call them mathematically simple or inadequate.
My own qualification to assess this is many courses in discrete and continous mathematics as well as numerical methods over the course of 8 years in post-secondary technology and science education.
And while we're on the subject of the people who should think about getting out of science, people with bad attitudes and a streak of elitism might be just as undesirable in the career field....
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect the number of people who know anything about large scale disaster planning in the media or who post on slashdot (as an alternative media outlet) are diminishingly small. Hence, we have a lot of people speaking to matters they know Sweet FA about.
I have served some time in the Army and have lots of friends in the Coast Gaurd and the US Army. The Coast Gaurd, especially, was making a full court press (as my friend put it) in the rescue efforts, getting 29 cutters and 52 aircraft into action fairly quickly.
Part of the problem is we (in the Western World) have become the 'now now now' Internet generation. We expect everything to happen post haste. My mother, who survived the Blitz and WW2 in Britain, finds the people getting all worked up over the US response to be ridiculous. I have to admit, I agree with her.
Let's look at the response. New Orleans didn't use its city and school buses to evacuate the city. Why not? People didn't leave the city when they were told to. What were they thinking? The levees weren't upgraded, even though this problem has been known about for many decades. Sure you can blame the Feds, but I'm thinking the state and NO taxpayers themselves had better go thinking about their part in that failure.
As for the Fed's response, they've put in (in about a week), more troops than are in the entire Canadian Army. They've deployed what I assume must be hundreds of helicopters on rescue duties. Now, yes, the helicopters picked people off of flooding housing and dropped them on overpasses and at the superdome. Those pilots did what they were told and are only first-line responders. Where was the NOPD, city gov't and state organization at the Superdome and the Convention Center? Not too visible, was it?
As far as getting rescue supplies in and second stage rescue operations setup - yes, it could have been done better I feel sure. Yet at the same time, in order to have a chopper operating to do rescue, you need to setup a FARP where the chopper can fuel up. You need base facilities for routine maintenance and mechanical failures to be handled (we've seen remarkably few catastrophic failures given the number of rescue sorties and presumably pilot duty schedules). Pilots need to sleep and be fed as do mechanics and SAR techs. All in a secure area. That takes a lot of logistics, just to get these sorts of FARPs setup. And it takes time.
It takes time for an Aircraft Carrier or Amphibious Assault ship to steam to the area. It takes time for the army engineers to clear roads to let larger relief vehicles in. NO wasn't the only place hit, many of the roads into new orleans would be absolutely impassable.
This process all takes time. Did it take too much time? Maybe. BUT THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN ASSESS THAT ARE DISASTER RELIEF EXPERTS WITH ALL THE DATA IN THEIR POSSESSION.
This is clearly an analysis that cannot be meaninfully conducted until well after the fact. I saw a piece in the UK Gaurdian talking about how most of the claims of murders and rapes and dead babies and such in the Superdome just cannot be substantiated or firsthand witnesses located. Rumour works like a wildfire in these situations. I'm not saying crappy stuff didn't happen and crimes didn't happen (I'm not an idiot). But it may well be that as bad as it was, the media hype and the rumour (how many times did the media talk to actual eyewitnesses? how many times did they tell you the unsubstantiated stories could not be confirmed? how many people, hearing these unsubstantiated tales, just took them as gospel?) probably did as much damage as anything and it shaped our perceptions.
We don't have the expertise to do anything more than say "It seems like more might have been done, maybe" or "The response didn't seem fast enough for the requirements... even if it was the fastest possible". We need to let experts on the subject collect data on the response, analyse that data, talk to the various institutions involved, talk to various first responders and organizers, and figure out what
One good reason it'll cost you something. If these people are left unemployed and unhoused in other places (having been evacuated), you'll just end up with more crime, more social support issues (and corresponding expenses), a more tightly stretched local and state tax base, and probably an economic recession.
Though it costs money, the rebuilding will lead to a mini-boom of sorts to help compensate for the flood, will get people back to work, encourage people to flow back out of the heavily refugee-laden states (whose own state planning is going to have troubles handling the population influx), etc.
It looks like money burnt, but in reality, much of the rebuilding and reconstruction money and accompanying programs to encourage industry will result in jobs, new opportunities, etc. and it will help turn people who are destitute now back into (in many cases) rate-payers.
So, you could be short-sighted and give them short shrift, but the people you'd really be screwing are the states they evacuated to and the nation as a whole.
Obviously a typo, AC.
And no, it is not a redundancy. First, there are many types of gamers (RPG gamers, LARP gamers, computer gamers, etc). Second, RPG is role-playing game, not role playing gamer. So RPG gamer is a perfectly valid construction. RP gamer might sound better, I concede.
Forgot Space Opera. And of course, I have a pile of Aftermath stuff too. SFB - Yes. Kzinti? You must be joking. KDSF or Hydrans please! Road Striker? Never even heard of it! Sounds interesting. Cyberpunk should be on the list, I agree. Car Wars, despite having character rules, probably wouldn't qualify being more boardgame.
While you're in the old lists:
:)
Star Frontiers & Knight Hawks?
Apocalypse?
Morrow Project?
Twilight 2K? (Not quite sci-fi...)
Star Trek, the RPG?
Star Wars, from WEG?
Star Ace?
Freedom in the Galaxy?
Timelords?
Original Paranoia?
That's all from memory. I know I'm missing a bunch....
Traveller has a very dedicated following, on the Traveller mailing list, on the Citizens of the Imperium web-forum and other places. With a number of generations (Classic Traveller, still incredibly popular, MegaTraveller, T4, T20, GURPS Traveller, Traveller:The New Era, and soon T5), it is probably one of the longest lived RPGs. The setting is what keeps it alive - the setting spans the rulesets and lives on. MegaTrav itself had a very easy to run yet functionally complete skill system and thus is a popular system with those of us that played it. I myself own all of the generations of Trav, but play MT rules (mostly). My players don't care much about the ruleset, but they know MT lets us tell good stories with minimal overhead.
So part of the passion for Traveller is a universe of 30 million sophonts, 11,000 worlds, several well developed major races, tens or hundreds of minor races, huge mapping projects, vast historical analysis, pirates, etc.
Classic Traveller and its reprints have enjoyed vast popularity because of their simplicity and open-endedness (they were less tied to setting than the subsequent rulesets).
I give you http://www.caddocourt.com/traveller/reasons.html
85 Reasons to Play CT :)
It won't die because there haven't been many good hard sci fi RPGs to come down the pike since, and none that gave the scope of adventure that CT and its successors offered as a setting - Dune, Honor Harrington, Star Wars, Star Trek, Merchanters, all of these sorts are represented in the setting. It also gives you The Great Game of Nations, espionage, diplomacy, real-politik, psionics, jump-space, a vast history, and reaslistic seeming NPCs and major setting characters, flawed and imperfect. And it remembers what makes for a fun game for players.
Yes, it is my second favorite game (after AD&D which is my favorite simply for historical reasons, and some of which may be apocryphal by now).
Visit http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/ Citizens of the Imperium or take a Jaunt over to the Steve Jackson's site for info on GURPS Traveller. :)
If only I had mod points today....
I've been gaming (and no, that doesn't require a computer) since 1980. I've made and kept many wonderful friends as a consequence. Engineers, Soldiers, Sailors, Police Officers, Computer Programmers, Chefs, Theater folks, Teachers... you name it. Not one of them comes up short on intelligence (at least in the raw...) or personal hygiene. Most have a university education and a broad interest in history, culture, and technology. Most also have an imagination. Most are married and quite a few have kids. Their kids are getting to enjoy their hobbies with them.
If that's the kind of folks I get lumped in with, I'm more than happy with the designation.
If you feel compelled to snipe at RGP gamers because of one or two outliers on the social curve, you're in some pretty dangerous territory on this forum. I've probably seen as many socially disfunctional computer/technology geeks as I ever did disfunctional gamers. Something about glass houses and bricks comes to mind here.
Nice post Evan.
Not all drugs that have the same active ingredients use the same dyes or fillers and whatnot. That difference can be important. Sometimes the brand name (or lack thereof) actually does matter.
And I think there is some US law prohibiting the advertising of the name and manufacturer of a drug in the same commercial as a discussion of its abilities. So you get viagra adds that don't refer to a particular manufacturer, and you get other adds from manufacturers that show happy scenes and suggest you visit their website or call your doctor for info about their products.
And I imagine some doctors get kickbacks (over or under the table) from drug company marketing teams.
So, I have to say, that whole pharamceutical advertising thing is insane. It probably should not go on. Yet, at the same time, sometimes you have to tell your GP about some new drug, then they investigate it and it actually helps you. So maybe banning advertising would be a two edged sword. It's a tough question, I think.
Oddly, this reminds me of a Strangelove moment and my great urge is to throw up my arm in salute while complaining about our mine shaft gap... (or software patent gap).
Nice post.
I know all about variable credibility, I watch Fox News! ;)
(Actually, just about all mainstream news outlets suffer from variable credibility these days... but that does not make it a desirable quality...)
I understand where you are going and where you are coming from in your commentary. However, I submit that exploits *are* going to be released in public in less than ten months and Cisco and Co. had better develop a method to cope with this.
If the Corvette can't stop, Darwin will notify the next of kin.
And simply saying that researchers releasing exploits like this is childish won't even come close to addressing the problem, in addition to which the situation might have a bit more depth than that in many cases.
I didn't ask the question about how long one should wait because I don't have a good answer. I've read arguments from the 'out at once' and the 'let them fix it (or hide it)' school. The reality is sometimes companies try to hide problems rather than fix them and just get all 'lawyeresque' with anyone who then talks about disclosure - the only workable disclosure then becomes immediate disclosure. If you give them time, they may resort to lawyers and after that, disclosure has a price you may not be willing to pay.
So I don't have an answer - both sides have valid points. But I think the larger point is some folks *are* going to continue to instantly divulge, so you'd better (if you are Cisco or the like) get yourself into a mode to handle things like this.
Better late than never doesn't apply in many cases. The Hiroshima Evacuation Plan, The decision/admission their were no WMDs, UN intervention in Rwanda, etc. Better late than never doesn't cut it in many cases. Now certainly I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect, but not all that much, if you consider the context. Cisco underpins the Internet. Vulnerabilities thus become *very* significant. Better late than never is not an acceptable policy. Period.
If Cisco can't or won't adapt and arrive at a better solution, one day, it and the networks it serves will regret it in a big way. And then the market will punish them. And maybe their successor will be more responsive.
As to getting router code, I'd imagine all you can get is binary code which you can decompile, as opposed to commented source, out of a router. And depending on the nature and degree of arcana in the code, that lack of comments and supporting documentation and designs could be quite significant. Yes, getting the code is a first step, but it isn't the full deal. Still, this is an aside in the larger discussion.
One point here:
You're talking about a bus, plane or train. If the transportation device was a Corvette, it could brake much harder. If everyone were strapped in to proper multi-point harnesses with SRS systems, you could take a minor hit much better too.
I'd argue this is a good reason not to opt for monolithic solutions. I'd also argue this is a good reason why companies in as pivotal of a role as Cisco need to be *more* agile. More agile than they are now and more agile than the bad guys.
It might take you eighteen months to develop a solution. Want to bet that it won't take a blackhat 18 months to develop and release an exploit? I wouldn't and Cisco shouldn't.
We now live on Internet time. Things happen *fast*. Companies have to react quickly and well and have to structure their operations (from support through development) with that in mind. If they aren't doing that, they need a kick in the teeth until they see the wisdom of doing so.
Don't get me wrong... I understand where you are coming from (I'm a software developer...) but I think vulnerabilities have to be able to be dealt with faster and if we can't do that, then we're doing something wrong - our whole methodology needs ot change or our whole paradigm of thinking about development of software.
Time, and blackhats, wait for no man. And certainly not for one showing up eighteen months later....
Or the fireplace channel (and then the outdoor channel) in The Governator's house with Sharon Stone at the beginning of Total Recall.
One of the issues here is that spam is a vector for various virii, trojans, spyware and other fun payloads. Also, spam does cost you money by eating up storage space, bandwidth, etc. That's not quite equivalent to a barking dog or someone talking on a cellphone. I think lawmakers have to be involved enough to make sure that sufficient protections exist for the individual to be free from harassment. It's a slippery slope, I give you, but you can stake out a basecamp somewhere on it usefully.
The situation you are likening things to probably doesn't work as you suspect.
Do you think the West was tamed by vigilante gangs, citizen lynchings, and the like? Do you believe this is what civilized the West?
Or rather, was it the coming of the railroad, the influx of honest people, the extension of the hands of law enforcement, the implementation of new laws and their enforcement, etc.
I submit that the Wild West was a place of murderers, vigilante gangs (murderers), hired guns (ditto), the precursor of the corporate army (likewise sometimes), and citizens who were sometimes willing to backshoot a dangerous stranger or lynch him without due process.
Now, all I'm getting at is reverting to the same type of action as the spammers is sort of like admitting you can't come up with anything better, more civilized, or more effective. That smacks of giving up, of throwing up your hands and saying "we can't beat 'em, better join 'em".
There are any number of existent laws and if the agencies that enforced them were a bit better funded and there was better international cooperation, we'd see a fairly marked decrease in some of this sort of traffic. Fighting spam is as much an international diplomatic/legal/bureaucratic issue as it is a technical one.
I mean, think of it in another way. You've got a dark room and you have a door onto it. You know the dark room has some nasty critters in it, and one might wander into your lighted door and try to eat you. I don't think the solution is releasing alternate strains of nasty critter. That's just magnifying the problem. Instead, you'd put a door on with a peep hole, you'd install a mantrap or two, and you might find out which other room is popping monsters out and send a group of people to that room to speak with them about it.
I figure we can win this war another way, we just have to decide to spend the money and put it as a priority for our law makers, law enforcers, and budget allocators for same. And of course, arm-twist some offshore havens into rethinking their policies.
Wrong. As I have stated before, the universe and everything within it exists due to absolute and definable laws. The universe is not capricious and there is no evidence whatsoever to prove otherwise.
You can't prove their is an objective reality/universe (versus a consensus reality or a subjective reality). Cannot be done. And whether you 'stated before' or not, doesn't make your conclusion necessarily true or valuable.
On the other hand, just asserting that something is true because it is true is a historical rhetorical technique which has worked a few times, if the listeners weren't paying attention.
The world is a big place. You might understand it better if you had a more scientific and logical mind. My perspective of the universe and everything within it is perfectly correct.
... in your mind. And perhaps only there. Your final statement would be familiar to any religious fundamentalist.
I find it funny that pro-science zealots constantly attempt to stipulate that their model of an objective reality that is entirely describable and understandable by science (which seems to be a process which has as a necessary precursor the genesis of the reality in question and which is encompassed by that reality). You can trot that out, you can play it with a marching band, and you can claim your perspective is perfectly correct (and ego-enhanced! It's SUPER!), but that doesn't make it either true or universally valid.
Snipe if you will. I guess some of us might not be convinced that we understand reality in such detail and perfection as you do. Similarly, some of us may still retain an open mind and an ability to question the nature of reality, not having reached a priori judgements in advance of sufficient data.
The lack of any sort of open mind automatically makes me wonder about your dedication to science - the root cause of all science is an open mind, a willingness not to form foregone conclusions and not to extrapolate data into areas that cannot yet be proven while claiming them as factual certainties.
You cling to your Science, as if it was a religion, believing in its certainties as any other religions person believes in theirs, while sniping away at other different perceptions, beliefs and conclusions. And of course, not acknowledging the validity of anyone else's religions while saying "But mine isn't a religion, its a fact!" in essence.
That's pretty damn funny, all things considered.
I agree with your description, but keep in mind the following: You retain the responsibility. You delegate the authority. If your decision to delegate the authority was bad, you'll get thumped for it.
Beyond the el-tee, some of whom actually are fairly actively involved, you're right about officers largely becoming high level decision makers and the NCOs being the implementors (or mid level directors, if you will).
But the point is, if my Pvt does something wrong, his section commander should know about it. If he doesn't, he probably isn't doing his job well enough. If he does, he should deal with it. If he doesn't, then he isn't doing his job well. If I've delegated power to him and trusted him to do the job and he isn't doing it well, that screw up is my fault as the LT along with *my responsibility*.
People often confuse blame and responsibility.
Blame is about saying 'who did X' after the fact. It is used to find witches to burn and to develop harsh lesson 'pour encourager les autres'.
Responsibility is about who has to fix or make right X during the event or stand up and account for why X was not fixed after the event.
In this sense, anything that goes wrong below you, you're responsible for. You have to account for why you didn't deal with it, if it is not dealt with correctly. Sure, you may have delegated the task, but then you have to account for your poor choice of delegate.
Interestingly, in the example in question, the Sergeant and Lieutenant are both *responsible*. The Sergeant is responsible to know what his section staff are doing, and the Lt. is responsible to know what his platoon folks are doing (or that someone who does know what they are doing is trustworthy to act as his proxy). If the ball is dropped, everyone is responsible - the ball dropper, and those who were supposed to see to it he was supervised.
Authority can be delegated, Responsibility cannot (but it can be assigned at multiple layers - not truly shared, but multiplied).
What should never happen, and the original military-example did try to capture this I think, is understand that responsibility should never be assigned without authority. That is, if you are responsible for X, you better have the authority to change X. Now, you can delegate your authority and retain your responsibility, but you should never be given responsibility without authority (and should not take it if someone tries to dump it on you).
1. One should not accept responsibility without commensurate power. One is setting oneself up to fall on a sword then. Because if something you are responsible for screws up, it *is* your arse they should be hunting. Hence the word "RESPONSIBLE".
2. "...used to have a culture where management never took the heat for anything..." - I submit that we still do largely have this culture, especially in the middle and upper management (not so much as team leaders and the like). CEOs can pile-drive their company or rape it for good looking financial markets and bad long term value and then what do they get? A nice big multi-million dollar severance cheque. Not exactly sure why you figure this is 'used to' versus 'currently'?
You should never accept responsibility (which means you *should* be called to account in the event of a bad outcome) if you don't have the power to go with it, to control and influence the situation sufficient to give you every opportunity to avoid the bad outcome. Because then, if it happens, either you were lazy, had bad judgement, or otherwise failed to take appropriate steps.
I agree you shouldn't hold powerless people to account for things they could not know nor could not control. Yet at the same time, when I hear Gagliano up in front of the public saying he couldn't reasonably have known about the millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars being illegally spent in his department, when he *is* SUPPOSED to be the RESPONSIBLE person, I can't help but say 'why did you take the job under those circumstances?'. Crown Ministers, CEOs, etc. should never accept a slot that assigns them more responsibility than power to change things and direct them - responsibility should be exactly commensurate with your ability to control things. Where you haven't got that control, you shouldn't accept the responsibility. The fact that you do so should not mean you are immune to consequences - maybe you'll know better next time!
At the same time, manager who try to foist responsibility for deadlines, etc. off onto their employees who had nothing to do with creating the timelines, should not reasonably expect the employees to accept that responsibility. If the company management had actually wanted buy-in and acceptance of responsibility (you can't, in my view, be forced into responsibility - you must accept it willingly), they would have involved those who they wished to make responsible in the decision making process.
It is just this confusion about responsibility (and the attempt to disclaim it or assign it without commensurate powers) that has led to the nightmares in the private and public sector which we see grace the evening news of late.
The irony of some of those critiques and sidewise shots coming from someone whose handle is IgnoramusMaximus is not lost on me....
I would, however, draw this to your attention:
We hardly know all there is to know about Medicine. Many 'scientific' conclusions of medicine are based on a very restrictive scope of experimentation. How many times have we been told "Take this, its good for X" and then years later we're told "Okay, that wasn't such a good idea because of A, B and C"? Medical Science (and biochemistry and pharmacology) all come up short from time to time.
Oddly, Homeopathic medicine and other traditional forms of medicine are found to have some merit *in particular situations* and *for treating particular conditions*. Sure, Homeopathy has many bogus theories and recommendations. Yet, at the same time, conventional science can verify that some aspects of it have beneficial outcomes in particular situations. So writing it off with one broad stroke would seem a bit premature and perhaps willfully ignorant.
As to leeching, I understand you are probably criticizing the earlier tendency to prescribe leeching for just about anything (sometimes to the very great detriment of the patient). Yet here again, leeching can be *very* effective (as can using maggots) in the treatment of particular conditions or situations, even perhaps more effective than conventional medication-based treatments. My mother, with 4 university nursing degrees, was trained in the use of leeches in the UK and still maintains they performed better than many of their replacements for certain conditions.
To blandly write off leeching in its entirety as some form of quackery is also rather dubious.
I share a certain skepticism when it comes to sociology and psychology, though perhaps not as virulent or vitriolic as yours appears to be. But at the same time, I'm not about to come out and write off ever bit of research or every conclusion that psychologists and sociologists have arrived at over the years. Some of them are probably quite sound.
And depending on 'science' to solve all problems is a bit ludicrious as well. We all know that science is only as good as the scientist and the methods he uses. In many instances, science can be perverted or the scientist can be sloppy. Even good science can be operating on a very limited scope, thus making inference beyond the available data problematic (thus the problem with many conclusions) or such conclusions can be correct, but incomplete when taken in the whole. The tendency to study body subsystems as if they were utterly independent and not mutually interconnected (a frequent homeopathic theme) is questionable from the start.
Science, as a discipline, is a tool we humans derived to help interpret our universe. It is therefore preforce smaller than and incapable of fully encompassing the entirety of that universe. Imagining that science or logic is the route to all answers or that the current implementation of either is of necessity either correct or adequate is quite a problematic approach. Science is a tool and, like all tools, has a place in the toolbox of man. It can help to increase our understanding. But just writing off the vast bulk of human knowledge that has been derived experientially because we have yet to evolve the science to show why it was a good idea (even though generations have discovered it to be so) is both unwise and lacking in comprehension.
The world is a big place. You might discover something useful if you widened your perspective slightly.
I have to admit I'd been wondering about buying the product. Let's just say I own every preceding generation of the product and was wondering what they'd offer me now that might be worthy of prying some more gold from my purse.
:)
It seems that this is a little less mechanistic and a bit more process oriented. That's a good thing, for many folks.
And I have to admit, I loved the original Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (Module U1) as a starter adventure. My current 15-16 year old campaign ran the series U1 to U3 about 14 years ago as part of the starting game. It took many of the PCs through a couple of levels and the fight vs. the Shahuagin is well remembered. So to see Saltmarsh reprised as a town with some detail is quite a fun idea!
So, thanks for the review, even if the slashgeeks do take an opportunity to poke at the rpggeeks (where the two won't admit to crossing over).
This still more or less presumes that if you work for someone, by virtue of them paying you a fee, they own you for a time period. This is not necessarily the only possible model of employee-employer relationships. Even saying 'well, they own the computer' is fine, but not really germaine. The question really should be 'what do I do for my employer' and in return 'what do they do for me' - the answer in my case is I write worthwhile code and solve the problems of their customers in such a manner as to hopefully generate repeat business. The answer from their side is 'pay me a decent salary, not be particular about the hours I keep or whether I surf the net once and while on the company computer, etc'. This relationship exists and works because both sides treat the other side with respect - I respect the deadlines they have to meet and their requirements for quality work and good customer interface perceptions, and they in return let me work at my own schedule most of the time and don't worry too much about a few minutes spent checking my gmail account or whatever.
Essentially, we treat each other with some sense of respect and understanding. When keylogging and other such technologies appear, it is a sign that this respect has gone the way of the mythical Dodo and that's a very bad step in the employee-employer relationship. I'd call it bad enough to think about working somewhere else. I mean, I've seen people fight to keep a job when their employer wants them out - that strikes me as silly too because the relationship is already poisoned.
An employer that would keylog or think this is a useful way to analyze employees is both shortsighted and one who is destructive to the significant aspects (trust and respect) of any relationship, including the employee-employer one. Once the perception of trust and good faith is gone, even if there wasn't bad faith and attempts to cheat the system beforehand, you'll pretty much gaurantee you get them afterwards. So it is just a bad management approach.
Sure, on some level, suicide bombers and the like are obviously (in one sense, since they are willing to die) imbalanced.
... riciculous.
Yet, to conceive of terrorism as solely the result of mental imbalance is
Let me put it to you another way and perhaps you can think about this:
Assume we have two forces, one large and well armed and trained, another smaller and less well supported. Assume that something the larger one has done has annoyed or threatened the smaller one (or that they percieve it is so, which is really all that matters).
Think of this strictly as a tactical problem. You are the smaller power, you are vehemently opposed to the larger power and its stance (whichever one you don't like very very much). You are at a point where you feel you have to fight back. So, how do you do it?
Do you:
A) Take your primitive tools, limited resources, and probably dubiously trained manpower into the field against modern professional armies with state of the art technology (planes, tanks, satellites, etc) and great training, pretty much knowing you're going to get your ass kicked?
Or do you
B) Take your primitive tools, limited resources, and dubiously trained manpower (and because of their dubious training, some of them may be well suited to certain 'special actions') and find a way to strike at your opposition which will: a) cause them great pain and upset and which *may* (maybe) lead to them changing their policies and b) strike at them in such a way as to not risk your organization or your ability to continue the fight and c) do so in such a way as you can afford and reasonably manage?
Strictly on a tactical level, going after the soft targets in a democritized society is a good decision for a small irregular force with some zealots handy.
No mental imbalance is required, except perhaps on the behalf of a couple of the zealots. Mostly, calm cool decision making is required from those who authorize, plan and order these actions. No mental imbalance there, just a real desire to take the fight to the enemy in a way that will really hurt them and do so in a cost effective way for the attacker.
Now, it remains to be seen if these tactics will force the changes in attitude or policy that the terrorists want. History tells us governments sometimes can be bloodied enough to back away from unpopular stances (sometimes at the behest of their own bloodied citizenry). Similarly, these ops may not be setup to play to a G8 crowd (other than to say 'you tried to take us out, we're not gone, now we're kicking you in the nads to remind you we ain't dead'), but may be playing to the recruiting areas where the terrorists look for a power base and economic support and recruits. They are saying to those people 'look, the little guy really *can* hurt the big guy' and 'our resistance is not ineffective' and 'we're willing to die for our beliefs' (or to order some brainwashed folks to do so for us, but that isn't stated in the PR).
I personally wore the uniform of my nation and would never like to think of myself as waging war on civilians. I'm not happy when I hear of civilians being hurt in exchanges between the UN and people using them as human shields. But the truth is, I was trained and acculturated into that view by the institution of my military.
If, OTOH, I'd grown up in a spot fraught with troubles, economic destitution, and guided by those who had a particular worldview and were gearing up for the final religious war or who were feeling religiously persecuted or somehow tainted or abused by a far off rich power (who are obviously corrupt because they're rich and we're not and we're morally pure so they must... not be?), then I'd probably look at the assets my side has (small amounts of money, having to work from the shadows, no B-2s, no F117s, no M1s, no satellites, etc) and I'd understand if they had to fight a bit dirty or hit at the soft targets. That's just how you have to fight when you're that outgunned. Or so I can ima
I think the only counter-example that someone might be able to come up with would be that employers probably shouldn't be able to install surveillance cameras in bathrooms, but that's something of a special case; everyone has to go to the bathroom from time to time, but it's seldom necessary for someone to use their work computer for personal purposes. Also, it's universally accepted that you have a right to privacy while in the bathroom
Maybe it isn't unreasonable to attach a universal right to not have your every moment watched and logged. Maybe the fundamental right to privacy should, assuming you aren't breaking a law, be the right that trumps the ownership issue.
Let me put it to you another way: They can't log phones at their whim, even though it is a corporate owned system. Why should email or even web browsing be any different?
Taken from a further standpoint, I do a lot of things for my company on my own time and outside of normal hours. In exchange, as long as the work gets done, they pretty much let me do things at my own pace or schedule, assuming their is no pressing need for me to be around for a meeting or something. And they don't monitor what I do, unless and until something suspicious were to come up. That, to me, is about the most sane approach.
And most importantly, though few have mentioned this, if you think keylogging = productivity, you've got a big problem. This remind's me of Dilbert's Wally character, when they put a $10 bounty on each bug they found and fixed, and he was writing the code and said "I'm gonna code me an RV!". Heck, if this was the case, I'd install my own keyboard buffer stuffing app! (Or just quit and go somewhere that treated me with some human dignity...)
The truth is, productivity can't be easily measured by such crass metrics. Is the customer service rep who deals with 8 customers an hour instead of 10 less productive? Well, if the faster rep leaves customers wanting to sue or not willing to do repeat business, then probably the 8 customer-per-hour rep is more productive *in the larger picture*. This is why many such metrics such - many aspects of doing business, and I do mean almost any sort of business, cannot be easily broken down to some hard numbers easily calculated. SLOC production measurement for coders isn't necessarily a great metric, for another instance. An elegant, bug free design may take some time. Or, you could bang out 5000 lines of code that sort of works and has all sorts of defects-in-waiting.
For all of you that want the company to have all the rights and the employees to have none, I'm guessing most of you have never been on the recieving end of being screwed by someone using corporate power in an unscrupulous way. I'm also guessing some of you have a bit of a naive faith in the profit motive as some sort of wonderful control on corporations. A little bit of observation shows us that corporations, left unchecked, will pretty much do whatever they want (a lot like governments). This is ther reason why corporations have checks (by the legal and executive branches of governments). Governments have checks in the legal system and in the electoral systems. Neither are lily-white paladins out for the good of every employee or taxpayer. Neither are inherently the source of all evil. Both are simply potentially beneficial or potentially harmful components of the modern economic engines that power our countries. We aren't doing away with them, so we'd better learn to live with them and the Courts serve a big part in keeping the powers of either relatively limited and in enforcing basic rights and freedom for the little guy (the employee or citizen). Or at least, that's the way it is supposed to work.
Having spent a fair bit of time talking with one of the world's best population modellers for Marine populations, I've seen some of the types of models she works with and I'd surely not call them mathematically simple or inadequate.
My own qualification to assess this is many courses in discrete and continous mathematics as well as numerical methods over the course of 8 years in post-secondary technology and science education.
And while we're on the subject of the people who should think about getting out of science, people with bad attitudes and a streak of elitism might be just as undesirable in the career field....
I guess now you're going to tell me there are no Freudlings either?
Sure, but they were all playing with their lightsabers.... or maybe that was just a cigar...?
(I should be giving Mel Brooks royalties after using that joke)