There is nothing in the linked article which implies that a Microsoft-created piece of phone HARDWARE was lost or stolen. All the article states is that a phone with prototype SOFTWARE was lost or stolen.
Not rocket science, but pay attention to detail.
on
Building Secure Computers?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Most of what you need to know is contained on the Defense Security Services (DSS) Information Assurance website: http://www.dss.mil/infoas/ The guiding document for DoD contractors is the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM). Classified systems have to go through a formal certification and accreditation process before they will be approved for classified processing. Since your ultimate goal is to satisfy the accreditor, you should contact him/her as soon as possible to have them explain what will be required and to hear their particular areas of concern so that you can address them early in your design. Security paperwork requires considerable time to fill out, and mistake can result in long delays in accreditation, or even the rejection of your system.
However, it isn't enough to just build a system with the proper hardware and software configuration -- you also have to make sure that the physical environment and users will meet the requirements of the NISPOM. If you don't already have a facility clearance, then you have a significant issue to tackle before you can even build your system. I'm hoping that you are simply building a new computer to add to an existing classified network or house in an existing DoD closed area -- if not, you may find this to be a very daunting task.
I'm still bummed that SatireWire went under...
on
Spam as Poetry
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· Score: 1
I had heard about the SatireWire spam poetry contest on Slashdot a couple of years ago, and had been working on my entry for contest #3 when the site went under. I was disappointed as hell, since I thought I had a decent shot at winning the contest. Back in Summer 2002, I signed up for a fake Hotmail account and subscribed to about every mailing list I could think of in order to generate the raw material for the poem.
The funny thing is that, despite my day job as an engineer, I'm actually a serious poet. Some of my poems have been published in anthologies that you can actually buy at Barnes & Noble, and I've read with some fairly famous poets (well, famous for poets, to be fair) over the last couple of years. The "spam poem" is a favorite at my performances, though, since it's a nice change of pace from my more serious work.
Normally I don't like to post my poetry on the internet until it's been published in a book or journal, but since I doubt there is any intellectual property in a collage of someone else's lines, I'll share with the group...
Oh, one other quick rant: Yes, there is a bunch of poetry being written today which is deliberately obscure, and I've sat through enough open mic poetry events to know that most people who "do poetry" are not interested in anything but the sound of their own voice and a captive audience for their five minutes. So, I can certainly understand some of the negative comments about poetry as a whole in this thread. But the standard for good poetry has never really changed. As T.S. Eliot said, "Great art communicates before it is understood." A good poem impacts the reader (or listener), and gradually reveals layers of meaning with study and reflection. But if it never makes that first impact -- or if the subject is too trivial or insular to make an impact in the first place -- then it's a bad poem. There really is good poetry being written now, if you take the time to look.
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Tired of searching for love in all the wrong places?
Find love now, the easy way. Safe, 100% natural and no prescription needed. The main thing you want to know is, does it work? As my crazy grandma always says the "proof is in the pudding." Check it out for yourself... They laughed at me until I showed them proof...Then Everybody shut up real quick and started asking with WIDE eyes how I (a simple guy from the mountains of North Carolina) could do it? For years I wasted money on products that promised a lot and delivered nothing. I could hardly walk and going down steps was very painful. This led to a decade of intense research, and what was discovered is quite amazing... It may not be your fault. It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like. Rise above genetics!
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The "turtles all the way down" story is probably apocryphal, and is quoted in a variety of different texts. Another popular one which hasn't been mentioned so far is A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking.
Although the turtle figures prominently in a variety of creation myths, the one probably referenced in the story is an ancient Hindu creation myth in which the Earth was conceived as a sphere or disk (depends on the source) resting on the backs of four elephants, who were in turn standing on the back of a giant turtle.
I have taken several presentation classes, and agree wholeheartedly with much of the advice given by the other posters: structure your information logically, use graphics whenever possible, limit the number of words per page, and avoid distracting graphical gimmicks. When you follow those guidelines and spend the time practicing your verbal style, you get good results giving your talk to the audience. However, the real problem lies with how PowerPoint is actually used in business -- namely, as a form of documentation, not merely as a visual aid.
As a case in point, I recently had to give a technical brief at the end of a program to the customer and my management. The problem was that although several members of senior management considered the briefing important enough to ask to be invited...none of them actually showed up! Of course, they wanted a copy of the presentation so they could read it at a later point. If I had constructed the presentation according to the guidelines mentioned above -- minimal text, etc. -- they would have gotten almost no information from it at all. So, anticipating this outcome, I did my best to use as many graphics as I could, but also included enough short statements so that someone could follow the outline of the talk I actually gave that day.
Personally, I think this situation is endemic in engineering. I have seen presentations circulated for years because they contained information which was never documented anywhere else. Although it would be far preferable to construct proper notes or white papers to go along with every presentation, I don't know of any managers who are willing to spend the extra money on putting together those artifacts -- or, for that matter, any engineers who have the spare time to craft them on their own. The best solution would be to record and archive the actual talk itself and pass those files around instead of the slides...but I think we have a long way to go before the verbal content is seen as the truly important element in a presentation, as it ought to be.
As a "creative person," I'd like to respond to a few of your points:
It is neither fair nor accurate to broadly label all "creative people" as being resistant to technology. For every person who is perfectly happy using "old" means to create art, someone else is intrigued by new technology and starts to create art using those new tools. (There was a recent article in Wired discussing how David Byrne used Microsoft PowerPoint to create visual art, for example.)
Further, I don't think that artists' opinions of technology is as black-and-white as you make it sound. From personal experience, If I'm creating a new poem using Word, it pisses me off when it tries to capitalize things that I intend to remain lowercase. (And yes, I know how to turn that off.) But then again, when I'm working on putting together a manuscript and want to provide insight to a publisher on WYSIWYG layout, Word is invaluable.
I think there is good reason why certain artists choose to use old, even anachronistic, technology to create art. The process of art is to translate a vision into some tangible/perceptible thing -- technology is simply one of the tools used to make that possible. In some cases, the tool affects what kind of art can be created -- the choice of a brush or a lens, for example. But in many cases, especially writing, the goal of the tool is to be as non-distracting as possible. If I have to think about how to do something with my word processor, I'm not thinking about my poetry. (As a last "point," art requires a unique viewpoint...and some artists I know try to purposefully be as different as possible from the "norm" as part of their character, which would include things like insisting that everything be written in pencil. Still, I know far too many artists who have day jobs in engineering or IT to think that those unique sorts make up the majority of artists.)
There will always be arguments over what constitutes "art," and I don't want to get involved by offering my own (arbitrary) definition -- I'm not going to solve any debate here. But I think it's clear that the struggle for acceptance is something that every individual artist goes through, just as much as any particular aesthetic -- computerized animation, interactive art, etc. -- has to work to find validation. I don't think you have said anything new. Digital photography is a poor example of this kind of debate since the issue is how well the technology mirrors current film capability -- not whether or not the contents of digitally-created or digitally-manipulated photos can be art. Those are entirely separate discussions.
Surprised no one thought of this theory yet...
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
Somehow, I think she was covering up for one of her teenaged sons who had just watched American Pie and stopped listening after the "hot apple" part of the line.
If true, that poor Powerbook may have other damage I don't want to think about.
Re:So will they blame terrorists...
on
Droning On
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· Score: 2
I'm not an expert on the Predator, but the general idea is that the pilot does indeed fly by remote control watching a video screen. I don't know what their contingency plans are for a lost link, but in general these planes are designed to crash violently if something bad happens. You don't want technology to fall into enemy hands.
The Global Hawk, on the other hand, can operate autonomously from takeoff to landing if so desired, including pre-programmed contingencies in the event of a problem. Unless you have some very specialized satellite communications gear, detailed knowledge of the aircraft navigation systems, and a way to break some stiff encryption, you have zero chance of hijacking one. (If you did happen to have such a rig, you'd be immediately obvious to anyone in the area who could detect your signal. There would be a "knock at your door" ASAP.)
As for something going terribly wrong in mid-air, the real issue is the reliability of the hardware. Humans are more frail than machines -- we get tired and sloppy at any kind of repetitive task, and just because near-misses by human pilots aren't widely reported doesn't make me any more confident that humans are more "reliable" than machines.
I don't need suggestions for peanut butter or laundry detergent -- I have those covered.
What I really need is a system that will suggest effective pick-up lines for that cute lady in the frozen food section, triggered by her buying preferences:
(if she's buying Lean Cuisine frozen lasagna) "Hi. You look great! Do you work out?"
I work in the defense industry, so I have to deal with security issues on occasion. Even though they got someone to sign off on the security of the wireless transmission, it will be interesting to see how they actually implement this technology as part of a larger accreditable system.
In my experience with security organizations, they tend to overemphasize the role of physical safeguards in designating a system as "secure," especially when it comes to COMSEC. How will they feel about accrediting a system in which multiple COMSEC units can be moved outside of a secured perimeter?
According to their ad slogans, they want everyone to change...is it so hard to expect the same from management?
Simple economics.
on
The Aging Gamer
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It isn't any great mystery -- it's simple economics, plus demographics.
Kids (say, up through early college) would like to play games, but don't have the disposable income.
Younger adults (say, late college through late 20s) have disposable income, but they are spending their money on social pursuits, vacations, cars, gadgets, clothing, etc.
But when they finally marry and start families, the center for entertainment switches to the home...and those $50 games are somewhat more affordable once you hold down a real job.
With apologies to Basho...
on
Haiku vs Spam
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· Score: 4, Funny
The old pond; spammer
jumps in; the sound of water;
please, please, no bubbles.
"1.) Not enough mass. The universe needs approximately 10x more mass in order to slow its expansion down to a stop. Does this theory account for that?"
If you had read the article, you would know that they are proposing a different space-time geometry than the one you have in mind. The 10X figure applies to the "old" expansion-contraction model which theorized consequences for the actual density of the universe being above the critical density.
"2.) How does it start up again? Even should it collapse, and we all turn into a black holish sort of thing, what starts the process up again? Relativity states outright that it would be impossible."
Relativity has nothing to do with this process. Also, I tend to ignore claims about relativity which don't include the modifiers "special" or "general" -- they deal with different areas.
"3.) Its a law in physics that whatever is contracted and expanded repetatively will gain heat. e.g. a metal bar bend backwards and forwards. So if the universe has been expanding a collapsing forever . . . where's all the infinite heat?"
First, objects do not "have" heat -- heat is a transfer of energy. Second, the metal bar example is completely wrong. The temperature of the bar rises because you are adding energy to the bar by performing mechanical work. It's not a closed system.
"Furthermore, for all those who believe they can crush religion with science, you must first establish that the universe has/can do this more than once. Then you must establish that it has/can do this infinitely. And even then, that means nothing about God - but it certainly would be interesting."
This part of your post disturbed me the most. Science does not exist to "crush" religion. Science exists to enquire about the nature of physical reality; religion exists to enquire about codes of behavior and/or the existence of a "supreme being" in whatever form may be supposed. They do not necessarily overlap with their subject matter.
"So really exploring these ideas doesn't touch religion, though perhaps some of the people doing research on this think it does, and mostly likely many people who read this will think the same. I'm just upset with it since it seems to be ignoring science."
This article had nothing to do with religion -- why did you feel the need to add your "two cents," which add up to some kind of agenda? As for ignoring science...I don't think I need to comment any further.
Addiction is defined as "a continued behavior despite mounting negative consequences." There is nothing in that definition which requires a physiological dependence for addiction to take place. Also notice that there is a clear line between a compulsive behavior and an addiction; namely the requirement that there be negative consequences which get worse over time.
There are plenty of gambling addicts who would take offense at how you've minimized their disease. Having spent some time around problem gamblers, I can assure you that they are in just as much pain as the problem drinkers and drug abusers...and causing just as much pain to those around them.
One last thing -- addiction is largely a matter of genetics. If your family has a history of addiction, you run the risk of having those same genes. Your only real choice is whether to trigger the addictive behavior with your choices or not.
As so many others have pointed out, this is not a case of rights -- it's a case of privilege. And, as usual, there seems to be a conflation of two different issues in the same discussion.
From the standpoint of security and/or legal responsibility, of course a company needs to restrict Internet access. No filter is perfect, but as long as it blocks out most of the obvious porn, gambling, "hacker" (speaking colloquially), racist, etc. sites it should at least make it abundantly clear that an employee is trying very hard to circumvent the rules. But then again, there should already be policies on the books dealing with those things, Internet or no Internet.
On the other hand, from a standpoint of productivity, a company should be very wary of restricting Internet access. I don't buy the argument that if an employee isn't surfing the Internet for X hours per day that all of a sudden, he will be productive for X more hours per day. There is a limit to how productive someone is going to be -- if you take away the Internet, some other "time waster" will rise in its place. Do you really think everyone who has a Palm just uses it for phone numbers and schedules? Do you think that just because someone is at their desk concentrating intently that they aren't working on a crossword puzzle? Do you think that every phone call made is for business? How about good old-fashioned staring into space?
An employee is productive if he or she performs to expectations, period. Companies should have an interest in getting rid of (or better yet, finding a way to motivate) unproductive employees anyway -- but it shouldn't involve cutting off the Internet from employees who are already pulling at least their own share of the weight, if not more. If my company wants to call me on the carpet for reading Slashdot or sending an e-mail to my girlfriend to see how her Monday is going after being sick with the flu all weekend, fine. I will be more than glad to show them the half-dozen individual and team achievement awards that senior management has given to me in the last three years, agree sarcastically that the Internet has indeed made me a lousy employee, and otherwise be as amicable as Galileo before the Inquisition. I will also be sure never to work more than 40 hours per week, observe Internet usage policies religiously, and perform utterly mediocre work for the length of time it takes to find a job for a competitor who understands that achievement is the bottom line.
If you type in "about:mozilla" into the address line in Mozilla, this is the quote which is displayed:
And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.
from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
(Red Letter Edition)
(I don't know why your "internet connection being too slow" has anything to do with Mozilla, but that's another story. It sounds like you have it confused with some other program. Mozilla is a browser, comparable in function to Netscape or Internet Explorer or Opera or whatever other one you might use.)
I worked briefly with sonoluminescence at UCLA when I was a student there several years ago. Dr. Seth Putterman is one of the notable names in the field, and wrote a wonderful piece in Scientific American a few years ago detailing how to make your own sonoluminescence apparatus at home. This article surprises me quite a bit, however, since the temperature of the bubbles is hardly a matter of consensus.
The evidence for fusion-capable temperatures inside a sonoluminescing bubble lies in two main categories:
You can examine the emission spectrum of the bubble. The spectrum is continuous, with a peak which depends on a variety of factors (noble gas content, temperature of the fluid, etc.), so you can try to figure out the temperature based on the emission expected from a blackbody of a similar temperature. The last I heard, the temperature was at least an order of magnitude less than what you would need.
You can run simulations which make assumptions about the bubble collapse mechanism. If the bubble remains perfectly spherical during the collapse, then you may get the temperatures being quoted in the article. But there are other theories for the collapse, and requiring the bubble to remain perfectly spherical during a violent collapse doesn't seem intuitively obvious to me.
It's been a few years since I worked with this stuff, so take this with a grain of salt, but I'm not optimistic about this paper being validated.
Given that Google has massive bandwidth and storage capabilities, perhaps SETI@Home should simply ask Google to host their servers. It's a win-win situation:
The kiddies get to keep downloading their MP3s and warez without that pesky space junk clogging their bandwidth.
Google gets to add yet another feature to their front page: "Search galactic transmissions for..."
(A first comment before I get distracted: There is a difference between working for a government contractor, which is a civilian company whose major customer is the government, and working for the government, where you are directly employed by a government agency. Reading other posts, I'm not sure people have been carefully distinguishing between the two...)
My friend and I graduated from college at the same time and both hired into the same major defense contractor within a week of each other, though in totally different areas. (His area of expertise was photonics; I ended up in a systems/software engineering role.) I have had a positive experience so far -- I work with bright people who are very technically skilled, although the development environment (Solaris 2.X; source code written in C) is far from any of the "buzzwords" like Java, C++, Linux, etc. that people love to put on their resumes. The pace of the work has been brisk -- I work in surveillance and reconnaissance systems, and as you might expect, we have gotten even busier after recent events. If anything, we have more work to do than people to do it -- we could stand to hire several more staff.
On the other hand, my friend hated his time at the company and found it to be utterly stagnant. Compounding his dissatisfaction with the projects was his frustration with the security clearance process -- the project that he was hired for required an SCI, which would have taken well over a year to obtain, and no one had discussed security clearances when he was hired. He left to join a startup company which did well at the time (1999), but has been cutting back staff and struggling to survive recently. I asked him if he'd consider coming back here if things didn't work out, but his preferences are strongly for the small company environment with the flexible work arrangements and informal structure. One thing he never could get over was the idea that work was work here. In his college lab, his co-workers were also his social group, and I think he expected that he'd meet a bunch of young engineers and have an instant peer group. I've certainly met some wonderful friends here, but it's far from a collegiate atmosphere.
Government contractors, like any other big company, are really a bunch of small companies under the same banner. If you end up in a good group, it might feel very much like a "dot-com" with the pace and challenge of the work. On the other hand, if you end up in a program which has been around for ten years and is in a maintenance phase, it might very well resemble all of the stodgy nightmares you had about "government work." The requirements are quite different -- the technology you develop today won't see action for a few years, and will be expected to function for a decade or more, typically. And above all -- like every other business -- you must understand your customer. Utility, reliability, maintainability, and ease of use are critical considerations, and your end user (at least for defense products) will be 19-year-olds who can't call you for tech support.
It's important work, and we could use more technical expertise to help us accomplish our goals. But any "dot-commer" considering the switch should carefully consider how well they can adapt to an entirely different culture before sending that resume.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing in the linked article which implies that a Microsoft-created piece of phone HARDWARE was lost or stolen. All the article states is that a phone with prototype SOFTWARE was lost or stolen.
Most of what you need to know is contained on the Defense Security Services (DSS) Information Assurance website: http://www.dss.mil/infoas/ The guiding document for DoD contractors is the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM). Classified systems have to go through a formal certification and accreditation process before they will be approved for classified processing. Since your ultimate goal is to satisfy the accreditor, you should contact him/her as soon as possible to have them explain what will be required and to hear their particular areas of concern so that you can address them early in your design. Security paperwork requires considerable time to fill out, and mistake can result in long delays in accreditation, or even the rejection of your system.
However, it isn't enough to just build a system with the proper hardware and software configuration -- you also have to make sure that the physical environment and users will meet the requirements of the NISPOM. If you don't already have a facility clearance, then you have a significant issue to tackle before you can even build your system. I'm hoping that you are simply building a new computer to add to an existing classified network or house in an existing DoD closed area -- if not, you may find this to be a very daunting task.
The funny thing is that, despite my day job as an engineer, I'm actually a serious poet. Some of my poems have been published in anthologies that you can actually buy at Barnes & Noble, and I've read with some fairly famous poets (well, famous for poets, to be fair) over the last couple of years. The "spam poem" is a favorite at my performances, though, since it's a nice change of pace from my more serious work.
Normally I don't like to post my poetry on the internet until it's been published in a book or journal, but since I doubt there is any intellectual property in a collage of someone else's lines, I'll share with the group...
Oh, one other quick rant: Yes, there is a bunch of poetry being written today which is deliberately obscure, and I've sat through enough open mic poetry events to know that most people who "do poetry" are not interested in anything but the sound of their own voice and a captive audience for their five minutes. So, I can certainly understand some of the negative comments about poetry as a whole in this thread. But the standard for good poetry has never really changed. As T.S. Eliot said, "Great art communicates before it is understood." A good poem impacts the reader (or listener), and gradually reveals layers of meaning with study and reflection. But if it never makes that first impact -- or if the subject is too trivial or insular to make an impact in the first place -- then it's a bad poem. There really is good poetry being written now, if you take the time to look.
The "turtles all the way down" story is probably apocryphal, and is quoted in a variety of different texts. Another popular one which hasn't been mentioned so far is A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking.
Although the turtle figures prominently in a variety of creation myths, the one probably referenced in the story is an ancient Hindu creation myth in which the Earth was conceived as a sphere or disk (depends on the source) resting on the backs of four elephants, who were in turn standing on the back of a giant turtle.
...not PowerPoint itself.
I have taken several presentation classes, and agree wholeheartedly with much of the advice given by the other posters: structure your information logically, use graphics whenever possible, limit the number of words per page, and avoid distracting graphical gimmicks. When you follow those guidelines and spend the time practicing your verbal style, you get good results giving your talk to the audience. However, the real problem lies with how PowerPoint is actually used in business -- namely, as a form of documentation, not merely as a visual aid.
As a case in point, I recently had to give a technical brief at the end of a program to the customer and my management. The problem was that although several members of senior management considered the briefing important enough to ask to be invited...none of them actually showed up! Of course, they wanted a copy of the presentation so they could read it at a later point. If I had constructed the presentation according to the guidelines mentioned above -- minimal text, etc. -- they would have gotten almost no information from it at all. So, anticipating this outcome, I did my best to use as many graphics as I could, but also included enough short statements so that someone could follow the outline of the talk I actually gave that day.
Personally, I think this situation is endemic in engineering. I have seen presentations circulated for years because they contained information which was never documented anywhere else. Although it would be far preferable to construct proper notes or white papers to go along with every presentation, I don't know of any managers who are willing to spend the extra money on putting together those artifacts -- or, for that matter, any engineers who have the spare time to craft them on their own. The best solution would be to record and archive the actual talk itself and pass those files around instead of the slides...but I think we have a long way to go before the verbal content is seen as the truly important element in a presentation, as it ought to be.
Somehow, I think she was covering up for one of her teenaged sons who had just watched American Pie and stopped listening after the "hot apple" part of the line.
If true, that poor Powerbook may have other damage I don't want to think about.
I'm not an expert on the Predator, but the general idea is that the pilot does indeed fly by remote control watching a video screen. I don't know what their contingency plans are for a lost link, but in general these planes are designed to crash violently if something bad happens. You don't want technology to fall into enemy hands.
The Global Hawk, on the other hand, can operate autonomously from takeoff to landing if so desired, including pre-programmed contingencies in the event of a problem. Unless you have some very specialized satellite communications gear, detailed knowledge of the aircraft navigation systems, and a way to break some stiff encryption, you have zero chance of hijacking one. (If you did happen to have such a rig, you'd be immediately obvious to anyone in the area who could detect your signal. There would be a "knock at your door" ASAP.)
As for something going terribly wrong in mid-air, the real issue is the reliability of the hardware. Humans are more frail than machines -- we get tired and sloppy at any kind of repetitive task, and just because near-misses by human pilots aren't widely reported doesn't make me any more confident that humans are more "reliable" than machines.
I don't need suggestions for peanut butter or laundry detergent -- I have those covered.
What I really need is a system that will suggest effective pick-up lines for that cute lady in the frozen food section, triggered by her buying preferences:
(if she's buying Lean Cuisine frozen lasagna) "Hi. You look great! Do you work out?"
Does anyone else think that this "Anonymous Coward" is actually Bill Gates looking for some love from the Slashdot crowd?
I work in the defense industry, so I have to deal with security issues on occasion. Even though they got someone to sign off on the security of the wireless transmission, it will be interesting to see how they actually implement this technology as part of a larger accreditable system.
In my experience with security organizations, they tend to overemphasize the role of physical safeguards in designating a system as "secure," especially when it comes to COMSEC. How will they feel about accrediting a system in which multiple COMSEC units can be moved outside of a secured perimeter?
According to their ad slogans, they want everyone to change...is it so hard to expect the same from management?
It isn't any great mystery -- it's simple economics, plus demographics.
Kids (say, up through early college) would like to play games, but don't have the disposable income.
Younger adults (say, late college through late 20s) have disposable income, but they are spending their money on social pursuits, vacations, cars, gadgets, clothing, etc.
But when they finally marry and start families, the center for entertainment switches to the home...and those $50 games are somewhat more affordable once you hold down a real job.
The old pond; spammer
jumps in; the sound of water;
please, please, no bubbles.
...because without the ability to bunny-hop constantly, I will get 0wn3d. I knew that I should have learned how to aim better...
You might try this:
When you and your girlfriend are feeling amorous, mention casually that on your way to the room, you saw a real live elven maiden in the hall.
When he goes out in the hall to look, shut and lock the door immediately and do your business.
Addiction is defined as "a continued behavior despite mounting negative consequences." There is nothing in that definition which requires a physiological dependence for addiction to take place. Also notice that there is a clear line between a compulsive behavior and an addiction; namely the requirement that there be negative consequences which get worse over time.
There are plenty of gambling addicts who would take offense at how you've minimized their disease. Having spent some time around problem gamblers, I can assure you that they are in just as much pain as the problem drinkers and drug abusers...and causing just as much pain to those around them.
One last thing -- addiction is largely a matter of genetics. If your family has a history of addiction, you run the risk of having those same genes. Your only real choice is whether to trigger the addictive behavior with your choices or not.
As so many others have pointed out, this is not a case of rights -- it's a case of privilege. And, as usual, there seems to be a conflation of two different issues in the same discussion.
From the standpoint of security and/or legal responsibility, of course a company needs to restrict Internet access. No filter is perfect, but as long as it blocks out most of the obvious porn, gambling, "hacker" (speaking colloquially), racist, etc. sites it should at least make it abundantly clear that an employee is trying very hard to circumvent the rules. But then again, there should already be policies on the books dealing with those things, Internet or no Internet.
On the other hand, from a standpoint of productivity, a company should be very wary of restricting Internet access. I don't buy the argument that if an employee isn't surfing the Internet for X hours per day that all of a sudden, he will be productive for X more hours per day. There is a limit to how productive someone is going to be -- if you take away the Internet, some other "time waster" will rise in its place. Do you really think everyone who has a Palm just uses it for phone numbers and schedules? Do you think that just because someone is at their desk concentrating intently that they aren't working on a crossword puzzle? Do you think that every phone call made is for business? How about good old-fashioned staring into space?
An employee is productive if he or she performs to expectations, period. Companies should have an interest in getting rid of (or better yet, finding a way to motivate) unproductive employees anyway -- but it shouldn't involve cutting off the Internet from employees who are already pulling at least their own share of the weight, if not more. If my company wants to call me on the carpet for reading Slashdot or sending an e-mail to my girlfriend to see how her Monday is going after being sick with the flu all weekend, fine. I will be more than glad to show them the half-dozen individual and team achievement awards that senior management has given to me in the last three years, agree sarcastically that the Internet has indeed made me a lousy employee, and otherwise be as amicable as Galileo before the Inquisition. I will also be sure never to work more than 40 hours per week, observe Internet usage policies religiously, and perform utterly mediocre work for the length of time it takes to find a job for a competitor who understands that achievement is the bottom line.
I don't know about you, but a little role-playing at 4 AM can be a lot of fun...nudge nudge, nod nod, wink wink:
You've been a BAD little dungeon master, haven't you? You must be punished...
(I don't know why your "internet connection being too slow" has anything to do with Mozilla, but that's another story. It sounds like you have it confused with some other program. Mozilla is a browser, comparable in function to Netscape or Internet Explorer or Opera or whatever other one you might use.)
I thought the evidence was more than clear:
Videogames don't make people violent. Twinkies do.
The evidence for fusion-capable temperatures inside a sonoluminescing bubble lies in two main categories:
- You can examine the emission spectrum of the bubble. The spectrum is continuous, with a peak which depends on a variety of factors (noble gas content, temperature of the fluid, etc.), so you can try to figure out the temperature based on the emission expected from a blackbody of a similar temperature. The last I heard, the temperature was at least an order of magnitude less than what you would need.
- You can run simulations which make assumptions about the bubble collapse mechanism. If the bubble remains perfectly spherical during the collapse, then you may get the temperatures being quoted in the article. But there are other theories for the collapse, and requiring the bubble to remain perfectly spherical during a violent collapse doesn't seem intuitively obvious to me.
It's been a few years since I worked with this stuff, so take this with a grain of salt, but I'm not optimistic about this paper being validated.(A first comment before I get distracted: There is a difference between working for a government contractor, which is a civilian company whose major customer is the government, and working for the government, where you are directly employed by a government agency. Reading other posts, I'm not sure people have been carefully distinguishing between the two...)
My friend and I graduated from college at the same time and both hired into the same major defense contractor within a week of each other, though in totally different areas. (His area of expertise was photonics; I ended up in a systems/software engineering role.) I have had a positive experience so far -- I work with bright people who are very technically skilled, although the development environment (Solaris 2.X; source code written in C) is far from any of the "buzzwords" like Java, C++, Linux, etc. that people love to put on their resumes. The pace of the work has been brisk -- I work in surveillance and reconnaissance systems, and as you might expect, we have gotten even busier after recent events. If anything, we have more work to do than people to do it -- we could stand to hire several more staff.
On the other hand, my friend hated his time at the company and found it to be utterly stagnant. Compounding his dissatisfaction with the projects was his frustration with the security clearance process -- the project that he was hired for required an SCI, which would have taken well over a year to obtain, and no one had discussed security clearances when he was hired. He left to join a startup company which did well at the time (1999), but has been cutting back staff and struggling to survive recently. I asked him if he'd consider coming back here if things didn't work out, but his preferences are strongly for the small company environment with the flexible work arrangements and informal structure. One thing he never could get over was the idea that work was work here. In his college lab, his co-workers were also his social group, and I think he expected that he'd meet a bunch of young engineers and have an instant peer group. I've certainly met some wonderful friends here, but it's far from a collegiate atmosphere.
Government contractors, like any other big company, are really a bunch of small companies under the same banner. If you end up in a good group, it might feel very much like a "dot-com" with the pace and challenge of the work. On the other hand, if you end up in a program which has been around for ten years and is in a maintenance phase, it might very well resemble all of the stodgy nightmares you had about "government work." The requirements are quite different -- the technology you develop today won't see action for a few years, and will be expected to function for a decade or more, typically. And above all -- like every other business -- you must understand your customer. Utility, reliability, maintainability, and ease of use are critical considerations, and your end user (at least for defense products) will be 19-year-olds who can't call you for tech support.
It's important work, and we could use more technical expertise to help us accomplish our goals. But any "dot-commer" considering the switch should carefully consider how well they can adapt to an entirely different culture before sending that resume.