Wah fucking wah. Standard socialist bullshit. If you don't like your working conditions, get a different job. We live in a free country, I don't know about you. This guy's biggest problem is that his company ids trying to short him on some stock options, not work him to death. It's California, for fuck's sake. Get a grip. There's a reason American tech workers aren't unionized, and it's NOT because Big Management is fighting tooth and nail to keep unions out. It's because the VAST majority of us want absolutely no part of a union, ever. I don't believe I have ever once talked to a programmer, engineer, analyst, DBA, SA, network cable monkey or repair tech that seriously wanted any part of a union, and I've been working in this business for over three decades.
I'd rather be screwed over by my employer -- who is paying me, regardless of the amount of screwage, and from whom I can separate at any time I decide the screwing isn't worth the compensation -- than a union, from whom I'd get a screwing over and PAY for it.
How appropriate that a comment about unions should appear with a subject line of "Mafia".
I believe I'd treat something like this the same as I would any other unidentified, obviously non-factory object found on a vehicle with no explanation for how it got there. I'd call 911, and tell them I just found what I believe looks like a pipe bomb attached to my vehicle. I'd follow that up immediately with calls to each of the local TV stations, letting them know where they could watch the police bomb squad in action.
How much would you bet the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing? It could be an interesting and entertaining afternoon. Let THEM blow it up. Hopefully not while still attached to my vehicle.
I blame the far left AND the far right for the probably-unavoidable demise of Social Security. Different color pigs feeding at the same tough.
You can get by on less, of course... but like I said, while $150K a year might sound like a whole big pile of money to a 25 year old with no kids (and it would be), it's not going to make a 50 year old with kids in college rich. Even if those kids get decent scholarships -- it's shocking what those don't cover, and how fast even a conservative, responsible college student can blow through money.
Perhaps if you're 20 or 25, making $150K a year, and never plan to marry or have kids. As one of the old curmudgeons (not a coder, thank God) I can tell you that $150K, while comfortable (in many parts of the country) even with a sizable family, will NOT let you retire early. At least not if you worked your way to that pay level starting from typical 20-something slave wages.
There's a reason we won't see flying cars, and it doesn't have anything to do with patents. You need a pilot's license to fly. To get a pilot's license, you need to be trained, and learn, and study. It's expensive, and it's a lot of work -- that will (and does) eliminate most of the population's even wanting to get one right there. And once you have the requisite knowledge and training to get a pilot's license, no sane individual would want to come anywhere near a city full of idiots with flying cars. Driving is bad enough, but when they're coming at you from ALL sides? No thanks.
Finally, I'm sitting here looking out the window watching it snow for the first time in ~70 years and have to seriously question your assumptions that the planet is even warming at all.
Oh, stop. See, that's why they had to stop calling it "global warming" and are now alarmed about "global climate change". That way they can blame the same thing no matter what the weather does. Try to keep up.:)
Hmm. Maybe that would work where you live. Fiji, right? My out of shape body lives in a part of the world where bamboo (and rubber for tires) would need to be imported by means of fossil fuel burning transport, and passive solar heating is not quite enough to hack a -30F winter week or three around here. Unless you're also proposing that we abandon living in areas such as these -- you know, the ones where we grow millions of tons of carbon-sequestering plants, that get harvested and turned into food to feed people all over the world. Even the poor ones in places where they don't think passive solar heating is such a grand idea, and would do anything for low humidity, electrically cooled houses.
But, hey, I live in the evil West, so ignore anything I say. I'm obviously just a right-wing global climate change denier, probably working for Monsanto and BP.
This could turn out to be an energy saving breakthrough. Just imagine the annual energy savings from being able to dramatically reduce lighting levels in restaurants.
They are grossly overestimating their own relevance. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I use PayPal to receive money from others (because they insist on it). I also use credit cards. But it will be a cold, cold day in hell before I stop carrying a wallet, or cash.
Those cocksuckers swiped a camera from my bag several years ago. TSA pointed the finger at Continental, Continental pointed the finger at TSA. Both parties basically said "Tough shit". Baggage is only covered at $0.50 per pound -- but ANYTHING of any value is specifically excluded. So if they steal electronics, jewelry, anything other than basically clothing, it's just tough shit.
Fuck 'em. I'd been a loyal Continental customer for years. After that incident and, shortly after that, trying in vain to find a way to actually use the many, many frequent flyer miles I had accumulated, I finally had had enough. Haven't set foot on a Continental flight nor given them a penny of revenue in several years now. Not that they cared in the slightest.
My point when I complained about my missing shit was, if someone were willing to commit a felony for a box of Hot Tamales (the only other thing missing from my bag), what could I have put IN a bag for, say, $10K? How about $50K? Somehow these shitheads don't make me feel any safer flying.
So if you meet an American who never went to college, you can't consider him "educated" at all. We have to go to college just to have a modicum of education.
You, sir, are so far off base it's not even funny. One could just as well say, "If you meet an American with a college degree, you can assume that he or she is a pompous, egotistical jackass." While certainly true in some cases, it's not an accurate generalization and would be a stupid thing to say.
If you meet an American who actually studied and applied him or herself during high school, he or she will be reasonably well "educated", whatever that means. Not all American public schools are pathetic, and some are quite good. As with most things, the education you get depends on how much effort you put forth. There are plenty of us without college degrees who are not exactly the knuckle-dragging morons you seem to think.
Of course, of course!! If anyone says anything less than worshipful about The Anointed One or one of His appointees, then obviously they must be no more than a shambling, mindless right-wing redneck who does nothing but watch Fox News and club small animals for fun.
Wake up and take a peek past your own reality distortion field. This guy doesn't have the qualifications to be the CIO of a gas station, let alone the US government. Like so many in the current administration, he seems to have had no practical experience that would make him an asset to the US. His speeches reveal that he has no clue what he's talking about, and an understanding of technology that's shallow and tenuous at best. The fact that he's incompetent and completely lacks qualifications for the post to which he was appointed has nothing to do with the fact that he's of Indian descent. However, it's pretty obvious that he got the job mainly because of it. Political cronyism isn't just for oil barons, you know
Am I the only one who expected to see a bill made up of recycled bits and pieces of old bills, stitched together and brought back to life in a midnight session?
Sure, if you know what book you're looking for it's great. But if you're looking for something for which you may need to sort through a shelf or two of books, it seems like this would make it tougher to just pull a book down, browse through it, and move on to the next. I also remember many hours spent leafing through various works of fiction, looking for something I might enjoy reading by reading a few pages here and there to get a general idea of the author's style and the book's plot.
Of course it's academic (so to speak), as I haven't been inside a library in years now.
No, killing civilians makes you a war criminal, not a terrorist.
No, intentionally killing unarmed, noncombatant civilians makes you a war criminal. If I shell a building just to kill the civilian occupants, I'm a war criminal. If I have to shell the same building, killing all the occupants because I'm taking sniper fire from there... well, sucks to live in that building, but I gotta do what I gotta do to protect my troops.
Collateral damage and civilian deaths during war are a fact of life. A sad and tragic fact of life, but a fact of life nonetheless.
When the apocalypse comes, I'll be happier that I have friends. And guns. And know how to distill booze. I probably won't care much about that dual pitch Correcting Selectric III I have stashed away.
I wouldn't say my machine is more secure than that of WordPress -- although, since theirs has been compromised and mine has not, I guess that's open for debate. One big difference is, I know what and where my vulnerabilities are, and I have my fingers in there daily so I'll know pretty quickly if and when someone breaks in. When hosting stuff on Other Peoples' Servers, you never really know for sure if they are secure, how secure they are, etc. Until you find out the hard way, of course.
As for my actual sensitive data, the stuff that would actually be inconvenient to have someone else see... yes, keeping it on my own system makes it more secure, for a number of reasons. None of which I'm ever likely to discuss.
In theory, you're right. In practice, not so much. Lots of money can (and often does) fundamentally alter the practices of many non-profits. Sure, they're nominally non-profit, with bylaws and directors. All of which/whom can be altered or replaced. If pallet loads of cash start flowing from the general direction of a Borg cube, enabling the construction of fancy new offices and much better compensation for the officers... well, you can see how that could happen. Many a nonprofit has been subverted by lots of money and infiltration by unscrupulous individuals.
You don't think they're just going to write a check, do you? They'll borrow a few billion and do the rest as a stock swap. It's a lot easier to defend borrowing and spending a few billion to acquire a competitor, than it is to spend a few billion upgrading your shitty infrastructure. One can be made to look really good on the quarterly earnings reports, the other can't -- at least to the average short term thinker, by whom we seem to be overrun.
I respectfully disagree. I believe the decision is based in large part upon whether intervention stands a substantial, realistic chance to do any good. Military intervention in places like Somalia would accomplish nothing productive; it's been tried. There often is no central government oppressing and attacking people, it's dozens (or more) bands of irregulars, led by warlords working mostly from drug money, fighting each other and taking the opportunity for the occasional tribal massacre. In some cases there *is* a central government oppressing and murdering people, but the alternative would be another Somalia.
In the case of Libya, it seems clear that the citizenry wants the current regime out, and the current regime is willing to kill a substantial percentage of the population to hold onto power. It's also a fair bet that, once the smoke clears, Libyans will be willing and able to establish a new government and bring things back to some semblance of normalcy.
If the decision were based solely upon maintaining a cheap oil supply, we could just as easily help crazy-ass dictators like Gaddafi restore order and suppress the rebellion, in exchange for a few price and production promises.
When sending troops to the US for a hostile takeover attempt, please remember that several million of the inhabitants are armed. We're not counted as part of the military, but we do make a pretty good defensive force.
That works great, but doesn't always scale well. For example, take my employer... over a quarter million employees, many hundreds of them being SAs who administer nearly every OS known to man distributed across over 30,000 servers scattered around the globe. They are by and large paid and treated *quite* well. However, the sheer numbers mean you're eventually going to encounter the occasional incompetent, or possibly the rare person with ill intent. Now you need something a lot more scalable than "check them out thoroughly before hiring them". If you don't believe that, your corporate auditors and government regulating bodies will gently tell you otherwise.
In many cases it's a mixture of enforced change management policy and commercially available, enterprise-sized tools to control, limit, grant, record and audit access to SAs. I may have root privileges on a server, or a few hundred of them, but in order to use that power I have to authenticate and everything is logged. Yes, I can turn all of that off... but the act of turning it off is, of course, logged and audited, and I had damn well better have a change control document to justify it.
I'm not going to mention specific tools here, because I do like my job and my employer (hi, Power Wielding / Paycheck Signing Overlords!) -- but they're not difficult to find. They are, however, generally expensive, and an enormous pain in the ass to implement and support.
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Wah fucking wah. Standard socialist bullshit. If you don't like your working conditions, get a different job. We live in a free country, I don't know about you. This guy's biggest problem is that his company ids trying to short him on some stock options, not work him to death. It's California, for fuck's sake. Get a grip. There's a reason American tech workers aren't unionized, and it's NOT because Big Management is fighting tooth and nail to keep unions out. It's because the VAST majority of us want absolutely no part of a union, ever. I don't believe I have ever once talked to a programmer, engineer, analyst, DBA, SA, network cable monkey or repair tech that seriously wanted any part of a union, and I've been working in this business for over three decades.
I'd rather be screwed over by my employer -- who is paying me, regardless of the amount of screwage, and from whom I can separate at any time I decide the screwing isn't worth the compensation -- than a union, from whom I'd get a screwing over and PAY for it.
How appropriate that a comment about unions should appear with a subject line of "Mafia".
I believe I'd treat something like this the same as I would any other unidentified, obviously non-factory object found on a vehicle with no explanation for how it got there. I'd call 911, and tell them I just found what I believe looks like a pipe bomb attached to my vehicle. I'd follow that up immediately with calls to each of the local TV stations, letting them know where they could watch the police bomb squad in action.
How much would you bet the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing? It could be an interesting and entertaining afternoon. Let THEM blow it up. Hopefully not while still attached to my vehicle.
I blame the far left AND the far right for the probably-unavoidable demise of Social Security. Different color pigs feeding at the same tough.
You can get by on less, of course... but like I said, while $150K a year might sound like a whole big pile of money to a 25 year old with no kids (and it would be), it's not going to make a 50 year old with kids in college rich. Even if those kids get decent scholarships -- it's shocking what those don't cover, and how fast even a conservative, responsible college student can blow through money.
Perhaps if you're 20 or 25, making $150K a year, and never plan to marry or have kids. As one of the old curmudgeons (not a coder, thank God) I can tell you that $150K, while comfortable (in many parts of the country) even with a sizable family, will NOT let you retire early. At least not if you worked your way to that pay level starting from typical 20-something slave wages.
There's a reason we won't see flying cars, and it doesn't have anything to do with patents. You need a pilot's license to fly. To get a pilot's license, you need to be trained, and learn, and study. It's expensive, and it's a lot of work -- that will (and does) eliminate most of the population's even wanting to get one right there. And once you have the requisite knowledge and training to get a pilot's license, no sane individual would want to come anywhere near a city full of idiots with flying cars. Driving is bad enough, but when they're coming at you from ALL sides? No thanks.
Finally, I'm sitting here looking out the window watching it snow for the first time in ~70 years and have to seriously question your assumptions that the planet is even warming at all.
Oh, stop. See, that's why they had to stop calling it "global warming" and are now alarmed about "global climate change". That way they can blame the same thing no matter what the weather does. Try to keep up. :)
Hmm. Maybe that would work where you live. Fiji, right? My out of shape body lives in a part of the world where bamboo (and rubber for tires) would need to be imported by means of fossil fuel burning transport, and passive solar heating is not quite enough to hack a -30F winter week or three around here. Unless you're also proposing that we abandon living in areas such as these -- you know, the ones where we grow millions of tons of carbon-sequestering plants, that get harvested and turned into food to feed people all over the world. Even the poor ones in places where they don't think passive solar heating is such a grand idea, and would do anything for low humidity, electrically cooled houses.
But, hey, I live in the evil West, so ignore anything I say. I'm obviously just a right-wing global climate change denier, probably working for Monsanto and BP.
This could turn out to be an energy saving breakthrough. Just imagine the annual energy savings from being able to dramatically reduce lighting levels in restaurants.
They are grossly overestimating their own relevance. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I use PayPal to receive money from others (because they insist on it). I also use credit cards. But it will be a cold, cold day in hell before I stop carrying a wallet, or cash.
Those cocksuckers swiped a camera from my bag several years ago. TSA pointed the finger at Continental, Continental pointed the finger at TSA. Both parties basically said "Tough shit". Baggage is only covered at $0.50 per pound -- but ANYTHING of any value is specifically excluded. So if they steal electronics, jewelry, anything other than basically clothing, it's just tough shit.
Fuck 'em. I'd been a loyal Continental customer for years. After that incident and, shortly after that, trying in vain to find a way to actually use the many, many frequent flyer miles I had accumulated, I finally had had enough. Haven't set foot on a Continental flight nor given them a penny of revenue in several years now. Not that they cared in the slightest.
My point when I complained about my missing shit was, if someone were willing to commit a felony for a box of Hot Tamales (the only other thing missing from my bag), what could I have put IN a bag for, say, $10K? How about $50K? Somehow these shitheads don't make me feel any safer flying.
So if you meet an American who never went to college, you can't consider him "educated" at all. We have to go to college just to have a modicum of education.
You, sir, are so far off base it's not even funny. One could just as well say, "If you meet an American with a college degree, you can assume that he or she is a pompous, egotistical jackass." While certainly true in some cases, it's not an accurate generalization and would be a stupid thing to say.
If you meet an American who actually studied and applied him or herself during high school, he or she will be reasonably well "educated", whatever that means. Not all American public schools are pathetic, and some are quite good. As with most things, the education you get depends on how much effort you put forth. There are plenty of us without college degrees who are not exactly the knuckle-dragging morons you seem to think.
Of course, of course!! If anyone says anything less than worshipful about The Anointed One or one of His appointees, then obviously they must be no more than a shambling, mindless right-wing redneck who does nothing but watch Fox News and club small animals for fun.
Wake up and take a peek past your own reality distortion field. This guy doesn't have the qualifications to be the CIO of a gas station, let alone the US government. Like so many in the current administration, he seems to have had no practical experience that would make him an asset to the US. His speeches reveal that he has no clue what he's talking about, and an understanding of technology that's shallow and tenuous at best. The fact that he's incompetent and completely lacks qualifications for the post to which he was appointed has nothing to do with the fact that he's of Indian descent. However, it's pretty obvious that he got the job mainly because of it. Political cronyism isn't just for oil barons, you know
Also known as the "Milli Vanilli Billi" Yeah, it's a slow day.
Am I the only one who expected to see a bill made up of recycled bits and pieces of old bills, stitched together and brought back to life in a midnight session?
Sure, if you know what book you're looking for it's great. But if you're looking for something for which you may need to sort through a shelf or two of books, it seems like this would make it tougher to just pull a book down, browse through it, and move on to the next. I also remember many hours spent leafing through various works of fiction, looking for something I might enjoy reading by reading a few pages here and there to get a general idea of the author's style and the book's plot.
Of course it's academic (so to speak), as I haven't been inside a library in years now.
No, killing civilians makes you a war criminal, not a terrorist.
No, intentionally killing unarmed, noncombatant civilians makes you a war criminal. If I shell a building just to kill the civilian occupants, I'm a war criminal. If I have to shell the same building, killing all the occupants because I'm taking sniper fire from there... well, sucks to live in that building, but I gotta do what I gotta do to protect my troops. Collateral damage and civilian deaths during war are a fact of life. A sad and tragic fact of life, but a fact of life nonetheless.
When the apocalypse comes, I'll be happier that I have friends. And guns. And know how to distill booze. I probably won't care much about that dual pitch Correcting Selectric III I have stashed away.
I wouldn't say my machine is more secure than that of WordPress -- although, since theirs has been compromised and mine has not, I guess that's open for debate. One big difference is, I know what and where my vulnerabilities are, and I have my fingers in there daily so I'll know pretty quickly if and when someone breaks in. When hosting stuff on Other Peoples' Servers, you never really know for sure if they are secure, how secure they are, etc. Until you find out the hard way, of course.
As for my actual sensitive data, the stuff that would actually be inconvenient to have someone else see... yes, keeping it on my own system makes it more secure, for a number of reasons. None of which I'm ever likely to discuss.
In theory, you're right. In practice, not so much. Lots of money can (and often does) fundamentally alter the practices of many non-profits. Sure, they're nominally non-profit, with bylaws and directors. All of which/whom can be altered or replaced. If pallet loads of cash start flowing from the general direction of a Borg cube, enabling the construction of fancy new offices and much better compensation for the officers... well, you can see how that could happen. Many a nonprofit has been subverted by lots of money and infiltration by unscrupulous individuals.
You don't think they're just going to write a check, do you? They'll borrow a few billion and do the rest as a stock swap. It's a lot easier to defend borrowing and spending a few billion to acquire a competitor, than it is to spend a few billion upgrading your shitty infrastructure. One can be made to look really good on the quarterly earnings reports, the other can't -- at least to the average short term thinker, by whom we seem to be overrun.
I respectfully disagree. I believe the decision is based in large part upon whether intervention stands a substantial, realistic chance to do any good. Military intervention in places like Somalia would accomplish nothing productive; it's been tried. There often is no central government oppressing and attacking people, it's dozens (or more) bands of irregulars, led by warlords working mostly from drug money, fighting each other and taking the opportunity for the occasional tribal massacre. In some cases there *is* a central government oppressing and murdering people, but the alternative would be another Somalia.
In the case of Libya, it seems clear that the citizenry wants the current regime out, and the current regime is willing to kill a substantial percentage of the population to hold onto power. It's also a fair bet that, once the smoke clears, Libyans will be willing and able to establish a new government and bring things back to some semblance of normalcy.
If the decision were based solely upon maintaining a cheap oil supply, we could just as easily help crazy-ass dictators like Gaddafi restore order and suppress the rebellion, in exchange for a few price and production promises.
Gabble??? Or did you possibly mean Joseph Goebbels?
When sending troops to the US for a hostile takeover attempt, please remember that several million of the inhabitants are armed. We're not counted as part of the military, but we do make a pretty good defensive force.
That works great, but doesn't always scale well. For example, take my employer... over a quarter million employees, many hundreds of them being SAs who administer nearly every OS known to man distributed across over 30,000 servers scattered around the globe. They are by and large paid and treated *quite* well. However, the sheer numbers mean you're eventually going to encounter the occasional incompetent, or possibly the rare person with ill intent. Now you need something a lot more scalable than "check them out thoroughly before hiring them". If you don't believe that, your corporate auditors and government regulating bodies will gently tell you otherwise.
In many cases it's a mixture of enforced change management policy and commercially available, enterprise-sized tools to control, limit, grant, record and audit access to SAs. I may have root privileges on a server, or a few hundred of them, but in order to use that power I have to authenticate and everything is logged. Yes, I can turn all of that off... but the act of turning it off is, of course, logged and audited, and I had damn well better have a change control document to justify it.
I'm not going to mention specific tools here, because I do like my job and my employer (hi, Power Wielding / Paycheck Signing Overlords!) -- but they're not difficult to find. They are, however, generally expensive, and an enormous pain in the ass to implement and support.