1: No torture (yet) is officially sanctioned in the US.
No torture that the public is aware of. There's no oversight to say, "no one's being tortured". We wouldn't know.
2: Far fewer informants (20% of the Iraqi population is estimated to be a paid informant for a secret police agency).
Does ratting out a fellow citizen to the IRS for a reward count? I'm sure our numbers would go way up if we included that. Granted, it probably wouldn't be 20%, but give it time....
3: A more credible and much more independent judicial system where if you are disappeared, at least your lawyer can still file paperwork for you and try to get access to you.
So long as your last name isn't Mitnick or you aren't labelled as a "computer terrorist".
I wonder what they were asking him to do for him to have to say that Truth comes before Justice.
Truth always comes before Justice. You can't have Justice without Truth. You can have Truth without Justice.
Justice, for the most part, is institutionalized revenge. Most religions and passivists teach that revenge is best left for the afterlife, but the search for Truth and Enlightenment is a noble goal to be sought in this lifetime.
Try this as a mental exercise:
Imagine that you could choose to know for certain whether or not the Juice really killed Nicole. Would you choose to know or to remain ignorant?
Now say that you possess the knowledge that he did. You must now choose whether or not carry out Justice, but you must do it yourself. You must place the barrel of the gun to his temple and pull the trigger, or tighten the noose around his neck and release the latch that is holding up the floor beneath his feet, or insert the syringe and depress the plunger releasing a lethal dose of Insulin into his bloodstream. Would you choose Justice now? It's not such an easy decision.
Just for the younger folk who may not know this: you can actually tap the hook the required number of times, pause, tap the next number, pause and so on....
Totally off-topic, but this will work if you have a hook to tap (most cordless phones probably can't do this very well, if at all). Also, remember that "0" is 10 clicks.;)
Very young kids have problems with attention span, reading, typing, etc. so you may want to use something like Lego Mindstorms instead of text-based programming.
Actually it's not just kids how have attention span issues who can benefit from Lego Mindstorms. If your siblings haven't yet taken high school geometry yet (or haven't had enough exposure to boolean logic), then Lego Mindstorms is a really cool to get a day-to-week-long introduction. Past that, I'd say, based on my own experience, that (when I was 11) C was difficult for me to pick up until after I learned Pascal. They both have similar structures, but Pascal was a much better introduction because of its use of natural language in most of its syntax.
The only problem with Pascal (nowadays) is that compilers/debuggers seem hard to come by. Here's a free one that might help. If that doesn't work, then you could always try something this, but I wouldn't recommend it for the beginner who doesn't even know what compilers or linkers are and why they are necessary.
I don't think this gets around the wording of the proposal. You're still using something to disguise the origin of the communication. In fact, it might make most public proxies illegal.
Would this also Wireless Ethernet cards illegal, since the legislation "would make it illegal to possess, use, etc. 'any communication device to receive... any communication service without the express consent or express authorization of the communication service provider'". I can use my 802.11b card to do this today. Would possession be a crime?
As long as coding, programming and scripting continue to be a primarily text-based endeavor, the CLI will retain its rightful place as the foundation interface above which all things are built (and rightly so). Declaring it dead and hoping that a Luna-themed glowing shiny button will replace #!/usr/bin/perl will not negate this fact.
And guess what, it makes the server easier to work with, it reduces the learning curve for new admins and lets people do more.
It does indeed reduce the first part of the learning curve for new admins, but will make the middle tier that much steeper. As seasoned admins know, they "do more" and find it "easier to work with" the CLI because of its inherent simplicity and power.
EVERY CRITICAL COMMAND IS AVAILABLE FROM THE COMMAND LINE.
The problem with this is that "EVERY" is qualified. If it's painful for me to do all (not just critical) server-related tasks over a TTY, then I'm not going to get along well with the OS. No one wants to spend an extra $5k on an overpriced remote video/mouse administration-over-tcp box when they don't have to. No one wants to make trips down to the data center when it could be avoided. Unless you start from the beginning by assuming the CLI is your only interface, and offering optional GUI configuration and management utilities on top of it, you're going to piss me off.
"The people who brought you Flash have done it again."
What I don't understand is why this is any different from what you can do today. I can download a *.swf file and open it up in a QuickTime player, and quess what. Post download, I can do it all offline. Mmm...innovation.
Uh, yeah. Like what do footnotes mean, when we can have pretty Flash Animation.
Actually, this isn't such a bad feature. For small new tech/software companies looking for investors, this makes lives that much easier. Most of the time, investors want to see HyperCard-like presentations (a la OO Impress and MS PowerPoint) for high-level concepts, spreadsheets/text documents (OO Calc, OO Writer) for financials and business plans, and Flash stuff for demos. I know this doesn't make a lot of sense (i.e., why we don't use HTML for presentations, and build actual working demos), but he who has to gold makes the rules.
Without a lot of cash to spend on Flash development software, small companies now don't have to waste part of their already tight budgets on buying stuff from Macromedia. To date, truly free XXX -> Flash conversion or Flash authoring software is relatively new, somewhat esoteric and hard to find. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but this would give the power to create rudimentary flash presos/demos with the necessary ease into a lot more hands.
What an excellent way to help young people become successfully integrated into society (formerly discussed here). Of course, if the Bush administration has its way, then this really will help...the kids will be more accustomed to destructively invasive surveillance than their parents; they'll be all ready for this brave new world....
I wonder how long it will take before someone figures out how to bypass this.
I wonder if it will end up being the service providers themselves. I wonder if mobile companies will, as a "feature" to their business customers (for a fee, of course), be able to route text messages to e-mail or other text mediums based on a set of criteria (originating domain, IP, phone #, etc.).
To all you companies out there tempted to patent this, consider this post prior art. Actually, I'm on my way to the patent office right now....
Actually, that's not entirely true. To the original poster's questions:
Employers: what have you done to improve employee morale in your company? As an employee, what can I do to improve the morale in the people I work with? How can I make my work environment more enjoyable? What kind of constructive suggestions can I take to management so that they can help improve the situation?
Here's what I've learned in my brief time spent on this earth about management and leadership. I've learned most of what I know from real-world inferences derived from what not to do. However, I have read a fair amount of leadership, management and sales literature (it should probably be said that I'm a software engineer by training/trade). I've found it boils down to a few things along one main theme:
The more closely the dynamic of company (and in turn, each of it's sub groups) resembles that really fun softball/basketball/water polo/lacrosse team you played on before high school (before sports got really competitive) or that club team you played on in college, the better and more productive it will be. Companies that have a strong family dynamic will always be more productive than those that don't. People want to belong, but they have to have something to want to belong to. The less the company acts like a high school and the more it acts like a volunteer community center the more vested everyone will be in making sure things go well.
Ownership by every member of the company is essential. I've learned that ownership does not mean stock options. Ownership means getting to make decisions, realizing the importance of those decisions and getting to make more decisions, even when mistakes are made. On a side note, if everyone feels ownership, the person most critical of the mistake will be the person who made it. Don't fuck with this dynamic or try to compete with it or your will harbor resentment.
There is no "by the numbers". Managers who stress numerical measurements as the sole method for advancement, and process and documentation as the sole way to solve problems are shitty managers. I'm not saying process (and to a very minimal extent documentation) and measurements are not tools which can be effectively applied, I'm saying that managers should be somewhat protective and nurturing mothers first and save the accounting for the accountants.
People are your most important asset, so treat them like it, damn it. Processes, products, service offerings, any kind of innovation/change in business practice or offerings can be copied (most often at a fraction of the cost incurred by the initial innovator). Your people are what allow you to maneuver more quickly than the competition. If you've got good people and good teams, and you're still tempted to down-size or (a personal favorite) "right"-size, you're doing something wrong. Not only will it cost you a buttload to get rid of them, you will have just sold your company (and your long-term shareholders/investors) down the tubes. This is a good way to demonstrate you don't give a flying fuck about the people "beneath" you.
You've probably already spotted the theme here: people, people and people. Unfortunately, if upper management doesn't buy into this, you're fucked. There's very little you can do (unless you're in a leadership position yourself) to combat this.The best you can hope for is to be laid off so you can collect unemployment while you search for a new job. Think of it as bozo cancer which has metastasized. If you are in a position of leadership, here's some things you can do:
Make sure everyone in your team gets a sincere compliment (doesn't have to be from you) at least once every couple of weeks (once a week is better). For engineers, compliments that start with, "
I'm really disappointed that this is the default shell in OS X. Using tcsh is downright painful for anyone used to real tab-completion (e.g., zsh, bash).
zsh - From what I've read, a good shell, but very nonstandard. Do you really want to lug a shell around and install it (and set up/etc/shells or whatever each time, etc.) for every machine you log into?...
bash - I think bash is a little better than ksh...
If you're a bash user for the interactive benefits (i.e., tab completion, etc.), then you should really consider converting to zsh. It will take you a day, but you'll be glad you spent the time and you'll never go back (unless you're forced to, in which case it will be painful).
Aside from the "embrace and extend" approach of these shells that a previous poster mentioned, zsh wins by a light year compared to anything else, especially with its tab completion libraries (imagine being able to hit TAB after typing cvs to get a list of the subcommands). Not only that, but zsh history/command-line editing are far superior (with a true emacs-style kill ring and real multi-line command editing). The learning curve can be steep, but there are plenty of tutorials out there to get you started. zsh is the power user's shell of choice if you spend any time in the shell (this is coming from a six-year bash zealot).
I don't think that a justice system should be used to "scare" someone....
More to the point, I don't think you can selectively enforce the law wherever it suits you. From the article:
"I can't see turning millions of college students into criminals," said Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University. "We'd have to build a lot of new prisons to hold the lawbreakers engaged in piracy of copyrighted materials."
Carter said making an example of a few college students could go a long way toward bringing home the message that sharing and duplicating copyrighted materials is wrong.
"Sometimes it takes the shock value of someone actually being punished," Carter said. "In this particular instance it might also send a message to these kids that are operating on these networks that, 'Hey, I better stop.'"
If you selectively jail a few members of a subset of the population as a scare tactic for the rest of that subset, you're no longer enforcing a law, you're engaging in discriminatory profiling. In this case, you'd be targeting college students instead of blacks or gays or Armenians or whatever.
That's okay, we want to punish people for being in college, anyway, right? After all, it's all these damned intellectuals that wanted to stop us from kicking the shit out of the bearded ones, right? Damn it, we need more people like this.
Moderators: you can mod me down for flamebait, but try reading it again without the last two sentences (three including this one), and see if that changes things for you (the last bit was just a personal rant).
Jails are for extremely violent or disorderly people who have the potential to ruin others' lives and do not care what happens to others.
John Carter is part of the effort to recruit mild law-breakers (i.e., drug users, file traders) into violent criminals in an effort to justify a beefed-up law system with more restrictions on individual liberties. What better way to turn a huge group of relatively innocuous human beings into people more likely to commit destruction of property, assault, rape or murder than to train them with the best!
(By the way this is meant to be funny...I don't actually have any evidence that there is such and effort, much less if John Carter is a part of it. The scary thing is that I wouldn't be one bit surprised if I found some.)
Slashdot Mirror
1: No torture (yet) is officially sanctioned in the US.
No torture that the public is aware of. There's no oversight to say, "no one's being tortured". We wouldn't know.
2: Far fewer informants (20% of the Iraqi population is estimated to be a paid informant for a secret police agency).
Does ratting out a fellow citizen to the IRS for a reward count? I'm sure our numbers would go way up if we included that. Granted, it probably wouldn't be 20%, but give it time....
3: A more credible and much more independent judicial system where if you are disappeared, at least your lawyer can still file paperwork for you and try to get access to you.
So long as your last name isn't Mitnick or you aren't labelled as a "computer terrorist".
[I]n one corner, you have Megaconglomerate Sony, and in the other corner, you have Megaconglomerate Sony.
In capitalism, man exploits man. In communism, it's the other way around.
I wonder what they were asking him to do for him to have to say that Truth comes before Justice.
Truth always comes before Justice. You can't have Justice without Truth. You can have Truth without Justice.
Justice, for the most part, is institutionalized revenge. Most religions and passivists teach that revenge is best left for the afterlife, but the search for Truth and Enlightenment is a noble goal to be sought in this lifetime.
Try this as a mental exercise:
Imagine that you could choose to know for certain whether or not the Juice really killed Nicole. Would you choose to know or to remain ignorant?
Now say that you possess the knowledge that he did. You must now choose whether or not carry out Justice, but you must do it yourself. You must place the barrel of the gun to his temple and pull the trigger, or tighten the noose around his neck and release the latch that is holding up the floor beneath his feet, or insert the syringe and depress the plunger releasing a lethal dose of Insulin into his bloodstream. Would you choose Justice now? It's not such an easy decision.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
I'm hoping this "feature" makes it into Palladium and other DRM "solutions" as well....
Just for the younger folk who may not know this: you can actually tap the hook the required number of times, pause, tap the next number, pause and so on....
;)
Totally off-topic, but this will work if you have a hook to tap (most cordless phones probably can't do this very well, if at all). Also, remember that "0" is 10 clicks.
Very young kids have problems with attention span, reading, typing, etc. so you may want to use something like Lego Mindstorms instead of text-based programming.
Actually it's not just kids how have attention span issues who can benefit from Lego Mindstorms. If your siblings haven't yet taken high school geometry yet (or haven't had enough exposure to boolean logic), then Lego Mindstorms is a really cool to get a day-to-week-long introduction. Past that, I'd say, based on my own experience, that (when I was 11) C was difficult for me to pick up until after I learned Pascal. They both have similar structures, but Pascal was a much better introduction because of its use of natural language in most of its syntax.
You can find some tutorials here, here, here, here, and here.
The only problem with Pascal (nowadays) is that compilers/debuggers seem hard to come by. Here's a free one that might help. If that doesn't work, then you could always try something this, but I wouldn't recommend it for the beginner who doesn't even know what compilers or linkers are and why they are necessary.
SSL encrypted proxy connection.
... any communication service without the express consent or express authorization of the communication service provider'". I can use my 802.11b card to do this today. Would possession be a crime?
I don't think this gets around the wording of the proposal. You're still using something to disguise the origin of the communication. In fact, it might make most public proxies illegal.
Would this also Wireless Ethernet cards illegal, since the legislation "would make it illegal to possess, use, etc. 'any communication device to receive
The CLI is dead, long live the CLI
As long as coding, programming and scripting continue to be a primarily text-based endeavor, the CLI will retain its rightful place as the foundation interface above which all things are built (and rightly so). Declaring it dead and hoping that a Luna-themed glowing shiny button will replace #!/usr/bin/perl will not negate this fact.
And guess what, it makes the server easier to work with, it reduces the learning curve for new admins and lets people do more.
It does indeed reduce the first part of the learning curve for new admins, but will make the middle tier that much steeper. As seasoned admins know, they "do more" and find it "easier to work with" the CLI because of its inherent simplicity and power.
EVERY CRITICAL COMMAND IS AVAILABLE FROM THE COMMAND LINE.
The problem with this is that "EVERY" is qualified. If it's painful for me to do all (not just critical) server-related tasks over a TTY, then I'm not going to get along well with the OS. No one wants to spend an extra $5k on an overpriced remote video/mouse administration-over-tcp box when they don't have to. No one wants to make trips down to the data center when it could be avoided. Unless you start from the beginning by assuming the CLI is your only interface, and offering optional GUI configuration and management utilities on top of it, you're going to piss me off.
Hey, you're hurt!
Lady, I'm fuckin' dead.
You were underwater for like five minutes! -- You think you can you teach my girlfriend to do that?
"The people who brought you Flash have done it again."
What I don't understand is why this is any different from what you can do today. I can download a *.swf file and open it up in a QuickTime player, and quess what. Post download, I can do it all offline. Mmm...innovation.
Uh, yeah. Like what do footnotes mean, when we can have pretty Flash Animation .
Actually, this isn't such a bad feature. For small new tech/software companies looking for investors, this makes lives that much easier. Most of the time, investors want to see HyperCard-like presentations (a la OO Impress and MS PowerPoint) for high-level concepts, spreadsheets/text documents (OO Calc, OO Writer) for financials and business plans, and Flash stuff for demos. I know this doesn't make a lot of sense (i.e., why we don't use HTML for presentations, and build actual working demos), but he who has to gold makes the rules.
Without a lot of cash to spend on Flash development software, small companies now don't have to waste part of their already tight budgets on buying stuff from Macromedia. To date, truly free XXX -> Flash conversion or Flash authoring software is relatively new, somewhat esoteric and hard to find. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but this would give the power to create rudimentary flash presos/demos with the necessary ease into a lot more hands.
Will the real Ximinem please stand up?
http://ooo.ximian.com/
All you adminstrators are just imitators, so grab yer alpha shaders an' GL accelerators.
I'm just thankfull and hopefull that they will, I think the Iraqi people deserve it.
That's assuming they actually do get it.
What an excellent way to help young people become successfully integrated into society (formerly discussed here). Of course, if the Bush administration has its way, then this really will help...the kids will be more accustomed to destructively invasive surveillance than their parents; they'll be all ready for this brave new world....
01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 01100001 01101100 01101100 01101111 01100110 01111001 01101111 01110101 01101000 01101111 01101101 01101111 01110011
How did you know? I didn't mention it in my profile....
I still think 7.3 is new.
It's not?! I just spent all day downloading the ISOs, damnit! I guess that's what I get for using in-span.net as a mirror....
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
01101110 01100101 01101001 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100001 01101101 01101001
Yes, I have enough to do, thank you.
I wonder how long it will take before someone figures out how to bypass this.
I wonder if it will end up being the service providers themselves. I wonder if mobile companies will, as a "feature" to their business customers (for a fee, of course), be able to route text messages to e-mail or other text mediums based on a set of criteria (originating domain, IP, phone #, etc.).
To all you companies out there tempted to patent this, consider this post prior art. Actually, I'm on my way to the patent office right now....
Yeah, what a bunch of whiners.
Actually, some of them are more like croakers and hissers....
Very well put! Have you write a book or something? I'd like to read'it!
;)
Thanks! I haven't yet, but I'll keep everyone posted....
...thanks to things like a VPN and Avaya IP Softphone
Holy shit. This was not the link to follow if you wanted a quick intro to the Avaya product line....
Welcome to every company everywhere.
Actually, that's not entirely true. To the original poster's questions:
Employers: what have you done to improve employee morale in your company? As an employee, what can I do to improve the morale in the people I work with? How can I make my work environment more enjoyable? What kind of constructive suggestions can I take to management so that they can help improve the situation?
Here's what I've learned in my brief time spent on this earth about management and leadership. I've learned most of what I know from real-world inferences derived from what not to do. However, I have read a fair amount of leadership, management and sales literature (it should probably be said that I'm a software engineer by training/trade). I've found it boils down to a few things along one main theme:
You've probably already spotted the theme here: people, people and people. Unfortunately, if upper management doesn't buy into this, you're fucked. There's very little you can do (unless you're in a leadership position yourself) to combat this.The best you can hope for is to be laid off so you can collect unemployment while you search for a new job. Think of it as bozo cancer which has metastasized. If you are in a position of leadership, here's some things you can do:
csh/tcsh...
/etc/shells or whatever each time, etc.) for every machine you log into? ...
I'm really disappointed that this is the default shell in OS X. Using tcsh is downright painful for anyone used to real tab-completion (e.g., zsh, bash).
zsh - From what I've read, a good shell, but very nonstandard. Do you really want to lug a shell around and install it (and set up
bash - I think bash is a little better than ksh...
If you're a bash user for the interactive benefits (i.e., tab completion, etc.), then you should really consider converting to zsh. It will take you a day, but you'll be glad you spent the time and you'll never go back (unless you're forced to, in which case it will be painful).
Aside from the "embrace and extend" approach of these shells that a previous poster mentioned, zsh wins by a light year compared to anything else, especially with its tab completion libraries (imagine being able to hit TAB after typing cvs to get a list of the subcommands). Not only that, but zsh history/command-line editing are far superior (with a true emacs-style kill ring and real multi-line command editing). The learning curve can be steep, but there are plenty of tutorials out there to get you started. zsh is the power user's shell of choice if you spend any time in the shell (this is coming from a six-year bash zealot).
I don't think that a justice system should be used to "scare" someone....
More to the point, I don't think you can selectively enforce the law wherever it suits you. From the article:
"I can't see turning millions of college students into criminals," said Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University. "We'd have to build a lot of new prisons to hold the lawbreakers engaged in piracy of copyrighted materials."
Carter said making an example of a few college students could go a long way toward bringing home the message that sharing and duplicating copyrighted materials is wrong.
"Sometimes it takes the shock value of someone actually being punished," Carter said. "In this particular instance it might also send a message to these kids that are operating on these networks that, 'Hey, I better stop.'"
If you selectively jail a few members of a subset of the population as a scare tactic for the rest of that subset, you're no longer enforcing a law, you're engaging in discriminatory profiling. In this case, you'd be targeting college students instead of blacks or gays or Armenians or whatever.
That's okay, we want to punish people for being in college, anyway, right? After all, it's all these damned intellectuals that wanted to stop us from kicking the shit out of the bearded ones, right? Damn it, we need more people like this.
Moderators: you can mod me down for flamebait, but try reading it again without the last two sentences (three including this one), and see if that changes things for you (the last bit was just a personal rant).
Jails are for extremely violent or disorderly people who have the potential to ruin others' lives and do not care what happens to others.
John Carter is part of the effort to recruit mild law-breakers (i.e., drug users, file traders) into violent criminals in an effort to justify a beefed-up law system with more restrictions on individual liberties. What better way to turn a huge group of relatively innocuous human beings into people more likely to commit destruction of property, assault, rape or murder than to train them with the best!
(By the way this is meant to be funny...I don't actually have any evidence that there is such and effort, much less if John Carter is a part of it. The scary thing is that I wouldn't be one bit surprised if I found some.)