My "favorite" IT story has our development team halfway across the world, needing access to a system in our DMZ from the customer's system. The IT team flat out refused to do it, citing "security". My boss had one of the dev people back in the US literally bypass them with an unauthorized Ethernet connection.
My second favorite involves a customer IT department who insisted on installing a broken anti-virus product on a VM I needed to work on, and then not being available to fix it. They were very unhappy when I managed to kill it (making the system usable again; it was trying to contact a server it had no path to, and using most of its cpu time doing it), especially when they realized they couldn't even credibly threaten me for doing it.
False dichotomy, there's no reason why there couldn't be a medium of some sort here.
The movie industry is the reason there cannot. They have forced the DMCA upon us, and it did not work. They have sued everyone they can find, and it has not worked. Now they want (and will likely get) the power to ban people from the Internet on their own say-so; of course, it will not work, so they'll come up with something even worse. Content fingerprinting in every videocamera, perhaps, much as the RIAA suggested an anti-piracy detector in every ADC.
As far as that goes we'd have to come a lot further towards totalitarianism before that becomes a serious issue.
The DMCA was enough. PROTECT-IP is more than enough.
For all the well justified hubbub we'd be better of just contributing to pay off the few suits that the *AA actually bothers to file.
I'm inclined to say that, because it is so exception-ridden, that the Spock statement is then not justification for any IRL social policy.
Spock's statement was one of personal morality, not social policy. He was sacrificing himself for the good of the many, not demanding that anyone else do so.
Actually, the world is waiting for the US to crumble. We don't really want to see any WMDs anymore, nobody gives half a shit about it. We just want to know when the bully gets tossed out of the school so we don't have to act as if we like him anymore to avoid getting beaten up.
Until you grow a pair, you're going to have to kiss someone's ass even if the US does crumble.
If you really want to be depressed: For a 1%er... if getting a solar installation subsidy cost them even an hour of their time talking to their congresscritter, it would be a losing proposition.
That's why the 1%ers have people for that. Actual face time to congresscritters to "seal the deal" is much less than an hour per subsidy.
Just like those "customer loyalty" thingies. Do you really thing they are for *your* benefit?
Theoretically it's a case of mutualism. You stick your proboscis in the nectar of discounts, and get the pollen of demographic information all over you.
What you're doing here is killing innovation, but you guys here don't see that. You're thanking the government for forcing you to pay $1200 for no productive purpose.
Not just the $1200, but the requirement to track all the end-users. Which means the end users must sign a register to get the product, just like with pseudoephedrine. Signing such a thing essentially says "Yes, you have probable cause go ahead and raid my house any time there's a hint of meth in my general area", thus further eroding the fourth amendment.
Yeah, I'm still stuffed about the loss of pseudoephedrine.
As much as I like this guy and his sense of humor, it seems much less sinister than the Slashdot linkbait summary indicates. It appears to be a pretty simple case of "government restricts chemical that can be used in meth labs, old guy making product in his garage with said product doesn't want to deal with the government bureaucracy and is surprised when the government shuts off his access to that chemical."
You can justify anything if you accept that sort of reasoning. Know another chemical used in meth labs? Yep, our old enemy DHMO.
Besides, the cops want infamy. Infamy inspires fear, fear inspires obedience. This is why the IRS never tries to refute any of the atrocity stories about them; they want the reputation.
In all the unjustified violence against OWS protesters, I am most shocked that heads aren't rolling, police officers aren't being fired and Mayor Bloomberg hasn't been deposed yet. For every excessive force use that occurred during these peaceful demonstration - how many have been punished by now as a consequence?? (except for those on the receiving end of the excessive force, that is)
Shocked really, or shocked like Claude Rains? Because if you're shocked really, you must be new here. And by here I mean the world, not Slashdot.
Did you actually read Brave New World? It was just as much reliant on fascist enforcement of thought crime laws as 1984. It was somewhat less sinister (Mustafa Mond seemed like a downright nice guy, all things considered), but the means involved were not terribly different.
BNW had the eugenics and the drugs and the prenatal manipulation, so in that way it was _more_ sinister; 1984 used conventional fear and punishment to make you into the new socialist man (or at least to act like him), whereas BNW more directly made you that way. But life in the _1984_ world was basically miserable, even for non-dissidents. BNW, on the other hand, was hedonistic.
I think "don't worry, it's all OK" is a bigger problem than panic among geeks right now. Television has had an effect on at least two generations of children: look at the difference in the kind of academic rigor that could be expected of children before the television age with those after.
Yeah, kids nowadays, they've never heard of "post hoc ergo propter hoc".
This is the often-overlooked benefit of top schools. The most talented students tend to learn a lot from one another, and so you want to surround yourself with the smartest peers you can. If all the smart people were going to North-South Nowhere State University at Tinyville, that's where you should go. But they're not. They're all going to the "top" programs. So, if your smart, you should go there too.
But they're not all going to the top programs, for various reasons. And sometimes quantity has a quality all of its own. I went to the University of Maryland for my BSCS (a decent program, but not typically mentioned in the same breath as MIT, Cornell, Stanford, etc), and while there were certainly any number of people in the program who just didn't get it, there were still quite a few really smart (at least in CS) people there... usually hanging out in the computer labs.
However, I think the worth of a top-tier school is much more today than it was 2 decades ago. Mostly because the economy is so terrible that top companies can be so selective as to ignore second-tier graduates for entry-level positions.
I see a lot of bitching with respect to patents, but without patents we would not have seen the 19th & 20th century rise of the U.S. in mechanical and electrical and electronic invention.
Maybe it would have been the 18th and 19th century rise instead. Sewing machines, steam engines, and digital computers -- three important inventions delayed in development for years over patent wars.
The more interesting data mining is currently implemented as trade secrets. Apparently, the credit card companies can predict, with 99% accuracy, if you are going to get a divorce within the next two years.
Note that Visa flat-out denied it. Which is unusual; usually there's a mealy-mouthed denial or a refusal to admit or deny it.
Also, the banks don't usually know what you bought, only where you bought it. This makes such precision a little harder. That's why there's 'loyalty cards'.
What that 1/3 range means is that batteries don't store as much energy per cubic foot as gasoline or diesel fuel does, that's all. And that is probably about to change anyway.
If only. Never believe a battery breakthrough until they're shipping the product; breakthroughs X years away from commercialization are a dime a dozen.
Aside from all the apologizing for the EU, the only real bit of extra information it provides is that this wasn't from the bottled water producers but a test case (troll?) from a couple of professors.
From the article:
Firstly, "regular consumption" of water doesn't reduce the risk of dehydration any more than eating a pork pie a day reduces the risk of starvation.
True but vacuous; eating a pork pie a day does reduce the risk of starvation.
If I drink half a pint of bottled water while running through a desert in the blistering sun, I'll still end up dehydrated, and if I drink several bottles today, that won't prevent me from dehydrating tomorrow.
True but irrelevant; the claim doesn't indicate these are true. By analogy: you can take an aspirin a day but if you smoke like a chimney and eat nothing but saturated fat, you're still at elevated risk of a heart attack. And if you stop taking the aspirin, the protective effect disappears.
Secondly, dehydration doesn't just mean a lack of water, or 'being thirsty'; electrolytes like sodium are important too.
No, I'm sorry, dehydration does in fact mean a lack of water. Being low on sodium while having plenty of water is a different condition, hyponatremia.
There is, in fact, very little a municipality can do about the flavor of their water.
Not true; they can mess with the disinfecting chemicals. Philadelphia, for instance, adds enough chlorine that the tap water burns your throat going down. Other municipalities use chloramines rather than straight chlorine, which produces a different taste.
Slashdot Mirror
Mordac, preventer of information services.
At worst, they're, well, worse.
My "favorite" IT story has our development team halfway across the world, needing access to a system in our DMZ from the customer's system. The IT team flat out refused to do it, citing "security". My boss had one of the dev people back in the US literally bypass them with an unauthorized Ethernet connection.
My second favorite involves a customer IT department who insisted on installing a broken anti-virus product on a VM I needed to work on, and then not being available to fix it. They were very unhappy when I managed to kill it (making the system usable again; it was trying to contact a server it had no path to, and using most of its cpu time doing it), especially when they realized they couldn't even credibly threaten me for doing it.
Unfortunately, that usually means they absorb each other's worst characteristics.
The movie industry is the reason there cannot. They have forced the DMCA upon us, and it did not work. They have sued everyone they can find, and it has not worked. Now they want (and will likely get) the power to ban people from the Internet on their own say-so; of course, it will not work, so they'll come up with something even worse. Content fingerprinting in every videocamera, perhaps, much as the RIAA suggested an anti-piracy detector in every ADC.
The DMCA was enough. PROTECT-IP is more than enough.
Paying the Danegeld never works.
He prefers to be called "Lord Sauron" now.
Is the entertainment you get from movies worth the loss of freedom all around that the movie industry buys?
Spock's statement was one of personal morality, not social policy. He was sacrificing himself for the good of the many, not demanding that anyone else do so.
Until you grow a pair, you're going to have to kiss someone's ass even if the US does crumble.
That's why the 1%ers have people for that. Actual face time to congresscritters to "seal the deal" is much less than an hour per subsidy.
Theoretically it's a case of mutualism. You stick your proboscis in the nectar of discounts, and get the pollen of demographic information all over you.
Not just the $1200, but the requirement to track all the end-users. Which means the end users must sign a register to get the product, just like with pseudoephedrine. Signing such a thing essentially says "Yes, you have probable cause go ahead and raid my house any time there's a hint of meth in my general area", thus further eroding the fourth amendment.
Yeah, I'm still stuffed about the loss of pseudoephedrine.
You can justify anything if you accept that sort of reasoning. Know another chemical used in meth labs? Yep, our old enemy DHMO.
Pepper spray is not a vomiting agent; if the protesters were vomiting then whatever was in there was more than pepper spray (CS).
Besides, the cops want infamy. Infamy inspires fear, fear inspires obedience. This is why the IRS never tries to refute any of the atrocity stories about them; they want the reputation.
Shocked really, or shocked like Claude Rains? Because if you're shocked really, you must be new here. And by here I mean the world, not Slashdot.
BNW had the eugenics and the drugs and the prenatal manipulation, so in that way it was _more_ sinister; 1984 used conventional fear and punishment to make you into the new socialist man (or at least to act like him), whereas BNW more directly made you that way. But life in the _1984_ world was basically miserable, even for non-dissidents. BNW, on the other hand, was hedonistic.
So, basically, it always matters?
Yeah, kids nowadays, they've never heard of "post hoc ergo propter hoc".
But they're not all going to the top programs, for various reasons. And sometimes quantity has a quality all of its own. I went to the University of Maryland for my BSCS (a decent program, but not typically mentioned in the same breath as MIT, Cornell, Stanford, etc), and while there were certainly any number of people in the program who just didn't get it, there were still quite a few really smart (at least in CS) people there... usually hanging out in the computer labs.
However, I think the worth of a top-tier school is much more today than it was 2 decades ago. Mostly because the economy is so terrible that top companies can be so selective as to ignore second-tier graduates for entry-level positions.
Sorry. Autonomous taxis aren't going to work until someone figures out a foolproof way of not making them into autonomous public toilets.
As dystopias go, it seems better than where we're headed now. Brave New World over 1984.
Maybe it would have been the 18th and 19th century rise instead. Sewing machines, steam engines, and digital computers -- three important inventions delayed in development for years over patent wars.
Note that Visa flat-out denied it. Which is unusual; usually there's a mealy-mouthed denial or a refusal to admit or deny it.
Also, the banks don't usually know what you bought, only where you bought it. This makes such precision a little harder. That's why there's 'loyalty cards'.
If only. Never believe a battery breakthrough until they're shipping the product; breakthroughs X years away from commercialization are a dime a dozen.
Aside from all the apologizing for the EU, the only real bit of extra information it provides is that this wasn't from the bottled water producers but a test case (troll?) from a couple of professors. From the article:
True but vacuous; eating a pork pie a day does reduce the risk of starvation.
True but irrelevant; the claim doesn't indicate these are true. By analogy: you can take an aspirin a day but if you smoke like a chimney and eat nothing but saturated fat, you're still at elevated risk of a heart attack. And if you stop taking the aspirin, the protective effect disappears.
No, I'm sorry, dehydration does in fact mean a lack of water. Being low on sodium while having plenty of water is a different condition, hyponatremia.
Not true; they can mess with the disinfecting chemicals. Philadelphia, for instance, adds enough chlorine that the tap water burns your throat going down. Other municipalities use chloramines rather than straight chlorine, which produces a different taste.