Amen! When you choose to be in a dangerous profession, you understand these risks and incorporate them into your decision making process.
Astronauts, like military members, police officers, firefighters, etc understand the risks inherent in their professions.
Unfortunately, the process gets perverted when the media sensationalizes individual deaths instead of the underlying good that these people do for society.
Then the public jumps on the bandwagon, causing the politicians to jump on the bandwagon, and public policy gets warped and we end up trying to make an inherently dangerous profession as safe as your typical office job.
I'd love it if we could someday learn to keep things in perspective and instead of flying off half-cocked we'd actually ask the people who are taking the risks if the risks are too great.
If the risks were truely greater then the rewards then we would not need NASA bureaucrats and politicians to shut down the program. The astronauts themselves would not be volunteering, and no one is ever forced to be an astronaut.
The website is by no means a plan for a atom bomb. It is a very generic description of the mechanisms used.
People do get locked up for disclosing national secrets. The Chinese guy probably deserves more then he got. The national labs are a mess (shitty mgmt, lack of oversite and training).
There is a practically unlimited amount of Uranium, only the absolute best sources are being tapped and accounted for on "reserve" calculations. Right now these are the most cost effective, and as such very limited uranium exploration has taken place. As the price of uranium goes up the number of places where it is economically feasible to mine for uranium goes up exponentially.
As far as who is mining the uranium, it is mostly a non-issue. Hell, in the mid 80's a French company (Cogema) bought several mines in the US including one in Wyoming where my father worked. As I recall they own a bunch in Australia too (the biggest current producer). Simply owning the mines and deposits does not trump the "host nation's" right to control how/where the exports go.
While I wouldn't consider many of the governments in Africa overly enlightened, I doubt the term "tribal government" is really appropriate to describe any of them since the colonial period.
As much as "You get what you pay for" might play into it so does "You get paid what you are worth".
I am an average guy, I went to public schools, I came home, and while I was told to do my homework daily, that was the extent of my parent's involvement in my education. I attended classes in overcrowded schools. I regularly had classes all through school with 30+ kids in them. I also had a 45 minute bus ride, two parents that worked, a good portion of the people I knew had alcoholic parents, etc.
The main difference was (Drum roll) My teachers, all of my teachers gave a shit, no one got "social promotions" and no one cared how I felt that I got F's in penmanship my entire school career. Every assignment was graded, by the teacher in a timely manner measured against a non-sliding scale.
If I felt my kid's teachers were half as good as mine were I'd happily vote to raise their pay to $50-60k after say 5 years (which is really fair (In my area, maybe not NY or DC) for someone with similar credentials).
Instead, what I see is bad test scores, rabid fighting against any efforts to hold them accountable, and this "Blame the parents", "Blame the tests", "Blame anyone but the teachers" attitude.
Parents can make the difference when teachers aren't performing properly, and when students are having particular problems. But when I am paying someone to educate my kids I expect that they will be doing the teaching, not abdicating the responsibility to me. My teachers did it, what's the problem?
I recently finished my bachelors degree (after 15 years, but that's not the point). The study room I used was frequented by teachers working on their masters degrees. I'll never forget an exchange amongst a group of them. They were discussing what was "their job" and what was the "parent's job", and one of them said "I don't even grade papers anymore, that's the parent's job". The others agreed that this was the way it should be. Yea...I'm putting that bunch in for a raise.
The time has come to (re)make teacher's and student's personally responsible for results. If you are a teacher and your students, as a whole, are performing subpar you get no raise, and after a couple of years, you have no job. As students, if you do not perform at the proper level you get held back until you perform properly or you turn 18, whichever comes first. I have found in my professional life that if you set the bar high, people will work to meet it.
There are a couple of barriers to this however that need knocked down. 1. Teacher's Unions - They reward longevity over skill, this is wrong. - They protect bad teachers, this is wrong. 2. The Lack of choices - If the schools are bad, parents and students alike need to be able to avoid them. You pro-union people can consider this a strike, we won't go to your school or support it with our tax dollars unless you make the conditions for learning tolerable (good dedicated teachers doing good work). 3. Waste of the tax dollars we do send your way - Why do new schools have to look like the Taj Mahal? - My first two schools looked like soviet era apartment complexes, we learned in them just fine. - Too much money is wasted on computers/networks/etc. Frankly, you don't need to learn too much (which is good because you won't) about computers in k-12 school. A basic familiarity is fine, "Cisco Network Academy" is just silly. You have plenty of time later to learn as much as you need. Spend time/money on teaching the basics, kids can specialize later in life. 4. Wasting valuable teaching time on spreading your personal values, philosophies and political doctrines. You teach the facts, my wife and I will take care of the values, etc. Also, if you feel the need to re-write history, do it on your time, at the bar, with friends, not with my kids. 5. Buying shitty textbooks. (Really, everyone who reads this should take a few minutes and google this, it was bad when I was a kid, it's worse now). 6. Bring back recess and daily PE.
Amen...If being considered a dickhead gets you into the same class of coder as Theo or DJB buy me a freaking turtleneck! I thought this was a meritocracy?
Linux can be a piece of shit. I've been using it since Slackware 95 and it's almost stable now (although at the same time it is becoming so bloated I'm not sure it is a real option for anything other then a desktop these days).
*BSD are relatively clean *NIX.
If you wanted to hack on Theo you should say "OpenBSD is a secure OS* there has never been a security flaw in core OpenBSD"
*Core OpenBSD is defined as the command 'ls' only. Any flaws in the other 9000 parts of the OS are solely the responsibility of the respective maintainers.
The problem is that half the people on here don't realise three important things: 1. Sun has given ALOT of free stuff to the community since the beginning. 2. The community is a hell of a lot more then Linux/Linus or Stallman(the designated socialist)/FSF or Debian or RedHat. It is an idea of sharing that transcends famous names and pundits. 3. The existance of a community, and a vast shared pool of open source code "Free as in beer" software is a hugely great thing.
So while Stallman can whine about the existance of intellectual property all he wants, sane (well non-socialist) people should not be dragged down to his level.
Hell, when I was a kid learning to program I would have killed for someone to give away a language and sdk like Sun does Java or a decent office suite like OO. The way it was I had to stick with BASIC until I had saved enough money and good grace with my dad for him to fork a couple of hundred dollars out for a C compiler.
And open source code? You jest! I trolled half the fidonet nodes in the country trying to find the few scraps of public domain source code that were available to learn from.
I guess the point here is that Sun gives you like $700 worth of "free as in beer" software and they get MFed for it.
If I had a friend who gave me $700 worth of free beer, I'd thank them instead of bitching because it was their favorite brand.
Amen! The only things more ignorant then this idea are the people who will actually spew forth their pseudo intellectual [left,fac,race]ist crap into "podcasts" to be broadcast on this station.
Maybe upon actually hearing their drivel broadcast they will realize the voices in their head are wrong, and they really are as stupid as I have been telling them they are all along.
Like this posting, the radio listeners of SF are going to need some moderation.:-)
Dan
P.S. It is also kinda cute that the HTML generator for "OpenSource Radio" is MSHTML. "content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2627" name=GENERATOR"
Sun's AMD based systems basically cost the same as Dells Intel based ones do at high quantities.
That is to say, I can go to Sun's website as Joe Blow and buy a more powerful AMD based system for equal or less then I can go to Dell's website and buy a comparable Intel system, even with my premier deal.
Then I can leverage this value because I can run the same OS (Solaris 10) on both my enterprise systems and web farms, etc. I can even "port" my custom apps easily between them (spelled re-compile) due to the source compatibility. So in essence, I can run any of my apps on systems from 256 CPU Fujitsu built systems clear down to 1U AMD based systems, all at 64 bits. And when the OS changes I KNOW my apps will still run.
Voila! Horizontal and Vertical scaling with 100% upward compatibility. Not bad...Who else offers this?
Then you throw on top of that linux compatibility, and zone technology and finally you have an OS that YOU control instead of it setting limits for you. Moreover, Solaris IS rock solid. For my money there is no other OS out there that can stack up to Solaris for reliability, and with the exception of some bad cpu's a few years ago the same could be said for Sun hardware (and really the bad cpu's were IBM screwing with them). Couple that with the fact that SPARC is an open architecture and technically anyone can build SPARC systems (Like Fujitsu does).
In fact the only negative things I think you could say about Sun/Solaris is that McNealy is a goof ball (But really, what big tech company from that era isn't headed by a goof ball? MS? Oracle? Apple?) and that their management console sucks (and I don't think that is really a liability, I LIKE my unix admins to actually know command line UNIX.)
While I would agree that Java development is sapping resources from Sun I don't think you could make a case for saying that Java is undermining Sun's hardware business unless you really don't understand what Java is.
I envy you...The first time really is the best (not that the other 100 times are bad mind you).
I got the 4 volume set as a way to "keep quiet" during a family vacation (I was maybe 12) to the west coast (from Wyoming). I ended up reading them all aloud, from somewhere around the part where the bypass plans were "On display" and where the mongolians thundered through the guy's mind because my family got sick of listening to me laugh hysterically and wondering what was wrong with me. It was a good trip, I think.
I now read the 5 book series at least annually...It helps keep me sane.
We expect our politicians to have political agendas as well as social agendas. (and really one group is as bad as the other, Democrats just bitch more when they are out of power)
We expect our companies to focus on making money and our actors to focus on entertaining. (recently, both have failed us)
If Ballmer wanted to get into the political scene he could get himself elected, same as Soros, M. Moore, or Ted Turner.
Misusing corporate funds to push social or unrelated political reform is inappropriate no matter who does it.
"Since when does the government owe any corporation a living? If the corporation can't find a market and compete within it, that's just tough shit."
I think the deal here is that they had a market and some geek at NOAA changed the rules a year or so ago and now the government is moving into the local and specialized forecast business where they never have been before.
This is kinda the same situation we would have if NSA had started actively developing, marketing, and distributing SELinux, effectively using our tax dollars to kill an existing industry, but at the same time providing a service to the population.
Each of these need to be decided on their own merits. Personally, I think NOAA should limit their involvement to collecting the raw data and deseminating it, not local or specialized forecasting. But this feeling is mostly based on the fact that NOAA is spending additional tax dollars to do something the private sector was doing fine, and effectively freely to most Americans (except specialized, which companies should pay for)
Why would a public company spend their money on pushing a bill that would tend to piss off half their customers when the outcome doesn't matter to them as a company?
TO me their getting messed up in this debate is a lose-lose situation: 1. They wasted $37M 2. They pissed off half their customers by wasting this $37M 3. They backed down 4. They pissed off the other half of their customers by backing down from a loser position
So...All of their customers are pissed off, and they are out $37M, good corporate governance!
This makes about as much sense as Sprint coming off anti-gun a few years back...
Advice to companies, stay out of politics unless the bill in question will affect your bottom line.
TO argue this point you would have to prove that there was an existing "right" to perform sodomy. I don't think you will find that this "right" existed after the fall of Rome.
As a man I don't understand why you think you (in the plural sense) have an obligation to "share" your "lifestyle" unless I specifically ask you (which would be in very bad taste).
I wouldn't mind gay people if they would shut the hell up about it, and quit throwing it in our (collective) faces. (Granted, not all gay people feel this need, I respect those that don't)
I certainly don't walk around telling people about my sexual practices, or groping my wife in public. Within reason I expect the same from everyone else. Lord knows I never felt the need to "out" myself to my friends and family, neither should you. Your mom doesn't want to know where you stick your "thing" and neither do your friends, and neither do I.
I won't wear a "Proud to screw chicks" shirt, you can get rid of your "proud to screw guys" shirt.
Although, this whole thread boggles my mind, I have never found anyone who did not like HHGG, hell, my wife who only reads about 1 book per decade wouldn't put it down after she got past the first couple chapters.
"despite the development of a vast number of new tools and languages"
It's probably as much "because of" as "despite". We were doing ok until perl (python, ruby, rebol, etc) came out.
Seriously, if you want to see code quality go up we'd need to revisit liability laws, not fix the languages, programmers, or OS's.
As long as the management of the involved companies can ship "good enough" without any liability there is no rationale for producing bullet proof code...It just costs too much and no one really cares.
While IMO he is kind of a loser these days, Nader did this exact thing with the automotive companies. Making companies liable is really the only way to fix it. (It's why we don't have 2005 Pintos blowing up left and right)
While it's probably not PC on SlashDot, It's not even a matter of "evil" companies, it is a matter of the managers of these companies being financially responsible. I don't own MS stock, but if I did I'd raise holy hell if I found out that they delayed a product for 5 years to fix all of the bugs, lost their market share, etc when "good enough" would earn me a dividend, and at no risk to the company (no liability).
My how angry! The anger of the zealots does lots to hold back Linux (just like it did to Mac and Amiga before it).
CA offers criticism of the current state of linux and the zealots get pissy. Hell in my opinion they are exactly right, there is a lot of bloat in the kernel these days. Some things should only be done as modules, and some stuff should be retired (err, removed from the default kernel)
Since right about 95 I've been of the opinion that the anti-MS desktop crowd has in many ways held back Linux from being the server platform it could be. I wouldn't mind seeing a fork where the "server" version went one way and the "desktop" version went another, within the kernel some decisions make more sense for one side then the other. Moreover, often simpler = more stable, everything else being equal I'd rather have a 1M line kernel then a 10M line kernel.
So instead of taking it as an opportunity to improve you take it the wrong way.
Maybe there are reasons for the way things are now, but that in no way makes this idea of coupling the modules looser a bad one or make CA the anti-christ (they are, but not for saying this) when they critique the state of things from their perspective.
Of course there are no viruses for OS X. The thing is practically unusable.
I decided in the interest of fairness I'd buy an Xserve for work.
So I got the thing in and set about setting the IP address (now this is a server so it's headless).
48 hours later we give up and start googling for a manual after we determine beyond the shadow of a doubt that ifconfig and/etc/hosts don't do anything, and neither does/etc/passwd or/etc/shadow either.
Finally, we figure out that we need to use 'serversetup' to do this (of course you do, this IS Unix after all) and to manipulate users we need to use 'nicl' or something like that.
So we decide, why not just load SuSE on this and forget this OS X crap? So we google around some more trying to find out how to boot from cdrom, which for some reason doesn't "just work". All we find is instructions for how to tell it to do this from a GUI, but like I said before this is headless and we're certainly not going to throw more good money after bad.
At this point we decide we'll just use this top of the line Xserve as an internal FTP repository, Apple couldn't have screwed that up. Well, they did. Setting a user's home directory and making the FTP server actually use it is a project that takes all afternoon.
All in all, they probably are as secure as obscurity can make something. I've worked on pretty much every UNIX out there and can tell you, this is the very worst, if you can even call it UNIX. Apple should have stuck with A/UX.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is a scorpion and a frog.
Everyone knows that God puffed out of existance over the BabelFish, not some stupid bee/bee-watcher deal.
Dan
I found this particular Nazi comment a bit bothersome given that he is a Finn (Who were Nazi allies in WW2)
In general they (comments like his) are in poor taste, but this just strikes me as worse.
Maybe it's just me.
Dan
The Wikipedia changed their name to Wikipaedia?
Amen! When you choose to be in a dangerous profession, you understand these risks and incorporate them into your decision making process.
Astronauts, like military members, police officers, firefighters, etc understand the risks inherent in their professions.
Unfortunately, the process gets perverted when the media sensationalizes individual deaths instead of the underlying good that these people do for society.
Then the public jumps on the bandwagon, causing the politicians to jump on the bandwagon, and public policy gets warped and we end up trying to make an inherently dangerous profession as safe as your typical office job.
I'd love it if we could someday learn to keep things in perspective and instead of flying off half-cocked we'd actually ask the people who are taking the risks if the risks are too great.
If the risks were truely greater then the rewards then we would not need NASA bureaucrats and politicians to shut down the program. The astronauts themselves would not be volunteering, and no one is ever forced to be an astronaut.
There are no rewards when no risks are taken.
Dan
Wow, where do I start...
The website is by no means a plan for a atom bomb. It is a very generic description of the mechanisms used.
People do get locked up for disclosing national secrets. The Chinese guy probably deserves more then he got. The national labs are a mess (shitty mgmt, lack of oversite and training).
There is a practically unlimited amount of Uranium, only the absolute best sources are being tapped and accounted for on "reserve" calculations. Right now these are the most cost effective, and as such very limited uranium exploration has taken place. As the price of uranium goes up the number of places where it is economically feasible to mine for uranium goes up exponentially.
As far as who is mining the uranium, it is mostly a non-issue. Hell, in the mid 80's a French company (Cogema) bought several mines in the US including one in Wyoming where my father worked. As I recall they own a bunch in Australia too (the biggest current producer). Simply owning the mines and deposits does not trump the "host nation's" right to control how/where the exports go.
While I wouldn't consider many of the governments in Africa overly enlightened, I doubt the term "tribal government" is really appropriate to describe any of them since the colonial period.
Dan
Actually this guy is all wrong.
He's right about the books, I have them all and use them on a regular basis - No better books on UNIX or IP out there.
He's wrong about checking with the wife. What you do is buy the books, all of them at once. Then tell your wife you blew the cash at the strip club.
Dan
As much as "You get what you pay for" might play into it so does "You get paid what you are worth".
I am an average guy, I went to public schools, I came home, and while I was told to do my homework daily, that was the extent of my parent's involvement in my education. I attended classes in overcrowded schools. I regularly had classes all through school with 30+ kids in them. I also had a 45 minute bus ride, two parents that worked, a good portion of the people I knew had alcoholic parents, etc.
The main difference was (Drum roll) My teachers, all of my teachers gave a shit, no one got "social promotions" and no one cared how I felt that I got F's in penmanship my entire school career. Every assignment was graded, by the teacher in a timely manner measured against a non-sliding scale.
If I felt my kid's teachers were half as good as mine were I'd happily vote to raise their pay to $50-60k after say 5 years (which is really fair (In my area, maybe not NY or DC) for someone with similar credentials).
Instead, what I see is bad test scores, rabid fighting against any efforts to hold them accountable, and this "Blame the parents", "Blame the tests", "Blame anyone but the teachers" attitude.
Parents can make the difference when teachers aren't performing properly, and when students are having particular problems. But when I am paying someone to educate my kids I expect that they will be doing the teaching, not abdicating the responsibility to me. My teachers did it, what's the problem?
I recently finished my bachelors degree (after 15 years, but that's not the point). The study room I used was frequented by teachers working on their masters degrees. I'll never forget an exchange amongst a group of them. They were discussing what was "their job" and what was the "parent's job", and one of them said "I don't even grade papers anymore, that's the parent's job". The others agreed that this was the way it should be. Yea...I'm putting that bunch in for a raise.
The time has come to (re)make teacher's and student's personally responsible for results. If you are a teacher and your students, as a whole, are performing subpar you get no raise, and after a couple of years, you have no job. As students, if you do not perform at the proper level you get held back until you perform properly or you turn 18, whichever comes first. I have found in my professional life that if you set the bar high, people will work to meet it.
There are a couple of barriers to this however that need knocked down.
1. Teacher's Unions - They reward longevity over skill, this is wrong. - They protect bad teachers, this is wrong.
2. The Lack of choices - If the schools are bad, parents and students alike need to be able to avoid them. You pro-union people can consider this a strike, we won't go to your school or support it with our tax dollars unless you make the conditions for learning tolerable (good dedicated teachers doing good work).
3. Waste of the tax dollars we do send your way - Why do new schools have to look like the Taj Mahal? - My first two schools looked like soviet era apartment complexes, we learned in them just fine. - Too much money is wasted on computers/networks/etc. Frankly, you don't need to learn too much (which is good because you won't) about computers in k-12 school. A basic familiarity is fine, "Cisco Network Academy" is just silly. You have plenty of time later to learn as much as you need. Spend time/money on teaching the basics, kids can specialize later in life.
4. Wasting valuable teaching time on spreading your personal values, philosophies and political doctrines. You teach the facts, my wife and I will take care of the values, etc. Also, if you feel the need to re-write history, do it on your time, at the bar, with friends, not with my kids.
5. Buying shitty textbooks. (Really, everyone who reads this should take a few minutes and google this, it was bad when I was a kid, it's worse now).
6. Bring back recess and daily PE.
Amen...If being considered a dickhead gets you into the same class of coder as Theo or DJB buy me a freaking turtleneck! I thought this was a meritocracy?
Linux can be a piece of shit. I've been using it since Slackware 95 and it's almost stable now (although at the same time it is becoming so bloated I'm not sure it is a real option for anything other then a desktop these days).
*BSD are relatively clean *NIX.
If you wanted to hack on Theo you should say "OpenBSD is a secure OS* there has never been a security flaw in core OpenBSD"
*Core OpenBSD is defined as the command 'ls' only. Any flaws in the other 9000 parts of the OS are solely the responsibility of the respective maintainers.
Respectfully
Dan
Amen.
The problem is that half the people on here don't realise three important things:
1. Sun has given ALOT of free stuff to the community since the beginning.
2. The community is a hell of a lot more then Linux/Linus or Stallman(the designated socialist)/FSF or Debian or RedHat. It is an idea of sharing that transcends famous names and pundits.
3. The existance of a community, and a vast shared pool of open source code "Free as in beer" software is a hugely great thing.
So while Stallman can whine about the existance of intellectual property all he wants, sane (well non-socialist) people should not be dragged down to his level.
Hell, when I was a kid learning to program I would have killed for someone to give away a language and sdk like Sun does Java or a decent office suite like OO. The way it was I had to stick with BASIC until I had saved enough money and good grace with my dad for him to fork a couple of hundred dollars out for a C compiler.
And open source code? You jest! I trolled half the fidonet nodes in the country trying to find the few scraps of public domain source code that were available to learn from.
I guess the point here is that Sun gives you like $700 worth of "free as in beer" software and they get MFed for it.
If I had a friend who gave me $700 worth of free beer, I'd thank them instead of bitching because it was their favorite brand.
Dan
Amen! The only things more ignorant then this idea are the people who will actually spew forth their pseudo intellectual [left,fac,race]ist crap into "podcasts" to be broadcast on this station.
:-)
Maybe upon actually hearing their drivel broadcast they will realize the voices in their head are wrong, and they really are as stupid as I have been telling them they are all along.
Like this posting, the radio listeners of SF are going to need some moderation.
Dan
P.S. It is also kinda cute that the HTML generator for "OpenSource Radio" is MSHTML.
"content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2627" name=GENERATOR"
Imagine that FUD on SlashDot...
Sun's AMD based systems basically cost the same as Dells Intel based ones do at high quantities.
That is to say, I can go to Sun's website as Joe Blow and buy a more powerful AMD based system for equal or less then I can go to Dell's website and buy a comparable Intel system, even with my premier deal.
Then I can leverage this value because I can run the same OS (Solaris 10) on both my enterprise systems and web farms, etc. I can even "port" my custom apps easily between them (spelled re-compile) due to the source compatibility. So in essence, I can run any of my apps on systems from 256 CPU Fujitsu built systems clear down to 1U AMD based systems, all at 64 bits. And when the OS changes I KNOW my apps will still run.
Voila! Horizontal and Vertical scaling with 100% upward compatibility. Not bad...Who else offers this?
Then you throw on top of that linux compatibility, and zone technology and finally you have an OS that YOU control instead of it setting limits for you. Moreover, Solaris IS rock solid. For my money there is no other OS out there that can stack up to Solaris for reliability, and with the exception of some bad cpu's a few years ago the same could be said for Sun hardware (and really the bad cpu's were IBM screwing with them). Couple that with the fact that SPARC is an open architecture and technically anyone can build SPARC systems (Like Fujitsu does).
In fact the only negative things I think you could say about Sun/Solaris is that McNealy is a goof ball (But really, what big tech company from that era isn't headed by a goof ball? MS? Oracle? Apple?) and that their management console sucks (and I don't think that is really a liability, I LIKE my unix admins to actually know command line UNIX.)
While I would agree that Java development is sapping resources from Sun I don't think you could make a case for saying that Java is undermining Sun's hardware business unless you really don't understand what Java is.
Dan
I envy you...The first time really is the best (not that the other 100 times are bad mind you).
I got the 4 volume set as a way to "keep quiet" during a family vacation (I was maybe 12) to the west coast (from Wyoming). I ended up reading them all aloud, from somewhere around the part where the bypass plans were "On display" and where the mongolians thundered through the guy's mind because my family got sick of listening to me laugh hysterically and wondering what was wrong with me. It was a good trip, I think.
I now read the 5 book series at least annually...It helps keep me sane.
Dan
Yea, except you missed the whole point...
We expect our politicians to have political agendas as well as social agendas. (and really one group is as bad as the other, Democrats just bitch more when they are out of power)
We expect our companies to focus on making money and our actors to focus on entertaining. (recently, both have failed us)
If Ballmer wanted to get into the political scene he could get himself elected, same as Soros, M. Moore, or Ted Turner.
Misusing corporate funds to push social or unrelated political reform is inappropriate no matter who does it.
Dan
"Since when does the government owe any corporation a living? If the corporation can't find a market and compete within it, that's just tough shit."
I think the deal here is that they had a market and some geek at NOAA changed the rules a year or so ago and now the government is moving into the local and specialized forecast business where they never have been before.
This is kinda the same situation we would have if NSA had started actively developing, marketing, and distributing SELinux, effectively using our tax dollars to kill an existing industry, but at the same time providing a service to the population.
Each of these need to be decided on their own merits. Personally, I think NOAA should limit their involvement to collecting the raw data and deseminating it, not local or specialized forecasting. But this feeling is mostly based on the fact that NOAA is spending additional tax dollars to do something the private sector was doing fine, and effectively freely to most Americans (except specialized, which companies should pay for)
Why would a public company spend their money on pushing a bill that would tend to piss off half their customers when the outcome doesn't matter to them as a company?
TO me their getting messed up in this debate is a lose-lose situation:
1. They wasted $37M
2. They pissed off half their customers by wasting this $37M
3. They backed down
4. They pissed off the other half of their customers by backing down from a loser position
So...All of their customers are pissed off, and they are out $37M, good corporate governance!
This makes about as much sense as Sprint coming off anti-gun a few years back...
Advice to companies, stay out of politics unless the bill in question will affect your bottom line.
Dan
TO argue this point you would have to prove that there was an existing "right" to perform sodomy. I don't think you will find that this "right" existed after the fall of Rome.
As a man I don't understand why you think you (in the plural sense) have an obligation to "share" your "lifestyle" unless I specifically ask you (which would be in very bad taste).
I wouldn't mind gay people if they would shut the hell up about it, and quit throwing it in our (collective) faces. (Granted, not all gay people feel this need, I respect those that don't)
I certainly don't walk around telling people about my sexual practices, or groping my wife in public. Within reason I expect the same from everyone else. Lord knows I never felt the need to "out" myself to my friends and family, neither should you. Your mom doesn't want to know where you stick your "thing" and neither do your friends, and neither do I.
I won't wear a "Proud to screw chicks" shirt, you can get rid of your "proud to screw guys" shirt.
Dan
"One year later CUPS still SUCKS"
Try Christopher Moore's books.
Similar effects, different stories.
Although, this whole thread boggles my mind, I have never found anyone who did not like HHGG, hell, my wife who only reads about 1 book per decade wouldn't put it down after she got past the first couple chapters.
"despite the development of a vast number of new tools and languages"
It's probably as much "because of" as "despite". We were doing ok until perl (python, ruby, rebol, etc) came out.
Seriously, if you want to see code quality go up we'd need to revisit liability laws, not fix the languages, programmers, or OS's.
As long as the management of the involved companies can ship "good enough" without any liability there is no rationale for producing bullet proof code...It just costs too much and no one really cares.
While IMO he is kind of a loser these days, Nader did this exact thing with the automotive companies. Making companies liable is really the only way to fix it. (It's why we don't have 2005 Pintos blowing up left and right)
While it's probably not PC on SlashDot, It's not even a matter of "evil" companies, it is a matter of the managers of these companies being financially responsible. I don't own MS stock, but if I did I'd raise holy hell if I found out that they delayed a product for 5 years to fix all of the bugs, lost their market share, etc when "good enough" would earn me a dividend, and at no risk to the company (no liability).
Dan
My how angry! The anger of the zealots does lots to hold back Linux (just like it did to Mac and Amiga before it).
CA offers criticism of the current state of linux and the zealots get pissy. Hell in my opinion they are exactly right, there is a lot of bloat in the kernel these days. Some things should only be done as modules, and some stuff should be retired (err, removed from the default kernel)
Since right about 95 I've been of the opinion that the anti-MS desktop crowd has in many ways held back Linux from being the server platform it could be. I wouldn't mind seeing a fork where the "server" version went one way and the "desktop" version went another, within the kernel some decisions make more sense for one side then the other. Moreover, often simpler = more stable, everything else being equal I'd rather have a 1M line kernel then a 10M line kernel.
So instead of taking it as an opportunity to improve you take it the wrong way.
Maybe there are reasons for the way things are now, but that in no way makes this idea of coupling the modules looser a bad one or make CA the anti-christ (they are, but not for saying this) when they critique the state of things from their perspective.
Hmmm...
I'm thinking mid 20's...
First job after McD's or the help desk...
Some college, no degree, "Smarter then everyone else"...(ITT?)
Writes perl scripts...badly...
Thinks the "king of the world" guy from the movie "GoldenEye" is cool...
Has at least 1 t-shirt from thinkgeek...(Probably "Got Root?")
Bad haircut...
Will probably get fired when his boss finds out what he did to the DNS server.
Dan
Of course there are no viruses for OS X. The thing is practically unusable.
/etc/hosts don't do anything, and neither does /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow either.
I decided in the interest of fairness I'd buy an Xserve for work.
So I got the thing in and set about setting the IP address (now this is a server so it's headless).
48 hours later we give up and start googling for a manual after we determine beyond the shadow of a doubt that ifconfig and
Finally, we figure out that we need to use 'serversetup' to do this (of course you do, this IS Unix after all) and to manipulate users we need to use 'nicl' or something like that.
So we decide, why not just load SuSE on this and forget this OS X crap? So we google around some more trying to find out how to boot from cdrom, which for some reason doesn't "just work". All we find is instructions for how to tell it to do this from a GUI, but like I said before this is headless and we're certainly not going to throw more good money after bad.
At this point we decide we'll just use this top of the line Xserve as an internal FTP repository, Apple couldn't have screwed that up. Well, they did. Setting a user's home directory and making the FTP server actually use it is a project that takes all afternoon.
All in all, they probably are as secure as obscurity can make something. I've worked on pretty much every UNIX out there and can tell you, this is the very worst, if you can even call it UNIX. Apple should have stuck with A/UX.
Dan
Or is she NOT going to be graduating anytime soon...This "invention" looks like something my 6 year old would come up with.