All men are equal under the law... the police are a little 'more equal than the rest of us' though.
That is a pretty ignorant statement. In truth law enformcement is held to a higher standard than normal civilians. That is the tradeoff made for the authority they are given. They can have their careers ruined and be fired for actions that are legal or misdeanors when comitted by civilians. They are more limited in how they can defend themselves if physically attacked than civilians are. They are more liable when attempting to help or rescue someone than civilians are. All this 24/7, regardless of whether on the job or off.
Not only do we need tight regulation of LE, every call to a scene should require the presence of a member of a public advocate (member of the press?) to document, witness and rate their actions.
The press is largely superficial, sometimes even clueless, why would you want them or other ill-informed individuals rating anyone's actions? If you doubt the press' cluelessness look at their reports in areas where you have in depth knowledge. In areas where I have such knowledge I often find their reports superficial, ill-informed, more emotional/sensationalist than informative or truth seeking. Why would I expect the press' performance to be any better in areas I don't have in depth knowledge? The image of the dedicated journalist digging for the truth against all odds is largely a fiction, a movie stereotype. In truth if they can get two unrelated people to say the same thing they generally go with that. There is already an effective balance on law enforcement, it's called the courts. If an officer misbehaves there is no shortage of lawyers who will be willing to file a lawsuit.
Secondly, the press can be about as dangerous to an individual as some around here accuse law enforcement. They are virtually untouchable, there is no check or balance upon them. They can get a story wrong, destroy you on the front page, and when they are proven to have been wrong they will bury their retraction inside and offer no compensation for the damage they have done.
Here's an idea, stop dropping bombs on people from the sky and they might stop blowing themselves up at the checkpoint.
Actually that is insufficient. They won't stop blowing things up until westerners leave all islamic countries and stop supporting non-secular or non-fundamentalist governments in these countries. If we had never touched Iraq the jihadists would still be setting off bombs, mostly in Kabul Afghanistan rather than Bagdhad Iraq. Their leaders are smart enough to know that they get far more political mileage out of Iraq, generating domestic political turmoil and fragmenting the west, since the west if far more unified regarding going into Afghanistan. This is very basic strategy.
"if there is anything evil it is the flaws in human nature"
This is exactly the point. Flaws in the nature/character of isolated individuals encourage them towards "crime" or "evil." Those flaws occur in law enforcement agents with very much the same frequency as in the larger population, but law enforcement agents have enhanced powers. Therefore, given identically flawed individuals from civilian and law enforcement populations, the "evil" law enforcement agent will be more dangerous.
Your logic is fatally flawed. Law enforcement officers are screened (investigated, tested, fired for questionable behavior on or off the job, etc) to weed out such individuals. The frequency is extremely low compared to the population as a whole.
He says the most dangerous criminals are government law enforcement agents.
You say you need police, and that they are a necessary evil.
Ok. So what's your disagreement with him exactly?
You mean beyond his being an idiot that thinks law enforcement agents are the most dangerous criminals? You do realize that the "evil" in "necessary evil" is figurative not literal, and that if there is anything evil it is the flaws in human nature that require large social units to have a professional policing force so that personal security is reasonably assured, and so that a stable social setting permitting art and commerce is established?
Corollary: your cops don't really have the option of having a second job; they're paid to ignore nothing, and to come down hard on anything that moves. For cops, no crime is too small. For spies, not so much. And that's why I trust spies more than cops.
You are mistaken. Police exercise a lot of discretion and do not "come down hard" on everything. It is logistically impossible to do so, time, paper work, etc. They also realize arrest is not always the most effective method to correct a situation. As a matter of fact, they bemoan various "zero tolerance" law/policies as distractions, wastes of time and resources, unjust,... However as those that wield the authority of the state, they are not allowed to make the laws and are stuck with whatever laws the politician who pandered to the voters best write.
As a kid who was brought up with the notion that "a policeman is someone you can always trust", that's the second-saddest fucking thing I've ever written. The saddest thing is that as an adult... it isn't that I've been lucky enough to have never encountered a bad cop (because I have been lucky -- I've never met a bad cop -- every cop I've encountered has been both polite and professional)... but it's that I think my experience has been lucky.
No you have met the typical cops. You don't hear about the good ones, just the aberrations that make the news doing something wrong.
Did anybody really think they wouldn't find a "use" for all the data they've been collecting?
Every single head-of-department has had his eye on it since day one.
Actually data mining and behavioral profiling has been going on for decades, "day one" was long before 9/11. It's no secret either.
The most dangerous of all criminals are those who carry badges and whose chief weapons are the power and authority of the state.
Without police you would be at the mercy of your neighbor with bigger muscles. Human nature is self serving, flawed in a social sense. People with badges and state authority are a necessary evil to create a peaceful environment once a community grows beyond the size of extended family / tribal units. In these smaller communities you kind of know everyone else and there are more intermediaries to talk people down when they are angered to a level that they become violent. Once a community becomes so large that anonymity is widespread violence becomes far more common, hence the development of professional law enforcement. Beyond a certain size a community is no longer self policing.
This assumes there are more chances that if someone has a different behavior to the majority's, then he is an undesirable person. This damages diversity by encouraging homogeneity.
I think you need to loosen the wrappings on the tin foil hat.;-) I knew a guy who did a lot of on-site tech support. Lots of flights around the country with very little time spent at the destination. Once when flying home the DEA questioned him for about 15 minutes. He fit a travel profile they look for, this was the early 1990s. He explained his job, they apologized for the inconvenience. I expect that nearly all false positives go something like that.
I expect that the article that started this thread misrepresented the details. Aside from behaviors like traveling to Pakistan for a couple of months, having wads of unexplained cash(1), etc they are not looking at many behaviors. Past law enforcement data mining that I saw had to do with associations. Who you called, who you had interactions with, what locations you frequented, etc. Such networks do help identify criminal networks - gangs, organized crime, etc. Might help for terrorist cells as well.
(1) Wads of unexplained cash have been reported for many decades. I think the laws requiring cash transactions above a certain to be reported are from the 1970s, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
People comiting "moral crimes". They have a history of blackmail using that sort of thing.
Actually, black mailing such individuals is a tried and true method of the foreign intelligence services. Hence the legitimate motivation for the FBI to look into such things with respect to security risks. Of course "moral" is a poor choice of words, and a certain lifestyle is not necessarily a security risk. For example it would be kind of tough to black mail a gay guy who was open about it. Someone who is hiding it could be a security risk, as is a straight guy who is cheating on his wife. Things are far more complicated than you suggest, and the black mail thing is largely from part decades.
I doubt phones based on this software will make much of an impact outside of geek circles.
Being a geek does not mean you will buy something merely because it is Linux based or FOSS based, that is a bit more like fan boy'ism. You need to realize that for most geeks Linux is not a crusade, many just need a good general purpose *nix environment and don't really give a rats ass about the politics and religion that gets so much attention. For this phone to make an impact in geek circles it has to deliver as a phone, like Linux delivered as a general purpose *nix. If its greatest feature is "its Linux based" then it will be a niche product even among geeks.
The entire concept of putting the state before the individual, is a cornerstone of fascist thinking.
"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" - John F. Kennedy
You need to review a math/logic text. "Facism implies Service" does not mean that "Service implies Facism".
I haven't read enough of Heinlein... I can certainly see why Starship Troopers in particular would make someone consider Heinlein militaristic.
I apologize for being repettitive but the movie was a pale shadow of the book, even with the book being a pretty short one. The book actually delevs into this topic far more than the movie. Heinlen was absolutely not militaristic in any fascist sense. He was coming from the perspective that a military is a necessary evil, and that having a military inferior to an aggressor invites aggression. History agrees with this perspective. You might want to read "Guns, Germs, and Steel", http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Socie ties/dp/0393317552. Over and over, in ancient and modern history, societies that lose the ability to wage war become victims - unless they have proxies who will defend them.
To me the most interesting, and a bit scary, thing with the movie is how blatant they managed to make the fascist/nazi imagery, complete with nazi style propaganda and uniforms while still getting viewers to cheer for the human military)
We embraced Stalin the fight Hitler, you don't think we would embrace Hitler to fight bugs.:-)
Most. Unless you are a hard core gamer with generous parents, or the less common job;-), there is little reason to replace a 3 year old computer. Software apps and computers have exceeded the demands of general home and business users many years ago.
Did I say "often"? No. I said it's easy. ie, it's not an uncommon situation.
Actually you are saying it happens often: "Not uncommon" -> common -> often.;-)
And five or six levels is very common, particularly in.NET, with the extra namespace declaration
If there is a single namespace declaration why indent? That sounds dogmatic.
Thus, a hard limit of 80 characters per line is, frankly, unrealistic, and only works to make code *less* readable, rather than moreso.
There are rare occasions when exceeding 80 characters helps rather than hurts. However it has been my experience that when I rework code that is getting excessively indented I end up with a better end result. I went through a phase where I dogmatically indented but I outgrew that and noticed the improvement.
1. Someone who actually knows what they're doing when it comes to computers is not a business person or an executive. A lot of people who dream about jobs in the technology sector always imagine that it somehow leads to the top of the glass tower and a corner office. It doesn't and it shouldn't. If you want that and you have middling to poor technical skills, then you're not cut out for technology. Instead you should go straight for that MBA now. Sure, there's the very rare and occasional individual who is very good with computers and also has business acumen, but you really have to look far and wide to find these strange hybrids. Most business people just aren't that good at computers other than using Office, maybe some SQL and that's about it. (This is not meant to insult anyone BTW)
I don't find geeks and execs incompatible. I think your observations are out of date, based upon the "old days" when computers were not part of every day culture. In short you are describing a generational thing, not a skills thing. The "very rare" individual you refer to is far more common today than in the past. For the last 10 to 15 years computers have been a part of every day life for children of a socioeconomic environment where buiness leaders and exec generally come from. More importantly I think you are failing to realize that individuals with lower skills exist in both the geek and business communities. I've seen plenty of programmers who generate some pretty mediocre code. I actually think the programmers are getting worse, today there are too many who entered the field because it seemed like a good career move rather than because they had some inherent interest. Personally I think managers and execs have been getting more technically proficient and that software developers have been getting less technically proficient. Also, the mistakes of executives are more visible than the mistakes of some technical folks.
FWIW, I am currently working on an MBA. I also had many erroneous preconceptions regarding business, marketing, etc. An MBA program has been a real eye opener. I have a much greater respect for business. I have used more advanced mathematics in marketing classes than in computer science classes, although not as much as in physics. Regarding my fellow classmates without technical backgrounds, I've not really had any problems explaining issues such as a Windows vs a Linux based infrastructure, how the GPL affects or does not affect a venture, how the internal acquisition of experience or domain knowledge can offset the short term cost advantages of offshoring, etc.
Heinlein was a militarist git that way too many quasi-fascists idolize for his 'service breeds citizenship' idiocy. OTOH, he did come up with the mobile suit, so I can't fault him entirely.
I'm not sure you are demonstrating any more understanding or insight than those you despise, which is typical IMHO. Also, did you bother to read the book or just watch the movie? If you had bothered to read Heinlen's actual writing you would have found that military service was *not* required for citizenship. That there were other methods of service, such as construction, mining, labor, etc. Boy Scouts are expected to offer some sort of service to their community, President Kennedy began his presidency with "ask what you can do for your country" and established the Peace Corp. Heinlen merely took such ideas one step further and made such service a requirement. The underlying idea was that before a person was provided power, be it a vote or authority, they must have demonstrated that they had materially put the good of society above their own personal welfare.
It is also somewhat telling that practically ALL of his female characters were relentlessly promiscuous, and even in his books aimed at a younger audience his female characters were unfailingly sexually precocious when you consider their age.
And as someone who lived through the sexual revolution of the 60s and the resulting 70s and early 80s, and who died before AIDS became well known, why wouldn't he make such an extrapolation?
Doogie Howser in a SS trench coat? Must be a Heinlein movie.
If you think the movie Starship Troopers resembles the book you obviously haven't read the book. Before you try to paint the movie as some kind of Americal right-wing thing you might want to consider that the guy who made the movie was European. Perhaps that explains why Juan Rico was blonde and caucasion. In Heinlen's book Juan Rico was ethnically Filipino.
"Majority Rule can be the worst tyranny of all." - Heinlein.
Yeah, it's also called mob rule for a reason. If you are trying to portray that quote as anti-American you might want to consider that the founding fathers of the United States had said the same thing:
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine" - Thomas Jefferson.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" - Benjamin Franklin.
"Money is the sincerest of all flattery." - Heinlein.
Ever hear the expressions "talk is cheap" or "put your money where your mouth is"? When people give you money, as in buy your invention, your product, your time, etc they are flattering you. They are essentially saying that of all the options you come out on top.
"For women, `equality' is a disaster." - Heinlein.
As in "equality" that ignores the *fact* that there are psyiological differences between the sexes. Consider Heinlen's *1959* book Starship Troopers, women served in combat. That was a quite progressive thought in those days. Yet, it was not out of some kind of femminism or notion of equality, it was based on psyiological *differences* between the sexes. In the book pilots were generally female due to merit, the book claimed (whether this was real or aristic license I don't know) that females had better coordiation/reflexes and were generally more capable as pilots.
More seriously, security through obscurity is only of marginal usefulness for obscure purposes. Maybe Joe Schmoe can't find his way past some obscurity defense, but if something is widely distributed, such as a publicly distributed software radio, then any obscurity element will likely be compromised quite quickly and quite trivially as soon as someone qualified to do so gets his or her hands on one.
Your use of obscurity seems quite narrow, as if it is confined to only a crypto algorithm. In reality it is far more complicated than that. Once upon a time I witnessed a closed source project that leveraged obscurity. It had hundreds of thousands of online users, an active hacking community, and obscurity greatly slowed down the progress of hackers as they revere engineered a closed source system, code, protocols, complex interactions,... After many months they figured it out, but in that time the developers had a patch waiting in the wings with new code, new protocols, new interactions,... The hackers made their breakthrough, the developers released a patch, the hackers had to start all over. This was the plan all along. Had the project been open source the hackers could have made their breakthroughs in a couple of weeks, maybe less, rather than many months. The point of obscurity was to slow down the hackers to a manageable rate. And of course, obscurity was not the foundation of the real security, it was just an element that kept hackers busy with less important things for a far greater amount of time than they would have liked. Don't underestimate the value of boring hackers with drudgery, of making someone else's project more interesting than yours.
The problem is that it is not easy to tell if your foundation is secure without considerable peer review. By adding the obscurity element you lose your peer review.
It is a fallacy to think that peer review requires open source. Considerable peer review does not require a million monkeys, a small number of outside experts under non-disclosure agreements can do quite nicely.
Gee, the general consensus among people who put in their two cents here on slashdot is that security through obscurity is ultimately flawed. Minus two posters, give or take.... If you see the pros and cons in both systems you can decide on an opinion for yourself. However, flatly claiming that Open Source is by its nature insecure is foolish.
If you had bothered to follow the link I provided you would have found that I wrote: 'I am not agreeing with the FCC on this one, but I am going to defend "security through obscurity" a little due to expected/. audience oversimplification and knee jerking. At times "security through obscurity" is a perfectly valid and desirable approach when used *alongside* other good techniques. It is only bad when it is the foundation of your security. Note that I am only addressing the security angle and not addressing open source philosophy (or for some out there religion).'.
I'm going to offer a tangent given that many/.'s misunderstand Google. Google is not really a "search" company, they are a targeted advertising company. Searches are just a means to build profiles on us, as is gmail. Microsoft and Google are fighting over who gets to profile us and collect the targeted advertising revenue streams. Basically who will websites pay to find out which ad banners to show us.
Slashdot Mirror
All men are equal under the law... the police are a little 'more equal than the rest of us' though.
That is a pretty ignorant statement. In truth law enformcement is held to a higher standard than normal civilians. That is the tradeoff made for the authority they are given. They can have their careers ruined and be fired for actions that are legal or misdeanors when comitted by civilians. They are more limited in how they can defend themselves if physically attacked than civilians are. They are more liable when attempting to help or rescue someone than civilians are. All this 24/7, regardless of whether on the job or off.
Not only do we need tight regulation of LE, every call to a scene should require the presence of a member of a public advocate (member of the press?) to document, witness and rate their actions.
The press is largely superficial, sometimes even clueless, why would you want them or other ill-informed individuals rating anyone's actions? If you doubt the press' cluelessness look at their reports in areas where you have in depth knowledge. In areas where I have such knowledge I often find their reports superficial, ill-informed, more emotional/sensationalist than informative or truth seeking. Why would I expect the press' performance to be any better in areas I don't have in depth knowledge? The image of the dedicated journalist digging for the truth against all odds is largely a fiction, a movie stereotype. In truth if they can get two unrelated people to say the same thing they generally go with that. There is already an effective balance on law enforcement, it's called the courts. If an officer misbehaves there is no shortage of lawyers who will be willing to file a lawsuit.
Secondly, the press can be about as dangerous to an individual as some around here accuse law enforcement. They are virtually untouchable, there is no check or balance upon them. They can get a story wrong, destroy you on the front page, and when they are proven to have been wrong they will bury their retraction inside and offer no compensation for the damage they have done.
Here's an idea, stop dropping bombs on people from the sky and they might stop blowing themselves up at the checkpoint.
Actually that is insufficient. They won't stop blowing things up until westerners leave all islamic countries and stop supporting non-secular or non-fundamentalist governments in these countries. If we had never touched Iraq the jihadists would still be setting off bombs, mostly in Kabul Afghanistan rather than Bagdhad Iraq. Their leaders are smart enough to know that they get far more political mileage out of Iraq, generating domestic political turmoil and fragmenting the west, since the west if far more unified regarding going into Afghanistan. This is very basic strategy.
"if there is anything evil it is the flaws in human nature"
This is exactly the point. Flaws in the nature/character of isolated individuals encourage them towards "crime" or "evil." Those flaws occur in law enforcement agents with very much the same frequency as in the larger population, but law enforcement agents have enhanced powers. Therefore, given identically flawed individuals from civilian and law enforcement populations, the "evil" law enforcement agent will be more dangerous.
Your logic is fatally flawed. Law enforcement officers are screened (investigated, tested, fired for questionable behavior on or off the job, etc) to weed out such individuals. The frequency is extremely low compared to the population as a whole.
He says the most dangerous criminals are government law enforcement agents. You say you need police, and that they are a necessary evil. Ok. So what's your disagreement with him exactly?
You mean beyond his being an idiot that thinks law enforcement agents are the most dangerous criminals? You do realize that the "evil" in "necessary evil" is figurative not literal, and that if there is anything evil it is the flaws in human nature that require large social units to have a professional policing force so that personal security is reasonably assured, and so that a stable social setting permitting art and commerce is established?
Corollary: your cops don't really have the option of having a second job; they're paid to ignore nothing, and to come down hard on anything that moves. For cops, no crime is too small. For spies, not so much. And that's why I trust spies more than cops.
... However as those that wield the authority of the state, they are not allowed to make the laws and are stuck with whatever laws the politician who pandered to the voters best write.
You are mistaken. Police exercise a lot of discretion and do not "come down hard" on everything. It is logistically impossible to do so, time, paper work, etc. They also realize arrest is not always the most effective method to correct a situation. As a matter of fact, they bemoan various "zero tolerance" law/policies as distractions, wastes of time and resources, unjust,
As a kid who was brought up with the notion that "a policeman is someone you can always trust", that's the second-saddest fucking thing I've ever written. The saddest thing is that as an adult... it isn't that I've been lucky enough to have never encountered a bad cop (because I have been lucky -- I've never met a bad cop -- every cop I've encountered has been both polite and professional)... but it's that I think my experience has been lucky.
No you have met the typical cops. You don't hear about the good ones, just the aberrations that make the news doing something wrong.
Did anybody really think they wouldn't find a "use" for all the data they've been collecting? Every single head-of-department has had his eye on it since day one.
Actually data mining and behavioral profiling has been going on for decades, "day one" was long before 9/11. It's no secret either.
The most dangerous of all criminals are those who carry badges and whose chief weapons are the power and authority of the state.
Without police you would be at the mercy of your neighbor with bigger muscles. Human nature is self serving, flawed in a social sense. People with badges and state authority are a necessary evil to create a peaceful environment once a community grows beyond the size of extended family / tribal units. In these smaller communities you kind of know everyone else and there are more intermediaries to talk people down when they are angered to a level that they become violent. Once a community becomes so large that anonymity is widespread violence becomes far more common, hence the development of professional law enforcement. Beyond a certain size a community is no longer self policing.
"If they're able to form a behaviour pattern"
;-) I knew a guy who did a lot of on-site tech support. Lots of flights around the country with very little time spent at the destination. Once when flying home the DEA questioned him for about 15 minutes. He fit a travel profile they look for, this was the early 1990s. He explained his job, they apologized for the inconvenience. I expect that nearly all false positives go something like that.
This assumes there are more chances that if someone has a different behavior to the majority's, then he is an undesirable person. This damages diversity by encouraging homogeneity.
I think you need to loosen the wrappings on the tin foil hat.
I expect that the article that started this thread misrepresented the details. Aside from behaviors like traveling to Pakistan for a couple of months, having wads of unexplained cash(1), etc they are not looking at many behaviors. Past law enforcement data mining that I saw had to do with associations. Who you called, who you had interactions with, what locations you frequented, etc. Such networks do help identify criminal networks - gangs, organized crime, etc. Might help for terrorist cells as well.
(1) Wads of unexplained cash have been reported for many decades. I think the laws requiring cash transactions above a certain to be reported are from the 1970s, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
People comiting "moral crimes". They have a history of blackmail using that sort of thing.
Actually, black mailing such individuals is a tried and true method of the foreign intelligence services. Hence the legitimate motivation for the FBI to look into such things with respect to security risks. Of course "moral" is a poor choice of words, and a certain lifestyle is not necessarily a security risk. For example it would be kind of tough to black mail a gay guy who was open about it. Someone who is hiding it could be a security risk, as is a straight guy who is cheating on his wife. Things are far more complicated than you suggest, and the black mail thing is largely from part decades.
I doubt phones based on this software will make much of an impact outside of geek circles.
Being a geek does not mean you will buy something merely because it is Linux based or FOSS based, that is a bit more like fan boy'ism. You need to realize that for most geeks Linux is not a crusade, many just need a good general purpose *nix environment and don't really give a rats ass about the politics and religion that gets so much attention. For this phone to make an impact in geek circles it has to deliver as a phone, like Linux delivered as a general purpose *nix. If its greatest feature is "its Linux based" then it will be a niche product even among geeks.
The entire concept of putting the state before the individual, is a cornerstone of fascist thinking.
... I can certainly see why Starship Troopers in particular would make someone consider Heinlein militaristic.
e ties/dp/0393317552. Over and over, in ancient and modern history, societies that lose the ability to wage war become victims - unless they have proxies who will defend them.
:-)
"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" - John F. Kennedy
You need to review a math/logic text. "Facism implies Service" does not mean that "Service implies Facism".
I haven't read enough of Heinlein
I apologize for being repettitive but the movie was a pale shadow of the book, even with the book being a pretty short one. The book actually delevs into this topic far more than the movie. Heinlen was absolutely not militaristic in any fascist sense. He was coming from the perspective that a military is a necessary evil, and that having a military inferior to an aggressor invites aggression. History agrees with this perspective. You might want to read "Guns, Germs, and Steel", http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Soci
To me the most interesting, and a bit scary, thing with the movie is how blatant they managed to make the fascist/nazi imagery, complete with nazi style propaganda and uniforms while still getting viewers to cheer for the human military)
We embraced Stalin the fight Hitler, you don't think we would embrace Hitler to fight bugs.
How many people use 3 year old PC's
;-), there is little reason to replace a 3 year old computer. Software apps and computers have exceeded the demands of general home and business users many years ago.
Most. Unless you are a hard core gamer with generous parents, or the less common job
Did I say "often"? No. I said it's easy. ie, it's not an uncommon situation.
;-)
.NET, with the extra namespace declaration
Actually you are saying it happens often: "Not uncommon" -> common -> often.
And five or six levels is very common, particularly in
If there is a single namespace declaration why indent? That sounds dogmatic.
Thus, a hard limit of 80 characters per line is, frankly, unrealistic, and only works to make code *less* readable, rather than moreso.
There are rare occasions when exceeding 80 characters helps rather than hurts. However it has been my experience that when I rework code that is getting excessively indented I end up with a better end result. I went through a phase where I dogmatically indented but I outgrew that and noticed the improvement.
1. Someone who actually knows what they're doing when it comes to computers is not a business person or an executive. A lot of people who dream about jobs in the technology sector always imagine that it somehow leads to the top of the glass tower and a corner office. It doesn't and it shouldn't. If you want that and you have middling to poor technical skills, then you're not cut out for technology. Instead you should go straight for that MBA now. Sure, there's the very rare and occasional individual who is very good with computers and also has business acumen, but you really have to look far and wide to find these strange hybrids. Most business people just aren't that good at computers other than using Office, maybe some SQL and that's about it. (This is not meant to insult anyone BTW)
I don't find geeks and execs incompatible. I think your observations are out of date, based upon the "old days" when computers were not part of every day culture. In short you are describing a generational thing, not a skills thing. The "very rare" individual you refer to is far more common today than in the past. For the last 10 to 15 years computers have been a part of every day life for children of a socioeconomic environment where buiness leaders and exec generally come from. More importantly I think you are failing to realize that individuals with lower skills exist in both the geek and business communities. I've seen plenty of programmers who generate some pretty mediocre code. I actually think the programmers are getting worse, today there are too many who entered the field because it seemed like a good career move rather than because they had some inherent interest. Personally I think managers and execs have been getting more technically proficient and that software developers have been getting less technically proficient. Also, the mistakes of executives are more visible than the mistakes of some technical folks.
FWIW, I am currently working on an MBA. I also had many erroneous preconceptions regarding business, marketing, etc. An MBA program has been a real eye opener. I have a much greater respect for business. I have used more advanced mathematics in marketing classes than in computer science classes, although not as much as in physics. Regarding my fellow classmates without technical backgrounds, I've not really had any problems explaining issues such as a Windows vs a Linux based infrastructure, how the GPL affects or does not affect a venture, how the internal acquisition of experience or domain knowledge can offset the short term cost advantages of offshoring, etc.
If you are *often* finding yourself 7 levels of indentation deep I don't really think you should be accusing others of being newbies or dogmatic.
"Yes, I could break that conditional up into multiple conditionals, but at the cost of making the code's intention less clear."
You find:
if other.is_a?(Message) && self.role == other.role && self.data == other.data
more clear than:
if other.is_a?(Message)
&& self.role == other.role
&& self.data == other.data
?
Personally I find the later more readable. The whitespace is suggesting the parsing of the expression.
You are correct, they did come from Buenos Aires. However Rico's ethnic heritage was Filipino not South American.
Heinlein was a militarist git that way too many quasi-fascists idolize for his 'service breeds citizenship' idiocy. OTOH, he did come up with the mobile suit, so I can't fault him entirely.
I'm not sure you are demonstrating any more understanding or insight than those you despise, which is typical IMHO. Also, did you bother to read the book or just watch the movie? If you had bothered to read Heinlen's actual writing you would have found that military service was *not* required for citizenship. That there were other methods of service, such as construction, mining, labor, etc. Boy Scouts are expected to offer some sort of service to their community, President Kennedy began his presidency with "ask what you can do for your country" and established the Peace Corp. Heinlen merely took such ideas one step further and made such service a requirement. The underlying idea was that before a person was provided power, be it a vote or authority, they must have demonstrated that they had materially put the good of society above their own personal welfare.
It is also somewhat telling that practically ALL of his female characters were relentlessly promiscuous, and even in his books aimed at a younger audience his female characters were unfailingly sexually precocious when you consider their age.
And as someone who lived through the sexual revolution of the 60s and the resulting 70s and early 80s, and who died before AIDS became well known, why wouldn't he make such an extrapolation?
Doogie Howser in a SS trench coat? Must be a Heinlein movie.
If you think the movie Starship Troopers resembles the book you obviously haven't read the book. Before you try to paint the movie as some kind of Americal right-wing thing you might want to consider that the guy who made the movie was European. Perhaps that explains why Juan Rico was blonde and caucasion. In Heinlen's book Juan Rico was ethnically Filipino.
"Majority Rule can be the worst tyranny of all." - Heinlein.
Yeah, it's also called mob rule for a reason. If you are trying to portray that quote as anti-American you might want to consider that the founding fathers of the United States had said the same thing:
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine" - Thomas Jefferson.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" - Benjamin Franklin.
"Money is the sincerest of all flattery." - Heinlein.
Ever hear the expressions "talk is cheap" or "put your money where your mouth is"? When people give you money, as in buy your invention, your product, your time, etc they are flattering you. They are essentially saying that of all the options you come out on top.
"For women, `equality' is a disaster." - Heinlein.
As in "equality" that ignores the *fact* that there are psyiological differences between the sexes. Consider Heinlen's *1959* book Starship Troopers, women served in combat. That was a quite progressive thought in those days. Yet, it was not out of some kind of femminism or notion of equality, it was based on psyiological *differences* between the sexes. In the book pilots were generally female due to merit, the book claimed (whether this was real or aristic license I don't know) that females had better coordiation/reflexes and were generally more capable as pilots.
More seriously, security through obscurity is only of marginal usefulness for obscure purposes. Maybe Joe Schmoe can't find his way past some obscurity defense, but if something is widely distributed, such as a publicly distributed software radio, then any obscurity element will likely be compromised quite quickly and quite trivially as soon as someone qualified to do so gets his or her hands on one.
... After many months they figured it out, but in that time the developers had a patch waiting in the wings with new code, new protocols, new interactions, ... The hackers made their breakthrough, the developers released a patch, the hackers had to start all over. This was the plan all along. Had the project been open source the hackers could have made their breakthroughs in a couple of weeks, maybe less, rather than many months. The point of obscurity was to slow down the hackers to a manageable rate. And of course, obscurity was not the foundation of the real security, it was just an element that kept hackers busy with less important things for a far greater amount of time than they would have liked. Don't underestimate the value of boring hackers with drudgery, of making someone else's project more interesting than yours.
Your use of obscurity seems quite narrow, as if it is confined to only a crypto algorithm. In reality it is far more complicated than that. Once upon a time I witnessed a closed source project that leveraged obscurity. It had hundreds of thousands of online users, an active hacking community, and obscurity greatly slowed down the progress of hackers as they revere engineered a closed source system, code, protocols, complex interactions,
The problem is that it is not easy to tell if your foundation is secure without considerable peer review. By adding the obscurity element you lose your peer review.
It is a fallacy to think that peer review requires open source. Considerable peer review does not require a million monkeys, a small number of outside experts under non-disclosure agreements can do quite nicely.
Gee, the general consensus among people who put in their two cents here on slashdot is that security through obscurity is ultimately flawed. Minus two posters, give or take. ... If you see the pros and cons in both systems you can decide on an opinion for yourself. However, flatly claiming that Open Source is by its nature insecure is foolish.
/. audience oversimplification and knee jerking. At times "security through obscurity" is a perfectly valid and desirable approach when used *alongside* other good techniques. It is only bad when it is the foundation of your security. Note that I am only addressing the security angle and not addressing open source philosophy (or for some out there religion).'.
If you had bothered to follow the link I provided you would have found that I wrote: 'I am not agreeing with the FCC on this one, but I am going to defend "security through obscurity" a little due to expected
I'm going to offer a tangent given that many /.'s misunderstand Google. Google is not really a "search" company, they are a targeted advertising company. Searches are just a means to build profiles on us, as is gmail. Microsoft and Google are fighting over who gets to profile us and collect the targeted advertising revenue streams. Basically who will websites pay to find out which ad banners to show us.