It can happen, it's just not hugely likely. You need one hell of a lucky capture to actually get anything identifiable enough to arrest someone and given the somewhat limited manpower available to the police they generally simply can't and won't prioritise non violent crime to actually do any significant investigation. We got done twice a couple years back(they seem to have come back looking for replacement items), forensics came out to do a quick fingerprint dust at the point of entry, but we never even saw a beat cop, just filed the police report for insurance purposes and moved on.
A security system to catch a regular old burglar is a complete waste of time and money. Your odds of getting any usable footage of the guys face is fairly low to begin with, the odds that the police will be able to identify the person on the video is even slimmer, and even if they happen to know who it is finding the guy and proving it is even less likely.
The purposes of an alarm system are as follows.
To minimize the amount of time the thief spends in your house and in doing so minimize the damage and amount of stuff stolen.
To make your neighbours house seem easier to break into(though you actually only need up to date alarm stickers for your windows to accomplish this, not an actual alarm system.
To potentially reduce your insurance costs.
Attemping to achieve any other goal is a long shot and a huge waste of time and money.
I'd read an earlier version of this article which said he'd been present. He's an idiot who took materials through customs without the right paperwork and got caught, it sucks for him, but it's just how it is, when you cross an international border you need to know whether what you're carrying with you is going to cause any problems and that goes doubly so for anything you can't replace.
There's been about 15 versions of this article, most of which are full of manufactured outrage and no facts. I'd read a previous one stating he was there and others saying he wasn't. Some articles say they knew it was flutes and it was to do with rosewood, some have said he had raw bamboo. The point being that this is just an excuse for a bunch of people to get their knickers in a twist about the big bad government. Those same people would of course be saying the government can't do anything right if an invasive species was brought in.
The fact that he's gotten through customs without any troubles a hundred times before doesn't make importing what he was importing legal, doesn't mean he had the right paperwork and doesn't make the customs agent in the wrong, but that's not important because we have to get angry about the big bad government.
Of course he didn't, his job is to keep invasive species and banned substances out of the US, it's a job that needs to be done and to be perfectly honest if it comes between the choice of even destroying the car or for that matter this idiot's flutes vs letting in some invasive species to potentially decimate entire industries and ecosystems, fuck the importer.
Nokia simply couldn't envision a world in which they were not the dominant phone vendor. They split their efforts between three UI systems so that developers had no idea which to use, put massively outdated versions of Symbian on cheap phones to try and make their pricey phones look better when instead it made all of Nokia look crap and they didn't understand what people actually wanted in a Smart Phone until Apple and Android already had a huge market share.
Fundamentally the Elop hatred has to do with QT and Meego and is generally from free software fanbois who are upset that Nokia went with Microsoft. I'm not suggesting that from the point of view of Nokia as an independent company that going with Windows Phone was a good idea, they got absolutely shafted on that when Microsoft announced the 7.5 phones would never get 8 3 months after their release and 6 months before 8 was going to come out essentially creating a six month phase when no one would buy or develop for a Nokia phone and leaving Nokia with warehouses full of stock they couldn't sell. The thing is though that by the time the Microsoft deal came up Nokia was on the verge of closing, the Microsoft deal gave them another couple of years and set them up to be bought by someone who actually kept most of the company together.
I code in one of their languages, but have before and could again code in others, I'm not employed by Microsoft, nor do I own any Microsoft stock or have any family or friends employed by them.
Mostly the "Microsoft are the Devil" people piss me off because they have no sense of perspective. Embrace Extend Extinguish is just a way of making "find an idea, make it better, everyone stops using the older version" sound evil, Open Source projects do it all the time, you give it the 3 E's and it sounds all borg and evil. You want to see embrace extend extinguish for real take a look at Android. Android is open source, and so are the apps, except they're not. The old calendar app is open source, but Google doesn't develop that one anymore and the replacement is sure as hell not. Hangouts which replaced Talk, also not open source. The new picture gallery in 4.4, not open source. Google also shafts any vendor that tries to sell an Android fork to ensure that you'll never see a version of Android that doesn't spy on you constantly.
In terms of Netscape, free Internet Explorer is why we have the internet we have today. If browsers still cost $50-100 you'd never have seen the massive uptake of non AOL internet that gave us what we have today. We also wouldn't have firefox keeping the bastard's honest, well honestish given they get all their money from Google. Honestly I could give a crap about the folks who lost money on Netscape because we benefited far more from them dying than their life could ever have given us.
The reality is that Microsoft isn't really any more evil than any other company and a whole lot less evil than most. They've crushed competition, so have any number of open source projects. Sure they had a near monopoly, so does Apache. Sure in the 80's they fought interoperability and standards, so did everyone else. Hell most Linux systems ignore standards when they're not convenient.
Seeing Microsoft as some sort of anti-christ blinds you to the evil committed by other companies. Google in particular is absolutely terrifying for all that everyone, myself included, keeps using their products.
Get a fucking grip. Microsoft aren't angels, but every crime a company can be guilty of short of murder? Not even close. A few dodgy business practices sure, and some folks lost. Netscape and DRDOS lost out, big fucking whoop. They didn't kill anyone, they've never dumped toxic waste, or run sweatshops, or used slave labour. Get a fucking grip.
Elop sucked, but Nokia was fucked because their phones and phone OS's sucked they were dying before Elop ever took the helm and even if they'd hired Steve Jobs to be CEO instead they'd still have likely gone bankrupt.
What exactly has Microsoft actually ever done? They bought out a bunch of companies and made their founders very rich. They charged you more than you'd have liked to pay, and they've stifled some innovation.
Google has turned over dissidents to the Chinese government, actively filtered content for that same government and collected a trove of information about you that is far more terrifying than anything the NSA has ever done. They've sold that information for a profit. They've also abused open source in ways Microsoft could never dream of.
You really need to get a sense of perspective on what both Microsoft and Google and for that matter Apple have done.
Bigotry against transgender people is far too common and not by any means restricted to feminists or women. It's even worse when the individual is in your shoes and isn't really one or the other.
If by male genital mutilation you mean circumcision which has clear and medically proven health benefits and is in no way comparable to female genital mutilation which is the actual removal of the clitoris and often the external lips usually with a sharp rock, then I'm sure I could find one, but it's not really a comparable situation.
I didn't say that women were never sexual predators. I said that there have been a fuck tonne of cases of sexual assault of both boys and girls in schools throughout the time period where supposedly the feminists were driving men out of the primary schools, whereas the number of women who are sexual predators in a school environment seems to be only a handful.
And again, there are a lot of factors driving men out of primary education, not least of which is, as I said earlier, pay. The fact that the more women are in these roles the less socially acceptable it is for men to be in them also creates a sort of feedback loop driving men out.
It's not opposing feminism as such that makes you a misogynist. You're already one of those, you just use anger at feminism to provide justification for your misogyny.
Only a blind person could spend any time in "geek" culture and not realise that there's a problem with misogyny, racism and homophobia. It's blatant and it's terrible. It's even terrible on Slashdot which attracts a slightly older crowd than some of the other places. I've seen "Tits or GTFO", threats of rape, people calling others "fags" and all sorts of racial epithets all over the place for decades, and sadly as far as I can tell it's not getting any better. Why in the hell would any woman join this field, given that if she's lucky she's going to be lecherously stared at by a bunch of social retards and at worst she'll be threatened with sexual assault. You don't seem to be blind or ignorant so I have to assume you think that this shit is OK and the girls are just weak for not putting up with it.
Some feminists are misandrists, in particularly some really famous ones are(the press loves misandry all the drama of misogyny with none of the backlash). Feminism and feminists in general are generally not. Overall in my life I've encountered far fewer misandrists than I have misogynists, casual or otherwise, you're a pretty good example for instance. You get your hate on for feminism because a few members are a bit misandrist and you use it as an excuse to denigrate attempts to genuinely improve the lot of women because you can tar those efforts with the "feminist" label and then push it back.
There are a hundred thousand reasons why there are very few men in teaching, particularly primary school teaching, the most important being that it's incredibly poorly paid. There's also the fact during the second half of the last century male teachers religious and otherwise actually being kiddy fiddlers was tragically common. It's not feminists pushing men out of primary education it's parents and they have some justification, not all men like to abuse children, but for decades men who do have been gravitating to school teaching.
And I've seen the same stuff in non union workforces. The guy who gets an executive position because he went to school with the CEO even though he can't tie his shoes, or the guy who will never be fired because he's learned the system well enough to completely avoid any repercussions while simultaneously being useless. That crap isn't union specific it's just work.
If you want to fix that problem the answer you want is proportional representation. You'll pretty much kiss any idea of true local representation goodbye. Gerrymandering up a bunch of low population red states is just more corruption of the system.
In my experience, medium sized organisations are actually much better than either large or small. In a small organisation you are far to subject to the personality of the owner, if he or she loves you that's great and you'll do really well, if he or she doesn't, no matter how good you are at your job, you're going to have a bad time. All those bullshit policies you complain about exist specifically to protect from actual evils which small organisations are full of.
At the same time you're right, when the separation between the guy who runs the place and the actual work is so vast that your illustrious leader doesn't actually know what his company produces you're equally boned.
TL;DR organisational structures vary between vastly impersonal at the large end to vastly too personal at the small end. Both suck.
I think you both overestimate the averaging affect of unions and massively underestimate the level of meritocracy existing in current organisations. I'm not saying unionisation is perfect or even necessarily the right solution for IT work, merely that the union world is far less horrible than you suggest and the current world is far less of a utopia. The Google's of the world will still hire the best they can get their hands on under unions and the most important merit you are currently rewarded for in any organisation is the ability to play politics not any kind of technical skill.
Man that was a load of verbal runs, the shit is up around my ankles now. So much selfishness and anti education crap.
The bloke at McDonald's does unskilled labour. He can do pretty much any unskilled labour he wants, and conversely pretty much anyone can do his job. He can't do any kind of skilled job at all of course because he has no skills so he can't actually take any job, but anyway.
The people you speak of as "smart" people are people with specialised skills for the most part, sure some of them are just desk sitting oxygen thieves, but they've still got skills which convince someone to let them sit at that desk and steal oxygen. The plus side of these skills is much higher wages because fewer people can do the job, the downside is that they're almost completely non transferable. Being a software engineer doesn't qualify you to be an electrical one or to work in marketing or to take any other skilled job, including a lot of jobs like construction which is not your traditional "smart" person job. On top of that though, if you have a university degree and qualifications and go and try to apply for the McDonald's job they won't actually give it to you because they assume you'll be miserable and quit. That's leaving aside the rather idiotic notions that workers can just up and move on a whim to follow job opportunities.
It's because Musk is a massive publicity whore with a tremendously thin skin. Anything happens with a Tesla anywhere in the world that isn't perfectly positive he has to comment.
I'm not even asking for stuff like network whitelisting. That'd be nice of course, but if you want that level of control you can root your phone and stick a firewall on it and achieve that goal. I'm talking more about the fact that it'd be nice for the app to be able to identify my phone without identifying me, or to create an account without having carte blanche to all the accounts I already have, just some really basic crap so that complete strangers can't lift my telephone number.
It'd also be nice if Google's own apps weren't the permission hungriest of them all. It'd be nice if you could say that a Google app asking for access to your SMS messages was suspicious, but it's not, Hangouts not only asks for that permission it frequently pops up alerts trying to convince you to let it take complete control of SMS messaging on your phone.
I'm attempting to make a point about the privacy of medical information and the way most people don't really understand it. Your point about your telco spying on you isn't really all that interesting so there wasn't much to say about it. They can already collect the information from the existing sensors if for some reason they wanted to whether you installed a medical app or not and unless the medical app was deliberately sharing with your Telco relatively trivial security mechanisms would stop them from getting anything from any additional sensors. The information isn't really all that interesting to them in isolation and doesn't give them much about you they couldn't already have gathered from information available to them.
The reason I was discussing what I was discussing is because if you're going to start having tin foil hat fantasies about your medical privacy it's important to actually understand the level of privacy you actually have and what that information actually is.
Digital music isn't going to be replacing instrumental artists any time soon, quite possibly it may never be even capable of doing so. Folks like Yo Yo Ma or the various orchestras are going to be able to make a living for a long time yet.
The problem is that digital music very much is replacing and will continue to replace commercial instrumental musicians, which are the vast majority of musicians actually able to earn a living from their craft. These folks are screwed. In the long term this may mean that there are far fewer instrumental artists simply because the chances of making a living from performance have become so small that no one bothers anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
It can happen, it's just not hugely likely. You need one hell of a lucky capture to actually get anything identifiable enough to arrest someone and given the somewhat limited manpower available to the police they generally simply can't and won't prioritise non violent crime to actually do any significant investigation. We got done twice a couple years back(they seem to have come back looking for replacement items), forensics came out to do a quick fingerprint dust at the point of entry, but we never even saw a beat cop, just filed the police report for insurance purposes and moved on.
A security system to catch a regular old burglar is a complete waste of time and money. Your odds of getting any usable footage of the guys face is fairly low to begin with, the odds that the police will be able to identify the person on the video is even slimmer, and even if they happen to know who it is finding the guy and proving it is even less likely.
The purposes of an alarm system are as follows.
Attemping to achieve any other goal is a long shot and a huge waste of time and money.
I'd read an earlier version of this article which said he'd been present. He's an idiot who took materials through customs without the right paperwork and got caught, it sucks for him, but it's just how it is, when you cross an international border you need to know whether what you're carrying with you is going to cause any problems and that goes doubly so for anything you can't replace.
There's been about 15 versions of this article, most of which are full of manufactured outrage and no facts. I'd read a previous one stating he was there and others saying he wasn't. Some articles say they knew it was flutes and it was to do with rosewood, some have said he had raw bamboo. The point being that this is just an excuse for a bunch of people to get their knickers in a twist about the big bad government. Those same people would of course be saying the government can't do anything right if an invasive species was brought in.
The fact that he's gotten through customs without any troubles a hundred times before doesn't make importing what he was importing legal, doesn't mean he had the right paperwork and doesn't make the customs agent in the wrong, but that's not important because we have to get angry about the big bad government.
Of course he didn't, his job is to keep invasive species and banned substances out of the US, it's a job that needs to be done and to be perfectly honest if it comes between the choice of even destroying the car or for that matter this idiot's flutes vs letting in some invasive species to potentially decimate entire industries and ecosystems, fuck the importer.
They were destroyed in front of him, as is standard operating procedure for customs, no thefts.
Nokia simply couldn't envision a world in which they were not the dominant phone vendor. They split their efforts between three UI systems so that developers had no idea which to use, put massively outdated versions of Symbian on cheap phones to try and make their pricey phones look better when instead it made all of Nokia look crap and they didn't understand what people actually wanted in a Smart Phone until Apple and Android already had a huge market share.
Fundamentally the Elop hatred has to do with QT and Meego and is generally from free software fanbois who are upset that Nokia went with Microsoft. I'm not suggesting that from the point of view of Nokia as an independent company that going with Windows Phone was a good idea, they got absolutely shafted on that when Microsoft announced the 7.5 phones would never get 8 3 months after their release and 6 months before 8 was going to come out essentially creating a six month phase when no one would buy or develop for a Nokia phone and leaving Nokia with warehouses full of stock they couldn't sell. The thing is though that by the time the Microsoft deal came up Nokia was on the verge of closing, the Microsoft deal gave them another couple of years and set them up to be bought by someone who actually kept most of the company together.
I code in one of their languages, but have before and could again code in others, I'm not employed by Microsoft, nor do I own any Microsoft stock or have any family or friends employed by them.
Mostly the "Microsoft are the Devil" people piss me off because they have no sense of perspective. Embrace Extend Extinguish is just a way of making "find an idea, make it better, everyone stops using the older version" sound evil, Open Source projects do it all the time, you give it the 3 E's and it sounds all borg and evil. You want to see embrace extend extinguish for real take a look at Android. Android is open source, and so are the apps, except they're not. The old calendar app is open source, but Google doesn't develop that one anymore and the replacement is sure as hell not. Hangouts which replaced Talk, also not open source. The new picture gallery in 4.4, not open source. Google also shafts any vendor that tries to sell an Android fork to ensure that you'll never see a version of Android that doesn't spy on you constantly.
In terms of Netscape, free Internet Explorer is why we have the internet we have today. If browsers still cost $50-100 you'd never have seen the massive uptake of non AOL internet that gave us what we have today. We also wouldn't have firefox keeping the bastard's honest, well honestish given they get all their money from Google. Honestly I could give a crap about the folks who lost money on Netscape because we benefited far more from them dying than their life could ever have given us.
The reality is that Microsoft isn't really any more evil than any other company and a whole lot less evil than most. They've crushed competition, so have any number of open source projects. Sure they had a near monopoly, so does Apache. Sure in the 80's they fought interoperability and standards, so did everyone else. Hell most Linux systems ignore standards when they're not convenient.
Seeing Microsoft as some sort of anti-christ blinds you to the evil committed by other companies. Google in particular is absolutely terrifying for all that everyone, myself included, keeps using their products.
Get a fucking grip. Microsoft aren't angels, but every crime a company can be guilty of short of murder? Not even close. A few dodgy business practices sure, and some folks lost. Netscape and DRDOS lost out, big fucking whoop. They didn't kill anyone, they've never dumped toxic waste, or run sweatshops, or used slave labour. Get a fucking grip.
Elop sucked, but Nokia was fucked because their phones and phone OS's sucked they were dying before Elop ever took the helm and even if they'd hired Steve Jobs to be CEO instead they'd still have likely gone bankrupt.
What exactly has Microsoft actually ever done? They bought out a bunch of companies and made their founders very rich. They charged you more than you'd have liked to pay, and they've stifled some innovation.
Google has turned over dissidents to the Chinese government, actively filtered content for that same government and collected a trove of information about you that is far more terrifying than anything the NSA has ever done. They've sold that information for a profit. They've also abused open source in ways Microsoft could never dream of.
You really need to get a sense of perspective on what both Microsoft and Google and for that matter Apple have done.
Bigotry against transgender people is far too common and not by any means restricted to feminists or women. It's even worse when the individual is in your shoes and isn't really one or the other.
If by male genital mutilation you mean circumcision which has clear and medically proven health benefits and is in no way comparable to female genital mutilation which is the actual removal of the clitoris and often the external lips usually with a sharp rock, then I'm sure I could find one, but it's not really a comparable situation.
I didn't say that women were never sexual predators. I said that there have been a fuck tonne of cases of sexual assault of both boys and girls in schools throughout the time period where supposedly the feminists were driving men out of the primary schools, whereas the number of women who are sexual predators in a school environment seems to be only a handful.
And again, there are a lot of factors driving men out of primary education, not least of which is, as I said earlier, pay. The fact that the more women are in these roles the less socially acceptable it is for men to be in them also creates a sort of feedback loop driving men out.
It's not opposing feminism as such that makes you a misogynist. You're already one of those, you just use anger at feminism to provide justification for your misogyny.
Only a blind person could spend any time in "geek" culture and not realise that there's a problem with misogyny, racism and homophobia. It's blatant and it's terrible. It's even terrible on Slashdot which attracts a slightly older crowd than some of the other places. I've seen "Tits or GTFO", threats of rape, people calling others "fags" and all sorts of racial epithets all over the place for decades, and sadly as far as I can tell it's not getting any better. Why in the hell would any woman join this field, given that if she's lucky she's going to be lecherously stared at by a bunch of social retards and at worst she'll be threatened with sexual assault. You don't seem to be blind or ignorant so I have to assume you think that this shit is OK and the girls are just weak for not putting up with it.
Some feminists are misandrists, in particularly some really famous ones are(the press loves misandry all the drama of misogyny with none of the backlash). Feminism and feminists in general are generally not. Overall in my life I've encountered far fewer misandrists than I have misogynists, casual or otherwise, you're a pretty good example for instance. You get your hate on for feminism because a few members are a bit misandrist and you use it as an excuse to denigrate attempts to genuinely improve the lot of women because you can tar those efforts with the "feminist" label and then push it back.
There are a hundred thousand reasons why there are very few men in teaching, particularly primary school teaching, the most important being that it's incredibly poorly paid. There's also the fact during the second half of the last century male teachers religious and otherwise actually being kiddy fiddlers was tragically common. It's not feminists pushing men out of primary education it's parents and they have some justification, not all men like to abuse children, but for decades men who do have been gravitating to school teaching.
And I've seen the same stuff in non union workforces. The guy who gets an executive position because he went to school with the CEO even though he can't tie his shoes, or the guy who will never be fired because he's learned the system well enough to completely avoid any repercussions while simultaneously being useless. That crap isn't union specific it's just work.
If you want to fix that problem the answer you want is proportional representation. You'll pretty much kiss any idea of true local representation goodbye. Gerrymandering up a bunch of low population red states is just more corruption of the system.
In my experience, medium sized organisations are actually much better than either large or small. In a small organisation you are far to subject to the personality of the owner, if he or she loves you that's great and you'll do really well, if he or she doesn't, no matter how good you are at your job, you're going to have a bad time. All those bullshit policies you complain about exist specifically to protect from actual evils which small organisations are full of.
At the same time you're right, when the separation between the guy who runs the place and the actual work is so vast that your illustrious leader doesn't actually know what his company produces you're equally boned.
TL;DR organisational structures vary between vastly impersonal at the large end to vastly too personal at the small end. Both suck.
I think you both overestimate the averaging affect of unions and massively underestimate the level of meritocracy existing in current organisations. I'm not saying unionisation is perfect or even necessarily the right solution for IT work, merely that the union world is far less horrible than you suggest and the current world is far less of a utopia. The Google's of the world will still hire the best they can get their hands on under unions and the most important merit you are currently rewarded for in any organisation is the ability to play politics not any kind of technical skill.
Man that was a load of verbal runs, the shit is up around my ankles now. So much selfishness and anti education crap.
The bloke at McDonald's does unskilled labour. He can do pretty much any unskilled labour he wants, and conversely pretty much anyone can do his job. He can't do any kind of skilled job at all of course because he has no skills so he can't actually take any job, but anyway.
The people you speak of as "smart" people are people with specialised skills for the most part, sure some of them are just desk sitting oxygen thieves, but they've still got skills which convince someone to let them sit at that desk and steal oxygen. The plus side of these skills is much higher wages because fewer people can do the job, the downside is that they're almost completely non transferable. Being a software engineer doesn't qualify you to be an electrical one or to work in marketing or to take any other skilled job, including a lot of jobs like construction which is not your traditional "smart" person job. On top of that though, if you have a university degree and qualifications and go and try to apply for the McDonald's job they won't actually give it to you because they assume you'll be miserable and quit. That's leaving aside the rather idiotic notions that workers can just up and move on a whim to follow job opportunities.
It's because Musk is a massive publicity whore with a tremendously thin skin. Anything happens with a Tesla anywhere in the world that isn't perfectly positive he has to comment.
I'm not even asking for stuff like network whitelisting. That'd be nice of course, but if you want that level of control you can root your phone and stick a firewall on it and achieve that goal. I'm talking more about the fact that it'd be nice for the app to be able to identify my phone without identifying me, or to create an account without having carte blanche to all the accounts I already have, just some really basic crap so that complete strangers can't lift my telephone number.
It'd also be nice if Google's own apps weren't the permission hungriest of them all. It'd be nice if you could say that a Google app asking for access to your SMS messages was suspicious, but it's not, Hangouts not only asks for that permission it frequently pops up alerts trying to convince you to let it take complete control of SMS messaging on your phone.
I'm attempting to make a point about the privacy of medical information and the way most people don't really understand it. Your point about your telco spying on you isn't really all that interesting so there wasn't much to say about it. They can already collect the information from the existing sensors if for some reason they wanted to whether you installed a medical app or not and unless the medical app was deliberately sharing with your Telco relatively trivial security mechanisms would stop them from getting anything from any additional sensors. The information isn't really all that interesting to them in isolation and doesn't give them much about you they couldn't already have gathered from information available to them.
The reason I was discussing what I was discussing is because if you're going to start having tin foil hat fantasies about your medical privacy it's important to actually understand the level of privacy you actually have and what that information actually is.
Digital music isn't going to be replacing instrumental artists any time soon, quite possibly it may never be even capable of doing so. Folks like Yo Yo Ma or the various orchestras are going to be able to make a living for a long time yet.
The problem is that digital music very much is replacing and will continue to replace commercial instrumental musicians, which are the vast majority of musicians actually able to earn a living from their craft. These folks are screwed. In the long term this may mean that there are far fewer instrumental artists simply because the chances of making a living from performance have become so small that no one bothers anymore.