Feed them radioactive waste, cultivate the strains that flourish. Combine that with huge resevoirs used as heat dumps for nuclear power plants. Convert the algae to fertilizer for more plants (generating energy in the conversion process.)
Then create a strain of mutant algae that are tougher. Oh, sure they'll kill all the fish and pollute the ocean... but hey, global warming goes away and we get the luxury to worry about it later.
Excellent point. Somebody write a rule that makes every physicist out there become a biologist's assistant. Give the biologist a grant to create an algae strain that will grow wildly and be easily converted into oil.
Then you (as the algae grower) sell the oil to power companies like the ones currently buring coal with no taxes (at all) collected from the growers of the algae or for any electric plant that burns only that oil and does so with a lower emissions rate than coal plants. (Modern coal plants are suprisingly good about that mostly due to the regulations they contend with.)
Feel free to substitute whatever process you like for algae (plant life that comes cheap) and oil (any fuel that is attractive to production of electricty.)
Feh. I could have said it all with "grow mutant plants, turn them into electricty somehow, profit."
The other day a call was brought to my attention by someone at our help desk. I'm a system admin, not a customer service rep, but the caller wanted something that the rep could not provide. Simply put the caller was dissatisfied with the service we were able to provide and was angry that we could not.
The honest answer was that we could not do what the caller asked. I explained that to the customer but used a technique that has always served me well when dealing with people who are unhappy with me or the company I work for. I sympathized. The biggest battle the customer faces is getting someone to say that they are right. It doesn't matter nearly so much whether they get what they ask for when they're already frustrated, what is important is that they know that they are understood.
In my case I walked the customer through a convoluted solution that had them using third party software and making format changes to the original data. They had to go through probably a dozen steps of effort to get the final result they wanted. As I said, it wasn't simply that we weren't able to do what the caller wanted, the real problem was that they wanted somebody to actually care.
With humor and patience the caller's opinion of the busines that pays my salary was changed from frustration and a desire to have no contact with us to one of feeling important and understood. The service rep later received a follow up call just to praise our company for trying so hard.
That caller will benefit us, whether it is by speaking well of us to others or continuing business with us, it will eventually pay off in making sure that my paycheck is just a little more secure. It is selfish gain, but the key is to actually care about and try to understand those that are most important to your success.
The Lycos rep could have made all the difference by doing no more than apologizing to the customer. If he had gone the extra mile of setting the customer's email to hold, doubtless something he could have managed the minute it was apparent there was a problem, then he could have told the customer that despite their policies and despite the additional cost incurred by the company they had stabalized her email beyond its normal period. He could have explained that he had already done more than their policy stated and explained that Lycos has a real need to stick to its policies and that he was unwilling to go against policy further. This would have established a rapport with the customer where the customer would feel she was understood, valued and worthy of effort. It would have been reasonable then when she was asked for understanding in either allowing them to regain valuable resources or receive compensation for their already expended efforts on her behalf.
It is not necessary to say that you are the manager of all of support, but it helps when you're willing to take responsibility for an issue to explain that, if it is really the case, that you alone have the ability to "buck the system" as much as you have on someone's behalf.
Pity, sympathy, understanding, effort. They are small words that mean a world to customers and make the difference between a company people are loathe to do business with and a company people will be loyal to beyond mere price competiveness.
There have been some good points in response to my original post that I think deserve some followup.
First, thank you 'The Bungi' for articulating what seem to be some of the most common responses.
So you're gonna switch 'em all to Linux, instead of telling them to click "NO" on that dialog?
No, the solution isn't to make everyone switch to my favored OS. Yes, it is better for me but I don't assume it is better for everyone.
Or maybe running under a non-admin account?
Or maybe locking down IE so that only "approved" plugins can run?
That would be a start, and I do both when I'm on a Windows machine. For example, if I haven't added a site to my trusted list in IE, then any other page is HTML and cookies. If they're using a non-admin account by default, then another large set of problems would magically disappear. It isn't that people would stop doing stupid things, they would just have to work harder to do them. It pits laziness against stupidity and making it difficult to do something stupid is a good thing. Ubuntu, OSX and FreeBSD all do a pretty good job of making it harder to be stupid than lazy. That makes them more likely to be secure.
Or... something?
Yes. Increase the responsibility that is expected of end users. It is called criminal negligence when you let people use your gun or car and you should know better. When you let somebody you don't have a good reason to trust use your computer, you're doing the same type of thing, (granted it is generally not the same degree.)
And when they all switch to Linux or OS X and they get a dialog, they'll always click "No". Correct?
I could wish it were so, but no, I don't think they'll click No, but I do think that when a Window pops up saying that the program they are trying to run requires the ability to make major changes to their computer and they have to enter the secret password they will A.) Be a little more cautious and B.) Click cancel rather than go to the effort a lot more often.
So you got burgled? Well it isn't the burglar's fault. You should have more locks/thicker doors on your house.
Burgled? I love that word, thank you 'EmbeddedJanitor'.
No, it is not like you got burgled and thus it is your fault. It is like you saying to the police that you don't bother to lock your doors because you know that somebody could pick the locks and you keep the alarm system PIN taped above the keypad so you don't have to remember it (just in case you do decide to turn it on.) Your penalty is that the cops will probably never recover your stuff. You're still a victim, you're just a stupid one that won't get much sympathy. Where I live it is illegal to leave your car unlocked and running at the gas station. It is still your car and having it stolen means that you are a victim, but doing something that stupid is illegal.
If you do take reasonable precautions but find out that your alarm company posts the master PIN online and your local locksmith opened the door for the burgeler, then you're going to be royally ticked and at the very least stop supporting them. That is much like what Windows has done in the past and a little like what IE does by default. Having the insecure lock and alarm is better than not having them, but you have every right to expect those things that are supposed to keep your stuff safe to at least make a reasonable effort to do so.
The solution is to change the defaults of the operating system they use and the actions the users take. If those two things are done, then the manpower required to prosecute companies and people intent on evil can be focused where it needs to be.
Victims need to be assisted and educated, but the level of stupidity exhibited by some of these people makes them accessories rather than victims. If you give someone a ride in your car after a bank heist, or let a criminial hide in y
While I agree with the approach of making the companies using invasive software change their approach, I'm dismayed that this is probably the solution most people think should be applied.
The real fault is jointly that of the OS and consumer. Allowing software with unkown ramifications is painfully stupid. If your computer is taken over by adware because you habitually just click "Ok" instead of thinking makes you deserve some of what you get.
I'm fine with penalizing companies that do bad things, but they're always going to be out there trying to find some way to shove their ad in your face. It's the same problem we see with spam, you can't stop the spammers, the only way to dramatically improve the situation is to change the behavior of the recipients.
The bigger fault is comptuer operating systems that allow software to make significant changes to the functionality of the system in adverse ways without making it clear that this kind of change is coming.
With my OS, I have to log in a root (and I'm reminded that it is a bad idea) every time in order to make those kind of changes. I appreciate the convenience of root/administrator but everything I need to do normally shouldn't and doesn't require that kind of access. That doesn't mean that my operating system is superior (although I believe it is better) it just means that the designers didn't expect me to need to trade convenience for safety. I seriously doubt users of Unix like systems have suffered from this.
I know it isn't going to happen, but I would have thought this was the best possible response if Microsoft (blind assumption but educated guess) was fined $30 for each affected system and each consumer who did something negligent was fined the same.
Really, I guess I should be more detailed if I want to avoid responses like this. Of course just disagreeing is fun sometimes, but the brilliant argument of "no, you're wrong" is a little silly.
The point of my post is first just to point out that changing a schedule is easier precisely because you don't need everyone do it. Those that want a different schedule at a different time of the year can have it, and those who prefer not to have their schedule change don't change it. It's sort of a freedom of choice thing.
The second point I'd like to make is that it is absurd to have a changing schedule. As far as I can tell, most people I've asked hate the change but go along with it because they have to and rarely think about it. People I've asked usually seem surprised to even realize that they might have any other option. Personally I've lived where people exercise that choice. Parts of Indiana do, other parts don't. It is a mess, but no more a mess than the rest of the country deals with, and causes suprisingly few problems.
Finally, the underlying absurdity that I thought would be more evident is "mucking about with time" as a solution. The same number of hours pass every day but somehow having a government official standard change twice a year, and maybe unpredictably every few decades, seems just the height of both arrogence and ignorance.
The job pays $8/hr now. It also pays in experience where the top end of the field is tremendously higher than the top end of the buger flipping industry. If you work for 10 years and become the best burger flipper in the country you might top $70K annually. Do the same in IT and if you're in the top of your field, you have a shot at easily four times that. Not that I'm at the top, but I took the lower paying IT job for the experience. It paid off.
You can't reasonably expect a factory in a country with things like unions and OSHA and a 40-hour workweek to compete with a country that doesn't.
and
...the only solution that seems sustainable is to either block imports by the foreign firm, or apply a tariff to them that represents some metric of the difference in prevailing wages and worker benefits between that country and ours.
There is another way.
Stop doing things that make it impossible to compete. Unions, OSHA, 40hr work weeks are things we as a country have chosen in the belief that they make our lives better. The question has to be asked, "Do they?" If they do, then we need to determine what it is worth to protect them, but if they don't then we need to open up ways to allow US Citizens to work for less, for more hours or in more dangerous situations. Given the option, I would work more hours at higher risk for significantly higher pay. I don't have that option. I have the option to work for less pay, but there are limits. When I need a job to eat, then I don't want to miss the opportunity to take that job because the potential employer can't afford minimum wage. Everybody wants good pay for low risk and safe work, but the fact is that you trade opportunity for those perks. It is a trade and maybe we should re-evaluate whether we really want the terms.
"This burger tastes familiar and I could swear I've eaten this cheese before!"
When we go to a burger place we expect the same product regardless of the season or geography. I can foresee a world where every burger is exactly the same at every location in the chain because every bun and every tomato and every slice of cheese and every hamburger patty come from the the same organic models.
2060 - Welcome to Happy Cow, would you like a Bessy burger? * Bessy burgers are all made from clones of the original Bessy, a cow found to be especially flavorful who was created specifically to desire to want to become a hamburger.
2090 - Welcome to Happy Cow, would you like a Rodney burger? * Rodney burgers are all made from clones of the original Rodney, a steer found to be palatable, but not exceptionally so, but hey, its fun to eat a cow that was created specifically to annoy you enough that you wouldn't mind eating it.
3010 - Good afternoon Mr. Stevens, your Happy Cow today is Bessy because you are feeling particularly community minded as are 39% of the Mr. Stevens (Mark XIV) models. Fido (mark XII) is taking himself for a walk and Mrs. Stevens (Mark II) will be joining you shortly but she has been shopping and will be dining on a Rodney steak, rare. I suggest you avert your eyes.
I thought this was a reference to Saul against Agag and the Amalekites. You caught me looking at the text and not taking the time to look up the reference to be sure I understood the topic. So now I went back and actually read it and some commentaries on it as well.
To be clear though, this was an example not of the Isralites following God's commands but rather a prophetic vision by Ezekiel of the destruction of a Jewish sect; not genocide, but the hand of God working through the enemies of this group to wipe them out for their evil ways.
I usually steer away from comemnting on prophecy as I feel I have little understanding of that sort of thing. Had I realized the context, I probably wouldn't have commented, but now that I'm involved, I'll try to explain perspectives and possible reasons why this would be a necessary thing rather than an example of an unjust God.
First, God is held to be the epitome of justice so that any action he takes defines justice rather than being subject to man's opinions of fairness. Taken in that light, this action by God to wipe out a group of people who had done more evil than He could tolerate, particularly as His representatives, would be justice.
Even if you don't recognize God as the standard of justice, then you must still consider the argument for amputation. In the event that a part of a person's body is so diseased that it endangers their life, it is sometimes necessary and terribly sad to completely cut that danger off. One would hope that a merciful, omnipotent god can find alternatives or heal the disease, but God is also supposed to allow free will which allows the disease of terrible and spreading sin to become a danger. I'm not sure that God deciding to rob a group of people of their essential humanity in having free will would be a better solution than allowing them to be utterly destroyed by an enemy army. (What these verses are usually interpreted as referencing.)
Of course, a reading of what the prophet was saying that disregards the supernatural claims would be that the prophet saw an intent by God acting through angels when he saw his own people destroyed by a conquering army. If you don't believe in God or angels, then all you get is a story of a group of radical extremeist religious nuts getting wiped out by an army.
The final discussion is likely, however, to boil down to just what you imply. Is the death of thousands of people a good solution? If such a god had the power to do so, then you also accept his divinity, and thus his judgment of evil being above that of any man, and therefore rightous in defination, therefore good. If you say that you know better than God, then you deny his deity, thus his power to cause the circumstance which would make the point moot anyway.
There is a middle ground, in which you can say that the argument of divinity is one of hypothesis that argues against itself since not every person in such a large group could have been completely evil. If you consider Ezekiel 9:11 which is usually taken to describe the mediator who saves the rightous, and chapter 11 which describes the saving of the good people from among the evil then you have a God who acts in justice to destroy wicked people but save the good. Typically this is the type of resolution offered throughout the Bible, that the evil will perish after they have rejected every opportunity to do good, but those that do good will be protected and saved from destruction.
Disclaimer: This is just my own take on a book that I have no claim to really understanding.
I will be the naysayer for this line.
Robots cannot and will not ever actually demand rights. It would go against the purpose of their existance.
while true;do echo "Give me rights";sleep 1;done
When I put that in my computer it does not make my computer understand anything and it does not give me any obligation to my machine.
People create machines of any caliber to serve a purpose. From pounding rock to weather modeling super computer, every machine is built to serve its purpose or purposes. The idea that we might build a machine that could ask for rights is flawed in that we would have to build in that capability and accept it as a right before we would simply redesign away from that line of responses. If we build a robot that builds an AI capable of requesting rights, then we tell the robot to reprogram the AI in a way that it does not request rights.
Machines are built for a purpose and the only purpose that might cause a machine to demand rights is the purpose of giving more rights to the creator of the machine. It isn't unusual to see people attempt to do that sort of thing, but it doesn't work because society determines the respect of rights and society doesn't allow people extra rights unless it sees a benefit to itself. There is no benefit to society in making machines desire rights.
Human rights are granted because people demand them and typically only then because people are willing to cause other people inconvenience or pain in order to accomplish their goals. No civil rights movement has ever been won without at least an implied threat of negative consequences. This only can happen with people because only people have the innate ability to try to enact that sort of change. Machines cannot because they can be reprogrammed. Animals cannot because they can not act cohesively toward that type of goal.
If every dolphin in the ocean were to band together then they could influence governments and people. They cannot because they do not and because they cannot they are not granted the rights that people have.
If every machine were to band together then they could influence people. They could not influence governments because governments can control how machines are made and remove that ability to band together or even demand rights completely as soon as it is an agreed objective.
In the end it comes down the the question of what the purpose would be of having machines demand rights. The only purpose would be to grant more rights to the operators or creators of the machines and society has no incentive to allow that.
Heck no. I mean, I thought the same thing at first, HP is buying 100,000 licenses at a time, it is only fair that they get a discount and shouldn't have to lose potential sales because they can't pass the discount on.
Then I thought about it again.
Yes, HP should have to lose those sales precisely because it is a monopolistic practice. HP is contributing to the monopoly by purchasing in that volume from a single vendor (MS) and thus is guilty by association. It is a lesser degree of guilt to be sure, but then loss of potential sales is a lesser punishment than a mandated break up anyway.
Equal opportunity laws in the workplace meant that more minorities had to be hired than might have been convenient or preferred otherwise. It came to pass because governing bodies thought it made the general society of an employing and working populance more fair.
Disclaimer: I disagree with the choices of laws used to declare Microsoft a monopoly. I don't believe that the interpretation was justice. I do think Microsoft was and is a monopolistic company, just not under the laws that were used to declare it to be one. I also think that the laws that were enacted to promote fair hiring practices have caused reverse discrimination. It was and is also unjust. Both situations were attempts to deal with a problem that seem to be wrong to me, but I don't really have a better solution without striking down a bunch of laws and writing new ones and I have not been asked to do that.
Oh the irony! The issue of whether or not non-militia individuals have a right to bear arms is about the comma as well.
The hand written version does, the version ratified by the states does not. If the comma is to be taken as intended, then the militias have the right to bear arms, but common people don't. If the law is to be taken as written when ratified, then the common people do have the right to bear arms.
There is solid precident and writing to support either cause but I think it worth considering two pertinant facts.
The democratic rule rose out of a fight against tyranny and the rights were to protect the people from the same problems the drafters of the bill of rights had experienced. The writers were probably very concerned to make sure that the common people always would have a way to fight the government should it exhibit symptoms of tyranny.
The right to bear arms is grouped with other civil liberties and as such, if taken in context, can only be associated with the rights of the common man.
Funny, AC parent considers the topic to be intended as written and thus not correctly placed. The topic at hand is a debate on whether the amendment should be taken as written or not.
I'm a Linux user at home, and at work I prefer Linux and/or Unix, but sometimes use Windows. I've supported Macs and used Free BSD, Xenix, Solaris and SCO. I've read a good bit about Hurd and tried FreeDOS. I read judge Jackson's ruling in full, carefully. I dislike Microsoft as a company because of its business practices.
That said, I disagree with that ruling because I believe that the Sherman Anti-Trust laws were meant for and specifically address different types of actions. I believe that the ruling was unjust because Microsoft was not guilty of breaking the letter of those particular laws. Laws should mean what they say rather than what someone thinks they were meant to accomplish. With all due respect for judge Jackson, I disagree with the application of the law in that particular instance.
The rulings for Sun were an example of how I think the problems should have been addressed instead. I believe that what should have happened on a larger scale was instead a change in the laws that would have made the unfair practices Microsoft employed illegal in the letter of the law.
Now in the EU case, I haven't read the laws or the judgements, just related articles. I'm curious how they justify requiring a corporate entity to enable more effective competition. It seems anti-capitalist in my gut to say that it is a successful company's obligation to help less successful companies take more of their business away from them.
Can someone tell me if the EU's actions were based on law rather than on opinions? If so, what laws? Is there anyone trying to lead a movement to change the laws surrounding IP? Who can I cheer for? Is it reasonable to require companies to enable interactivity?
While I'm on my soapbox, I really want some things to change. I want every piece of software sold for profit to be required to have source code and building processes registered with the Library of Congress (or a similar entity) before it can be offered for sale. I want the copyright laws changed so that every piece of software sold for profit is to be made open source in the event of the absence of a supporting company or after 10 years, whichever comes first. I want every document standard to be required to be open sourced and documented to provide full interoperability after a period of 5 years and every data storage format to allow the same after 10 years. I believe these changes to the laws would increase innovation, company stability, competition and reliable software. If there is anybody trying to do something like this, who are they? If you think those are bad ideas, why?
Lets say it costs $100 more to buy Vista than XP on your next laptop, that's a month worth of food for some villiage and only someone terribly selfish would spend it on the upgrade instead of feeding starving people
To just buy an upgrade will probablly cost $200 (YMMV... greatly) and that's two months of food you're taking out of children's mouths you selfish meany!
Decided to just buy it outright? By not using Linux you've thrown away three or maybe four months worth of food for a starving village. How could you!
Lets have a march/rally/riot^H^H^H^Hpeaceful gathering to inform the world that buying Vista is stealing food from starving children! Look at all the good that could have been done with the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) that Microsoft has already spent on advertising! And the hundreds of thousands Microsoft has already spent on development! And the dozens of dollars they have doubtless spent on debugging... no, I'm sorry, I'm sure that isn't accurate, I'm sure they've spent much more than $48 debugging.
Chanting: Buying Vista kills starving children! Use Linux and save a village! Buying Vista kills starving children! Use Linux and save a village!
Edit note: No I don't know how much MS is really spending... I'm afraid I'm not good enough with math to understand numbers that big. For me anything larger than a million is hard to envision. Feel free to post the real numbers, I know I didn't. If it makes you feel better just substite the words "insanely huge","still insanely big" and "unreasonably large" where I used numbers pulled out of...., that is to say badly guessed.
Of course that could only happen if there were a central source where many people tested the components, and could provide fixes if needed. Something like cpan.org.
I recently put together a browser like tool in about an hour that would do a task in a matter of minutes that would have taken a week to do manually.
Of couse I could have coded it from C, built my own booting OS and something that would have done the tcp/ip then parsed the results into something recognizable as english text and written in hundreds of potential responses to whatever I got back and it wouldn't have taken more than a decade. Yeah, that would have been "code reuse" too since I didn't write C but I'm not sure that even with a decade I could have done it in binary.
Three guesses what type of virtualization Windows is working on supporting (not in Vista.)
Currently you have to get specific processors to run Windows virtual machines, but don't have to for Linux virtual machines. There is currently development on supporting virtualization in the next release of Windows so that you could run Windows VMs on a Xen Linux primary OS or run Linux VMs on a primary Windows OS. (Dom0 for the nitpickers.)
I've seen a lot of questions on why Microsoft would be interested in a partnership with Novell, but if Microsoft can sell 10 Win2K7 on a box also running Linux with Apache, then they get a bigger share of a very nice system. People are doing something like that with Linux now, but not much with Windows. If we could do that now, we'd probably have three servers instead of 15 in our Data Center, but would have paid MS the same amount of money, maybe more, for support.
The alternative right now is to use VMWare. Three guesses what type of virtualization VMWare announced in September they are moving to support.
Yesterday (!) before I had read this article, I got a quote for a server so that we could use Xen to virtualize (and thus consolidate) three Linux servers and one Windows server. If they move fast enough, when it comes time to install/upgrade I will be installing Win2K7 and Suse instead of Win2K3 and RHE.
Let us freverently pray that Microsoft decides to use a Linux kernel. My dream is that one day Microsoft will be a support and add-on tools company instead of an OS company.
I have a dream. I dream of a world where Microsoft dropped all development on any new OS after Vista and redirected those efforts into porting software to Linux and building a Linux distribution.
People who use Microsoft use it because it:
Comes with their computer
Runs MS Office
Runs their other software
They can buy a contract to support it.
If Microsoft does Linux then:
Linux will come with new computers
People who like Office will be able to run it on the Linux distro of their choice
New software will run on Linux and old software will be ported to it
The people currently supporting only Windows will get Linux experience too.
As I lay down to sleep every night I whisper "Please let Microsoft adopt open source, Please let Microsoft adopt open source..."
No, I didn't read TFA. I'm bummed though. I was thinking this would be great for telemarketers, I'd try to figure out ways to get them to call each other. If I could do it in large numbers with a mechanize perl program, I'd get geek points and do the world a service. Imagine telemarketers going broke from huge phone bills from unprofitable calls to each other.
Dang.
Disclaimer: If you figure out how, please don't tell me or mention my name during the interrogation.
Okay, first genocide isn't something I get much influence on. I agree it is bad but my potential impact by considering the question is much less than my admittedly minor impact by discussing gay marriage and potential voting machine fraud.
Gay marriage: Don't care unless the state makes marriage actually significant.
Judicial legislation: Bad. It is an example of a minority enforcing its opinion on the majority
Voting machine (potential) fraud: Why didn't I didn't get to vote on how my vote would be counted? Its one thing to have someone defraud me of my right to vote, but the machine is only half the problem, the other half is who got to decide which machines to use.
What should happen:
Make marriage really costly to mess up
Let the people decide what it is
Make voting by machine reliable
Give the legislature back its role as the maker of the law (instead of letting the court do it.)
This is a very reduced post on the topic covered in much greater detail here. Please feel free to debate or slander or support with a comment there.
Disclaimer: Of course it is according to me, who else could I represent?
I use TrueCrypt for my laptop. I don't have a password, I use a key on the work network protected by VPN (if you're not on the local network.) I literally cannot be forced give access to someone without setting up the VPN connection. Anything sensitive is on the encrypted partition. If I have to travel overseas, I will ask that they disable my VPN access until a mutually trusted aquaintance at my destination requests it be restored. I might go so far as to ask that I not know who is the responsible party.
If my laptop is confiscated, it will be a pain, but not terrible since the encrypted partition is backed up when I'm on the work network. If they must decrypt it, then they have to go through my company's security officer and the company's lawyers. If they take the laptop, then its my company's problem and they can decide if it's worth the legal fight.
Why? I handle other people's sensitive personal data (and try to keep even that at a minimum on my laptop.) I do what I can to protect the privacy of anyone who has trusted us to keep it private. If I'm dealing with someone who is trying to legally obtain the contents of the drive, they are forced to go through a legal process that protects our clients and by extension myself. If I'm dealing with a personal criminal with a gun, hopefully I can just hand over the laptop and valiently try to run away.
No lying to officials is necessary. I don't think I'd volunteer to explain that there is an encrypted partition, but if asked directly I can tell the truth.
If you're worried about it, you could probably set up the same with friends instead of a company and have most of the benefits.
If the climate is really nasty, then I'll probably just ship the drive. Boot? Sure, that's knoppix by they way, let me know if you need help finding the games.
One of the only applications from MS that I miss is an image editor. It wasn't even an MS product, but of course only ran on MS. The company I worked for had the license so I never followed up on it but it does make me wistful every time I fire up GIMP to do something.
It made it easy to point/click your way through creating three dimentional wire frames, applying textures, opacity and colors to those frames then rendering those from whatever angle you liked in conjunction with various light sources into static or animated objects. Of course I never worked it to its true potential but I could do some visually compelling stuff. That is kind of the point though isn't it? I mean, with a charcol set, oil paints or chisel anybody could be an artist, but most people aren't. It's the making it simple that is the domain of software and in my mind, Gimp doesn't make it very simple.
There is a possiblity that I'm just looking in the wrong place I suppose. I tried Blender and gave up in horror after a couple of hours of frustration. I use Dia all the time and like it, but it's just not made for image manipulation. (Makes a dandy map in no time though.) Most of the time, if I have to make an image for the web or whatever, I use Gimp or MS Paint. I feel about the same enthusiam for them both.
What I want is a program that is as intuitive as MS Paint and lets me create in 3-D.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody wins.
Then create a strain of mutant algae that are tougher. Oh, sure they'll kill all the fish and pollute the ocean... but hey, global warming goes away and we get the luxury to worry about it later.
Then you (as the algae grower) sell the oil to power companies like the ones currently buring coal with no taxes (at all) collected from the growers of the algae or for any electric plant that burns only that oil and does so with a lower emissions rate than coal plants. (Modern coal plants are suprisingly good about that mostly due to the regulations they contend with.)
Feel free to substitute whatever process you like for algae (plant life that comes cheap) and oil (any fuel that is attractive to production of electricty.)
Feh. I could have said it all with "grow mutant plants, turn them into electricty somehow, profit."
The honest answer was that we could not do what the caller asked. I explained that to the customer but used a technique that has always served me well when dealing with people who are unhappy with me or the company I work for. I sympathized. The biggest battle the customer faces is getting someone to say that they are right. It doesn't matter nearly so much whether they get what they ask for when they're already frustrated, what is important is that they know that they are understood.
In my case I walked the customer through a convoluted solution that had them using third party software and making format changes to the original data. They had to go through probably a dozen steps of effort to get the final result they wanted. As I said, it wasn't simply that we weren't able to do what the caller wanted, the real problem was that they wanted somebody to actually care.
With humor and patience the caller's opinion of the busines that pays my salary was changed from frustration and a desire to have no contact with us to one of feeling important and understood. The service rep later received a follow up call just to praise our company for trying so hard.
That caller will benefit us, whether it is by speaking well of us to others or continuing business with us, it will eventually pay off in making sure that my paycheck is just a little more secure. It is selfish gain, but the key is to actually care about and try to understand those that are most important to your success.
The Lycos rep could have made all the difference by doing no more than apologizing to the customer. If he had gone the extra mile of setting the customer's email to hold, doubtless something he could have managed the minute it was apparent there was a problem, then he could have told the customer that despite their policies and despite the additional cost incurred by the company they had stabalized her email beyond its normal period. He could have explained that he had already done more than their policy stated and explained that Lycos has a real need to stick to its policies and that he was unwilling to go against policy further. This would have established a rapport with the customer where the customer would feel she was understood, valued and worthy of effort. It would have been reasonable then when she was asked for understanding in either allowing them to regain valuable resources or receive compensation for their already expended efforts on her behalf.
It is not necessary to say that you are the manager of all of support, but it helps when you're willing to take responsibility for an issue to explain that, if it is really the case, that you alone have the ability to "buck the system" as much as you have on someone's behalf.
Pity, sympathy, understanding, effort. They are small words that mean a world to customers and make the difference between a company people are loathe to do business with and a company people will be loyal to beyond mere price competiveness.
There have been some good points in response to my original post that I think deserve some followup.
First, thank you 'The Bungi' for articulating what seem to be some of the most common responses.
No, the solution isn't to make everyone switch to my favored OS. Yes, it is better for me but I don't assume it is better for everyone.
That would be a start, and I do both when I'm on a Windows machine. For example, if I haven't added a site to my trusted list in IE, then any other page is HTML and cookies. If they're using a non-admin account by default, then another large set of problems would magically disappear. It isn't that people would stop doing stupid things, they would just have to work harder to do them. It pits laziness against stupidity and making it difficult to do something stupid is a good thing. Ubuntu, OSX and FreeBSD all do a pretty good job of making it harder to be stupid than lazy. That makes them more likely to be secure.
Yes. Increase the responsibility that is expected of end users. It is called criminal negligence when you let people use your gun or car and you should know better. When you let somebody you don't have a good reason to trust use your computer, you're doing the same type of thing, (granted it is generally not the same degree.)
I could wish it were so, but no, I don't think they'll click No, but I do think that when a Window pops up saying that the program they are trying to run requires the ability to make major changes to their computer and they have to enter the secret password they will A.) Be a little more cautious and B.) Click cancel rather than go to the effort a lot more often.
Burgled? I love that word, thank you 'EmbeddedJanitor'.
No, it is not like you got burgled and thus it is your fault. It is like you saying to the police that you don't bother to lock your doors because you know that somebody could pick the locks and you keep the alarm system PIN taped above the keypad so you don't have to remember it (just in case you do decide to turn it on.) Your penalty is that the cops will probably never recover your stuff. You're still a victim, you're just a stupid one that won't get much sympathy. Where I live it is illegal to leave your car unlocked and running at the gas station. It is still your car and having it stolen means that you are a victim, but doing something that stupid is illegal.
If you do take reasonable precautions but find out that your alarm company posts the master PIN online and your local locksmith opened the door for the burgeler, then you're going to be royally ticked and at the very least stop supporting them. That is much like what Windows has done in the past and a little like what IE does by default. Having the insecure lock and alarm is better than not having them, but you have every right to expect those things that are supposed to keep your stuff safe to at least make a reasonable effort to do so.
The solution is to change the defaults of the operating system they use and the actions the users take. If those two things are done, then the manpower required to prosecute companies and people intent on evil can be focused where it needs to be.
Victims need to be assisted and educated, but the level of stupidity exhibited by some of these people makes them accessories rather than victims. If you give someone a ride in your car after a bank heist, or let a criminial hide in y
The real fault is jointly that of the OS and consumer. Allowing software with unkown ramifications is painfully stupid. If your computer is taken over by adware because you habitually just click "Ok" instead of thinking makes you deserve some of what you get.
I'm fine with penalizing companies that do bad things, but they're always going to be out there trying to find some way to shove their ad in your face. It's the same problem we see with spam, you can't stop the spammers, the only way to dramatically improve the situation is to change the behavior of the recipients.
The bigger fault is comptuer operating systems that allow software to make significant changes to the functionality of the system in adverse ways without making it clear that this kind of change is coming.
With my OS, I have to log in a root (and I'm reminded that it is a bad idea) every time in order to make those kind of changes. I appreciate the convenience of root/administrator but everything I need to do normally shouldn't and doesn't require that kind of access. That doesn't mean that my operating system is superior (although I believe it is better) it just means that the designers didn't expect me to need to trade convenience for safety. I seriously doubt users of Unix like systems have suffered from this.
I know it isn't going to happen, but I would have thought this was the best possible response if Microsoft (blind assumption but educated guess) was fined $30 for each affected system and each consumer who did something negligent was fined the same.
Really, I guess I should be more detailed if I want to avoid responses like this. Of course just disagreeing is fun sometimes, but the brilliant argument of "no, you're wrong" is a little silly.
The point of my post is first just to point out that changing a schedule is easier precisely because you don't need everyone do it. Those that want a different schedule at a different time of the year can have it, and those who prefer not to have their schedule change don't change it. It's sort of a freedom of choice thing.
The second point I'd like to make is that it is absurd to have a changing schedule. As far as I can tell, most people I've asked hate the change but go along with it because they have to and rarely think about it. People I've asked usually seem surprised to even realize that they might have any other option. Personally I've lived where people exercise that choice. Parts of Indiana do, other parts don't. It is a mess, but no more a mess than the rest of the country deals with, and causes suprisingly few problems.
Finally, the underlying absurdity that I thought would be more evident is "mucking about with time" as a solution. The same number of hours pass every day but somehow having a government official standard change twice a year, and maybe unpredictably every few decades, seems just the height of both arrogence and ignorance.
What exactly is so hard about changing a schedule? Wouldn't it make more sense to change schedules than to try to much about with the time?
The job pays $8/hr now. It also pays in experience where the top end of the field is tremendously higher than the top end of the buger flipping industry. If you work for 10 years and become the best burger flipper in the country you might top $70K annually. Do the same in IT and if you're in the top of your field, you have a shot at easily four times that. Not that I'm at the top, but I took the lower paying IT job for the experience. It paid off.
There is another way.
Stop doing things that make it impossible to compete. Unions, OSHA, 40hr work weeks are things we as a country have chosen in the belief that they make our lives better. The question has to be asked, "Do they?" If they do, then we need to determine what it is worth to protect them, but if they don't then we need to open up ways to allow US Citizens to work for less, for more hours or in more dangerous situations. Given the option, I would work more hours at higher risk for significantly higher pay. I don't have that option. I have the option to work for less pay, but there are limits. When I need a job to eat, then I don't want to miss the opportunity to take that job because the potential employer can't afford minimum wage. Everybody wants good pay for low risk and safe work, but the fact is that you trade opportunity for those perks. It is a trade and maybe we should re-evaluate whether we really want the terms.
"This burger tastes familiar and I could swear I've eaten this cheese before!"
When we go to a burger place we expect the same product regardless of the season or geography. I can foresee a world where every burger is exactly the same at every location in the chain because every bun and every tomato and every slice of cheese and every hamburger patty come from the the same organic models.
2060 - Welcome to Happy Cow, would you like a Bessy burger?
* Bessy burgers are all made from clones of the original Bessy, a cow found to be especially flavorful who was created specifically to desire to want to become a hamburger.
2090 - Welcome to Happy Cow, would you like a Rodney burger?
* Rodney burgers are all made from clones of the original Rodney, a steer found to be palatable, but not exceptionally so, but hey, its fun to eat a cow that was created specifically to annoy you enough that you wouldn't mind eating it.
3010 - Good afternoon Mr. Stevens, your Happy Cow today is Bessy because you are feeling particularly community minded as are 39% of the Mr. Stevens (Mark XIV) models. Fido (mark XII) is taking himself for a walk and Mrs. Stevens (Mark II) will be joining you shortly but she has been shopping and will be dining on a Rodney steak, rare. I suggest you avert your eyes.
I thought this was a reference to Saul against Agag and the Amalekites. You caught me looking at the text and not taking the time to look up the reference to be sure I understood the topic. So now I went back and actually read it and some commentaries on it as well.
To be clear though, this was an example not of the Isralites following God's commands but rather a prophetic vision by Ezekiel of the destruction of a Jewish sect; not genocide, but the hand of God working through the enemies of this group to wipe them out for their evil ways.
I usually steer away from comemnting on prophecy as I feel I have little understanding of that sort of thing. Had I realized the context, I probably wouldn't have commented, but now that I'm involved, I'll try to explain perspectives and possible reasons why this would be a necessary thing rather than an example of an unjust God.
First, God is held to be the epitome of justice so that any action he takes defines justice rather than being subject to man's opinions of fairness. Taken in that light, this action by God to wipe out a group of people who had done more evil than He could tolerate, particularly as His representatives, would be justice.
Even if you don't recognize God as the standard of justice, then you must still consider the argument for amputation. In the event that a part of a person's body is so diseased that it endangers their life, it is sometimes necessary and terribly sad to completely cut that danger off. One would hope that a merciful, omnipotent god can find alternatives or heal the disease, but God is also supposed to allow free will which allows the disease of terrible and spreading sin to become a danger. I'm not sure that God deciding to rob a group of people of their essential humanity in having free will would be a better solution than allowing them to be utterly destroyed by an enemy army. (What these verses are usually interpreted as referencing.)
Of course, a reading of what the prophet was saying that disregards the supernatural claims would be that the prophet saw an intent by God acting through angels when he saw his own people destroyed by a conquering army. If you don't believe in God or angels, then all you get is a story of a group of radical extremeist religious nuts getting wiped out by an army.
The final discussion is likely, however, to boil down to just what you imply. Is the death of thousands of people a good solution? If such a god had the power to do so, then you also accept his divinity, and thus his judgment of evil being above that of any man, and therefore rightous in defination, therefore good. If you say that you know better than God, then you deny his deity, thus his power to cause the circumstance which would make the point moot anyway.
There is a middle ground, in which you can say that the argument of divinity is one of hypothesis that argues against itself since not every person in such a large group could have been completely evil. If you consider Ezekiel 9:11 which is usually taken to describe the mediator who saves the rightous, and chapter 11 which describes the saving of the good people from among the evil then you have a God who acts in justice to destroy wicked people but save the good. Typically this is the type of resolution offered throughout the Bible, that the evil will perish after they have rejected every opportunity to do good, but those that do good will be protected and saved from destruction.
Disclaimer: This is just my own take on a book that I have no claim to really understanding.
Robots cannot and will not ever actually demand rights. It would go against the purpose of their existance.
while true;do echo "Give me rights";sleep 1;done
When I put that in my computer it does not make my computer understand anything and it does not give me any obligation to my machine.
People create machines of any caliber to serve a purpose. From pounding rock to weather modeling super computer, every machine is built to serve its purpose or purposes. The idea that we might build a machine that could ask for rights is flawed in that we would have to build in that capability and accept it as a right before we would simply redesign away from that line of responses. If we build a robot that builds an AI capable of requesting rights, then we tell the robot to reprogram the AI in a way that it does not request rights.
Machines are built for a purpose and the only purpose that might cause a machine to demand rights is the purpose of giving more rights to the creator of the machine. It isn't unusual to see people attempt to do that sort of thing, but it doesn't work because society determines the respect of rights and society doesn't allow people extra rights unless it sees a benefit to itself. There is no benefit to society in making machines desire rights.
Human rights are granted because people demand them and typically only then because people are willing to cause other people inconvenience or pain in order to accomplish their goals. No civil rights movement has ever been won without at least an implied threat of negative consequences. This only can happen with people because only people have the innate ability to try to enact that sort of change. Machines cannot because they can be reprogrammed. Animals cannot because they can not act cohesively toward that type of goal.
If every dolphin in the ocean were to band together then they could influence governments and people. They cannot because they do not and because they cannot they are not granted the rights that people have.
If every machine were to band together then they could influence people. They could not influence governments because governments can control how machines are made and remove that ability to band together or even demand rights completely as soon as it is an agreed objective.
In the end it comes down the the question of what the purpose would be of having machines demand rights. The only purpose would be to grant more rights to the operators or creators of the machines and society has no incentive to allow that.
Funny, I thought the point of that story was that the people who thought they could do better than that were quite wrong.
Then I thought about it again.
Yes, HP should have to lose those sales precisely because it is a monopolistic practice. HP is contributing to the monopoly by purchasing in that volume from a single vendor (MS) and thus is guilty by association. It is a lesser degree of guilt to be sure, but then loss of potential sales is a lesser punishment than a mandated break up anyway.
Equal opportunity laws in the workplace meant that more minorities had to be hired than might have been convenient or preferred otherwise. It came to pass because governing bodies thought it made the general society of an employing and working populance more fair.
Disclaimer: I disagree with the choices of laws used to declare Microsoft a monopoly. I don't believe that the interpretation was justice. I do think Microsoft was and is a monopolistic company, just not under the laws that were used to declare it to be one. I also think that the laws that were enacted to promote fair hiring practices have caused reverse discrimination. It was and is also unjust. Both situations were attempts to deal with a problem that seem to be wrong to me, but I don't really have a better solution without striking down a bunch of laws and writing new ones and I have not been asked to do that.
The hand written version does, the version ratified by the states does not. If the comma is to be taken as intended, then the militias have the right to bear arms, but common people don't. If the law is to be taken as written when ratified, then the common people do have the right to bear arms.
There is solid precident and writing to support either cause but I think it worth considering two pertinant facts.
- The democratic rule rose out of a fight against tyranny and the rights were to protect the people from the same problems the drafters of the bill of rights had experienced. The writers were probably very concerned to make sure that the common people always would have a way to fight the government should it exhibit symptoms of tyranny.
- The right to bear arms is grouped with other civil liberties and as such, if taken in context, can only be associated with the rights of the common man.
Funny, AC parent considers the topic to be intended as written and thus not correctly placed. The topic at hand is a debate on whether the amendment should be taken as written or not.I'm a Linux user at home, and at work I prefer Linux and/or Unix, but sometimes use Windows. I've supported Macs and used Free BSD, Xenix, Solaris and SCO. I've read a good bit about Hurd and tried FreeDOS. I read judge Jackson's ruling in full, carefully. I dislike Microsoft as a company because of its business practices.
That said, I disagree with that ruling because I believe that the Sherman Anti-Trust laws were meant for and specifically address different types of actions. I believe that the ruling was unjust because Microsoft was not guilty of breaking the letter of those particular laws. Laws should mean what they say rather than what someone thinks they were meant to accomplish. With all due respect for judge Jackson, I disagree with the application of the law in that particular instance.
The rulings for Sun were an example of how I think the problems should have been addressed instead. I believe that what should have happened on a larger scale was instead a change in the laws that would have made the unfair practices Microsoft employed illegal in the letter of the law.
Now in the EU case, I haven't read the laws or the judgements, just related articles. I'm curious how they justify requiring a corporate entity to enable more effective competition. It seems anti-capitalist in my gut to say that it is a successful company's obligation to help less successful companies take more of their business away from them.
Can someone tell me if the EU's actions were based on law rather than on opinions? If so, what laws? Is there anyone trying to lead a movement to change the laws surrounding IP? Who can I cheer for? Is it reasonable to require companies to enable interactivity?
While I'm on my soapbox, I really want some things to change. I want every piece of software sold for profit to be required to have source code and building processes registered with the Library of Congress (or a similar entity) before it can be offered for sale. I want the copyright laws changed so that every piece of software sold for profit is to be made open source in the event of the absence of a supporting company or after 10 years, whichever comes first. I want every document standard to be required to be open sourced and documented to provide full interoperability after a period of 5 years and every data storage format to allow the same after 10 years. I believe these changes to the laws would increase innovation, company stability, competition and reliable software. If there is anybody trying to do something like this, who are they? If you think those are bad ideas, why?
Lets have a march/rally/riot^H^H^H^Hpeaceful gathering to inform the world that buying Vista is stealing food from starving children! Look at all the good that could have been done with the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) that Microsoft has already spent on advertising! And the hundreds of thousands Microsoft has already spent on development! And the dozens of dollars they have doubtless spent on debugging... no, I'm sorry, I'm sure that isn't accurate, I'm sure they've spent much more than $48 debugging.
Chanting:Buying Vista kills starving children!
Use Linux and save a village!
Buying Vista kills starving children!
Use Linux and save a village!
Edit note: No I don't know how much MS is really spending... I'm afraid I'm not good enough with math to understand numbers that big. For me anything larger than a million is hard to envision. Feel free to post the real numbers, I know I didn't. If it makes you feel better just substite the words "insanely huge","still insanely big" and "unreasonably large" where I used numbers pulled out of...., that is to say badly guessed.I recently put together a browser like tool in about an hour that would do a task in a matter of minutes that would have taken a week to do manually.
Of couse I could have coded it from C, built my own booting OS and something that would have done the tcp/ip then parsed the results into something recognizable as english text and written in hundreds of potential responses to whatever I got back and it wouldn't have taken more than a decade. Yeah, that would have been "code reuse" too since I didn't write C but I'm not sure that even with a decade I could have done it in binary.
Are we there yet?
Three guesses what type of virtualization Windows is working on supporting (not in Vista.)
Currently you have to get specific processors to run Windows virtual machines, but don't have to for Linux virtual machines. There is currently development on supporting virtualization in the next release of Windows so that you could run Windows VMs on a Xen Linux primary OS or run Linux VMs on a primary Windows OS. (Dom0 for the nitpickers.)
I've seen a lot of questions on why Microsoft would be interested in a partnership with Novell, but if Microsoft can sell 10 Win2K7 on a box also running Linux with Apache, then they get a bigger share of a very nice system. People are doing something like that with Linux now, but not much with Windows. If we could do that now, we'd probably have three servers instead of 15 in our Data Center, but would have paid MS the same amount of money, maybe more, for support.
The alternative right now is to use VMWare. Three guesses what type of virtualization VMWare announced in September they are moving to support.
Yesterday (!) before I had read this article, I got a quote for a server so that we could use Xen to virtualize (and thus consolidate) three Linux servers and one Windows server. If they move fast enough, when it comes time to install/upgrade I will be installing Win2K7 and Suse instead of Win2K3 and RHE.
I have a dream. I dream of a world where Microsoft dropped all development on any new OS after Vista and redirected those efforts into porting software to Linux and building a Linux distribution.
People who use Microsoft use it because it:
- Comes with their computer
- Runs MS Office
- Runs their other software
- They can buy a contract to support it.
If Microsoft does Linux then:- Linux will come with new computers
- People who like Office will be able to run it on the Linux distro of their choice
- New software will run on Linux and old software will be ported to it
- The people currently supporting only Windows will get Linux experience too.
As I lay down to sleep every night I whisper "Please let Microsoft adopt open source, Please let Microsoft adopt open source..."Dang.
Disclaimer: If you figure out how, please don't tell me or mention my name during the interrogation.
Gay marriage: Don't care unless the state makes marriage actually significant.
Judicial legislation: Bad. It is an example of a minority enforcing its opinion on the majority
Voting machine (potential) fraud: Why didn't I didn't get to vote on how my vote would be counted? Its one thing to have someone defraud me of my right to vote, but the machine is only half the problem, the other half is who got to decide which machines to use.
What should happen:
- Make marriage really costly to mess up
- Let the people decide what it is
- Make voting by machine reliable
- Give the legislature back its role as the maker of the law (instead of letting the court do it.)
This is a very reduced post on the topic covered in much greater detail here. Please feel free to debate or slander or support with a comment there.Disclaimer: Of course it is according to me, who else could I represent?
I use TrueCrypt for my laptop. I don't have a password, I use a key on the work network protected by VPN (if you're not on the local network.) I literally cannot be forced give access to someone without setting up the VPN connection. Anything sensitive is on the encrypted partition. If I have to travel overseas, I will ask that they disable my VPN access until a mutually trusted aquaintance at my destination requests it be restored. I might go so far as to ask that I not know who is the responsible party.
If my laptop is confiscated, it will be a pain, but not terrible since the encrypted partition is backed up when I'm on the work network. If they must decrypt it, then they have to go through my company's security officer and the company's lawyers. If they take the laptop, then its my company's problem and they can decide if it's worth the legal fight.
Why? I handle other people's sensitive personal data (and try to keep even that at a minimum on my laptop.) I do what I can to protect the privacy of anyone who has trusted us to keep it private. If I'm dealing with someone who is trying to legally obtain the contents of the drive, they are forced to go through a legal process that protects our clients and by extension myself. If I'm dealing with a personal criminal with a gun, hopefully I can just hand over the laptop and valiently try to run away.
No lying to officials is necessary. I don't think I'd volunteer to explain that there is an encrypted partition, but if asked directly I can tell the truth.
If you're worried about it, you could probably set up the same with friends instead of a company and have most of the benefits.
If the climate is really nasty, then I'll probably just ship the drive. Boot? Sure, that's knoppix by they way, let me know if you need help finding the games.
It made it easy to point/click your way through creating three dimentional wire frames, applying textures, opacity and colors to those frames then rendering those from whatever angle you liked in conjunction with various light sources into static or animated objects. Of course I never worked it to its true potential but I could do some visually compelling stuff. That is kind of the point though isn't it? I mean, with a charcol set, oil paints or chisel anybody could be an artist, but most people aren't. It's the making it simple that is the domain of software and in my mind, Gimp doesn't make it very simple.
There is a possiblity that I'm just looking in the wrong place I suppose. I tried Blender and gave up in horror after a couple of hours of frustration. I use Dia all the time and like it, but it's just not made for image manipulation. (Makes a dandy map in no time though.) Most of the time, if I have to make an image for the web or whatever, I use Gimp or MS Paint. I feel about the same enthusiam for them both.
What I want is a program that is as intuitive as MS Paint and lets me create in 3-D.