Well, "evidence" is hard to provide, but to (accurately) invoke the old saying "The plural of anecdote is data": My older brother, his wife, and their son were all born profoundly deaf. I have a number of relatives that were born profoundly deaf due to an inherited genetic defect in my father's family line (which was identified by researchers in part by sequencing my brother's family's genomes--his wife is a distant relative)
Neither my brother nor his wife sign...at all. They both learned to read lips (they are in their 40s) so they could interact more fully with society. My sister in law briefly attended a university that is very popular among deaf culture and she left after one semester. She was ostracized because she saw lip reading as a superior alternative to ASL. She was ostracized because most of her friends were hearing.
The stories they have about their own interactions with deaf culture are astounding. To a great extent, they will have nothing to do with it if possible. My brother is a well-known athlete in the deaf community, and so he interacts with many more of the deaf than he'd prefer. Not because they are deaf, but because of their attitude. When my nephew was born, there was never any doubt that he would have a cochlear implant. At one point, they prepared to pay cash for it (50k+) because of a fight with the insurance company (this was ~16 years ago). When this decision got out, they received more scorn from the community for 'betraying' it.
They can regale you with stories about 'deaf culture' advocates angrily leaving restaurants when confronted with a waiter who doesn't sign. Or about the lack of grammatical structure in ASL, which leads to a serious deficit in the writing abilities of most signers.
The list goes on. That you aren't aware of 'deaf culture' doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And that it exists in not necessarily a bad thing. But technology has provided an amazing cure for this condition, yet instead of embracing it, they reject it as an assault on their culture. Can you imagine this from the blind community? Or the wheel-chair bound community?
What? The Udvar-Hazy is free (though parking is $10 or $15 per car), but the Intrepid museum and the Kennedy Space Center Museum are both definitely not free, and are both, in fact, private organizations. Kennedy is here: http://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/buy-tickets-admission-hours.aspx Intrepid's site seems not to be responding. I don't know anything about the LA location. But having taken the family to Intrepid, Kennedy, Udvar-Hazy, and Air Force museum; I can assure you that 'free' had nothing to do with the site selection. In fact, as the museums must now pay NASA $28m (except for the Smithsonian), I'd say that the free museums were at a disadvantage.
Well, I can tell you that at Ohio State University, this is exactly what has happened. Effectively, every single machine that _may_ have ever had 'sensitive' (FERPA or HIPAA or Grant-defined) data on it must be encrypted. If it is lost & not encrypted, then it is the owner's burden of proof to prove that no sensitive data was on the machine; which is only possible if you have a complete & recent backup.
So, it can be done, but it is very expensive (though much cheaper now--BitLocker is really nice on Win7, FileVault on Mac) in terms of software and time. When we had to implement this ('08, I think) it cost our department of 25 faculty about $10,000-$15,000 to implement in software & time.
"Scanning for credit card data and SSN is quite easy and simple"
Sure, if you don't mind a false positive rate of 99%, which is what a colleague of mine got when he ran an automated tool on his machine that contained hundreds of GBs of particle physics data. Shocking, but its not hard to find 9 digit numbers (SSNs) or 15-18 digit numbers (CC) when you look at large repositories of quantitative data.
So the problem is, if you are mandated to run such software, and you get 1 million possible #s, what do you do then? If you are a typical clueless IT lackey (which luckily, we have dept-level IT, so ours are quite good & clued-in) he tells you to delete all of the dangerous data, or _prove_ that its not dangerous. (This has happened to a number of fellow profs at my Uni, which is one of the largest in the US).
The reality is that (a) the Uni should've stopped giving access to such info to anybody w/o a strict need-to-know decades ago. But they didn't. Now its everybody else's problem.
It depends on the field of research. Medical researchers will often have 'sensitive' (HIPAA in the US) data on their test subjects. My university, like many others, until recently, indexed all students with SSNs, and if I downloaded a roster for use in Excel, I got the SSNs with no option to delete them. That's what really angered me; I didn't want or need the data, but they (the Uni) shoved it down my throat & then threw a fit years later and pushed the cost of fixing the problem down to the departments.
Further, it depends on your definition of student data. I am a professor at a Big10 uni in the US, and our institutional definition of student records (which are declared sensitive by federal law) includes things as inane as emails from a student stating that the grader mis-added their score & they should've gotten an 80 on a quiz instead of a 75. So pretty much every communication to/from a student must be protected.
Your solution is entirely inadequate. I am a professor at a Big10 university. I have 41GB of files and data in my Docs directory. The point is, how do I know which of these files are protected? Your quip of "Anything you need saved goes on removable storage" is ridiculous. How do you protect the removable medium? What happens if you lose it? It was the loss of a removable disk 4 years ago that caused our state (and ergo our university) to attempt this same exercise. All of the tools are pretty useless. Its really hard to scan for SSNs without hitting false positives (what person engaged in empirical research doesn't have at least some 9 digit numbers hanging around?)
Our final solution? Encrypt everything under the assumption that there is sensitive data on all machines. Its not pretty. In fact, its really annoying, but it provides political & economic cover.
That is, until you, as a professor, go to the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro for a month to do research. At that point, the assumption of 'always connected' is incorrect, and you must carry data with you. Frequently, you must also carry some forms of student information, too, in order to respond to emails that you get from students when you are in town at the internet cafe once per week.
please recall from Econ 101 that in an ideal free market, profits will approach zero anyway. TWCs profit is a sign of market inefficiency. The ideal outcome is for both (or more) competitors to fight over minimal profit.
Uhh, no, if that is what you recall from Econ 101, you weren't paying attention. You are confusing economic profits with accounting profits. Economics says that all economic profits will be driven to zero, not that all accounting profits will be driven to zero. What is the difference? The return on investment. If you invest $1m and earn $1/year, you have turned an accounting profit, but not an economic profit, because, even in this economy, you can earn about 1% interest with little or no risk. IAAE (I am an Economist)
Apple doesn't get special privileges because it "only" holds a smaller percentage of the hundreds of millions of computer sales out there. Their computers are overpriced and they need competition.
I am confused. You state that Apple has a small market share, but doesn't have enough competition. It would seem to me that the other 85% of the market might provide it some competition. For example, there's this OS called windows, perhaps you've heard of it? I've heard it's pretty popular, and some people apparently choose it instead of OS X.
I totally and completely disagree. The issue is one of pedagogy--which language can kids learn at an early age? I was coding 1000 line programs in BASIC at age 8, and I wasn't alone in that. BASIC is an easy language to learn. Is it limited? Definitely. Would I prefer today to code in BASIC instead of the Perl, Matlab, and Fortran that I now use? No. But the author's point is about _learning_ to code. Perl isn't terribly easy to 'learn' nor are c or c++ or java, at least not to an 8yo.
On the contrary, there is a perfectly good legalese word for free-as-in-beer: gratis. It is the free-as-in-speech concept for which there is no generally recognized succinct legal term. Libre is commonly used in the OSS community to denote the concept, but in legal circles, libre is more commonly used as an astrological reference.
that patriot act of yours is darn scary. does anyone know if there is an equivilant in Britain?
Are you kidding me? You guys don't even have a Constitution to provide an foundation to object to laws like PATRIOT. Have you ever checked out the UK's anti-terror laws? Check out the "Anti- Terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001" (which, BTW I'm unclear whether its anti terrorism, crime, and security, or only anti terrorism and crime; I would presume that it is pro-security, though the title is a bit ambiguous on that point.) Its chock full of fun bits.
Better yet, check out the laws in the UK in the 1970's and 80's to deal with the IRA--I'm not defending any group or act here, just pointing out that many of those laws make PATRIOT look benign. Just a hint: indefinite detention without any trial, and there's more where that came from.
Far from what the rhetoric of/. would lead one to believe, the civil liberties in the US are quite extensive, and quite well-protected. It is only because they are so extensive, that we notice when they are diminished.
I know you're looking for an MB, not a system, but if you go to http://www.xicomputer.com/ and check out their NetRaider 64 LT. You can custom configure it to have up to 12GB of ram w/ a single Opteron 244.
Because in a capitalistic society, demand drives production, not the other way around. The only situation where this is not true is where a monopoly controls the market, a situation which is -rightly- illegal.
Repeat after me: monopolies are NOT illegal monopolies are NOT illegal monopolies are NOT illegal
Look around you: how many companies do you want putting sewer pipes into your house? Or gas lines? Or providing police or justice systems? Or running phone lines to your house? Should we abolish all copyrights & patents? Ask Pfizer to continue to spend 8 BILLION dollars a year on R&D knowing that their discoveries will be immediately copied by others?
The/. crowd is badly in need of some basic economic education--which, per chance, is my occupation.
Monopolies are not always and everywhere bad. The power to set prices is not always and everywhere bad. The monopoly power granted patent and copyright holders exists to incentivize continued creation. Are there abuses? Sure. Do some/many of the items that can be patented/copyrighted seem dubious? I think so. But that doesn't call for the abolition of copyrights & patents, it calls for the reform of the system.
Monopolies are bad where a firm creates barriers to entry and then exploits those barriers to artificially support the price and reduce consumption. In the case of music, those barriers exist to incentivize continued production.
The natural/. retort here is to point out how much money the record companies make by exploiting those poor artists, who all die broke because they never saw one cent of their revenues, which instead enriched the stupid record company execs and their minions at the RIAA.
If any of you./ers believe that, then I have a suggestion for you: start a record company. Really. Do it. Tell the artists that you will pay them fairly, however you define it, and then turn around and sell DRM-free mp3/ogg format via PayPal. Then, get back to us all on how many artists that you sign (which you are neither a member of, related to, nor live in your neighborhood) and how much money you make them. Because there MUST be a business model here, right? Otherwise people would just stop talking about it.
Actually, Big 3 cars have significantly higher domestic content than even transplants (i.e. Hondas or Toyotas made in the US). Check out http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/regrev/evaluat e/809208.html.
But the point is, how many of these disaffected actually cared about 'outsourcing' until it bothered them. How many of them now care about it in non-IT sectors. And how many of them have changed and/or forgone consumption decisions because the product or service was produced overseas? That's my question.
Really? You might want to look into genetic programming. Although its not the 'same' kind of programming, it is a computational approach to algorithmic development--which is pretty dang close.
Further, why does it matter whether it's fantasy? Why does it matter whether jobs are being replaced by computers or people in other countries? This isn't rhetorical, to me there is no difference, but to others there clearly is, and I am trying to understand that difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, "evidence" is hard to provide, but to (accurately) invoke the old saying "The plural of anecdote is data":
My older brother, his wife, and their son were all born profoundly deaf. I have a number of relatives that were born profoundly deaf due to an inherited genetic defect in my father's family line (which was identified by researchers in part by sequencing my brother's family's genomes--his wife is a distant relative)
Neither my brother nor his wife sign...at all. They both learned to read lips (they are in their 40s) so they could interact more fully with society. My sister in law briefly attended a university that is very popular among deaf culture and she left after one semester. She was ostracized because she saw lip reading as a superior alternative to ASL. She was ostracized because most of her friends were hearing.
The stories they have about their own interactions with deaf culture are astounding. To a great extent, they will have nothing to do with it if possible. My brother is a well-known athlete in the deaf community, and so he interacts with many more of the deaf than he'd prefer. Not because they are deaf, but because of their attitude. When my nephew was born, there was never any doubt that he would have a cochlear implant. At one point, they prepared to pay cash for it (50k+) because of a fight with the insurance company (this was ~16 years ago). When this decision got out, they received more scorn from the community for 'betraying' it.
They can regale you with stories about 'deaf culture' advocates angrily leaving restaurants when confronted with a waiter who doesn't sign. Or about the lack of grammatical structure in ASL, which leads to a serious deficit in the writing abilities of most signers.
The list goes on. That you aren't aware of 'deaf culture' doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And that it exists in not necessarily a bad thing. But technology has provided an amazing cure for this condition, yet instead of embracing it, they reject it as an assault on their culture. Can you imagine this from the blind community? Or the wheel-chair bound community?
They are going to free museums.
What? The Udvar-Hazy is free (though parking is $10 or $15 per car), but the Intrepid museum and the Kennedy Space Center Museum are both definitely not free, and are both, in fact, private organizations. Kennedy is here: http://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/buy-tickets-admission-hours.aspx Intrepid's site seems not to be responding. I don't know anything about the LA location. But having taken the family to Intrepid, Kennedy, Udvar-Hazy, and Air Force museum; I can assure you that 'free' had nothing to do with the site selection. In fact, as the museums must now pay NASA $28m (except for the Smithsonian), I'd say that the free museums were at a disadvantage.
Well, I can tell you that at Ohio State University, this is exactly what has happened. Effectively, every single machine that _may_ have ever had 'sensitive' (FERPA or HIPAA or Grant-defined) data on it must be encrypted. If it is lost & not encrypted, then it is the owner's burden of proof to prove that no sensitive data was on the machine; which is only possible if you have a complete & recent backup.
So, it can be done, but it is very expensive (though much cheaper now--BitLocker is really nice on Win7, FileVault on Mac) in terms of software and time. When we had to implement this ('08, I think) it cost our department of 25 faculty about $10,000-$15,000 to implement in software & time.
"Scanning for credit card data and SSN is quite easy and simple"
Sure, if you don't mind a false positive rate of 99%, which is what a colleague of mine got when he ran an automated tool on his machine that contained hundreds of GBs of particle physics data. Shocking, but its not hard to find 9 digit numbers (SSNs) or 15-18 digit numbers (CC) when you look at large repositories of quantitative data.
So the problem is, if you are mandated to run such software, and you get 1 million possible #s, what do you do then? If you are a typical clueless IT lackey (which luckily, we have dept-level IT, so ours are quite good & clued-in) he tells you to delete all of the dangerous data, or _prove_ that its not dangerous. (This has happened to a number of fellow profs at my Uni, which is one of the largest in the US).
The reality is that (a) the Uni should've stopped giving access to such info to anybody w/o a strict need-to-know decades ago. But they didn't. Now its everybody else's problem.
It depends on the field of research. Medical researchers will often have 'sensitive' (HIPAA in the US) data on their test subjects. My university, like many others, until recently, indexed all students with SSNs, and if I downloaded a roster for use in Excel, I got the SSNs with no option to delete them. That's what really angered me; I didn't want or need the data, but they (the Uni) shoved it down my throat & then threw a fit years later and pushed the cost of fixing the problem down to the departments.
Further, it depends on your definition of student data. I am a professor at a Big10 uni in the US, and our institutional definition of student records (which are declared sensitive by federal law) includes things as inane as emails from a student stating that the grader mis-added their score & they should've gotten an 80 on a quiz instead of a 75. So pretty much every communication to/from a student must be protected.
Your solution is entirely inadequate. I am a professor at a Big10 university. I have 41GB of files and data in my Docs directory. The point is, how do I know which of these files are protected? Your quip of "Anything you need saved goes on removable storage" is ridiculous. How do you protect the removable medium? What happens if you lose it? It was the loss of a removable disk 4 years ago that caused our state (and ergo our university) to attempt this same exercise. All of the tools are pretty useless. Its really hard to scan for SSNs without hitting false positives (what person engaged in empirical research doesn't have at least some 9 digit numbers hanging around?)
Our final solution? Encrypt everything under the assumption that there is sensitive data on all machines. Its not pretty. In fact, its really annoying, but it provides political & economic cover.
That is, until you, as a professor, go to the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro for a month to do research. At that point, the assumption of 'always connected' is incorrect, and you must carry data with you. Frequently, you must also carry some forms of student information, too, in order to respond to emails that you get from students when you are in town at the internet cafe once per week.
CENTURION: What's this, then? 'Romanes Eunt Domus'? 'People called Romanes they go the house'?
BRIAN: It-- it says, 'Romans, go home'.
CENTURION: No, it doesn't. What's Latin for 'Roman'? Come on!
BRIAN: Aah!
CENTURION: Come on!
BRIAN: 'R-- Romanus'?
CENTURION: Goes like...?
BRIAN: 'Annus'?
CENTURION: Vocative plural of 'annus' is...?
BRIAN: Eh. 'Anni'?
CENTURION: 'Romani'. 'Eunt'? What is 'eunt'?
BRIAN: 'Go'. Let--
CENTURION: Conjugate the verb 'to go'.
BRIAN: Uh. 'Ire'. Uh, 'eo'. 'Is'. 'It'. 'Imus'. 'Itis'. 'Eunt'.
CENTURION: So 'eunt' is...?
BRIAN: Ah, huh, third person plural, uh, present indicative. Uh, 'they go'.
CENTURION: But 'Romans, go home' is an order, so you must use the...?
BRIAN: The... imperative!
CENTURION: Which is...?
BRIAN: Umm! Oh. Oh. Um, 'i'. 'I'!
CENTURION: How many Romans?
BRIAN: Ah! 'I'-- Plural. Plural. 'Ite'. 'Ite'.
CENTURION: 'Ite'.
BRIAN: Ah. Eh.
CENTURION: 'Domus'?
BRIAN: Eh.
CENTURION: Nominative?
BRIAN: Oh.
CENTURION: 'Go home'? This is motion towards. Isn't it, boy?
BRIAN: Ah. Ah, dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! Oh, the... accusative! Accusative! Ah! 'Domum', sir! 'Ad domum'! Ah! Oooh! Ah!
CENTURION: Except that 'domus' takes the...?
BRIAN: The locative, sir!
CENTURION: Which is...?!
BRIAN: 'Domum'.
CENTURION: 'Domum'.
BRIAN: Aaah! Ah.
CENTURION: 'Um'. Understand?
BRIAN: Yes, sir.
CENTURION: Now, write it out a hundred times.
BRIAN: Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.
CENTURION: Hail Caesar. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
BRIAN: Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar and everything, sir! Oh. Mmm!
Finished!
ROMAN SOLDIER STIG: Right. Now don't do it again.
They will simply become Swedish Sperm Savings and Loans.
Uhh, no, if that is what you recall from Econ 101, you weren't paying attention. You are confusing economic profits with accounting profits. Economics says that all economic profits will be driven to zero, not that all accounting profits will be driven to zero. What is the difference? The return on investment. If you invest $1m and earn $1/year, you have turned an accounting profit, but not an economic profit, because, even in this economy, you can earn about 1% interest with little or no risk. IAAE (I am an Economist)
Apple doesn't get special privileges because it "only" holds a smaller percentage of the hundreds of millions of computer sales out there. Their computers are overpriced and they need competition.
I am confused. You state that Apple has a small market share, but doesn't have enough competition. It would seem to me that the other 85% of the market might provide it some competition. For example, there's this OS called windows, perhaps you've heard of it? I've heard it's pretty popular, and some people apparently choose it instead of OS X.
But we hate UNC more...
I totally and completely disagree. The issue is one of pedagogy--which language can kids learn at an early age? I was coding 1000 line programs in BASIC at age 8, and I wasn't alone in that. BASIC is an easy language to learn. Is it limited? Definitely. Would I prefer today to code in BASIC instead of the Perl, Matlab, and Fortran that I now use? No. But the author's point is about _learning_ to code. Perl isn't terribly easy to 'learn' nor are c or c++ or java, at least not to an 8yo.
On the contrary, there is a perfectly good legalese word for free-as-in-beer: gratis. It is the free-as-in-speech concept for which there is no generally recognized succinct legal term. Libre is commonly used in the OSS community to denote the concept, but in legal circles, libre is more commonly used as an astrological reference.
http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/
:-)
You can send me the mod points later.
Have you considered a career in academia?
If so, those guys are good. They even got the ICE homepage: http://www.ice.gov/graphics/
that patriot act of yours is darn scary. does anyone know if there is an equivilant in Britain?
/. would lead one to believe, the civil liberties in the US are quite extensive, and quite well-protected. It is only because they are so extensive, that we notice when they are diminished.
Are you kidding me? You guys don't even have a Constitution to provide an foundation to object to laws like PATRIOT. Have you ever checked out the UK's anti-terror laws? Check out the "Anti- Terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001" (which, BTW I'm unclear whether its anti terrorism, crime, and security, or only anti terrorism and crime; I would presume that it is pro-security, though the title is a bit ambiguous on that point.) Its chock full of fun bits.
Better yet, check out the laws in the UK in the 1970's and 80's to deal with the IRA--I'm not defending any group or act here, just pointing out that many of those laws make PATRIOT look benign. Just a hint: indefinite detention without any trial, and there's more where that came from.
Far from what the rhetoric of
Uhhhh, Britain's VAT?
I know you're looking for an MB, not a system, but if you go to http://www.xicomputer.com/ and check out their NetRaider 64 LT. You can custom configure it to have up to 12GB of ram w/ a single Opteron 244.
Have fun!
You're aware that "corporation" is just a legal code-word for "a bunch of people working together", aren't you?
ummm, i think that should read:
"a bunch of people working together to make a profit"
Uhhh, no, that would be a for profit corporation.
There are also non-profit corporations--which, intentionally or not, I am sure that scaled composites currently is.
Matt.
Because in a capitalistic society, demand drives production, not the other way around. The only situation where this is not true is where a monopoly controls the market, a situation which is -rightly- illegal.
/. crowd is badly in need of some basic economic education--which, per chance, is my occupation.
/. retort here is to point out how much money the record companies make by exploiting those poor artists, who all die broke because they never saw one cent of their revenues, which instead enriched the stupid record company execs and their minions at the RIAA.
./ers believe that, then I have a suggestion for you: start a record company. Really. Do it. Tell the artists that you will pay them fairly, however you define it, and then turn around and sell DRM-free mp3/ogg format via PayPal. Then, get back to us all on how many artists that you sign (which you are neither a member of, related to, nor live in your neighborhood) and how much money you make them. Because there MUST be a business model here, right? Otherwise people would just stop talking about it.
Repeat after me:
monopolies are NOT illegal
monopolies are NOT illegal
monopolies are NOT illegal
Look around you: how many companies do you want putting sewer pipes into your house? Or gas lines? Or providing police or justice systems? Or running phone lines to your house? Should we abolish all copyrights & patents? Ask Pfizer to continue to spend 8 BILLION dollars a year on R&D knowing that their discoveries will be immediately copied by others?
The
Monopolies are not always and everywhere bad. The power to set prices is not always and everywhere bad. The monopoly power granted patent and copyright holders exists to incentivize continued creation. Are there abuses? Sure. Do some/many of the items that can be patented/copyrighted seem dubious? I think so. But that doesn't call for the abolition of copyrights & patents, it calls for the reform of the system.
Monopolies are bad where a firm creates barriers to entry and then exploits those barriers to artificially support the price and reduce consumption. In the case of music, those barriers exist to incentivize continued production.
The natural
If any of you
I'm not trying to indict all techies. My point is that many don't draw the connection.
PC
Actually, Big 3 cars have significantly higher domestic content than even transplants (i.e. Hondas or Toyotas made in the US). Check out http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/regrev/evaluat e/809208.html.
But the point is, how many of these disaffected actually cared about 'outsourcing' until it bothered them. How many of them now care about it in non-IT sectors. And how many of them have changed and/or forgone consumption decisions because the product or service was produced overseas? That's my question.
Really? You might want to look into genetic programming. Although its not the 'same' kind of programming, it is a computational approach to algorithmic development--which is pretty dang close.
Further, why does it matter whether it's fantasy? Why does it matter whether jobs are being replaced by computers or people in other countries? This isn't rhetorical, to me there is no difference, but to others there clearly is, and I am trying to understand that difference.
PC