I've been following this for some time, and there's little doubt in my mind that it's all legit on her part. She's a very credible person - and of course the people she is accusing are very non-credible people.
Edmonds WAS the "investigation." She was translating documents that had been mis-translated before by FBI personnel who were apparently in the pay of those being investigated. When she brought this to the attention of her superiors, she was fired in retaliation. The FBI internal affairs investigation confirmed this.
The "investigations" you are referring to were ongoing and were being sabotaged inside the FBI itself. The people involved even tried to recruit Edmonds to continue the sabotage, which she refused to do. Once she was fired and went outside the FBI to Congress, the DoJ gagged her.
There is nothing here involving "national security". The gag order was intended to prevent her from revealing that, as she puts it, "senior elected US officials" are engaged in wholesale treason. She has provided information to several US Senators in a secure facility inside Congress. She testified before the 9/11 Commission - and her testimony was reduced to a footnote in the final report. She was promised by Henry Waxman that her case would be number one on his list when the Democrats came to power in January - since then, his office has refused her calls.
The reality is that what she knows is so dangerous to the stability of the US government that I'm surprised she's still breathing - although of course if she ended up dead, that would be pretty much a problem for these people, too, especially as you can imagine she has some sort of "dead man" trigger set up so that the info gets revealed anyway.
I, personally, think she SHOULD just dump it all on her Web site. In fact, after the Time Online article two weeks ago, she posted several pictures of certain officials on her Web site without comment. You are supposed to understand that these are the people involved.
Without some sort of legal immunity, however, and given the Guantanamo situation, it obviously is a very great risk for her to just defy the ban without having enough public impact as a result that it would blunt any attempt to "disappear" her.
How does this get rated "insightful"? It should be "troll".
Why someone reported this story from BoingBoing is beyond me - it's the Times Online that is involved, and other sites have referred to it. The whole background story has been on the Web for several years now. It is merely that the Times Online has done some investigation of their own that makes this part of the story interesting, since no US media has bothered to do its own investigation of Edmonds' allegations.
Putting it on the Internet would make it just another "conspiracy theory site". She needs to broadcast the evidence so it can't be covered up or ignored. How many people watch "60 Minutes" versus some Web site they never heard of? How many people other than geeks have ever heard of Slashdot?
Hell, I can't even get major blog sites like Talking Points Memo to refer to Edmonds stuff. It's very doubtful the blogosphere would cover this story enough to get it known to the general public (although some have - Antiwar.com has been covering Edmonds since day one.)
The US media has not covered her evidence - only the fact that she has made allegations and been gagged for making them. And the whole point is that the media isn't willing to break the gag order even for what would clearly be the biggest story in years - massive treason by elected and appointed US officials. Why? For the same reason the media doesn't really do investigative reporting that would really shake the Establishment - because they are part of the Establishment. This shouldn't be "news" to anyone.
There's no "price tag" attached, and there is plenty of hard evidence. Edmonds can cite chapter and verse from her time at the FBI, and an official investigation at the FBI deemed her allegations "credible" and that her firing was in retaliation. There would be no problem finding out whether she has "hard evidence".
Skepticism in most cases is warranted, but not in this one.
Since you're evidently ignorant of the entire story behind Sibel Edmonds, I'd suggest you spend some time getting up to speed before babbling about this.
On your behalf, the story as covered in the topic is not the whole story, so your ignorance can be excused - once.
This is not "conspiracy theory". There is an actual, real life conspiracy going on here, the details of which have been officially and publicly suppressed as personified in Sibel Edmonds. Look up the details.
I believe the case of faked documents you are referring to was not directed at Iraq but at Iran and is not related to the FBI case document under discussion in the Times article.
The CIA recruited a Russian scientist to deliver faked nuclear design documents to Iran. Most of the documents were genuine, but there were flaws in the design.
The problem was that the Russian scientist quickly identified the flaws and realized that not only would the Iranian scientists see them quickly, too, destroying the idea that they were legitimate, but that the rest of the design would be valuable to the Iranians. He pointed this out to his CIA handler, who dismissed the concerns as not important.
So the Russian, before delivering the designs to his Iranian connection at the IAEA, added notes to them pointing out the flaws in an effort to make the documents more believable. He did this without the knowledge of his handler, apparently.
It is clear from this that the intent as explained to the Russian of trying to fool the Iranians into building a flawed design was ITSELF a cover story. The real purpose was simply to get the plans into Iranian hands, thus justifying the concept that Iran had a nuclear weapons program (for which there is zero evidence other than a laptop the providence of which no one can ascertain, and which is very likely a forgery along the lines of the Niger documents.)
The document under discussion is totally different. An anonymous letter sent to The Liberty Coalition, a DC-based transpartisan civil and human rights watchdog organization. A subsequent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, asking for information referring to that case number, resulted in a denial from the FBI that such a case exists. The letter referred to the FBI case document. The FBI case document, the contents of which Edmonds knows, was described by her as follows:
"The case in question, she told The BRAD BLOG, careful to avoid categorical defiance of her gag order, "concerns 1996 to 2002 information, targeting Turkish counter-intelligence, and it involves U.S. officials both appointed and elected."
What Edmonds has alleged, based on what she knows from documents she translated at the FBI, is that Marc Grossman, a State Department employee, tipped off the nuclear black marketers that Valerie Plame's organization was in fact a CIA operation. The anonymous letter which is referred to above also made this claim,
The document in question is an FBI case file, not a CIA operation. So it is not the same as the Iranian false flag operation.
Edmonds has made it clear that there is no "national security" involved in this situation. What is involved is the intent to protect certain elected and appointed government officials from charges of treason, which at the same time would embarrass several national governments such as Turkey, Israel, and others.
Plame was never outed because of an attempt to use a charge of "nepotism" to discredit Joe Wilson. That cover story never made any sense. Who cares if the guy's wife was at the CIA and suggested him for the Niger investigation? It only barely made more sense if the concept was that the CIA was somehow deliberately sabotaging the Iraq war - which also never made any sense.
Plame was outed because her organization was investigating the nuclear black market including the A. Q. Khan network and its connections to Iran. That investigation would have inevitably led back to the people in the US State Department and the US nuclear agencies who were on the payroll of the black marketers. So Plame's operation had to be shut down.
Keep in mind that Scooter Libby was once Marc Rich's attorney - and Rich is supposed to be one of or the money man behind this operation. Exactly how deep Dick Cheney's involvement is unclear at this point, but there is no doubt that Marc Grossman at the State Department was involved in the outing, and it is likely that Libby got his information from him.
Sibel Edmonds has evidence that a number of countries and organizations are involved in this, including members of governments, organized crime groups, and front groups for various nationalities. She points the finger primarily at the ATC, a Turkish-American front organization, which operates similarly to AIPAC, the Jewish American front organization.
Edmonds says you can start examining the situation from any start you want - the Plame case, the AIPAC espionage trial, her gagging case - they all end up with the same group of people in the US and Turkish governments, in the ATC and AIPAC organizations, and in organized crime figures like Marc Rich (pardoned by Bill Clinton, if you remember, in exchange for some thousands of dollars in bribes.) The scale of the criminal organization is massive and crosses over drugs, weapons smuggling, and the nuclear black market. She says "senior elected US officials" are guilty of massive treason - and that means senior Senators and Congressmen - and possibly even Dick Cheney, if not Bush himself. Keep in mind that Scooter Libby was once Marc Rich's attorney.
The sad part is that Sibel, after years of trying to get a Senator to front the classified info she has in her head, finally decided to risk jail by offering to go on any national broadcast news show and tell all as long as it was unedited. No US media would take her up on it, so she has been forced to go outside the country to the Times. This shows how deep the corruption goes - no US media will reveal what she knows.
This country is almost literally being run by organized crime - and not even Italian organized crime! - at this point. It reminds me of the Warren Ellis comic, "Reload".
Oh, hell, no. That thing is a joke. Corrupts its files if you breathe on it.
People need to realize that apps developed with proprietary software of any kind are BAD NEWS. I don't how perfectly it does a particular job that a particular company needs done. It's bad news in the long run. Either the company that makes it will break it, or the company itself will be bought, or go out of business. Look at SQR, the database report writing language. That thing has been sold a half dozen times, and currently resides with PeopleSoft IIRC. Sure, its still "supported" - except nothing has been to really enhance it in years. It's crap. Nothing it does can't be done in Perl and probably better and more clearly.
Apps should never be developed in proprietary macro languages, or proprietary script languages, or proprietary development languages, period. I don't care how many millions of lines of code have been written in Ryan-McFarland COBOL or frickin' IBM RPG II (or III) or VBA or whatever anybody cares to cite. It will have to be rewritten in an open language sooner or later.
The issue is not whether it has to be done, it's how it should be done. Companies with apps in legacy and proprietary languages need to simply PLAN AHEAD. Budget for re-engineering over time. If your company is not going anywhere, who cares how long it takes to convert? By doing it this way, it won't cost an arm and a leg over time and it will afford some future disaster that will cost an arm and a leg.
"How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?"
Based on this moron.
Read the Ars Technica article on this idiot. First he planted the logic bomb because he thought he was going to be fired. Then after he wasn't fired, he tried to disable it, but failed. Then he decided to set it off anyway. Then it failed to do what it was supposed to do.
As Ars Technica put it, "You are not Zero Cool."
Well, what can you expect from an HP/UX sys admin?
People who carry water for the CIA don't go around announcing themselves - and they don't work as receptionists.
William Casey was a classic example - he was a major businessman before he went CIA and in a CIA row over a news story by ABC News accusing the CIA of murder, apparently his former company tried to take over ABC. That's something that would be well above your pay grade.
I can't find a source for the quote after some searching, but there is a similar one allegedly made by Casey at his first staff meeting in 1981 to the effect that "we'll know our disinformation campaign is effective when everything the American public believes is false."
There's an article here that addresses the issue in the context of the rise of neoconservatism.
But it's not new. You can go back to Aleister Crowley complaining about the press (and he was a "celebrity" who constantly ended up in the press) being a bunch of hacks with an agenda - and that was back in the late 1800's. Hitler said the same thing except he blamed it all on the Jews.
Some years back former CIA director William Casey publicly said that ALL the mainstream media was either owned (through fronts) or controlled by the CIA. He wasn't joking when he said it.
I see nothing on the air to discredit that statement. Quite a few people have pointed out that large numbers of (supposedly) "ex"-CIA analysts are doing the writing and editing for most of the major media - even including some of the (supposedly) left wing "alternative" media. The excuse is that CIA analysts are good at producing concise, condensed recaps of analytical material - which makes them great journalists.
Except as General Gogol said, "Nobody ever leaves the KGB."
And once you get beyond the CIA, you've got corporate interests - and beyond, corporate stupidity - and beyond that, personal incompetence and stupidity.
How "news" could survive that chain of barriers without being completely useless is beyond me.
Look at today - we've got a bit of "news" coming out of India that supposedly Benazir Bhutto was shot with some kind of laser gun!
Right. I'll buy that for a dollar. More disinformation to confuse the matter, so that anybody who thinks she was killed by the Pakistani government looks like a "conspiracy nut".
Yeah, that all sounds terribly rational - until you look around at the results - which is FUBAR in almost every category of human experience today. Which means it isn't rational at all - it's rationalizing.
And blaming me for Africa's problems is just ridiculous. I'm well aware of how fucked up much of the world is, and how much the US and the EU are connected to that. That's part of the shit I don't believe in - and part of the shit that it seems you can find a reason to justify.
"here is a reason things are a certain way and that changing it makes things worse in reality."
But you're willing to blame Africa's problems on the West. Good luck making that argument up in Washington and on Wall Street. You'll get the exact same argument you just made - "there's a reason things are a certain way and we shouldn't change it."
It's all self-centered crap.
"See I believe in rationality and moderation not baseless illogical beliefs."
Couldn't prove it by your post. It sounds to me more of the usual "I'm better than you because I'm oh so much nicer than you and I understand so much more than you and you're wrong and I'm right." That's what most arguments boil down to.
I had to admit, that page was funny. And it makes his rant funnier, too. Actually I thought it was funny to begin with - and I had to agree with a lot of his observations about how companies and consultancies are mostly assholes.
I'm still not sure whether somewhere in the back of his mind he really believes the funny stuff he wrote about himself. But after reading that page, I have to assume he doesn't. He DOES think of himself as a comedian, though - maybe on the Don Rickles model (for older guys) or Andrew Dice Clay (for younger readers.)
But OTOH I've read some articles where people say, "That's how you really should think of yourself. Because if you don't, nobody else will."
There's something to be said for sober self-assessment. Except AFAIK nobody does it. It's just not chimpanzee style.
So having an inflated opinion of yourself is not necessarily a bad thing - as long as you don't do really stupid shit based on it that will get you or somebody else you like seriously hurt. And as long as you KNOW you have a really inflated opinion of yourself on some meta-level.
The problem for most people is that they don't know.
Anybody who thinks Zed has shot himself in the foot for this rant is overestimating the influence of the blogosphere. While a handful of people might read it and not want to work with him, there will always be companies who have never of it - or him - or anybody else's opinion of him - and will hire based on his past credentials - or no credentials at all, just because they need somebody to do the work. Which is likely how he's survived so far, like most people.
So mostly all these posts about how fucked up he is are just people trying to establish how much better they are then he is - which is pathetic in itself.
"i do agree that its performance isnt as stable as the one found on java servers, but i do think that the whole idea makes up for that fact."
That is never true.
If it can't work reliably, it's crap. Software is supposed to do a job. Crashing and restarts are not doing the job. I can put up with inadequate capabilities, or no documentation, or even hard to use, or whatever. But if it crashes or needs frequent restarts, it's gone. And anybody trying to do production work will agree.
I gotta agree. Had the same experiences from thirty years in IT. Problem is, it doesn't matter what area you work in - coding, sys admin, tech support. It doesn't even matter what industry you work in.
It's all like this, everywhere.
Corporate morons and thieves, ego boosters, incompetence, maliciousness, shit that simply doesn't work without a major redesign.
You can't win - or even make any money - unless you're either lucky or a major asshole willing to walk on anybody to do it.
I'm trying to learn to be a major asshole since luck isn't in the cards for me. Maybe Zed is, too.
Had some clown I worked for last spring, working on a Nagios monitoring project for openWRT wireless routers. Had to learn Nagios, openWRT, plus what they were doing. Spent twenty-odd hours learning their stuff (zero documentation) without a contract, and without much direction, even gave the guy my lower contract rate instead of my hourly rate on the expectation that he was going to go on contract once I proved I could learn the stuff. Finally told him I had to bill him for time spent so far, then he got upset because it was $800. I managed to get $500 off him, then wrote him off. He tells me he has three other people mucking around with the system - probably because his original developer dumped him would be my guess. He thinks this is "redundancy in development." My impression was he was clueless about what he was doing and how he was doing it.
Losers. Bottom feeders. Like Zed says, people who want to pay $14/hour for work. That seems to be the only clients out there any more.
I need to do what that consultancy he bitched about does - charge 600% more for nothing. Apparently you're only taken seriously when you charge insane rates and spout bullshit about what you do.
Well, I can do that. From now one, I think I will. Can't do any worse than I'm doing now, so I have nothing to lose.
I think the idea is that the bullets are an undefined class and the foot has no exception handling. Or maybe the passed parameters aren't typed correctly.
Your entire attitude is called "bending over for the corporation".
We get Enron from shit like that.
"Life is about compromises and being able to deal with people different from you, if you can't deal with that reality then the problem is you not the rest of society."
No, it isn't. The problem is precisely with society being unable to get along with people who question its basic premises - usually correctly.
The problem is precisely with chimpanzees who are so obsessed with how they are perceived by everyone else that they ruthlessly attack anyone different than themselves, usually under the exact guise you put out - that it's all about "compromise" and "getting along".
Bullshit.
It's about survival. And the bulk of the human species is about fucking each other over in the name of survival - while making survival actually more difficult - while sugar-coating it with "morality", "ethics", "democracy", and other content-less concepts.
Go right ahead. In my view, ideas are open source. It's action that matters.
I've been touting this concept for at least a year now. It's basically a return to how musicians started - live performing before an audience. Not really a new concept except for the introduction of Net broadcasting.
Of course, it may be a while before effective, cost efficient Net broadcasting (at least via video) is feasible for everybody. Bandwidth for video costs. Bob Cringely has been talking about it recently.
For audio, of course, it's already being done. One case that stuck in my mind was a woman in London who broadcasts her performances on the Net from her home. She's had up to 70,000 listeners to some performances. If she could monetize that with subscriptions!
A band like the Corrs - who are a visual band by virtue of being probably the best looking band out there - would have an edge on Net broadcast, but any band could do it. The key would be to make the video broadcast interesting. But even noodling around or a jam session would be acceptable to the hardcore fans - let them see how an album was progressing, let them hear earlier versions of a song and see the development. Hell, even let them influence the development with their own ideas - open source music!
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent recap. Good job.
I've been following this for some time, and there's little doubt in my mind that it's all legit on her part. She's a very credible person - and of course the people she is accusing are very non-credible people.
No, you've got it entirely backward.
Edmonds WAS the "investigation." She was translating documents that had been mis-translated before by FBI personnel who were apparently in the pay of those being investigated. When she brought this to the attention of her superiors, she was fired in retaliation. The FBI internal affairs investigation confirmed this.
The "investigations" you are referring to were ongoing and were being sabotaged inside the FBI itself. The people involved even tried to recruit Edmonds to continue the sabotage, which she refused to do. Once she was fired and went outside the FBI to Congress, the DoJ gagged her.
There is nothing here involving "national security". The gag order was intended to prevent her from revealing that, as she puts it, "senior elected US officials" are engaged in wholesale treason. She has provided information to several US Senators in a secure facility inside Congress. She testified before the 9/11 Commission - and her testimony was reduced to a footnote in the final report. She was promised by Henry Waxman that her case would be number one on his list when the Democrats came to power in January - since then, his office has refused her calls.
The reality is that what she knows is so dangerous to the stability of the US government that I'm surprised she's still breathing - although of course if she ended up dead, that would be pretty much a problem for these people, too, especially as you can imagine she has some sort of "dead man" trigger set up so that the info gets revealed anyway.
I, personally, think she SHOULD just dump it all on her Web site. In fact, after the Time Online article two weeks ago, she posted several pictures of certain officials on her Web site without comment. You are supposed to understand that these are the people involved.
Without some sort of legal immunity, however, and given the Guantanamo situation, it obviously is a very great risk for her to just defy the ban without having enough public impact as a result that it would blunt any attempt to "disappear" her.
How does this get rated "insightful"? It should be "troll".
Why someone reported this story from BoingBoing is beyond me - it's the Times Online that is involved, and other sites have referred to it. The whole background story has been on the Web for several years now. It is merely that the Times Online has done some investigation of their own that makes this part of the story interesting, since no US media has bothered to do its own investigation of Edmonds' allegations.
Putting it on the Internet would make it just another "conspiracy theory site". She needs to broadcast the evidence so it can't be covered up or ignored. How many people watch "60 Minutes" versus some Web site they never heard of? How many people other than geeks have ever heard of Slashdot?
Hell, I can't even get major blog sites like Talking Points Memo to refer to Edmonds stuff. It's very doubtful the blogosphere would cover this story enough to get it known to the general public (although some have - Antiwar.com has been covering Edmonds since day one.)
The US media has not covered her evidence - only the fact that she has made allegations and been gagged for making them. And the whole point is that the media isn't willing to break the gag order even for what would clearly be the biggest story in years - massive treason by elected and appointed US officials. Why? For the same reason the media doesn't really do investigative reporting that would really shake the Establishment - because they are part of the Establishment. This shouldn't be "news" to anyone.
There's no "price tag" attached, and there is plenty of hard evidence. Edmonds can cite chapter and verse from her time at the FBI, and an official investigation at the FBI deemed her allegations "credible" and that her firing was in retaliation. There would be no problem finding out whether she has "hard evidence".
Skepticism in most cases is warranted, but not in this one.
Since you're evidently ignorant of the entire story behind Sibel Edmonds, I'd suggest you spend some time getting up to speed before babbling about this.
On your behalf, the story as covered in the topic is not the whole story, so your ignorance can be excused - once.
This is not "conspiracy theory". There is an actual, real life conspiracy going on here, the details of which have been officially and publicly suppressed as personified in Sibel Edmonds. Look up the details.
You're an idiot. Go look up the details, moron.
This case is probably the most well-known gag case in history. Edmonds has been officially labeled THE most gagged person in US history.
The FBI ITSELF in its internal investigation labeled her allegations credible and said that she had been fired as a result of retaliation.
Moron.
I believe the case of faked documents you are referring to was not directed at Iraq but at Iran and is not related to the FBI case document under discussion in the Times article.
The CIA recruited a Russian scientist to deliver faked nuclear design documents to Iran. Most of the documents were genuine, but there were flaws in the design.
The problem was that the Russian scientist quickly identified the flaws and realized that not only would the Iranian scientists see them quickly, too, destroying the idea that they were legitimate, but that the rest of the design would be valuable to the Iranians. He pointed this out to his CIA handler, who dismissed the concerns as not important.
So the Russian, before delivering the designs to his Iranian connection at the IAEA, added notes to them pointing out the flaws in an effort to make the documents more believable. He did this without the knowledge of his handler, apparently.
It is clear from this that the intent as explained to the Russian of trying to fool the Iranians into building a flawed design was ITSELF a cover story. The real purpose was simply to get the plans into Iranian hands, thus justifying the concept that Iran had a nuclear weapons program (for which there is zero evidence other than a laptop the providence of which no one can ascertain, and which is very likely a forgery along the lines of the Niger documents.)
The document under discussion is totally different. An anonymous letter sent to The Liberty Coalition, a DC-based transpartisan civil and human rights watchdog organization. A subsequent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, asking for information referring to that case number, resulted in a denial from the FBI that such a case exists. The letter referred to the FBI case document. The FBI case document, the contents of which Edmonds knows, was described by her as follows:
"The case in question, she told The BRAD BLOG, careful to avoid categorical defiance of her gag order, "concerns 1996 to 2002 information, targeting Turkish counter-intelligence, and it involves U.S. officials both appointed and elected."
What Edmonds has alleged, based on what she knows from documents she translated at the FBI, is that Marc Grossman, a State Department employee, tipped off the nuclear black marketers that Valerie Plame's organization was in fact a CIA operation. The anonymous letter which is referred to above also made this claim,
The document in question is an FBI case file, not a CIA operation. So it is not the same as the Iranian false flag operation.
Edmonds has made it clear that there is no "national security" involved in this situation. What is involved is the intent to protect certain elected and appointed government officials from charges of treason, which at the same time would embarrass several national governments such as Turkey, Israel, and others.
It wasn't "inadvertent". That's the point.
Plame was never outed because of an attempt to use a charge of "nepotism" to discredit Joe Wilson. That cover story never made any sense. Who cares if the guy's wife was at the CIA and suggested him for the Niger investigation? It only barely made more sense if the concept was that the CIA was somehow deliberately sabotaging the Iraq war - which also never made any sense.
Plame was outed because her organization was investigating the nuclear black market including the A. Q. Khan network and its connections to Iran. That investigation would have inevitably led back to the people in the US State Department and the US nuclear agencies who were on the payroll of the black marketers. So Plame's operation had to be shut down.
Keep in mind that Scooter Libby was once Marc Rich's attorney - and Rich is supposed to be one of or the money man behind this operation. Exactly how deep Dick Cheney's involvement is unclear at this point, but there is no doubt that Marc Grossman at the State Department was involved in the outing, and it is likely that Libby got his information from him.
It's even more complicated than that.
Sibel Edmonds has evidence that a number of countries and organizations are involved in this, including members of governments, organized crime groups, and front groups for various nationalities. She points the finger primarily at the ATC, a Turkish-American front organization, which operates similarly to AIPAC, the Jewish American front organization.
Edmonds says you can start examining the situation from any start you want - the Plame case, the AIPAC espionage trial, her gagging case - they all end up with the same group of people in the US and Turkish governments, in the ATC and AIPAC organizations, and in organized crime figures like Marc Rich (pardoned by Bill Clinton, if you remember, in exchange for some thousands of dollars in bribes.) The scale of the criminal organization is massive and crosses over drugs, weapons smuggling, and the nuclear black market. She says "senior elected US officials" are guilty of massive treason - and that means senior Senators and Congressmen - and possibly even Dick Cheney, if not Bush himself. Keep in mind that Scooter Libby was once Marc Rich's attorney.
The sad part is that Sibel, after years of trying to get a Senator to front the classified info she has in her head, finally decided to risk jail by offering to go on any national broadcast news show and tell all as long as it was unedited. No US media would take her up on it, so she has been forced to go outside the country to the Times. This shows how deep the corruption goes - no US media will reveal what she knows.
This country is almost literally being run by organized crime - and not even Italian organized crime! - at this point. It reminds me of the Warren Ellis comic, "Reload".
Access?
Oh, hell, no. That thing is a joke. Corrupts its files if you breathe on it.
People need to realize that apps developed with proprietary software of any kind are BAD NEWS. I don't how perfectly it does a particular job that a particular company needs done. It's bad news in the long run. Either the company that makes it will break it, or the company itself will be bought, or go out of business. Look at SQR, the database report writing language. That thing has been sold a half dozen times, and currently resides with PeopleSoft IIRC. Sure, its still "supported" - except nothing has been to really enhance it in years. It's crap. Nothing it does can't be done in Perl and probably better and more clearly.
Apps should never be developed in proprietary macro languages, or proprietary script languages, or proprietary development languages, period. I don't care how many millions of lines of code have been written in Ryan-McFarland COBOL or frickin' IBM RPG II (or III) or VBA or whatever anybody cares to cite. It will have to be rewritten in an open language sooner or later.
The issue is not whether it has to be done, it's how it should be done. Companies with apps in legacy and proprietary languages need to simply PLAN AHEAD. Budget for re-engineering over time. If your company is not going anywhere, who cares how long it takes to convert? By doing it this way, it won't cost an arm and a leg over time and it will afford some future disaster that will cost an arm and a leg.
"How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?"
Based on this moron.
Read the Ars Technica article on this idiot. First he planted the logic bomb because he thought he was going to be fired. Then after he wasn't fired, he tried to disable it, but failed. Then he decided to set it off anyway. Then it failed to do what it was supposed to do.
As Ars Technica put it, "You are not Zero Cool."
Well, what can you expect from an HP/UX sys admin?
Like you'd know.
People who carry water for the CIA don't go around announcing themselves - and they don't work as receptionists.
William Casey was a classic example - he was a major businessman before he went CIA and in a CIA row over a news story by ABC News accusing the CIA of murder, apparently his former company tried to take over ABC. That's something that would be well above your pay grade.
I can't find a source for the quote after some searching, but there is a similar one allegedly made by Casey at his first staff meeting in 1981 to the effect that "we'll know our disinformation campaign is effective when everything the American public believes is false." There's an article here that addresses the issue in the context of the rise of neoconservatism.
A pretty good piece.
But it's not new. You can go back to Aleister Crowley complaining about the press (and he was a "celebrity" who constantly ended up in the press) being a bunch of hacks with an agenda - and that was back in the late 1800's. Hitler said the same thing except he blamed it all on the Jews.
Some years back former CIA director William Casey publicly said that ALL the mainstream media was either owned (through fronts) or controlled by the CIA. He wasn't joking when he said it.
I see nothing on the air to discredit that statement. Quite a few people have pointed out that large numbers of (supposedly) "ex"-CIA analysts are doing the writing and editing for most of the major media - even including some of the (supposedly) left wing "alternative" media. The excuse is that CIA analysts are good at producing concise, condensed recaps of analytical material - which makes them great journalists.
Except as General Gogol said, "Nobody ever leaves the KGB."
And once you get beyond the CIA, you've got corporate interests - and beyond, corporate stupidity - and beyond that, personal incompetence and stupidity.
How "news" could survive that chain of barriers without being completely useless is beyond me.
Look at today - we've got a bit of "news" coming out of India that supposedly Benazir Bhutto was shot with some kind of laser gun!
Right. I'll buy that for a dollar. More disinformation to confuse the matter, so that anybody who thinks she was killed by the Pakistani government looks like a "conspiracy nut".
I'd rather be waterboarded than use vi!
Yeah, that all sounds terribly rational - until you look around at the results - which is FUBAR in almost every category of human experience today. Which means it isn't rational at all - it's rationalizing.
And blaming me for Africa's problems is just ridiculous. I'm well aware of how fucked up much of the world is, and how much the US and the EU are connected to that. That's part of the shit I don't believe in - and part of the shit that it seems you can find a reason to justify.
"here is a reason things are a certain way and that changing it makes things worse in reality."
But you're willing to blame Africa's problems on the West. Good luck making that argument up in Washington and on Wall Street. You'll get the exact same argument you just made - "there's a reason things are a certain way and we shouldn't change it."
It's all self-centered crap.
"See I believe in rationality and moderation not baseless illogical beliefs."
Couldn't prove it by your post. It sounds to me more of the usual "I'm better than you because I'm oh so much nicer than you and I understand so much more than you and you're wrong and I'm right." That's what most arguments boil down to.
Good luck with that. It went nowhere with me.
I had to admit, that page was funny. And it makes his rant funnier, too. Actually I thought it was funny to begin with - and I had to agree with a lot of his observations about how companies and consultancies are mostly assholes.
I'm still not sure whether somewhere in the back of his mind he really believes the funny stuff he wrote about himself. But after reading that page, I have to assume he doesn't. He DOES think of himself as a comedian, though - maybe on the Don Rickles model (for older guys) or Andrew Dice Clay (for younger readers.)
But OTOH I've read some articles where people say, "That's how you really should think of yourself. Because if you don't, nobody else will."
There's something to be said for sober self-assessment. Except AFAIK nobody does it. It's just not chimpanzee style.
So having an inflated opinion of yourself is not necessarily a bad thing - as long as you don't do really stupid shit based on it that will get you or somebody else you like seriously hurt. And as long as you KNOW you have a really inflated opinion of yourself on some meta-level.
The problem for most people is that they don't know.
Anybody who thinks Zed has shot himself in the foot for this rant is overestimating the influence of the blogosphere. While a handful of people might read it and not want to work with him, there will always be companies who have never of it - or him - or anybody else's opinion of him - and will hire based on his past credentials - or no credentials at all, just because they need somebody to do the work. Which is likely how he's survived so far, like most people.
So mostly all these posts about how fucked up he is are just people trying to establish how much better they are then he is - which is pathetic in itself.
"i do agree that its performance isnt as stable as the one found on java servers, but i do think that the whole idea makes up for that fact."
That is never true.
If it can't work reliably, it's crap. Software is supposed to do a job. Crashing and restarts are not doing the job. I can put up with inadequate capabilities, or no documentation, or even hard to use, or whatever. But if it crashes or needs frequent restarts, it's gone. And anybody trying to do production work will agree.
There is no substitute for reliability.
I gotta agree. Had the same experiences from thirty years in IT. Problem is, it doesn't matter what area you work in - coding, sys admin, tech support. It doesn't even matter what industry you work in.
It's all like this, everywhere.
Corporate morons and thieves, ego boosters, incompetence, maliciousness, shit that simply doesn't work without a major redesign.
You can't win - or even make any money - unless you're either lucky or a major asshole willing to walk on anybody to do it.
I'm trying to learn to be a major asshole since luck isn't in the cards for me. Maybe Zed is, too.
Had some clown I worked for last spring, working on a Nagios monitoring project for openWRT wireless routers. Had to learn Nagios, openWRT, plus what they were doing. Spent twenty-odd hours learning their stuff (zero documentation) without a contract, and without much direction, even gave the guy my lower contract rate instead of my hourly rate on the expectation that he was going to go on contract once I proved I could learn the stuff. Finally told him I had to bill him for time spent so far, then he got upset because it was $800. I managed to get $500 off him, then wrote him off. He tells me he has three other people mucking around with the system - probably because his original developer dumped him would be my guess. He thinks this is "redundancy in development." My impression was he was clueless about what he was doing and how he was doing it.
Losers. Bottom feeders. Like Zed says, people who want to pay $14/hour for work. That seems to be the only clients out there any more.
I need to do what that consultancy he bitched about does - charge 600% more for nothing. Apparently you're only taken seriously when you charge insane rates and spout bullshit about what you do.
Well, I can do that. From now one, I think I will. Can't do any worse than I'm doing now, so I have nothing to lose.
I think the idea is that the bullets are an undefined class and the foot has no exception handling. Or maybe the passed parameters aren't typed correctly.
Or something.
Didn't seem too Java-specific enough to me.
Brilliant. Best link from Slashdot all year. (Wait a minute, year just started - okay, last year.)
Your entire attitude is called "bending over for the corporation".
We get Enron from shit like that.
"Life is about compromises and being able to deal with people different from you, if you can't deal with that reality then the problem is you not the rest of society."
No, it isn't. The problem is precisely with society being unable to get along with people who question its basic premises - usually correctly.
The problem is precisely with chimpanzees who are so obsessed with how they are perceived by everyone else that they ruthlessly attack anyone different than themselves, usually under the exact guise you put out - that it's all about "compromise" and "getting along".
Bullshit.
It's about survival. And the bulk of the human species is about fucking each other over in the name of survival - while making survival actually more difficult - while sugar-coating it with "morality", "ethics", "democracy", and other content-less concepts.
I'll take my chances outside that bullshit.
I love your sig - it made me laugh for five minutes or more straight.
I'm stealing it.
Personally, I prefer to either IED the fucker or snipe him from a hundred yards with a Dragunov or a Marine Remington 700.
I mean, as Dick Marcinko says, never give a sucker an even break.
Why ever expose yourself to retaliation of any kind?
It's far better to be an assassin than a brawler.
Of course, the martial arts do come in handy since shit happens.
Go right ahead. In my view, ideas are open source. It's action that matters.
I've been touting this concept for at least a year now. It's basically a return to how musicians started - live performing before an audience. Not really a new concept except for the introduction of Net broadcasting.
Of course, it may be a while before effective, cost efficient Net broadcasting (at least via video) is feasible for everybody. Bandwidth for video costs. Bob Cringely has been talking about it recently.
For audio, of course, it's already being done. One case that stuck in my mind was a woman in London who broadcasts her performances on the Net from her home. She's had up to 70,000 listeners to some performances. If she could monetize that with subscriptions!
A band like the Corrs - who are a visual band by virtue of being probably the best looking band out there - would have an edge on Net broadcast, but any band could do it. The key would be to make the video broadcast interesting. But even noodling around or a jam session would be acceptable to the hardcore fans - let them see how an album was progressing, let them hear earlier versions of a song and see the development. Hell, even let them influence the development with their own ideas - open source music!