How is this different from the current human environment?
When I look at people, I see chimps in clothes.
Anybody remember the "Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp" Saturday morning kids' show back in the '70's? They had these chimps dressed up in suits and fedoras and dresses sitting at tables, drinking coffee, driving little cars and motorboats, and lip-synching dialog. Totally hilarious. The chimps ALWAYS looked like they knew exactly what they were doing.
There was a column in InfoWorld just recently that mentions the same thing - why isn't everyone using a certificate? Answer: Newbies don't know how - and it's not that easy even if you do. If they did, the result would be no spam, no surveillance, no viruses, etc.
A few hundred thousand US citizens with pistols and AK's could take down the entire US military and the political apparatus within a year.
The problem is you can't get a few hundred thousand US citizens to do anything that coordinated unless it involves sex or money.
And if Ayatollah Sistani puts a hundred thousand armed Iraqis on the street sometime in the next nine months, the US military is out the door the next week. That situation is far different from anything the US military is able to handle and has nothing to do with the conventional war last year. What are they going to do - murder a hundred thousand Iraqis? What do they do about the five hundred thousand that hit the streets the next day? The million the next day?
Pilots can't drop bombs when they're shot dead while they sleep. Tank drivers can't drive tanks, ditto. Artillery doesn't work at all against insurgents. The ONLY thing that works against insurgents (temporarily) is if you have the same number (preferably more) of personnel competent in guerrilla tactics as your enemy. And eventually that fails also as more of the local population join the insurgency as a result of your killing their relatives. Care to move the entire US military to Iraq? All one million-odd personnel? Facing at least ten percent of Iraqis who hate your guts - which is 2.5 million?
Vietnam proved what can be done by insurgents (and don't drag in the North Vietnamese Army, they did the same crap the VC did in addition to trying regular battles). And Iraq is proving it again.
The problem in the US is stupidity, ignorance and fear - as usual. The US population are sheep. Period. There won't be an insurrection in this country - even a political one at the polls - until things get a lot worse - and they will get a lot worse.
Heh, how do you spy on hundreds of millions of physical letters anyway - in any kind of time, even allowing for how slow the USPS is? Hardly an argument against a slippery slope where email is concerned.
Like they're cleaning up the depleted uranium dust in Iraq? Or the cluster bomblets the kids are playing with? Right.
When did/. get taken over by right-wing Christian Zionist Republicans? Anyone know? I thought this was a geek site and geeks were supposed to be less rabid than Rush Limbough (until you diss their computer language, CPU or OS anyway.)
Actually to date they have repeatedly succeeded in tunneling under the DMZ - the fact that the tunnels were detected at the last minute is not comforting. Have you read how BIG those tunnels were in some cases?
In any event, the bottom line is the US refuses to ban land mines because it is expedient for the US not to do so vis-a-vis North Korea.
You have no clue about code maintenance costs, do you?
For the last thirty years, people have been exhorted to use indentation and other lexical structural means to expose program structure in order to reduce bugs and the cost of program maintenance which is many times the cost of program development.
Nested parentheses to the degree that LISP uses them is a major disaster in this regard. As someone pointed out, you have to use a smart editor to even begin to deal with it.
Now imagine several hundred thousands lines of code crushed into a few hundred with parentheses.
Ridiculous.
LISP may have useful functions but the syntax is a disaster - as is APL and to a far lesser degree Perl.
There is a joke about how a Perl programmer says, No - that's not encryption - that's my Perl script." I showed it to my Perl instructor and he laughed and said properly written Perl should look encrypted.
As a joke, this is okay. As an academic exercise, it might be okay. For corporate program maintenance, it is NOT okay. For personal program maintenance, if you have the time to waste re-interpreting nested parentheses you wrote two years ago (presumably without any comments since how do you embed comments in nested parentheses readably?), then you have far too much time on your hands.
Management could care less what the reasoning is. If they want you to train your replacement, you do it or you get fired for whatever reason they think is adequate to prevent being sued - and most employees do NOT sue even when they have good legal grounds to do so.
My point is that management could care less about employees - and that applies in the usual scenario and in this scenario. From their standpoint, asking someone to train their replacement is perfectly normal. From the employee's standpoint, asking them to train a replacement when it was NOT the EMPLOYEE's decision to leave is an insult and a sign of disrespect - and it is such a sign because management is ALWAYS disrespectful of employees (if not of lawsuits).
How many big-time CEO's who were turned out by their Boards were asked to "train their replacement"?
> all they'd need to do to reduce layoff costs > would be to assign everyone an impossible task > then fire them for non-performance of duties
You haven't worked much in this country, have you?
The above is called normal employment here.
You try to do your job, but brain-dead management does not allow you to have the tools, the training, the time, the budget, the competent co-workers, whatever, to do said job. Then they fire you when the fault was entirely theirs.
Yes, you're correct in that, I considered that after posting my message.
Nonetheless, it's still a bit of an obscure vulnerability. OTOH, it would be nice if software would notify one when an incorrect file extension is used and prompt for action rather than assuming all is well. Irfanview does that with incorrectly named JPG images, for example.
Some of this "vulnerability" stuff is getting out of hand.
Reminds me of the Marty Feldman bit where he goes into an insurance broker's office and asks him if he is protected "from falling into a pit of hedge-hogs whilst playing croquet" and "from being struck by a meteorite whilst sun-bathing on the beach?"
> The Republican party is consistently making > efforts to become more Libertarian in order to > court our votes.
Bullcrap.
The Libertarian movement is considered a fringe movement and always has been - by the main parties and the public. In fact, I've always been amused - as an anarchist - how the Libs put down anarchists as "fringe" when in fact to the average person there is absolutely no distinction between "fringe Libs" and "fringe anarchists" - the operative distinction is "fringe" - that's all the average person cares about.
Only the Greens get any significant national attention and that only because Nader - a celebrity in his own right - runs for them. If anybody else did, they'd be insignificant, too.
> Libertarians are the main faction of the > Republican party.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
While it is true that most Libertarians are, as Bob Black once put it, "Republicans who smoke dope", the idea that the Republican Party is composed of Libs is hilarious.
Get a clue.
I can think of only one Republican Representative who used to be a Lib (in fact, Lib candidate for President IIRC): Ron Paul.
Personally I think the Gates Foundation is a stock laundering scheme. It's run by his father (who is a lawyer, if that helps).
It operates like this: Gates as head of MS can only convert so much stock at a time into cash per SEC rules. So he donates it to the Foundation, who converts it for him, then sprinkles a few million of the $10 billion into donations of Windows to schools (MS market creation tactic)plus a few million for AIDS research or whatever in order to look good (the interest on the holdings covers that handily.)
Where do you see philanthropy in any of this?
Read any bio of Gates. He's a greedy rich Harvard kid who is an expert in poker and contract law and the son of a rich lawyer.
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How is this different from the current human environment?
When I look at people, I see chimps in clothes.
Anybody remember the "Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp" Saturday morning kids' show back in the '70's? They had these chimps dressed up in suits and fedoras and dresses sitting at tables, drinking coffee, driving little cars and motorboats, and lip-synching dialog. Totally hilarious. The chimps ALWAYS looked like they knew exactly what they were doing.
That's what you all look like to me.
Have a nice day, primates.
Austrian economic theory has answered all this crap for decades.
Intellectual property is an oxymoron and a corporate statist land grab.
Morons.
Get a clue.
Pass all the laws you want. Kill the entertainment industries by doing so. Go ahead. Feel free. Make my day - punks.
I'll still get the music and movies I want either by downloading or buying it when necessary and feasible.
In the end, what the Situationists said in the 1960's is still valid: Art has been superceded. The only art worth creating is one's own life.
There was a column in InfoWorld just recently that mentions the same thing - why isn't everyone using a certificate? Answer: Newbies don't know how - and it's not that easy even if you do. If they did, the result would be no spam, no surveillance, no viruses, etc.
The tech is there and nobody cares.
Not true.
A few hundred thousand US citizens with pistols and AK's could take down the entire US military and the political apparatus within a year.
The problem is you can't get a few hundred thousand US citizens to do anything that coordinated unless it involves sex or money.
And if Ayatollah Sistani puts a hundred thousand armed Iraqis on the street sometime in the next nine months, the US military is out the door the next week. That situation is far different from anything the US military is able to handle and has nothing to do with the conventional war last year. What are they going to do - murder a hundred thousand Iraqis? What do they do about the five hundred thousand that hit the streets the next day? The million the next day?
Pilots can't drop bombs when they're shot dead while they sleep. Tank drivers can't drive tanks, ditto. Artillery doesn't work at all against insurgents. The ONLY thing that works against insurgents (temporarily) is if you have the same number (preferably more) of personnel competent in guerrilla tactics as your enemy. And eventually that fails also as more of the local population join the insurgency as a result of your killing their relatives. Care to move the entire US military to Iraq? All one million-odd personnel? Facing at least ten percent of Iraqis who hate your guts - which is 2.5 million?
Vietnam proved what can be done by insurgents (and don't drag in the North Vietnamese Army, they did the same crap the VC did in addition to trying regular battles). And Iraq is proving it again.
The problem in the US is stupidity, ignorance and fear - as usual. The US population are sheep. Period. There won't be an insurrection in this country - even a political one at the polls - until things get a lot worse - and they will get a lot worse.
> Well, the Bill of Rights for one...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
And who's enforcing the Bill of Rights in this country? Ashcroft?
Get a clue.
The only one "enforcing" the Bill of Rights is the NRA - and that poorly.
Heh, how do you spy on hundreds of millions of physical letters anyway - in any kind of time, even allowing for how slow the USPS is? Hardly an argument against a slippery slope where email is concerned.
Like they're cleaning up the depleted uranium dust in Iraq? Or the cluster bomblets the kids are playing with? Right.
When did
Be careful what YOU read.
The US vetoed the UN resolution because Ariel Sharon owns this country's foreign policy in the Middle East. Period.
Hamas wouldn't be killing anybody if Zionists weren't committing genocide against Palestinians.
Read some David Ben Gurion if you don't know anything about Zionism and its intentions for the Palestinians.
Actually to date they have repeatedly succeeded in tunneling under the DMZ - the fact that the tunnels were detected at the last minute is not comforting. Have you read how BIG those tunnels were in some cases?
In any event, the bottom line is the US refuses to ban land mines because it is expedient for the US not to do so vis-a-vis North Korea.
You left out quite a few other nations like the Phillipines, Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, ah, I'm sure there are dozens more.
And saying the US military destroyed the Soviet Union is stretching things rather a lot.
In other words, bullshit.
You have no clue about code maintenance costs, do you?
For the last thirty years, people have been exhorted to use indentation and other lexical structural means to expose program structure in order to reduce bugs and the cost of program maintenance which is many times the cost of program development.
Nested parentheses to the degree that LISP uses them is a major disaster in this regard. As someone pointed out, you have to use a smart editor to even begin to deal with it.
Now imagine several hundred thousands lines of code crushed into a few hundred with parentheses.
Ridiculous.
LISP may have useful functions but the syntax is a disaster - as is APL and to a far lesser degree Perl.
There is a joke about how a Perl programmer says,
No - that's not encryption - that's my Perl script." I showed it to my Perl instructor and he laughed and said properly written Perl should look encrypted.
As a joke, this is okay. As an academic exercise, it might be okay. For corporate program maintenance, it is NOT okay. For personal program maintenance, if you have the time to waste re-interpreting nested parentheses you wrote two years ago (presumably without any comments since how do you embed comments in nested parentheses readably?), then you have far too much time on your hands.
Get a clue.
Get a clue.
Management could care less what the reasoning is. If they want you to train your replacement, you do it or you get fired for whatever reason they think is adequate to prevent being sued - and most employees do NOT sue even when they have good legal grounds to do so.
My point is that management could care less about employees - and that applies in the usual scenario and in this scenario. From their standpoint, asking someone to train their replacement is perfectly normal. From the employee's standpoint, asking them to train a replacement when it was NOT the EMPLOYEE's decision to leave is an insult and a sign of disrespect - and it is such a sign because management is ALWAYS disrespectful of employees (if not of lawsuits).
How many big-time CEO's who were turned out by their Boards were asked to "train their replacement"?
Yeah, and Bill Gates gives millions to charity.
Oh, wait, I already pointed out that is a stock laundering scheme.
Never mind.
> all they'd need to do to reduce layoff costs
> would be to assign everyone an impossible task
> then fire them for non-performance of duties
You haven't worked much in this country, have you?
The above is called normal employment here.
You try to do your job, but brain-dead management does not allow you to have the tools, the training, the time, the budget, the competent co-workers, whatever, to do said job. Then they fire you when the fault was entirely theirs.
This is commonplace in American business.
Get a clue.
> Join in, and have a look inside our cockpit and
> help us fly the plane.
And the only box that works is the ammo one.
If the other three worked, we wouldn't be in this mess now.
Wow, you're gullible.
You want cynicism, look to Gates, not me.
> 70 percent of the world's data are still housed
> in mainframe computers.
Pathetic. You monkeys get more primitive by the day, not less.
OTOH, it does make hash of the Sun line that "The network is the computer" (or was it the other way around?)
Yes, you're correct in that, I considered that after posting my message.
Nonetheless, it's still a bit of an obscure vulnerability. OTOH, it would be nice if software would notify one when an incorrect file extension is used and prompt for action rather than assuming all is well. Irfanview does that with incorrectly named JPG images, for example.
I use the "XM tracker format" "all the time"...
I'm so scared...
Some of this "vulnerability" stuff is getting out of hand.
Reminds me of the Marty Feldman bit where he goes into an insurance broker's office and asks him if he is protected "from falling into a pit of hedge-hogs whilst playing croquet" and "from being struck by a meteorite whilst sun-bathing on the beach?"
> The Republican party is consistently making
> efforts to become more Libertarian in order to
> court our votes.
Bullcrap.
The Libertarian movement is considered a fringe movement and always has been - by the main parties and the public. In fact, I've always been amused - as an anarchist - how the Libs put down anarchists as "fringe" when in fact to the average person there is absolutely no distinction between "fringe Libs" and "fringe anarchists" - the operative distinction is "fringe" - that's all the average person cares about.
Only the Greens get any significant national attention and that only because Nader - a celebrity in his own right - runs for them. If anybody else did, they'd be insignificant, too.
Get a clue.
Barry Goldwater was NEVER a Libertarian.
Get a clue. (You are right about the rest, however.)
> Libertarians are the main faction of the
> Republican party.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
While it is true that most Libertarians are, as Bob Black once put it, "Republicans who smoke dope", the idea that the Republican Party is composed of Libs is hilarious.
Get a clue.
I can think of only one Republican Representative who used to be a Lib (in fact, Lib candidate for President IIRC): Ron Paul.
Get serious.
LISP doesn't have more parentheses? It's just an accident of making it "cleaner"?
Jeez...
Some fanatics will claim anything. Do you know bin Laden - or Bush?
Personally I think the Gates Foundation is a stock laundering scheme. It's run by his father (who is a lawyer, if that helps).
It operates like this: Gates as head of MS can only convert so much stock at a time into cash per SEC rules. So he donates it to the Foundation, who converts it for him, then sprinkles a few million of the $10 billion into donations of Windows to schools (MS market creation tactic)plus a few million for AIDS research or whatever in order to look good (the interest on the holdings covers that handily.)
Where do you see philanthropy in any of this?
Read any bio of Gates. He's a greedy rich Harvard kid who is an expert in poker and contract law and the son of a rich lawyer.
Fuck him.