Several points. First, just because the Bible is "THE most accurate historical document of its time" doesn't mean that the Bible is entirely accurate, historically. Lots of things come into play here, not the least of which being that there simply weren't that many "accurate" historians at the time, and those that existed weren't really paying much attention to a Jewish carpenter and his family. Kind of a "big fish, small pond" thing.
Next, the elements that have some evidence as being historically accurate are largely contextual rather than structural to the whole God story thing. For example, yes, there was a Caesar, and he was in charge of the Roman empire during the alleged time period of Christ's life. Just because the context is believed to be accurate, that doesn't mean that the story is. Also note the lack of corroboration of key events, such as the "walk on water" story, the "water into wine" story, or the "came back from the dead" thing. The only evidence found so far of those events is the Bible. Granted, this doesn't prove that the events didn't exist, but it also doesn't prove that they did.
On other stories, such as the great flood from Noah's time, have bits that corroborate, but the context is not quite right. There has yet to be found evidence of a great deluge that flooded the whole world at once, wiping out everything. There is evidence of catastrophic flooding of relatively large areas that, to the inhabitants, could have appeared to be world-engulphing, but this still lends support to the Bible being read as a metaphor or story, rather than a factual, purely historical document.
Finally, God didn't write the Bible. At best, the Bible was written by men inspired by God. The Bible being read by the vast majority of people siting the Bible as an authoritatively source is a translation of a translation of a variety of texts written in a variety of languages (Greek, Latin, Arameic, etc.) Even if you believe that there was one true Bible, accurately set down by the hand of man, unfalteringly transcribing the words of God, the subsequent, cumulative effects of so many people rehashing it so many times means that it is likley that many of the versions available today have been modified to fit the particular goals of their transcriber. In a way, one could liken the evolution of the Bible to the evolution of man: each subsequent copy that survives does so because it fit the environment in which it was developed.
I guess my point is that relying on the Bible as a historical document and as basis for scientific theory is about as useful, academically, as people 2000 years from now relying on The Da Vinci Code for similar purposes. Sure, there is lots of easily verified stuff (the Louvre exists, it is an art museum, the Mona Lisa is there, etc.), but there's lots of blatantly wrong things too (GPS receiver that works inside, has a transmitter strong enough to send its location over a mile or more, and is small enough to fit in a bar of soap).
The problem I had was not that the message was rejected. The problem was I cleared the message with my management prior to the meeting, and then got punished for presenting it by the same people who approved it.
I know they won't always listen. It'd be nice if I could at least know that my management will show enough spine to back me up when I do what they told me to do.
Re:The world is not a Dilbert strip...
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hehe, before I did the Fortune 100 thing, I worked for a company of 20 people. Believe me, the grass is not greener over there. The president of the company had no clue how to run a startup (his background was head of a major international bank), his operations manager was a power hungry, self absorbed geek wannabe that mandated, amongst other things, that the whole business system that delivered our system must be rewritten in Pascal, since that was the only language he knew. The president hired craploads of sales people (15 out of 20 were sales) and spent tens of thousands of dollars on equipment that sat idle for two years, based on the idea that all those sales people would automatically translate into lots of paying customers.
Of course, political channels were much shorter. I felt comfortable walking into the president's office and asking if it would be a good time to buy a house. He was great, told me that he was thinking of buying a house too, showed me pictures of the place and everything, so I went ahead and bought. 30 days after we closed on the house, he called everyone into the bullpen and announced that the checkbook was empty, gave us 50% of our last paycheck, and asked several of us to continue working, without pay of course, for a couple weeks to "get the company through the dry spell".
For all its Dilbertian aspects, I much prefer working at a large corporation. Sure, I'd get cut off at the knees for daring to speak directly to the CEO, and there are currently seven layers of management between him and me, but the odds of a single person's mistakes causing the whole company to fold are significantly lower. There are other perks, too. There's just something special about being authorized to spend over $100,000 to upgrade the proxy servers or be sent to China for a month to set up a new office. Granted, my individual work isn't likely to impact the overall direction of the company, but I've still managed to work on projects that saved the company money in one month that was greater than my salary for the year, and given the resources of the company, and the fact that the SEC filings makes the financials public knowledge, there will be warning signs months in advance letting me know its time to jump ship with the other rats.
Oh, yeah. If you do decide to go the startup route, remember that for every Google or eBay, there's hundreds, probably thousands of Webvans or pets.coms. Some people become millionaires from startup stock options. Others become homeless.
Re:Consider some specialization
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· Score: 3, Insightful
While I agree that focussing on an area that is somewhat related to the poster's military career is good advice, don't be fooled that IT security is less BS prone than any other area. Having done security for a Fortune 100 company for ten years, I can say emphatically that Dilbertesque moments abound. I've gone into meetings on my management's behalf and given the message I was told to give only to be censured afterwards because the other people in the meeting didn't like the message. I've been told by a man who received all his promotions from his uncle that political harmony is frequently more important than security ideals. I've had to spend MONTHS collecting data and statistics from external sources to convince a division that Internet email is not an appropriate delivery platform for mission critical communications that absolutely MUST be received, unaltered and unread, within 2 minutes of sending.
If you can make the intellectual leap that a paycheck is its own reward and that, as long as you are receiving one, it doesn't really matter much what the company does, then working in the private sector can be both rewarding and relaxing. If, on the other hand, you truly belive that you can make a difference and/or save the company from itself, then perhaps you ought to consider a career with a greater chance of success, such as carrying ice cubes on the palm of your hand across the Sahara before they melt.
At least in the military, "I was just following orders" is still a plausible excuse.
Hehe. I played RPGs in the 80's, but haven't really done so since graduating HS. Feeling a bit nostalgic, I dragged my wife to the local RPG group that meets on Saturdays in the library. It was embarrassing. I was the oldest person there by far. There was one kid who wasn't even born the last time I'd played D&D. Granted, they were kids who were serious into gaming. The one guy had written his own game, based on the d20 system, and the group played that quite a bit, but I was unable to figure out how to "belong" in the group. For me, the group was often more important than the game, so we haven't been back.
So, while gaming groups may still exist, and may be quite active, due to shifting priorities in life, don't be surprised if you truly look like an over-the-hill geek.
Interesting. I'd add to the "scheduled" events the possibility of pseudo-random things happening whenever a certain number of crew members are logged in. For example, if there are at least 2 bridge officers and, say 8 crew available, then there's a chance that some random event will occur (containment problem of the warp core, random sentient rock materializing to port of the ship, etc.) After all, battles and problems rarely occur on schedule. Having the chance of random events occuring will just add to the "realism" of the game.
Don't get me wrong, I like the sounds of the game, particularly the pseudo-reality of it, if there can be such a thing.
Even with starting everyone on ground crew, there can be issues. First, and foremost, is the chicken/egg problem: if everyone's ground crew, who's the captain? If the captain is pre-seeded, then how do you remove him from such a post?
The other problem is longevity. For the events to be useful and fun to the people who put the time, effort, and money into being promoted, the underlings need to follow orders. If they don't, then no one will hang around long enough to establish a well-run ship. On the other hand, most gamers I've been around don't like following orders, particularly if they have their eyes on the bridge. So, in either case, it will be very difficult to keep both underlings and bridge crew satisfied for a long-running campaign. In fact, I think that the underlings will likely only be useful with a constant influx of fresh meat, because no one really wants to spend their entire life just being told what to do. I play games to get away from that.
I've seen suggestions along these lines a couple of times now from a variety of sources. The one thing that leaps to mind for me is that, while the theory of MMORPGs allows for bridge crew, federation command, and away teams, the reality of the masses of ORPG players tends to not work quite so well.
I played Anarchy Online as a paying customer for about 2.5 years. The org I was in was great and had people who'd played from the begining, but we routinely ran into problems when trying to get teams set up to go do something. Invariably, we wouldn't have enough org memebers to do the run on our own, and once we opened the team up to outsiders, we usually ended up with a team full of people that didn't work together. The outsiders didn't pay attention and would run headlong into battles we knew from experience weren't winnable that way, and would then run back to us, drawing all the bosses in the room with them, which would kill everyone in the team.
The Star Trek game works even better. Everyone and their grandmother would want to be the captain of a Galaxy-class starship, but I bet that you'd have to pay people to be the guy in the red uniform on the away teams.
When it comes down to it, there can be only one captain of a starship and only one Admiral Akbar yelling "It's a trap!" Even if there were some experience/testing process to become supreme commander of federated forces, I'd have to pay for months, or even years, before I'd logged enough time to get there, and I'd still potentially have to resort to assassination to create a vacancy. Hell, I get enough of that crap at the office, and they pay me to be here, not the other way around.
In addition to what jimicus said, there are lots of issues that lead to such a policy.
For example, there's the support issues. If my company has selected Word Perfect as the standard word processing application and I decide to write all my documents in MS Word, then there are going to be problems getting a clean translation from one format to another. Additionally, large companies in particular have standard desktop loads that include diagnostic software. If I call the help desk about a supported application but the help desk doesn't have access to the diagnostic software, then the cost of diagnostics goes up and my productivity goes down.
Also consider licensing considerations. Most software licenses, even site and enterprise licenses, do not include provisions to install such software on computers not owned by the licensee. While such agreements do exist, they are invariably much more expensive than the standard. Furthermore, I'm sure that the Business Software Alliance (BSA) would love to include that downloaded version of Doom III in the software audit, just the same way that the RIAA would love to sue Big Company X for music piracy since they have so much more money than Joe User.
Privacy laws might also come into play. Many companies, particularly American ones, have policies that explicitly state the company can read anything on their assets. In the US, privacy of employee-owned laptops probably isn't a problem given the complete lack of regard individual privacy has here, but in Europe, it may not even be possible for the company to review log files on the company-owned laptop without the employee's permission. This gets even worse for the company if they do not own the asset at all.
In the end, there is such a myriad of issues associated with non-company computer systems, that it is significantly better to have a policy that outright forbids them than it is to try and come up with enforcable rules that make every employee happy all the time.
Oh, yeah. I forgot that most employment in the US is at-will. If you don't like the rules that your employer has, convince them to change the rules, find another job, or get over it. Believe it or not, it isn't up to the employees to decide which rules to follow.
I learned a lot about what adulthood was like through my father. He never explicitly stated that work is not fun, but as I became a teen ager, I could tell that he was not doing what he wanted to be doing (he was involved in writing manuals for insurance agents, and wanted to be an artist). He spent his entire career in a job that sucked the life out of him.
Why did he do it? It was the only job available in the area my mother wanted to live in, and he is too devoted to her and to us kids to leave.
Now that I'm an adult, I find myself following in his footsteps. Granted, my options are better due to formal education and a wife that is more flexible in where to live, but I've still spent the past ten years working for a single company to ensure that my family has the essentials and that my wife has the flexibility to be self-employeed. To me, this means the daily grind of work, albeit in a job that isn't totally awful. I know that, while my company must employ someone in this position due to regulatory compliance and shareholder confidence, the majority of the people in this company look at my job as a roadblock at best. On the other hand, there are job functions that I truly enjoy, so it isn't as bad as what Dad did for thirty-odd years.
As far as I can tell, we have to get over this notion that everyone can get a job that they will always love. As others have mentioned, there are jobs that must be done regardless of how much fun factor they have. On top of that, unless you are single and live alone, chances are that there are other people who rely, at least in part, on the benefits derrived from steady employment. At some point, you have to end the quest for the perfect job and make sure that your family has everything it needs, including the comfort in the knowledge that there is some stability to the lifestyle and location.
As a side note, I have also learned from my father that childhood and retirement are the only points in one's life where the possibility exists to really follow your heart and always do only what you want to.
I know that security is not a product of my company. I know that engineers are responsible for producing the products we sell (although not most of the services). However, engineers have to understand, particularly in a diverse corporation with many different independant businesses, that compromise is not where the other guy backs down. I agree, taking away the modem lines from a company that manufactures modems is stupid and that there are times where developers might need admin-level access to their development platform. I understand, though, that secretaries, content writers, marketing reps, and call-center techs do not need modems that accept inbound connections or admin access to their desktops.
On who works for whom, you are right that public corporations are beholden to the shareholders, but that doesn't change the fact that companies are not created for the convenience of the employees. Your final paragraph is a perfect demonstration of that. The company goes away, are there any employees any more? What difference does it make that the policy allows you to surf porn during business hours if the company goes belly up? Also, my guess is that security policy alone was not what sunk your 125 year old company. Bad management can do wonders towards destroying a legacy.
Also, just because some engineer somewhere designed the computer and some developer wrote the software I use, that doesn't mean that the engineers and developers in this corporation, which manufactures no computers and sells no software, are entitled to the same rights and privileges that IBM or Microsoft grants their development staff. Everyone needs to get some perspective, both security staff and engineering, and they need to realize that the perfect compromize typically means that neither side is happy.
Ah-ha! I think you got my point, even if you haven't recognized it yet. I never said that we imposed security policy by fiat and ignored all requests for changes. We put in place policies designed to protect the assets of the whole company, and then work with the business to develop solutions to their problems that both enable the business functionality to continue and abide by the security policy.
We have hundreds of engineers in our company, and to my knowledge, every single one of them is able to do their job. If a new threat comes out (mass-mailing worm that spreads via SMTP from the client) that requires a change to the security posture and impacts the engineers, we work with them to either find a new tool/method to achieve the task or we document an exception, including who approved it, for whom was it done, why was it done, and, if applicable, when the exception will end.
The engineers I have problems with are not the majority. I have a problem with the ones that insist that their solution is the only one, even though every other engineer in the company is using the official solution successfully. I have a problem with engineers who think they're smarter than security and deliberately attempt to bypass the security measures without contacting us first to see if there's a known, supported fix. Finally, I have a problem with anyone who believes that their personal use of the company's assets (computers, Internet connection, time, etc.) is more important than federally mandated security controls. While it is often necessary to reduce some security controls so that the company's business can continue, there is no time where we will consider a reduction in the security posture for an employee to run their own company or make accomodations to enable someone to become even less productive than they already are.
Pushing patches via SMS/WSUS != pushing patches w/o testing.
The company I work for is set up with WSUS for the vast majority of our end-users. Typically, the desktop support folks can download patches, test them on a suite of test machines (one for each core load of software), package the patches, send out announcements to the known exception sites, and push the patches out in 48 hours. It is uncommon for it to take more than an additional two days before we've got 85% patch propegation, and that's with 30-40k systems being patched. Servers take a couple days longer, but that's more of an effect of change controls and planned outages for reboots than anything, and you'd better believe that those patches are tested first.
Contrary to what you'd be lead to think by reading/., the days of the NT4 patches that brick systems are pretty much past. Since we instituted the above system 2-3 years ago, I am unaware of any patch that made it through testing and broke a bunch of machines. Those systems that did go non-responsive from a patch were typically loaded with software that was unauthorized, unsupported, and unnecessary (from a business standpoint).
I have been a corporate security professional for over 10 years, and the only people that I ever get whines from like the parent are typically engineers or IT people who either believe that a) they are God's gift to computers and/or b) the rules don't apply to them. I may seem a bit pissy here, but it just burns me to read posts like this from people who clearly have never tried to think about security from the perspective of the business protecting its assets.
Contrary to what most people seem to think, companies do not exist for the convience of the employees. It is the other way around. Employees have jobs to do what the company tells them to. If the policies at your company don't allow for any way for you to do your job, talk to management. More than likely, either an alternative solution exists, or the business function you're trying to do hasn't come up before and security will have to figure out how to incorporate it. If the problem is that the official method of doing your job isn't as convenient, as cool, or as uber as what you'd like to do, then either get over it or get a different job. Corporate policies and standards are put in place to homogenize the environment, ease support, and maintain regulatory compliance. They are not put in place, at least in my company, to inconvenience employees. In fact, the point behind security efforts in my environment is to enable the business to do everything they need to do, but in a manner that doesn't put the company at risk. Some times, this means that one business unit will have to accept a less-than-optimal solution because of more pressing issues at another, but we haven't been faced yet with a situation where there's been no way to safely do a valid business function.
In large corporations, in particular, security decisions are frequently a balance between the needs of very different business units. For example, a unit that provides credit functions to customers in the US is regulated by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, but a manufacturing unit in the same corporation wouldn't be normally. GLBA may apply to both, however, unless there is some system in place to prevent mistakes at the manufacturing unit from affecting the credit unit. So, while encrypted, authenticated wireless access may not be convenient for an engineer at the manufacturing unit, without internal firewalls to segment security zones, encrypted, authenticated wireless is the only option.
Don't get me wrong, we do things I don't agree with. Proxy blocking, for example, seems pointless to me. Surfing porn from a company system is not a technical issue, it is an HR issue. Have a policy that states what is acceptable, give one warning per user, then fire their ass. Believe me, Internet usage reports get much cleaner when someone at a site has been fired recently, regardless of what the proxy is blocking.
Oh, yeah. The so-called draconian policies we have in place have created an environment where a really, really bad virus outbreak is 2-3 machines worldwide. Before we went down this path, there were worms that affected thousands of systems all around the world. We also have a very, very low incidence of harassment issues, we have five-nines uptime on our production systems, we've never had to completely sever our Internet connections to deal with security threats, and we've managed to balance security and business function well enough that end-users rarely have to contact the help desk because a security measure is preventing them from doing their job. Things may not work this well at other companies, but whinging on/. isn't likely to change that anyway.
I tried to restrain myself, but obviously failed. So, given that good grammar==more formal, the list of formal/informal sources breaks down as formal(dictionary,WSJ,BBC,KJB,history book) and informal(poetry,grafitti), and/. is obviously not marked by its adherence to the Queen's English, does that mean that/. is either poetic in its inaccuracies, or is it simply the Internet equivalent of "For a good time, call Taco"?
Having been born the son of a man whose idea of a good hobby is proof-reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, I'm afraid I have to differ with you. While there are times where an occasional misspelling or grammatical error does not drastically alter the meaning of the sentence, there are a lot of times where the mistake is substantive. Consider, for example, the following sentence:
last week frank helped his uncle jack off his horse.
Depending on capitalization and punctuation, that could either mean that Frank assisted his uncle, named Jack, to get down from a horse. Or, it could mean that Frank assisted his uncle in one part of an animal husbandry function. The meaning is changed drastically by one letter and two commas.
The rules of grammar are akin to the rules of any activity. While it might be technically possible to play a game similar to baseball in your back yard using whatever materials are available, were one to show up at Wrigley Field with a basketball and a golf club expecting to play a quick game with the Cubs, the only reaction from observers would be laughter or incredulity. Auditioning for American Idol without being able to carry a tune gets you laughed off the stage. Similarly, attempting to engage in a serious debate on technical topics but being unable to demonstrate even a basic understanding of the rules of English degrades the impression the message leaves with observers.
Is it possible to be understood by competent readers even if you break the occasional grammatical rule here or there? Certainly. Is it possible to appear anything but a buffon or a dullard when trying to counter a well-reasoned and well-written argument with l33t-sp34k? Probably not.
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls, but I can't resist:-)
The Scheimpflug Principle, or maneuver as I learned it, essentially takes and aligns the film, lens, and subject planes such that they all converge at a single point (line? geometry never was my strong suit). This creates a resulting image wherein the depth of field has nearly everything in the image in focus.
Really nice thing to do with a view camera, although it can take time to set it up correctly and, in certain cases, can require special bellows to allow the film and lens planes to be angled sufficiently. Still, given that many point-and-shoot cameras are set up to provide as much depth of field as possible (often to compensate for autofocus errors, particularly on the low end), getting the majority of an image in focus isn't a problem that I've had to work with on digitals. More often than not, I'd like less depth of field, not more, since I don't necessarily want the garbage in the background of the beautiful rose I'm taking a picture of. Of course, I just deal with it in post-process anyway, so even that doesn't bother me much...
I have no doubt that your Leica is a superlative camera, but having a great camera is often only part of the problem. I spent 6 months doing photography in China a decade ago while in film school, and while I took thousands of dollars of equipment with me, the best pictures I took on the trip were with my Vivitar point-and-shoot film camera. Why? Because it was always with me and because there was no location that I went to that was too wet, too dirty, or too dangerous for that $40 camera. Since I always had it with me, I had more opportunity to shoot, took more pictures, and ended up with better shots. Large format film cameras, while fantastic for studio work and well-planned landscape type photography rather suck for getting that perfect picture of the rare orchid hanging 1/2 way down the cliff that you're climbing or for action shots while the irascible subjects are trying to shoot you.
I hate to point it out to you, but company rules (and government laws, btw) are not written for those who are already doing good. They are written to limit the impact that someone who lacks your good behavior.
Other posts have commented about the balance involved, and it is a difficult one to strike. In many cases, the official geeks (i.e. IT staff charged with maintaing the systems, etc.) need greater access, but part of the company's process should include a method of documenting who gets such access, why it is needed, and who takes responsibility for granting the exception. When done properly, this can mean that Joe Secretary is a limited user that is unable to install software on his computer, but Jackie Systemanalyst has local admin privileges so she can install and test the new version of Software X.
Simple fact is, unless your company has only one employee, it is unlikely that any rule will fit 100% of the employees 100% of the time. The job of security/compliance/auditing is to ensure that all of the rules are applied in a standard fashion and that those exceptions are adaquitely documented in a way that allows a) figuring what went wrong and b) who to fry for it when an employee abuses their position.
Nope. Rebooting only clears 90% of symptoms, it doesn't necessarily make the problems go away. For example, if you have a webserver that's got a memory leak and that leak takes 72 hours to fill RAM to the point that the system becomes unusable, rebooting clears the symptom (unusable system) but doesn't resolve the problem (bug in the webserver). Too many people think that the reboot fixes the problem, so they don't ever bother finding out what the real problem is.
Ah-ha! But there's the rub, there really aren't that many people who actually read Tolstoy (or Dostoyevsky, or Proust, or...) for FUN. Lots of people read them, some of them do it as entertainment, but not nearly as many as read "lighter" authors. It may not really be so much of a comparison between Tolstoy and Superman as a comparison between Tolstoy and, say, Kipling.
Don't get me wrong, I read deeper stuff. I'm reading 1984 right now, just finished Henry V, and have 100 Years of Solitude in the queue for my annual read of that. The fact is, though, that I play video games explicitly because they don't require the same level of mental engagement that reading literature.
BTW, Tolstoy was a bad choice to argue with me. I've had a really hard time getting in to most Russian authors I've read, including Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Checkov. I'm sure they're all very good, the styles, especially the verbosity of Tolstoy, have been difficult enough that I haven't managed to force myself through them. To buy a book for $10-15 and not read it is one thing. To spend $50 on a video game that I don't play for more than 30 minutes just pisses me off.
D'oh! Bad form to reply to one's self, but I forgot to add the other reason I play female toons... they're easier to see around. In chase-cam games, playing the steroid-enhanced towering bundle of muscles frequently means that you can't see anything but your own character. Playing a short, skinny female with almost no boobs (I'm behind her, what do I care?) means you can see often 80% of the stuff in front of you.
"It's an overall tendency to pick a character to project yourself in a way that you perceive would be attractive to others or that is attractive to you."
I am male, and used to play Anarchy Online, and many of my characters were busty females in scant clothing, particularly when going through cities. Why? Because horny teenaged boys have a tendancy to give gifts to the attractive characters in an attempt to hit on them. Got two Yalms that way. Regardless of how "real" short, fat men are, no one ever gives those guys free cars!
Ya know, I play games so I get a break from dealing with "conflicted, nuanced" people all the time. I also play games as a form of escapism from the drudgery of a real life in which I am unattractive, unathletic, and have relatively no control over the vast majority of things that go on in my life.
I have a strong feeling that if, for example, WoW were to change their plot lines from "Go kill the big, bad dragon" to "Try to balance the challenges of building a career and raising happy, well-adjusted kids", they would suffer a dramatic drop-off in playership.
Reality is the unwar in Iraq, a constant increase in power by the religious right, six murders on the news before the weather, and crack-whores dipping their baby's pacifier in herion to calm the little brat down a bit. Reality sucks, give me more fantasy I say!
Slashdot Mirror
From what I just read, a really nice place in Colorado just opened up...
Several points. First, just because the Bible is "THE most accurate historical document of its time" doesn't mean that the Bible is entirely accurate, historically. Lots of things come into play here, not the least of which being that there simply weren't that many "accurate" historians at the time, and those that existed weren't really paying much attention to a Jewish carpenter and his family. Kind of a "big fish, small pond" thing.
Next, the elements that have some evidence as being historically accurate are largely contextual rather than structural to the whole God story thing. For example, yes, there was a Caesar, and he was in charge of the Roman empire during the alleged time period of Christ's life. Just because the context is believed to be accurate, that doesn't mean that the story is. Also note the lack of corroboration of key events, such as the "walk on water" story, the "water into wine" story, or the "came back from the dead" thing. The only evidence found so far of those events is the Bible. Granted, this doesn't prove that the events didn't exist, but it also doesn't prove that they did.
On other stories, such as the great flood from Noah's time, have bits that corroborate, but the context is not quite right. There has yet to be found evidence of a great deluge that flooded the whole world at once, wiping out everything. There is evidence of catastrophic flooding of relatively large areas that, to the inhabitants, could have appeared to be world-engulphing, but this still lends support to the Bible being read as a metaphor or story, rather than a factual, purely historical document.
Finally, God didn't write the Bible. At best, the Bible was written by men inspired by God. The Bible being read by the vast majority of people siting the Bible as an authoritatively source is a translation of a translation of a variety of texts written in a variety of languages (Greek, Latin, Arameic, etc.) Even if you believe that there was one true Bible, accurately set down by the hand of man, unfalteringly transcribing the words of God, the subsequent, cumulative effects of so many people rehashing it so many times means that it is likley that many of the versions available today have been modified to fit the particular goals of their transcriber. In a way, one could liken the evolution of the Bible to the evolution of man: each subsequent copy that survives does so because it fit the environment in which it was developed.
I guess my point is that relying on the Bible as a historical document and as basis for scientific theory is about as useful, academically, as people 2000 years from now relying on The Da Vinci Code for similar purposes. Sure, there is lots of easily verified stuff (the Louvre exists, it is an art museum, the Mona Lisa is there, etc.), but there's lots of blatantly wrong things too (GPS receiver that works inside, has a transmitter strong enough to send its location over a mile or more, and is small enough to fit in a bar of soap).
The problem I had was not that the message was rejected. The problem was I cleared the message with my management prior to the meeting, and then got punished for presenting it by the same people who approved it.
I know they won't always listen. It'd be nice if I could at least know that my management will show enough spine to back me up when I do what they told me to do.
Hehe, before I did the Fortune 100 thing, I worked for a company of 20 people. Believe me, the grass is not greener over there. The president of the company had no clue how to run a startup (his background was head of a major international bank), his operations manager was a power hungry, self absorbed geek wannabe that mandated, amongst other things, that the whole business system that delivered our system must be rewritten in Pascal, since that was the only language he knew. The president hired craploads of sales people (15 out of 20 were sales) and spent tens of thousands of dollars on equipment that sat idle for two years, based on the idea that all those sales people would automatically translate into lots of paying customers.
Of course, political channels were much shorter. I felt comfortable walking into the president's office and asking if it would be a good time to buy a house. He was great, told me that he was thinking of buying a house too, showed me pictures of the place and everything, so I went ahead and bought. 30 days after we closed on the house, he called everyone into the bullpen and announced that the checkbook was empty, gave us 50% of our last paycheck, and asked several of us to continue working, without pay of course, for a couple weeks to "get the company through the dry spell".
For all its Dilbertian aspects, I much prefer working at a large corporation. Sure, I'd get cut off at the knees for daring to speak directly to the CEO, and there are currently seven layers of management between him and me, but the odds of a single person's mistakes causing the whole company to fold are significantly lower. There are other perks, too. There's just something special about being authorized to spend over $100,000 to upgrade the proxy servers or be sent to China for a month to set up a new office. Granted, my individual work isn't likely to impact the overall direction of the company, but I've still managed to work on projects that saved the company money in one month that was greater than my salary for the year, and given the resources of the company, and the fact that the SEC filings makes the financials public knowledge, there will be warning signs months in advance letting me know its time to jump ship with the other rats.
Oh, yeah. If you do decide to go the startup route, remember that for every Google or eBay, there's hundreds, probably thousands of Webvans or pets.coms. Some people become millionaires from startup stock options. Others become homeless.
While I agree that focussing on an area that is somewhat related to the poster's military career is good advice, don't be fooled that IT security is less BS prone than any other area. Having done security for a Fortune 100 company for ten years, I can say emphatically that Dilbertesque moments abound. I've gone into meetings on my management's behalf and given the message I was told to give only to be censured afterwards because the other people in the meeting didn't like the message. I've been told by a man who received all his promotions from his uncle that political harmony is frequently more important than security ideals. I've had to spend MONTHS collecting data and statistics from external sources to convince a division that Internet email is not an appropriate delivery platform for mission critical communications that absolutely MUST be received, unaltered and unread, within 2 minutes of sending.
If you can make the intellectual leap that a paycheck is its own reward and that, as long as you are receiving one, it doesn't really matter much what the company does, then working in the private sector can be both rewarding and relaxing. If, on the other hand, you truly belive that you can make a difference and/or save the company from itself, then perhaps you ought to consider a career with a greater chance of success, such as carrying ice cubes on the palm of your hand across the Sahara before they melt.
At least in the military, "I was just following orders" is still a plausible excuse.
Hehe. I played RPGs in the 80's, but haven't really done so since graduating HS. Feeling a bit nostalgic, I dragged my wife to the local RPG group that meets on Saturdays in the library. It was embarrassing. I was the oldest person there by far. There was one kid who wasn't even born the last time I'd played D&D. Granted, they were kids who were serious into gaming. The one guy had written his own game, based on the d20 system, and the group played that quite a bit, but I was unable to figure out how to "belong" in the group. For me, the group was often more important than the game, so we haven't been back.
So, while gaming groups may still exist, and may be quite active, due to shifting priorities in life, don't be surprised if you truly look like an over-the-hill geek.
Interesting. I'd add to the "scheduled" events the possibility of pseudo-random things happening whenever a certain number of crew members are logged in. For example, if there are at least 2 bridge officers and, say 8 crew available, then there's a chance that some random event will occur (containment problem of the warp core, random sentient rock materializing to port of the ship, etc.) After all, battles and problems rarely occur on schedule. Having the chance of random events occuring will just add to the "realism" of the game.
Don't get me wrong, I like the sounds of the game, particularly the pseudo-reality of it, if there can be such a thing.
Even with starting everyone on ground crew, there can be issues. First, and foremost, is the chicken/egg problem: if everyone's ground crew, who's the captain? If the captain is pre-seeded, then how do you remove him from such a post?
The other problem is longevity. For the events to be useful and fun to the people who put the time, effort, and money into being promoted, the underlings need to follow orders. If they don't, then no one will hang around long enough to establish a well-run ship. On the other hand, most gamers I've been around don't like following orders, particularly if they have their eyes on the bridge. So, in either case, it will be very difficult to keep both underlings and bridge crew satisfied for a long-running campaign. In fact, I think that the underlings will likely only be useful with a constant influx of fresh meat, because no one really wants to spend their entire life just being told what to do. I play games to get away from that.
I've seen suggestions along these lines a couple of times now from a variety of sources. The one thing that leaps to mind for me is that, while the theory of MMORPGs allows for bridge crew, federation command, and away teams, the reality of the masses of ORPG players tends to not work quite so well.
I played Anarchy Online as a paying customer for about 2.5 years. The org I was in was great and had people who'd played from the begining, but we routinely ran into problems when trying to get teams set up to go do something. Invariably, we wouldn't have enough org memebers to do the run on our own, and once we opened the team up to outsiders, we usually ended up with a team full of people that didn't work together. The outsiders didn't pay attention and would run headlong into battles we knew from experience weren't winnable that way, and would then run back to us, drawing all the bosses in the room with them, which would kill everyone in the team.
The Star Trek game works even better. Everyone and their grandmother would want to be the captain of a Galaxy-class starship, but I bet that you'd have to pay people to be the guy in the red uniform on the away teams.
When it comes down to it, there can be only one captain of a starship and only one Admiral Akbar yelling "It's a trap!" Even if there were some experience/testing process to become supreme commander of federated forces, I'd have to pay for months, or even years, before I'd logged enough time to get there, and I'd still potentially have to resort to assassination to create a vacancy. Hell, I get enough of that crap at the office, and they pay me to be here, not the other way around.
If that's the case, then I enjoy the delicious irony of the spammer being slashdotted into oblivion!
In addition to what jimicus said, there are lots of issues that lead to such a policy.
For example, there's the support issues. If my company has selected Word Perfect as the standard word processing application and I decide to write all my documents in MS Word, then there are going to be problems getting a clean translation from one format to another. Additionally, large companies in particular have standard desktop loads that include diagnostic software. If I call the help desk about a supported application but the help desk doesn't have access to the diagnostic software, then the cost of diagnostics goes up and my productivity goes down.
Also consider licensing considerations. Most software licenses, even site and enterprise licenses, do not include provisions to install such software on computers not owned by the licensee. While such agreements do exist, they are invariably much more expensive than the standard. Furthermore, I'm sure that the Business Software Alliance (BSA) would love to include that downloaded version of Doom III in the software audit, just the same way that the RIAA would love to sue Big Company X for music piracy since they have so much more money than Joe User.
Privacy laws might also come into play. Many companies, particularly American ones, have policies that explicitly state the company can read anything on their assets. In the US, privacy of employee-owned laptops probably isn't a problem given the complete lack of regard individual privacy has here, but in Europe, it may not even be possible for the company to review log files on the company-owned laptop without the employee's permission. This gets even worse for the company if they do not own the asset at all.
In the end, there is such a myriad of issues associated with non-company computer systems, that it is significantly better to have a policy that outright forbids them than it is to try and come up with enforcable rules that make every employee happy all the time.
Oh, yeah. I forgot that most employment in the US is at-will. If you don't like the rules that your employer has, convince them to change the rules, find another job, or get over it. Believe it or not, it isn't up to the employees to decide which rules to follow.
I learned a lot about what adulthood was like through my father. He never explicitly stated that work is not fun, but as I became a teen ager, I could tell that he was not doing what he wanted to be doing (he was involved in writing manuals for insurance agents, and wanted to be an artist). He spent his entire career in a job that sucked the life out of him.
Why did he do it? It was the only job available in the area my mother wanted to live in, and he is too devoted to her and to us kids to leave.
Now that I'm an adult, I find myself following in his footsteps. Granted, my options are better due to formal education and a wife that is more flexible in where to live, but I've still spent the past ten years working for a single company to ensure that my family has the essentials and that my wife has the flexibility to be self-employeed. To me, this means the daily grind of work, albeit in a job that isn't totally awful. I know that, while my company must employ someone in this position due to regulatory compliance and shareholder confidence, the majority of the people in this company look at my job as a roadblock at best. On the other hand, there are job functions that I truly enjoy, so it isn't as bad as what Dad did for thirty-odd years.
As far as I can tell, we have to get over this notion that everyone can get a job that they will always love. As others have mentioned, there are jobs that must be done regardless of how much fun factor they have. On top of that, unless you are single and live alone, chances are that there are other people who rely, at least in part, on the benefits derrived from steady employment. At some point, you have to end the quest for the perfect job and make sure that your family has everything it needs, including the comfort in the knowledge that there is some stability to the lifestyle and location.
As a side note, I have also learned from my father that childhood and retirement are the only points in one's life where the possibility exists to really follow your heart and always do only what you want to.
I know that security is not a product of my company. I know that engineers are responsible for producing the products we sell (although not most of the services). However, engineers have to understand, particularly in a diverse corporation with many different independant businesses, that compromise is not where the other guy backs down. I agree, taking away the modem lines from a company that manufactures modems is stupid and that there are times where developers might need admin-level access to their development platform. I understand, though, that secretaries, content writers, marketing reps, and call-center techs do not need modems that accept inbound connections or admin access to their desktops.
On who works for whom, you are right that public corporations are beholden to the shareholders, but that doesn't change the fact that companies are not created for the convenience of the employees. Your final paragraph is a perfect demonstration of that. The company goes away, are there any employees any more? What difference does it make that the policy allows you to surf porn during business hours if the company goes belly up? Also, my guess is that security policy alone was not what sunk your 125 year old company. Bad management can do wonders towards destroying a legacy.
Also, just because some engineer somewhere designed the computer and some developer wrote the software I use, that doesn't mean that the engineers and developers in this corporation, which manufactures no computers and sells no software, are entitled to the same rights and privileges that IBM or Microsoft grants their development staff. Everyone needs to get some perspective, both security staff and engineering, and they need to realize that the perfect compromize typically means that neither side is happy.
Ah-ha! I think you got my point, even if you haven't recognized it yet. I never said that we imposed security policy by fiat and ignored all requests for changes. We put in place policies designed to protect the assets of the whole company, and then work with the business to develop solutions to their problems that both enable the business functionality to continue and abide by the security policy.
We have hundreds of engineers in our company, and to my knowledge, every single one of them is able to do their job. If a new threat comes out (mass-mailing worm that spreads via SMTP from the client) that requires a change to the security posture and impacts the engineers, we work with them to either find a new tool/method to achieve the task or we document an exception, including who approved it, for whom was it done, why was it done, and, if applicable, when the exception will end.
The engineers I have problems with are not the majority. I have a problem with the ones that insist that their solution is the only one, even though every other engineer in the company is using the official solution successfully. I have a problem with engineers who think they're smarter than security and deliberately attempt to bypass the security measures without contacting us first to see if there's a known, supported fix. Finally, I have a problem with anyone who believes that their personal use of the company's assets (computers, Internet connection, time, etc.) is more important than federally mandated security controls. While it is often necessary to reduce some security controls so that the company's business can continue, there is no time where we will consider a reduction in the security posture for an employee to run their own company or make accomodations to enable someone to become even less productive than they already are.
Pushing patches via SMS/WSUS != pushing patches w/o testing.
The company I work for is set up with WSUS for the vast majority of our end-users. Typically, the desktop support folks can download patches, test them on a suite of test machines (one for each core load of software), package the patches, send out announcements to the known exception sites, and push the patches out in 48 hours. It is uncommon for it to take more than an additional two days before we've got 85% patch propegation, and that's with 30-40k systems being patched. Servers take a couple days longer, but that's more of an effect of change controls and planned outages for reboots than anything, and you'd better believe that those patches are tested first.
Contrary to what you'd be lead to think by reading /., the days of the NT4 patches that brick systems are pretty much past. Since we instituted the above system 2-3 years ago, I am unaware of any patch that made it through testing and broke a bunch of machines. Those systems that did go non-responsive from a patch were typically loaded with software that was unauthorized, unsupported, and unnecessary (from a business standpoint).
Insightful? You gotta be kidding!
I have been a corporate security professional for over 10 years, and the only people that I ever get whines from like the parent are typically engineers or IT people who either believe that a) they are God's gift to computers and/or b) the rules don't apply to them. I may seem a bit pissy here, but it just burns me to read posts like this from people who clearly have never tried to think about security from the perspective of the business protecting its assets.
Contrary to what most people seem to think, companies do not exist for the convience of the employees. It is the other way around. Employees have jobs to do what the company tells them to. If the policies at your company don't allow for any way for you to do your job, talk to management. More than likely, either an alternative solution exists, or the business function you're trying to do hasn't come up before and security will have to figure out how to incorporate it. If the problem is that the official method of doing your job isn't as convenient, as cool, or as uber as what you'd like to do, then either get over it or get a different job. Corporate policies and standards are put in place to homogenize the environment, ease support, and maintain regulatory compliance. They are not put in place, at least in my company, to inconvenience employees. In fact, the point behind security efforts in my environment is to enable the business to do everything they need to do, but in a manner that doesn't put the company at risk. Some times, this means that one business unit will have to accept a less-than-optimal solution because of more pressing issues at another, but we haven't been faced yet with a situation where there's been no way to safely do a valid business function.
In large corporations, in particular, security decisions are frequently a balance between the needs of very different business units. For example, a unit that provides credit functions to customers in the US is regulated by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, but a manufacturing unit in the same corporation wouldn't be normally. GLBA may apply to both, however, unless there is some system in place to prevent mistakes at the manufacturing unit from affecting the credit unit. So, while encrypted, authenticated wireless access may not be convenient for an engineer at the manufacturing unit, without internal firewalls to segment security zones, encrypted, authenticated wireless is the only option.
Don't get me wrong, we do things I don't agree with. Proxy blocking, for example, seems pointless to me. Surfing porn from a company system is not a technical issue, it is an HR issue. Have a policy that states what is acceptable, give one warning per user, then fire their ass. Believe me, Internet usage reports get much cleaner when someone at a site has been fired recently, regardless of what the proxy is blocking.
Oh, yeah. The so-called draconian policies we have in place have created an environment where a really, really bad virus outbreak is 2-3 machines worldwide. Before we went down this path, there were worms that affected thousands of systems all around the world. We also have a very, very low incidence of harassment issues, we have five-nines uptime on our production systems, we've never had to completely sever our Internet connections to deal with security threats, and we've managed to balance security and business function well enough that end-users rarely have to contact the help desk because a security measure is preventing them from doing their job. Things may not work this well at other companies, but whinging on /. isn't likely to change that anyway.
I tried to restrain myself, but obviously failed. So, given that good grammar==more formal, the list of formal/informal sources breaks down as formal(dictionary,WSJ,BBC,KJB,history book) and informal(poetry,grafitti), and /. is obviously not marked by its adherence to the Queen's English, does that mean that /. is either poetic in its inaccuracies, or is it simply the Internet equivalent of "For a good time, call Taco"?
Having been born the son of a man whose idea of a good hobby is proof-reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, I'm afraid I have to differ with you. While there are times where an occasional misspelling or grammatical error does not drastically alter the meaning of the sentence, there are a lot of times where the mistake is substantive. Consider, for example, the following sentence:
last week frank helped his uncle jack off his horse.
Depending on capitalization and punctuation, that could either mean that Frank assisted his uncle, named Jack, to get down from a horse. Or, it could mean that Frank assisted his uncle in one part of an animal husbandry function. The meaning is changed drastically by one letter and two commas.
The rules of grammar are akin to the rules of any activity. While it might be technically possible to play a game similar to baseball in your back yard using whatever materials are available, were one to show up at Wrigley Field with a basketball and a golf club expecting to play a quick game with the Cubs, the only reaction from observers would be laughter or incredulity. Auditioning for American Idol without being able to carry a tune gets you laughed off the stage. Similarly, attempting to engage in a serious debate on technical topics but being unable to demonstrate even a basic understanding of the rules of English degrades the impression the message leaves with observers.
Is it possible to be understood by competent readers even if you break the occasional grammatical rule here or there? Certainly. Is it possible to appear anything but a buffon or a dullard when trying to counter a well-reasoned and well-written argument with l33t-sp34k? Probably not.
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls, but I can't resist :-)
The Scheimpflug Principle, or maneuver as I learned it, essentially takes and aligns the film, lens, and subject planes such that they all converge at a single point (line? geometry never was my strong suit). This creates a resulting image wherein the depth of field has nearly everything in the image in focus.
Really nice thing to do with a view camera, although it can take time to set it up correctly and, in certain cases, can require special bellows to allow the film and lens planes to be angled sufficiently. Still, given that many point-and-shoot cameras are set up to provide as much depth of field as possible (often to compensate for autofocus errors, particularly on the low end), getting the majority of an image in focus isn't a problem that I've had to work with on digitals. More often than not, I'd like less depth of field, not more, since I don't necessarily want the garbage in the background of the beautiful rose I'm taking a picture of. Of course, I just deal with it in post-process anyway, so even that doesn't bother me much...
I have no doubt that your Leica is a superlative camera, but having a great camera is often only part of the problem. I spent 6 months doing photography in China a decade ago while in film school, and while I took thousands of dollars of equipment with me, the best pictures I took on the trip were with my Vivitar point-and-shoot film camera. Why? Because it was always with me and because there was no location that I went to that was too wet, too dirty, or too dangerous for that $40 camera. Since I always had it with me, I had more opportunity to shoot, took more pictures, and ended up with better shots. Large format film cameras, while fantastic for studio work and well-planned landscape type photography rather suck for getting that perfect picture of the rare orchid hanging 1/2 way down the cliff that you're climbing or for action shots while the irascible subjects are trying to shoot you.
I hate to point it out to you, but company rules (and government laws, btw) are not written for those who are already doing good. They are written to limit the impact that someone who lacks your good behavior.
Other posts have commented about the balance involved, and it is a difficult one to strike. In many cases, the official geeks (i.e. IT staff charged with maintaing the systems, etc.) need greater access, but part of the company's process should include a method of documenting who gets such access, why it is needed, and who takes responsibility for granting the exception. When done properly, this can mean that Joe Secretary is a limited user that is unable to install software on his computer, but Jackie Systemanalyst has local admin privileges so she can install and test the new version of Software X.
Simple fact is, unless your company has only one employee, it is unlikely that any rule will fit 100% of the employees 100% of the time. The job of security/compliance/auditing is to ensure that all of the rules are applied in a standard fashion and that those exceptions are adaquitely documented in a way that allows a) figuring what went wrong and b) who to fry for it when an employee abuses their position.
"Rebooting Solves 90% of Windows problems"
Nope. Rebooting only clears 90% of symptoms, it doesn't necessarily make the problems go away. For example, if you have a webserver that's got a memory leak and that leak takes 72 hours to fill RAM to the point that the system becomes unusable, rebooting clears the symptom (unusable system) but doesn't resolve the problem (bug in the webserver). Too many people think that the reboot fixes the problem, so they don't ever bother finding out what the real problem is.
Ah-ha! But there's the rub, there really aren't that many people who actually read Tolstoy (or Dostoyevsky, or Proust, or...) for FUN. Lots of people read them, some of them do it as entertainment, but not nearly as many as read "lighter" authors. It may not really be so much of a comparison between Tolstoy and Superman as a comparison between Tolstoy and, say, Kipling.
Don't get me wrong, I read deeper stuff. I'm reading 1984 right now, just finished Henry V, and have 100 Years of Solitude in the queue for my annual read of that. The fact is, though, that I play video games explicitly because they don't require the same level of mental engagement that reading literature.
BTW, Tolstoy was a bad choice to argue with me. I've had a really hard time getting in to most Russian authors I've read, including Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Checkov. I'm sure they're all very good, the styles, especially the verbosity of Tolstoy, have been difficult enough that I haven't managed to force myself through them. To buy a book for $10-15 and not read it is one thing. To spend $50 on a video game that I don't play for more than 30 minutes just pisses me off.
D'oh! Bad form to reply to one's self, but I forgot to add the other reason I play female toons... they're easier to see around. In chase-cam games, playing the steroid-enhanced towering bundle of muscles frequently means that you can't see anything but your own character. Playing a short, skinny female with almost no boobs (I'm behind her, what do I care?) means you can see often 80% of the stuff in front of you.
"It's an overall tendency to pick a character to project yourself in a way that you perceive would be attractive to others or that is attractive to you."
I am male, and used to play Anarchy Online, and many of my characters were busty females in scant clothing, particularly when going through cities. Why? Because horny teenaged boys have a tendancy to give gifts to the attractive characters in an attempt to hit on them. Got two Yalms that way. Regardless of how "real" short, fat men are, no one ever gives those guys free cars!
Ya know, I play games so I get a break from dealing with "conflicted, nuanced" people all the time. I also play games as a form of escapism from the drudgery of a real life in which I am unattractive, unathletic, and have relatively no control over the vast majority of things that go on in my life.
I have a strong feeling that if, for example, WoW were to change their plot lines from "Go kill the big, bad dragon" to "Try to balance the challenges of building a career and raising happy, well-adjusted kids", they would suffer a dramatic drop-off in playership.
Reality is the unwar in Iraq, a constant increase in power by the religious right, six murders on the news before the weather, and crack-whores dipping their baby's pacifier in herion to calm the little brat down a bit. Reality sucks, give me more fantasy I say!