Ok, if you want to dismiss studies and get into anecdotal evidence, how bout this.
In Canada, they rely on signs and lights a lot, and there are four way stop signs everywhere.
So, I'm driving at night, I'm tired, and I get to a four way stop, and I stop, and I look both ways, and I drive out.
And some stupid bitch who I expect to stop for the sign T-bones my car.
She was overtired from working two jobs, and she didn't see the sign. I, of course, figured she was just one of those idiots who likes to slam her stops instead of slowing into them. In my mind, it's "Of course she's going to stop, there's a stop sign."
Now, you contrast that with Australia, where I've also done a lot of driving.
There are roundabouts everywhere you might find a four way stop. With a nice tree in the middle.
Now, you can't tune out what's going on and trust signs in such an environment. If you do, you'll crash your car after a single block.
The accident I had was caused by trusting signs, it could have easily been prevented by taking an attitude that roads should not have signs on them and should be designed accordingly, and there are nations in the world that have done this to various degrees.
I have to say, I think your example, being that it's about labeling hazards in the middle of nowhere, is completely irrelevant. We're talking about traffic control here, not driving up the edge of a mountainside in the dark on an empty road.
You get enticed to solve problems, not invent tools. Money is enticement.
If you can't find a single person out there who has a problem that needs solving and involves your new tool, your new tool is useless.
A tool is a means to achieve a goal, not a goal in itself. If there is no goal at the end of the train, then yes, your whole pyramid is built of meaningless crap.
Being that this is finances he's talking about, all of it is meaningless. The value of financial software is in how close to zero you can bring the time you spend working on it, because it's all administrative overhead and no productivity whatsoever.
Financial stuff gets stale fast as laws change, so I might suggest something along the lines of:
1) Give it away, and sell its advantages strongly far and wide 2) Make it update itself to the suit the latest legal/financial environment from central servers with new data, but only for paying customers 3) Create a business model around being "The guys who watch the laws and make sure our software still suits them."
In other words, don't trap them, empower them, and make money dealing with the ongoing bullshit that's closer to your skill set than their own.
You' should be actively handing it down to the next generation.
Well yes, Sparky. And you know how that's done? By watching to see who the hell deserves it. You know who gets to decide? Those doing the handing, not those with their hands out.
You know what? You don't get to decide that this person doesn't deserve to have the reins handed to them. You can try, but you're going to get old and decrepit before you die, and we are going to take the reins anyways.
And when we do, we are going to remember how little you cared about helping us be strong enough to do it all, and we're going to actually feel a certain vindictive joy when we leave you to die in the dirt uncared for and alone.
As Mr Nash pointed out, the whole mathematical model that supports the market presupposes that no one ever considers anything beyond "who's paying most for least".
If people actually develop a moral sense and use it to drive their actions rather than operating on pure greed, the market model breaks down and things that seemed predictable as the seasons collapse. That's collapse, as in goodbye, gone, kaput.
This problem isn't going to get fixed. People HATE corporations because they're evil, and only those who don't give a fuck about anyone work for them without being compelled by desperation. Interestingly enough, people who don't give a fuck about anyone are more likely to land your corporation in court than anything else.
Free software is by and for people who are scratching their own itch.
Your question could be reduced to "I've invented a new hammer that works much better than old ones, but anyone can make a hammer just like it. How am I going to make money off my hammer?"
The answer is simple. USE your new hammer to build things instead of calling a halt to your problem solving career and trying to open a hammer store.
You don't have the population. That's why you are not capable of exploiting the natural resources here, and instead rely on places like China, who didn't fuck their civilization up with all these so called "human rights" and end up systematically sterilizing themselves.
The only thing that might save civilization in North America here is massive waves of immigration from places like India, Pakistan or China. The so-called values that we hold here, they're going out the door either way regardless.
Yes, it makes space less accessible, but when you're behind your "competitor" then they have more to lose than you do. Sadly this kind of logic has an attraction to the less responsible elements present in some governments.
This is a joke, right? You think people who are custodians of the safety of billions of people have a primary responsibility to preserve space access for the future? It would absolutely be a fulfillment of their responsibility in such circumstances.
Are you unable to comprehend how large the immediate orbital region surrounding out planet is? Or for that matter, exactly how difficult it would be to target only specific satellites, instead of risking wiping out your own with some shotgun approach?
Exactly my point. Shotgun approach, easy, no more raining death from the sky, problem solved. You think people under threat of death care about the future of their communication satellites? It only takes one person to piss in the pool.
Are you unable to comprehend that this has nothing to do with anti-satellite attacks? All you need to do is ship up some junk and spread it around, and that's the end of it, indefinitely. Space access relies on everyone agreeing not to do this. If space access becomes a threat to any nation, space access can be removed from every nation.
Kind of makes US reliance on space based technological dominance in the theater of war into a bit of a joke, doesn't it. If some dumb nation were to weaponize space, this is how easily they and their efforts could be shut down. Kind of makes the whole idea seem really stupid.
All you need to do with the platters is hit them with the sledgehammer a few times. The interesting thing is the rare earth magnets inside... you can have all sorts of fun with those puppies. Don't put them on opposite sides of your finger webbing unless you're looking for a piercing.
It doesn't have to be that way. I spent the last three years working from home, managing software that linked together networks of thousands of others around the globe who were also self employed.
My next project launch is going to revolve around helping artists who are making original works go direct to market globally with professional and individualized multilingual websites in addition to a central marketplace, leveraging the fact that their product does not rely on copies by releasing digital images under liberal copying licenses like creative commons to create a cultural recognition and drive up the exclusivity value of their actual creations.
I intend to make it practical for individual, self-employed creators in the middle of nowhere to operate on a global level, without language barriers, at low operating cost without the need for a copyright system to exist to support their endeavors, and make the growth of the digital pool of liberally licensed works an easy choice to those for whom it is a strategically wise one, creating an ongoing funded stream of open culture that erodes the value of copyrighted media pools and liberates creative budgets for more work.
There are a sea of people who would work like whipped horses if they felt that there was some sort of honest future in it for them, just waiting for someone to help them get it together.
You can't fight and win. You can't yell and win. You have to find new ways that make the old ways obsolete, and then you can just walk away, and let them chase you to fight or yell if they want, because you don't need to be involved with them anymore.
That's how I got myself free of that shit and found something to be passionate about, anyways. I spend my time working on systems that value individual people and help them compete with giant organizations and co-operate with each other.
I'm quite happy that I've managed to hone myself into not being the sort of guy who is going to work in a corporate office, but I do have a lot of optimism:P
We don't feel that we should be expected to "earn" the right to be part of the important goings on in our culture. We feel that, even if we do "earn" what rights are available, we will still be pawns in someone elses game, and we have no more love or respect for their game than they have for us, so we don't bother.
We consume these "opiates" because we hate the real world we live in, we see no hope of changing it, and we have given up and fled to imaginary land. In our zoned out state, we do only what we must to exist, because we are not really here.
Now, some of us haven't given up. But we still don't take jobs for employers, we become self-employeed.
None of us are interested in taking these "entry level jobs" in the hopes that we might be blessed with something better some day. We know that someday will not come.
If young people were going to develop responsibility, they would need to have a connection to what they're responsible for, which means giving them real power in the world, which isn't happening.
If young people do develop a sense of responsibility, they are still not going to take jobs. They are going to take over.
They're not stealing from their children, really. They didn't have children; that's why there was a population bust.
This is the source of all the so-called wealth that these structures purport to create. They didn't create wealth, they cashed in the chips on their civilization. They said, "Lets just put a stop to the whole thing, stop having babies and making more people, and just party like it's 1999". They created a myth about overpopulation to give it all a tint of morality and decided to just pursue hedonism.
Those of us who are here, we are the product of the few boomers who actually cared about humanity enough to try to make more humans in a world that would much rather they just get to work making leisure products with all that spare time.
As it stands, you can divide the population into demographics by generation, and the oldest generation outnumbers the two younger ones. And at this point, they are generally united, and their interests run the show.
I'd say, politically, the best tactic to move forward is to recognize that the richest boomers are the ones who didn't have kids, while the ones who did are the poorer ones. This being the case, the rich boomers are going to be poised to use economics to compel us young people to care for them before caring for our own parents, in a world where there aren't enough young able bodied people to care for everyone.
If everyone was to recognize and acknowledge this, it might be possible to split the boomers, restructure the rules and disenfranchise the ones who didn't have children and therefore have no one motivated to speak for them out of love, but purely through leverage.
At the end of the day, we don't have the able bodied population to take care of our elderly in anything approaching the fashion they were promised. We'll be lucky if we can take care of ourselves.
I could say the same of your own post. Did you see the guy you were replying to talking about whipping a musical instrument out in mid interview? No, me neither. You just ranted about how idiotic such a thing would be in an attempt to belittle the person you were replying to.
Now, my own example is an attempt to bring the abstraction under discussion into the concrete world as an example. I didn't put forth the example as a paraphrasing of your own words and attack the example, therefore, it's not a straw man argument at all.
Perhaps if you'd studied music, you might have an easier time dealing with these abstract concepts, and not have made a fool of yourself. Too late now though.
Most managers believe that as well, but I think it's the rare manager who will give the programmer 30% extra time, when the code admittedly "already works and just needs some cleaning up".
That's why you always leave the interface ugly as possible until the very end. A good programmer doesn't allow something half finished to look polished because he knows he won't be permitted to do the job properly if he does, and he refuses to churn out crap at any price.
He does this because he knows there are more problems than people with the skills and discipline to solve them, and that it is the employer who is privileged in attracting his attention to the problem, not he who is privileged to be permitted to solve it.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you refuse to turn out crap, you will develop good skills and habits. If you don't refuse to turn out crap, you won't develop good skills and habits. You are what you make of yourself.
Music is very complex. The fact that you are comfortable with its complexities is a testament to your capacity to handle complexity.
If you had two recent graduates, one liked to play foozeball during their spare time, while the other liked to compose music, you really wouldn't see that as evidence that one was more drawn to complexity than the other?
Secondly, I hate when people excuse bad driving as normal. It's not acceptable. If you don't clear the intersection when emergency vehicles are coming, you shouldn't be driving, period. If you consistently drive 5mph under the speed limit, your license should be revoked. If you can't PARK YOUR CAR without extreme effort, license REVOKED! If you took licenses away from all the people that shouldn't have them for safety reasons, there would be 50% fewer people on the road, AT LEAST.
So, if more than 50% of the people are kept off the road because you don't like how they drive, perhaps they should round YOU up, get rid of YOU, and drive as they see fit without interference from micromanaging busy bodies who think we're obligated to operate in a way that you can predict and write down?
You know, there have been numerous suppressed studies demonstrating that road rules and signs actually make driving less safe because they give a false sense of security. I don't have a link at my fingertips, but there have been several of them done. The safest way to structure roads is to remove all signs and controls, and force people to remain interactive with the environment rather than being hypnotized into routine. The reason the highly structured and regulated road systems continue is because they are an industry with an interest in self-preservation, and a cash cow for government, not because they are a good way to do things.
No, it means we should thank him for demonstrating this flaw in the current system, and work on a solution to prevent future abuses.
Or, maybe we just shouldn't structure our world in such an imbalanced way as to make stealing another persons identity seem appealing in the first place. Of course, you're not going to see a moron with his own TV show point something like that out, because he's one of the ones getting the long straw.
Funny... that's my definition of a good project manager.
And in any organization of more than about 20 people, "programmer" and "project manager" should probably NOT be roles performed by the same person.
The problem is, most of the time project managers are salespeople first and foremost. It's when your project manager thinks he's a salesperson and that it's his job to retain the client that you run into troubles. It's not. The client should have been sold on, and legally committed to, the project, not the right to control your time and efforts in the abstract.
There is nothing that will tank your career faster than playing ball with such people. They teach you how to be habitually ineffectual, which doesn't just waste a year of your life, but actually destroys your capacity to be a critical thinker and develop your problem solving skills.
Of course, the modern corporate structure is designed to serve itself, and a corporate structure doesn't serve itself by teaching it's serfs how to succeed on their own, so you won't find many in such realms who don't take an active role in keeping you either squashed under their thumb or broken and useless once they have power over your livelihood.
You're going to have to do it because you're independently motivated, in the presence of active opposition. It's hard, and no one in authority wants to see you succeed.
There are two entire generations who have been disenfranchised from their society, and they won't have any connection to it in the foreseeable future because economics, politics and a population bust have seen to it that there is no peaceful way to have any influence or involvement.
Young people resent the system because in all material ways, it really does disempower them and keep them small and subservient.
The older generation appreciate it because, for them, it does the opposite. For them, it is an expression of and mechanism for empowerment.
That's why young people don't care about the systems that dominate our world, and why old people lend their support to increasingly totalitarian methods of controlling people.
They're not going to let this guy grow into anything that might threaten them. They might use education to specialize and stunt his development until he's utterly dependent on them, then use him as a sort of pet/tool once he has no means by which to make use of any freedom, or they might just stunt and destroy him with confinement.
While I would agree that anyone in the know should be promoting an alternative to IE, sometimes it isn't the IT guy's choice. My company "outlawed" Firefox... That order came from the CEO who can barely operate his cell phone.
Don't worry. Companies headed by idiots don't last. You could always put together a better organization to meet the same needs since you're in the industry.
There is a certain difference between being careless in a way which will cause you trouble, and being careless in a way which will cause other people trouble.
True. That's why only the people who either use banks or are involved with charity should be able to poke his eyes out for the inconveniences and added expenses he caused. Right?
"I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account," he said. "The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.
Admitting the error of his previous article dismissing identity theft concerns, he wrote that, "I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake." The incident seems to have changed his opinion about the risks to which the 25 million Brits have been exposed. "Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy."
So, does that mean that every charity and bank out there who has to deal with administrative headaches because he gave his information away should get to poke sticks in his eyes?
How about "People who don't think about the larger effects their actions will have are reckless, while people who recognize that their actions will have larger, detrimental effects on others and still engage in those actions are moral, immoral or amoral, depending on whether they think it is right, wrong or neither, respectively."
Right. They "accidentally" went to a black hat SEO to push up their site rank.
More abstractly, there is a difference between being reckless, which involves jeopardizing your own safety and security, and being careless, which involves jeopardizing other peoples safety and security. The fact that some people are both reckless and careless doesn't make them the same thing. Some actions are criminally careless, in which case it's reckless to engage in them. Some actions are not criminal, but the careless, indiscriminate wielding of power, which isn't really reckless at all.
Gaming these systems amounts to spreading misinformation on a global scale. That's not a harmless act, nor is it a passive act, or an act of passion. It's a scheme, and it's a scheme that's not really defensible on any basis, which is why all the defenses people put forward are intended to minimalise the act rather than redeem it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, if you want to dismiss studies and get into anecdotal evidence, how bout this.
In Canada, they rely on signs and lights a lot, and there are four way stop signs everywhere.
So, I'm driving at night, I'm tired, and I get to a four way stop, and I stop, and I look both ways, and I drive out.
And some stupid bitch who I expect to stop for the sign T-bones my car.
She was overtired from working two jobs, and she didn't see the sign. I, of course, figured she was just one of those idiots who likes to slam her stops instead of slowing into them. In my mind, it's "Of course she's going to stop, there's a stop sign."
Now, you contrast that with Australia, where I've also done a lot of driving.
There are roundabouts everywhere you might find a four way stop. With a nice tree in the middle.
Now, you can't tune out what's going on and trust signs in such an environment. If you do, you'll crash your car after a single block.
The accident I had was caused by trusting signs, it could have easily been prevented by taking an attitude that roads should not have signs on them and should be designed accordingly, and there are nations in the world that have done this to various degrees.
I have to say, I think your example, being that it's about labeling hazards in the middle of nowhere, is completely irrelevant. We're talking about traffic control here, not driving up the edge of a mountainside in the dark on an empty road.
You get enticed to solve problems, not invent tools. Money is enticement.
If you can't find a single person out there who has a problem that needs solving and involves your new tool, your new tool is useless.
A tool is a means to achieve a goal, not a goal in itself. If there is no goal at the end of the train, then yes, your whole pyramid is built of meaningless crap.
Being that this is finances he's talking about, all of it is meaningless. The value of financial software is in how close to zero you can bring the time you spend working on it, because it's all administrative overhead and no productivity whatsoever.
Financial stuff gets stale fast as laws change, so I might suggest something along the lines of:
1) Give it away, and sell its advantages strongly far and wide
2) Make it update itself to the suit the latest legal/financial environment from central servers with new data, but only for paying customers
3) Create a business model around being "The guys who watch the laws and make sure our software still suits them."
In other words, don't trap them, empower them, and make money dealing with the ongoing bullshit that's closer to your skill set than their own.
You' should be actively handing it down to the next generation.
Well yes, Sparky. And you know how that's done? By watching to see who the hell deserves it. You know who gets to decide? Those doing the handing, not those with their hands out.
You know what? You don't get to decide that this person doesn't deserve to have the reins handed to them. You can try, but you're going to get old and decrepit before you die, and we are going to take the reins anyways.
And when we do, we are going to remember how little you cared about helping us be strong enough to do it all, and we're going to actually feel a certain vindictive joy when we leave you to die in the dirt uncared for and alone.
As Mr Nash pointed out, the whole mathematical model that supports the market presupposes that no one ever considers anything beyond "who's paying most for least".
If people actually develop a moral sense and use it to drive their actions rather than operating on pure greed, the market model breaks down and things that seemed predictable as the seasons collapse. That's collapse, as in goodbye, gone, kaput.
This problem isn't going to get fixed. People HATE corporations because they're evil, and only those who don't give a fuck about anyone work for them without being compelled by desperation. Interestingly enough, people who don't give a fuck about anyone are more likely to land your corporation in court than anything else.
Free software is by and for people who are scratching their own itch.
Your question could be reduced to "I've invented a new hammer that works much better than old ones, but anyone can make a hammer just like it. How am I going to make money off my hammer?"
The answer is simple. USE your new hammer to build things instead of calling a halt to your problem solving career and trying to open a hammer store.
You don't have the population. That's why you are not capable of exploiting the natural resources here, and instead rely on places like China, who didn't fuck their civilization up with all these so called "human rights" and end up systematically sterilizing themselves.
The only thing that might save civilization in North America here is massive waves of immigration from places like India, Pakistan or China. The so-called values that we hold here, they're going out the door either way regardless.
Yes, it makes space less accessible, but when you're behind your "competitor" then they have more to lose than you do. Sadly this kind of logic has an attraction to the less responsible elements present in some governments.
This is a joke, right? You think people who are custodians of the safety of billions of people have a primary responsibility to preserve space access for the future? It would absolutely be a fulfillment of their responsibility in such circumstances.
Are you unable to comprehend how large the immediate orbital region surrounding out planet is? Or for that matter, exactly how difficult it would be to target only specific satellites, instead of risking wiping out your own with some shotgun approach?
Exactly my point. Shotgun approach, easy, no more raining death from the sky, problem solved. You think people under threat of death care about the future of their communication satellites? It only takes one person to piss in the pool.
Are you unable to comprehend that this has nothing to do with anti-satellite attacks? All you need to do is ship up some junk and spread it around, and that's the end of it, indefinitely. Space access relies on everyone agreeing not to do this. If space access becomes a threat to any nation, space access can be removed from every nation.
Kind of makes US reliance on space based technological dominance in the theater of war into a bit of a joke, doesn't it. If some dumb nation were to weaponize space, this is how easily they and their efforts could be shut down. Kind of makes the whole idea seem really stupid.
All you need to do with the platters is hit them with the sledgehammer a few times. The interesting thing is the rare earth magnets inside... you can have all sorts of fun with those puppies. Don't put them on opposite sides of your finger webbing unless you're looking for a piercing.
It doesn't have to be that way. I spent the last three years working from home, managing software that linked together networks of thousands of others around the globe who were also self employed.
:P
My next project launch is going to revolve around helping artists who are making original works go direct to market globally with professional and individualized multilingual websites in addition to a central marketplace, leveraging the fact that their product does not rely on copies by releasing digital images under liberal copying licenses like creative commons to create a cultural recognition and drive up the exclusivity value of their actual creations.
I intend to make it practical for individual, self-employed creators in the middle of nowhere to operate on a global level, without language barriers, at low operating cost without the need for a copyright system to exist to support their endeavors, and make the growth of the digital pool of liberally licensed works an easy choice to those for whom it is a strategically wise one, creating an ongoing funded stream of open culture that erodes the value of copyrighted media pools and liberates creative budgets for more work.
There are a sea of people who would work like whipped horses if they felt that there was some sort of honest future in it for them, just waiting for someone to help them get it together.
You can't fight and win. You can't yell and win. You have to find new ways that make the old ways obsolete, and then you can just walk away, and let them chase you to fight or yell if they want, because you don't need to be involved with them anymore.
That's how I got myself free of that shit and found something to be passionate about, anyways. I spend my time working on systems that value individual people and help them compete with giant organizations and co-operate with each other.
I'm quite happy that I've managed to hone myself into not being the sort of guy who is going to work in a corporate office, but I do have a lot of optimism
We don't feel that we should be expected to "earn" the right to be part of the important goings on in our culture. We feel that, even if we do "earn" what rights are available, we will still be pawns in someone elses game, and we have no more love or respect for their game than they have for us, so we don't bother.
We consume these "opiates" because we hate the real world we live in, we see no hope of changing it, and we have given up and fled to imaginary land. In our zoned out state, we do only what we must to exist, because we are not really here.
Now, some of us haven't given up. But we still don't take jobs for employers, we become self-employeed.
None of us are interested in taking these "entry level jobs" in the hopes that we might be blessed with something better some day. We know that someday will not come.
If young people were going to develop responsibility, they would need to have a connection to what they're responsible for, which means giving them real power in the world, which isn't happening.
If young people do develop a sense of responsibility, they are still not going to take jobs. They are going to take over.
They're not stealing from their children, really. They didn't have children; that's why there was a population bust.
This is the source of all the so-called wealth that these structures purport to create. They didn't create wealth, they cashed in the chips on their civilization. They said, "Lets just put a stop to the whole thing, stop having babies and making more people, and just party like it's 1999". They created a myth about overpopulation to give it all a tint of morality and decided to just pursue hedonism.
Those of us who are here, we are the product of the few boomers who actually cared about humanity enough to try to make more humans in a world that would much rather they just get to work making leisure products with all that spare time.
As it stands, you can divide the population into demographics by generation, and the oldest generation outnumbers the two younger ones. And at this point, they are generally united, and their interests run the show.
I'd say, politically, the best tactic to move forward is to recognize that the richest boomers are the ones who didn't have kids, while the ones who did are the poorer ones. This being the case, the rich boomers are going to be poised to use economics to compel us young people to care for them before caring for our own parents, in a world where there aren't enough young able bodied people to care for everyone.
If everyone was to recognize and acknowledge this, it might be possible to split the boomers, restructure the rules and disenfranchise the ones who didn't have children and therefore have no one motivated to speak for them out of love, but purely through leverage.
At the end of the day, we don't have the able bodied population to take care of our elderly in anything approaching the fashion they were promised. We'll be lucky if we can take care of ourselves.
I could say the same of your own post. Did you see the guy you were replying to talking about whipping a musical instrument out in mid interview? No, me neither. You just ranted about how idiotic such a thing would be in an attempt to belittle the person you were replying to.
Now, my own example is an attempt to bring the abstraction under discussion into the concrete world as an example. I didn't put forth the example as a paraphrasing of your own words and attack the example, therefore, it's not a straw man argument at all.
Perhaps if you'd studied music, you might have an easier time dealing with these abstract concepts, and not have made a fool of yourself. Too late now though.
Most managers believe that as well, but I think it's the rare manager who will give the programmer 30% extra time, when the code admittedly "already works and just needs some cleaning up".
That's why you always leave the interface ugly as possible until the very end. A good programmer doesn't allow something half finished to look polished because he knows he won't be permitted to do the job properly if he does, and he refuses to churn out crap at any price.
He does this because he knows there are more problems than people with the skills and discipline to solve them, and that it is the employer who is privileged in attracting his attention to the problem, not he who is privileged to be permitted to solve it.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you refuse to turn out crap, you will develop good skills and habits. If you don't refuse to turn out crap, you won't develop good skills and habits. You are what you make of yourself.
Music is very complex. The fact that you are comfortable with its complexities is a testament to your capacity to handle complexity.
If you had two recent graduates, one liked to play foozeball during their spare time, while the other liked to compose music, you really wouldn't see that as evidence that one was more drawn to complexity than the other?
Secondly, I hate when people excuse bad driving as normal. It's not acceptable. If you don't clear the intersection when emergency vehicles are coming, you shouldn't be driving, period. If you consistently drive 5mph under the speed limit, your license should be revoked. If you can't PARK YOUR CAR without extreme effort, license REVOKED! If you took licenses away from all the people that shouldn't have them for safety reasons, there would be 50% fewer people on the road, AT LEAST.
So, if more than 50% of the people are kept off the road because you don't like how they drive, perhaps they should round YOU up, get rid of YOU, and drive as they see fit without interference from micromanaging busy bodies who think we're obligated to operate in a way that you can predict and write down?
You know, there have been numerous suppressed studies demonstrating that road rules and signs actually make driving less safe because they give a false sense of security. I don't have a link at my fingertips, but there have been several of them done. The safest way to structure roads is to remove all signs and controls, and force people to remain interactive with the environment rather than being hypnotized into routine. The reason the highly structured and regulated road systems continue is because they are an industry with an interest in self-preservation, and a cash cow for government, not because they are a good way to do things.
No, it means we should thank him for demonstrating this flaw in the current system, and work on a solution to prevent future abuses.
Or, maybe we just shouldn't structure our world in such an imbalanced way as to make stealing another persons identity seem appealing in the first place. Of course, you're not going to see a moron with his own TV show point something like that out, because he's one of the ones getting the long straw.
Funny... that's my definition of a good project manager.
And in any organization of more than about 20 people, "programmer" and "project manager" should probably NOT be roles performed by the same person.
The problem is, most of the time project managers are salespeople first and foremost. It's when your project manager thinks he's a salesperson and that it's his job to retain the client that you run into troubles. It's not. The client should have been sold on, and legally committed to, the project, not the right to control your time and efforts in the abstract.
There is nothing that will tank your career faster than playing ball with such people. They teach you how to be habitually ineffectual, which doesn't just waste a year of your life, but actually destroys your capacity to be a critical thinker and develop your problem solving skills.
Of course, the modern corporate structure is designed to serve itself, and a corporate structure doesn't serve itself by teaching it's serfs how to succeed on their own, so you won't find many in such realms who don't take an active role in keeping you either squashed under their thumb or broken and useless once they have power over your livelihood.
You're going to have to do it because you're independently motivated, in the presence of active opposition. It's hard, and no one in authority wants to see you succeed.
There are two entire generations who have been disenfranchised from their society, and they won't have any connection to it in the foreseeable future because economics, politics and a population bust have seen to it that there is no peaceful way to have any influence or involvement.
Young people resent the system because in all material ways, it really does disempower them and keep them small and subservient.
The older generation appreciate it because, for them, it does the opposite. For them, it is an expression of and mechanism for empowerment.
That's why young people don't care about the systems that dominate our world, and why old people lend their support to increasingly totalitarian methods of controlling people.
They're not going to let this guy grow into anything that might threaten them. They might use education to specialize and stunt his development until he's utterly dependent on them, then use him as a sort of pet/tool once he has no means by which to make use of any freedom, or they might just stunt and destroy him with confinement.
While I would agree that anyone in the know should be promoting an alternative to IE, sometimes it isn't the IT guy's choice. My company "outlawed" Firefox... That order came from the CEO who can barely operate his cell phone.
Don't worry. Companies headed by idiots don't last. You could always put together a better organization to meet the same needs since you're in the industry.
There is a certain difference between being careless in a way which will cause you trouble, and being careless in a way which will cause other people trouble.
True. That's why only the people who either use banks or are involved with charity should be able to poke his eyes out for the inconveniences and added expenses he caused. Right?
This guy is a jackass.
"I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account," he said. "The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.
Admitting the error of his previous article dismissing identity theft concerns, he wrote that, "I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake." The incident seems to have changed his opinion about the risks to which the 25 million Brits have been exposed. "Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy."
So, does that mean that every charity and bank out there who has to deal with administrative headaches because he gave his information away should get to poke sticks in his eyes?
How about "People who don't think about the larger effects their actions will have are reckless, while people who recognize that their actions will have larger, detrimental effects on others and still engage in those actions are moral, immoral or amoral, depending on whether they think it is right, wrong or neither, respectively."
Right. They "accidentally" went to a black hat SEO to push up their site rank.
More abstractly, there is a difference between being reckless, which involves jeopardizing your own safety and security, and being careless, which involves jeopardizing other peoples safety and security. The fact that some people are both reckless and careless doesn't make them the same thing. Some actions are criminally careless, in which case it's reckless to engage in them. Some actions are not criminal, but the careless, indiscriminate wielding of power, which isn't really reckless at all.
Gaming these systems amounts to spreading misinformation on a global scale. That's not a harmless act, nor is it a passive act, or an act of passion. It's a scheme, and it's a scheme that's not really defensible on any basis, which is why all the defenses people put forward are intended to minimalise the act rather than redeem it.