And consider the brewery as well. The measures that brewers have to take to keep their strains of yeast pure are so well understood that people do it at home: 1) sanitize your containers, 2) disinfect/cook the source material. The fact that the bacteria/algae are producing sugar instead of consuming it is still a negative, but I don't see it as insurmountable in an industrial environment. We aren't going to have these things growing on trees, they're going to be in "refineries" under tightly-controlled (eventually, after an industrial accident or two) processes.
A bigger hurdle in my mind is the extraction and purification of the cellulose from the matrix of bacteria without killing the bacteria or wasting the cellulose. Maybe adding brewers' yeast to the mix would help in the extraction, as well as keeping the sugars down and producing ethanol directly. In fact, they should be working on boosting the sugar output at the expense of the cellulose output. The sugars are directly convertible to alcohol, while the cellulose would require additional reactions to break it down.
And just why are you taking personal patient data around with you on a laptop in the first place? You're probably violating HIPAA just having the data unencrypted on the laptop drive, which isn't stored in a secure environment.
Any of the items you list could be on paper. I still don't see the distinction here between a hard drive file and a paper file, other than (potentially) the quantity of data involved. Can you name one type of data that can be stored on a hard-drive that (given enough mass of paper) cannot be printed on paper in a human readable format? For example even executable code can be disassembled and printed out.
you have to play all 9 innings. Until John and the SCOTUS rule, we can argue about it all we want, but it ain't over till the "world's oldest doo-wop group" sings.
Whether or not a person actually knows what they are talking about is irrelevant to whether or not they have a small group of fanatics who follow their every activity and hang on every word they say.
On the other hand, it does take a certain exploitive aspect in one's personality to put up with that kind of nonsense for very long.
For that matter, Sobell himself has various editions of "plain old Unix" books going back to the 1980's. The Ubuntu edition sounds like a useful update to my earlier editions of "A practical guide to the Unix System". Combine these with the Advanced Bash Scripting guide and the other online documentation at tldp.org, and you're good to go.
People worry about the material development as the first step, but it really should be done concurrently with some good static and dynamic analysis of some basic design structures. Apart from the mere mass of the structure itself, there are soooo many features that would exert forces on the structure and the elevator cars. The cable structure can flex in and out, wobble around its tether point or around the geosynchronous terminal, oscillate like a guitar string and or twist along its length. There are variations in atmospheric forces, gravitation, electromagnetic forces on a regular basis, apart from the forces that occur during an "incident" such as an impact.
Some of these forces could end up being beneficial. A force implies an energy source, if nothing else. For example the electrical discharge could possibly be used to provide power, but it would require a heck of a design. Running an electrical short-circuit up through the Van Allen belt is not an option.
But imagine what happens when the cable vibrates like a guitar string with frequency of say 1/10 Hz and an amplitude of a few meters, and that wave reaches the ground. This size of vibration is microscopic compared with the length of the structure but can cause a real mess on the ground, even in a low frequency. The elevator will require damping technology even more extensive than what we use for earthquake mitigation, and that will add even more mass to the cable requirements. Do we even have the measurements needed to simulate all of the vibrational and other forces on a computer model?
I'm curious what would happen if we decided not to tether the earh-end of the elevator because of stuff like this. Run the cable down to 8,000 m above sea-level or so, and transport up to it with some sort of a lighter than air (blimp/zeppelin/dirigible) or VTL craft that can dock with the end point. I suspect it would be much more difficult to damp out undesired motion, but that may be a good thing. This thing would be so massive, and the geo-synchronous center of mass would be like the fulcrum of a 22,000 mile lever. If we tether it to the ground we may affect the earth's rotation.
Of course there's the time value of money and energy to consider, too. Otherwise FedEx would never exist. Sometimes you need to ship something fast and expensively.
Furthermore, I'd be more inclined to believe that if put into power, engineers and other hard scientists would probably institute forms of fascism into the government, because they would be more interested in fixing the problem than in actually running the system.
Let's see, if the problem is terrorism and lack of access to Iraqi oil, does that mean Dick Cheney is an engineer?
More or less correct. The fee on music CDs was an attempt to collect a license fee for something that was already legal (format shifting/recompilation) under fair-use anyway. Now if the license on a blank CD had included re-distribution rights, the value equation would've been a little different.
And of course as long as "data" CDs were out there that didn't include the fee, there wasn't a chance in hell consumers would buy the "music" disks.
So if this $5/month includes a grant of license to re-distribute, then hey, that's not a bad deal for a serious file-sharer. If there's no grant of license, then they're still reserving the right to sue you in spite of the $5/month. Which is a complete waste of everyone's time to even discuss it.
And of course, the ISPs have their own issues with the bandwidth taken by P2P networks, though that's mostly because they can't deliver the "unlimited" service to all their customers simultaneously, despite what they are advertising. It's not going to happen any time soon, but if ISPs stopped advertising their regular service as unlimited and actually state what the caps are, and offer a true unlimited service that actually reflects their costs, and the media companies grant redistribution rights for the monthly fee, it might actually be worth paying.
Eventually, maybe, the distribution channel will actually match the demand.
Is there anyone here, living in a state where non-compete clauses are legal, who doesn't have similar language about inventions and products they may develop using company resources. For a news producer, political opinions and news data would probably constitute work-related material similar to code for a developer or customer lists for a salesman.
Also, maybe this guy isn't as stupid as we think. If I was planning leaving anyway to start a commercial blog on politics, some of the best publicity I can think of would be that "I'm an award winning producer who was fired from my job at CNN for posting on my blog."
Finally, if CNN can keep neo-isolationist Lou Dobbs on the air, I don't think they can go around claiming that the guy's opinions were too extreme for a member of their staff.
Of course they're doing it for the publicity, but that doesn't mean it's automatically crap. Baen has offered several award-winning works on their free site in the past. And the (Baen) books are available as HTML or RTF, as well as e-Book formats. I usually read mine in reader format in MS Word (or its functional equivalent).
Given that Baen already has a working model for this type of distribution, I doubt that Tor can have an offering that is substantially worse or they won't be able to compete. The fact that they're moving in this direction at all implies that there is some competitive pressure already.
Given the slashdot demographic, it's about 99% probable that I wouldn't want you performing that act on me in any venue, let alone in the street, HBI. (Sorry, have to keep my post SFW).
For what it's worth...
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
The two main professional organizations for Engineers and scientists in IT both have codes of ethics:
IEEE and
ACM
This doesn't have much practical effect, since membership or certification by these organizations is rarely a job requirement in IT, but they do serve as a baseline for evaluating behavior in the industry. It's a sad state of affairs.
The only way banks can send verifiable information to their clients is if they provide each client with a unique public key for signing and decryption. Until internet fraud becomes so expensive that this option looks affordable, it isn't going to happen.
Even then, some bonehead consumers will fall for unsigned emails from "their bank" saying that the encryption key needs to be updated, but I think of that as evolution in action. There are always going to be people falling for different types of fraud simply out of their own greed or stupidity. Kind of like the sub-prime loan crisis where the mortgage brokers and mortgage derivatives houses seem to have scammed the rest of the financial industry, as well as consumers of both mortgages and mortgage-backed financial instruments.
Apart from the fines, are there any other interesting/useful effects if a firm or its lawyers are sanctioned under rule 11? For example, do cases from the firm attract more scrutiny from the courts? Is it likely to cost them clients because the sanction appears in public records that clients can see?
The line between features demanded by Apple's clients (media portability), and features demanded by their suppliers (like the record labels) is a jagged edge. It's not surprising that sometimes they cut themselves on the serrations.
As I recall, AT&T reserves the right to change the terms of service with a certain period of advance notice (90 days?). If they want to throttle down current "unlimited" plans to tiered service, they can probably do it as long as they give users the option to cancel service without penalty, and provide sufficient notification as documented in the service agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
And consider the brewery as well. The measures that brewers have to take to keep their strains of yeast pure are so well understood that people do it at home: 1) sanitize your containers, 2) disinfect/cook the source material. The fact that the bacteria/algae are producing sugar instead of consuming it is still a negative, but I don't see it as insurmountable in an industrial environment. We aren't going to have these things growing on trees, they're going to be in "refineries" under tightly-controlled (eventually, after an industrial accident or two) processes.
A bigger hurdle in my mind is the extraction and purification of the cellulose from the matrix of bacteria without killing the bacteria or wasting the cellulose. Maybe adding brewers' yeast to the mix would help in the extraction, as well as keeping the sugars down and producing ethanol directly. In fact, they should be working on boosting the sugar output at the expense of the cellulose output. The sugars are directly convertible to alcohol, while the cellulose would require additional reactions to break it down.
Not to mention DEC and IBM (Windows NT) and Digital Research (DOS)...
And just why are you taking personal patient data around with you on a laptop in the first place? You're probably violating HIPAA just having the data unencrypted on the laptop drive, which isn't stored in a secure environment.
Any of the items you list could be on paper. I still don't see the distinction here between a hard drive file and a paper file, other than (potentially) the quantity of data involved. Can you name one type of data that can be stored on a hard-drive that (given enough mass of paper) cannot be printed on paper in a human readable format? For example even executable code can be disassembled and printed out.
you have to play all 9 innings. Until John and the SCOTUS rule, we can argue about it all we want, but it ain't over till the "world's oldest doo-wop group" sings.
Whether or not a person actually knows what they are talking about is irrelevant to whether or not they have a small group of fanatics who follow their every activity and hang on every word they say.
On the other hand, it does take a certain exploitive aspect in one's personality to put up with that kind of nonsense for very long.
And the one that SCO forgot: "Never file an intellectual property lawsuit against IBM."
For that matter, Sobell himself has various editions of "plain old Unix" books going back to the 1980's. The Ubuntu edition sounds like a useful update to my earlier editions of "A practical guide to the Unix System". Combine these with the Advanced Bash Scripting guide and the other online documentation at tldp.org, and you're good to go.
People worry about the material development as the first step, but it really should be done concurrently with some good static and dynamic analysis of some basic design structures. Apart from the mere mass of the structure itself, there are soooo many features that would exert forces on the structure and the elevator cars. The cable structure can flex in and out, wobble around its tether point or around the geosynchronous terminal, oscillate like a guitar string and or twist along its length. There are variations in atmospheric forces, gravitation, electromagnetic forces on a regular basis, apart from the forces that occur during an "incident" such as an impact.
Some of these forces could end up being beneficial. A force implies an energy source, if nothing else. For example the electrical discharge could possibly be used to provide power, but it would require a heck of a design. Running an electrical short-circuit up through the Van Allen belt is not an option.
But imagine what happens when the cable vibrates like a guitar string with frequency of say 1/10 Hz and an amplitude of a few meters, and that wave reaches the ground. This size of vibration is microscopic compared with the length of the structure but can cause a real mess on the ground, even in a low frequency. The elevator will require damping technology even more extensive than what we use for earthquake mitigation, and that will add even more mass to the cable requirements. Do we even have the measurements needed to simulate all of the vibrational and other forces on a computer model?
I'm curious what would happen if we decided not to tether the earh-end of the elevator because of stuff like this. Run the cable down to 8,000 m above sea-level or so, and transport up to it with some sort of a lighter than air (blimp/zeppelin/dirigible) or VTL craft that can dock with the end point. I suspect it would be much more difficult to damp out undesired motion, but that may be a good thing. This thing would be so massive, and the geo-synchronous center of mass would be like the fulcrum of a 22,000 mile lever. If we tether it to the ground we may affect the earth's rotation.
Of course there's the time value of money and energy to consider, too. Otherwise FedEx would never exist. Sometimes you need to ship something fast and expensively.
90% of everything is crap.
Can't blame the arts when the same standard applies to code. Produced by engineers.
Furthermore, I'd be more inclined to believe that if put into power, engineers and other hard scientists would probably institute forms of fascism into the government, because they would be more interested in fixing the problem than in actually running the system.
Let's see, if the problem is terrorism and lack of access to Iraqi oil, does that mean Dick Cheney is an engineer?
More or less correct. The fee on music CDs was an attempt to collect a license fee for something that was already legal (format shifting/recompilation) under fair-use anyway. Now if the license on a blank CD had included re-distribution rights, the value equation would've been a little different.
And of course as long as "data" CDs were out there that didn't include the fee, there wasn't a chance in hell consumers would buy the "music" disks.
So if this $5/month includes a grant of license to re-distribute, then hey, that's not a bad deal for a serious file-sharer. If there's no grant of license, then they're still reserving the right to sue you in spite of the $5/month. Which is a complete waste of everyone's time to even discuss it.
And of course, the ISPs have their own issues with the bandwidth taken by P2P networks, though that's mostly because they can't deliver the "unlimited" service to all their customers simultaneously, despite what they are advertising. It's not going to happen any time soon, but if ISPs stopped advertising their regular service as unlimited and actually state what the caps are, and offer a true unlimited service that actually reflects their costs, and the media companies grant redistribution rights for the monthly fee, it might actually be worth paying.
Eventually, maybe, the distribution channel will actually match the demand.
I dunno. As I recall I got quite a bit of sleep in the classroom during my high-school years. Nothing so strange about that.
And this is different from the tech industry how?
Is there anyone here, living in a state where non-compete clauses are legal, who doesn't have similar language about inventions and products they may develop using company resources. For a news producer, political opinions and news data would probably constitute work-related material similar to code for a developer or customer lists for a salesman.
Also, maybe this guy isn't as stupid as we think. If I was planning leaving anyway to start a commercial blog on politics, some of the best publicity I can think of would be that "I'm an award winning producer who was fired from my job at CNN for posting on my blog."
Finally, if CNN can keep neo-isolationist Lou Dobbs on the air, I don't think they can go around claiming that the guy's opinions were too extreme for a member of their staff.
Of course they're doing it for the publicity, but that doesn't mean it's automatically crap. Baen has offered several award-winning works on their free site in the past. And the (Baen) books are available as HTML or RTF, as well as e-Book formats. I usually read mine in reader format in MS Word (or its functional equivalent).
Given that Baen already has a working model for this type of distribution, I doubt that Tor can have an offering that is substantially worse or they won't be able to compete. The fact that they're moving in this direction at all implies that there is some competitive pressure already.
Any good laptop should work with RTF or HTML formatted books. And I doubt you throw your laptop around your dorm the way you do your bag.
Which would apply to the Computer Society: http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/ethics/code_ethics.html
...that you say nothing about keeping their employees happy. Or do you consider employees to be suppliers?
Given the slashdot demographic, it's about 99% probable that I wouldn't want you performing that act on me in any venue, let alone in the street, HBI. (Sorry, have to keep my post SFW).
This doesn't have much practical effect, since membership or certification by these organizations is rarely a job requirement in IT, but they do serve as a baseline for evaluating behavior in the industry. It's a sad state of affairs.The only way banks can send verifiable information to their clients is if they provide each client with a unique public key for signing and decryption. Until internet fraud becomes so expensive that this option looks affordable, it isn't going to happen.
Even then, some bonehead consumers will fall for unsigned emails from "their bank" saying that the encryption key needs to be updated, but I think of that as evolution in action. There are always going to be people falling for different types of fraud simply out of their own greed or stupidity. Kind of like the sub-prime loan crisis where the mortgage brokers and mortgage derivatives houses seem to have scammed the rest of the financial industry, as well as consumers of both mortgages and mortgage-backed financial instruments.
Another question for you, NYCL:
Apart from the fines, are there any other interesting/useful effects if a firm or its lawyers are sanctioned under rule 11? For example, do cases from the firm attract more scrutiny from the courts? Is it likely to cost them clients because the sanction appears in public records that clients can see?
The line between features demanded by Apple's clients (media portability), and features demanded by their suppliers (like the record labels) is a jagged edge. It's not surprising that sometimes they cut themselves on the serrations.
As I recall, AT&T reserves the right to change the terms of service with a certain period of advance notice (90 days?). If they want to throttle down current "unlimited" plans to tiered service, they can probably do it as long as they give users the option to cancel service without penalty, and provide sufficient notification as documented in the service agreement.