I'm not sure about tainted ones, but there's been a number of reports of counterfeit drugs coming from China. I read about one a while ago where the pills were the right shade of blue but were made from plaster! A woman died from it (well, not from the plaster but from her condition, which the fake pills didn't treat too effectively.)
but if I were running a major law firm that regularly handled confidential matters for multi-billion dollar clients... I'd certainly encrypt the Hell out of every communication that left my offices. I mean, all they had to do was install some free (free!) encryption software like PGP, and there'd have been no problem.
Well, it's a lot like other illegal media downloads. The people that post video torrents remove commercials, remove copy protection, all in all make the "pirated" content a much more enjoyable experience. The guys that crack software do the same thing: they remove copy protection, product activation, serial number requirements... all in all, making the pirated versions much more usable products. I can install a pirated Windows and never have to worry about calling Microsoft to beg for a reactivation because my hard disk blew or I upgraded my motherboard. The irony is that the pirates are more concerned about their customers than Microsoft is about its own customer base.
The people who pirate brought this whole mess upon themselves and they don't have the balls to take responsability for it.
You work for Comcast don't you?
The truth of the matter is this: the people that run our major ISPs brought this upon all of us by lying, cheating and stealing, and they're still doing it. Frankly, I want the 200 billion dollars the Feds gave them for network buildouts back, because they took the money and delivered nothing for it. Maybe if they refund that money they can talk about how the power users are hurting their bottom line.
Bloodsucking leeches. If you buy into their crap you deserve to pay ten bucks a gigabyte on your 256 kbps DSL line.
Personally, I think the risk of an all-inclusive DNA database, for the average citizen, is greater when it comes to insurance companies that from the government. Those assholes would just love to know all about the possible things that can go wrong with each one of us. Employers, too, would pay big bucks to get access to that data. On a day-to-day basis, law enforcement is probably the least of the threats we face from big biometric databases.
is that the FBI has a history of completely botching major systems upgrades (just like the IRS, the FAA, and a number of other big Federal organizations.)
they're going to find out just how little we really need what they have to offer. Broadband is a fairly recent phenomenon, and I don't believe it's as entrenched in our society as they seem to think it is, nor are they as important to us as they think they are. Furthermore, obnoxiously anti-competitive efforts designed to kill off the major reason millions of us have broadband in the first place is just stupid. So, fine. They win. If I need to use the Web for anything I'll do it after hours at work. They can shove it.
It is possible to have a life without Time-Warner or Comcast in it.
But there's no case where a non-programmer should be responsible for the quality of the software.
I don't know as that's necessarily true. As a software developer myself, I have to say that many (maybe most) top managers aren't programmers or engineers. Rather than having programming ability (which does not, in and of itself, mean anything so far as overall product quality is concerned) I'd say it's more important to have an excellent grasp of the design/development and quality control processes, and understand the care and feeding of engineers. Push upper management to spend money on testing, then push them some more. Watch the engineering staff, be aware of when they're starting to go off the beam, and most of all use them to check and monitor each other so they can't stray too far. In other words, an efficient organization designed around the production of good software.
In any event, my point is that when it comes to an organizational structure that consistently supports good design (and good designers), and the allocation of resources to ensure that said design is verified, reviewed and double-checked, and then checked again, and also that adequate quality control is applied to the final product... that, my friend, is the purview of the MBA. Many of them, I might add, do a piss poor job of it. That's because quality costs lots of money, and there are many things upon which money can be spent which have nothing to do with product quality. Like that MBA's salary, for example.
Sure, you can have a senior engineer whose reputation is on the line, who goes down in flames when something goes wrong. However, if the organization backing him up is lacking, a string of disasters is in the making no matter how good he is at his job. The truth is, engineers rarely have the authority to determine how such things are set up... management decides that.
Then, when they screw up royally and get some people killed, guess who gets the blame... yeah, that's right. The engineer, who was probably doing his best to work with whatever crumbs they gave him. Seems like you hardly ever see the MBAs going to jail, or losing their certifications, when it's usually their fault.
That's just not true. Developers have gotten in deep shit over serious bugs... when people have died you better believe the lawyers will go after anyone and everyone. However, you're right that in most cases that doesn't happen and I'll tell you why.
See, most of the time the software developer is not where the responsibility lies. Nobody is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and it is management's responsibility to make sure that the organization is capable of spotting such errors and correcting them. You know... management: the guys in the corner offices that make three times the pay of the people who work for them. Also, in the case of a building or other major physical structure, there's no real way to test it until you've built it, which is why mechanical engineering tends to be so conservative. With software, that's just not the case. Software can be tested, before a customer ever sees it, can be tested continually while it is under development. If it's not tested, or not tested well enough, that is not the developer's responsibility. It is management's for not devoting sufficient resources to quality control.
Sure, you can point to specific areas where a program can't be fully tested until it's actually used (the Space Shuttle control systems come to mind) but in no case is a single developer or engineer solely responsible for a problem. There are layers of checks and balances that code (and its architecture) must go through before it ever gets near a Shuttle computer. That's also true in major engineering tasks of any kind, whether we're talking a bridge, a skyscraper or a passenger jet. If you can point to a decision made by a single engineer and lay all the blame at his feet, it means the organization itself was deficient.
Not genies... that would be magic, and everyone knows there's no such thing as magic. However, I do believe that Gremlins are involved somehow. White Gremlins, the ones that try to fix things rather than break them. There aren't enough of them to go around, unfortunately, so things still break now and then.
A software developer must be part writer and poet, part salesperson and public speaker, part artist and designer, and always equal parts logic and empathy.
Would you like some cheese with that whine? I think I'm going to be sick.
Let us also not forget that the ultimate responsibility for a major team effort failing is usually managerial. There are processes that any professional engineering team's leadership puts in place in order to make sure the end result is as expected. That's because nobody is perfect and mistakes get made. So, it's easy to pick on a single individual, like the aforementioned civil engineer. One should ask why there was no proper design review (and if there was, why did they sign off on it?) In any event, a properly structured real-world project has layers of checks and balances. Modern engineering projects may have hundreds of individuals working on them, and for anything other then chaos to result, there has to be direction, there has to be oversight, there has to be management.
When you get right down to it, when a big project fails the grade (like, say, Vista) it's the people who get the big paychecks that should be held accountable. That's why they get the big paychecks! They're supposed to make certain that the development and support staff are competent, and set up systems that provide adequate assurance of quality. Failure to do that is not the fault of the individual engineer, but is a systemic issue with all the fingers pointing to the top. Managers (particularly incompetent ones) will usually find a scapegoat in the form of an engineer, who they can point to and say, "See? It was all his fault!" That conveniently ignores that fact that, even if said engineer is a total bumblefuck... it was management that hired him in the first place, and failed to manage him effectively in the second.
The parallels between the Weimar Republic in post-World War I Germany prior to the rise of the Third Reich and the last few decades of U.S. history are eerily similar in some ways.
The interesting thing is going to be whether Google successfully monetizes technological forays outside their core competence. Microsoft has been trying for decades to come up with a major moneymaker other than the Windows/Office duo and has largely failed.
Don't forget, among the other recent RIAA college sins, their quickly pulled back "audit package" based on GPL'd software for the colleges to use in tracking song swapping. It was another clear low point in the RIAA's campaign of terror and extortion.
Actually, I believe that monitoring software was released by the MPAA, not the RIAA.
It should take an afternoon, and cost no more than a few hundred dollars, which the record labels have to pay after you are found innocent.
Do you have even the slightest idea what you're talking about? This is the American legal system we're talking about here: there are traffic tickets that cost more than a few hundred dollars. Defending yourself against a lawsuit (frivolous or otherwise) takes a hell of a lot more than that.
Seriously, you should take a look at my sig (not that I expect such an obnoxious remark as yours to actually get modded up.) I find people like you that see all Americans in the same light, regardless of who they are and what they stand for, to be just as repulsive.
At the time, I thought that the Max Headroom future was rather unbelievable (even though I enjoyed the show immensely) but after twenty years I've come to realize that it was, in fact, prophetic.
{sigh} you, like most other posters here, completely missed the point. What I'm trying to get across is that laws will not get changed in any intelligent way unless we stop calling each other names, stop trying to scare each other, and look at what's really going on. I don't care what particular issue you want to talk about: immigration, stem-cells, abortion, foreign policy, War on Drugs, War in Iraq, TSA, Copyright/Patent Reform, you name it.
So excuse me, but the fact that those immigration laws are on the books means they're on the goddamn books until Congress decides to change them. You sir, are going to have to come up with a better argument as to why those laws should be blatantly ignored other than that certain people happen to disagree with them. Those who disagree, oddly enough, are those who benefit the most economically by breaking them, at considerable cost to the rest of society. The burden is on you to show why that is a good thing, not on those that are simply calling for proper enforcement. Should you feel that the laws are unjust... do what you can to get them changed! Don't go around saying that it's okay to break them just because you think they might be racist. As a general principle, the Rule of Law is better than no law at all. So far as laws against Sodomy and Suicide, and unenforceable laws is concerned, the answer is that they're unenforceable and consequently irrelevant to this discussion.
Furthermore, I don't really understand how you can call a nation that accepts people from literally every country on the planet as being in any way racist. The truth is that some people (for very self-serving reasons) want the flood of illegal Mexican immigrants to continue, and the best way they can find to do that is to shout down any opposition by calling them racist. By doing so, they immediately smear said opposition, forcing them to defend themselves against a charge that in this society is arguably worse than calling them child molesters, and shuts down any possibility of rational discourse. That, of course, is the whole point: to prevent the idea that maybe America doesn't want to give away the candy store from being openly talked about.
Who knows, perhaps we really should just fire all the border guards and just open up completely. Let everyone in that wants to be here, forget about such nonsense as cultural assimilation, and citizenship, forget about our traditions and forget about what it means to be an American. Because, you know, who the hell needs those? Really, we're just a nation of foreigners, right? Being an American is no different from being a Mexican or a Canadian or a German or a Frenchman or anyone else, and besides, they're entitled to pig a share of our goodies, since after all they're people too and have a right to take whatever they want because we Americans just don't deserve it anymore. Does that sound a bit ridiculous to you? It does to me too, but it's seems to be the prevailing attitude nowadays. It's one Hell of a way to run a country, let me tell you.
Regardless, if that's how you think our laws and politics should work, fine... but don't expect me to agree.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure about tainted ones, but there's been a number of reports of counterfeit drugs coming from China. I read about one a while ago where the pills were the right shade of blue but were made from plaster! A woman died from it (well, not from the plaster but from her condition, which the fake pills didn't treat too effectively.)
Going for that Insightful mod I see. Good luck.
but if I were running a major law firm that regularly handled confidential matters for multi-billion dollar clients ... I'd certainly encrypt the Hell out of every communication that left my offices. I mean, all they had to do was install some free (free!) encryption software like PGP, and there'd have been no problem.
Huh. I'll bet they will now.
Well, it's a lot like other illegal media downloads. The people that post video torrents remove commercials, remove copy protection, all in all make the "pirated" content a much more enjoyable experience. The guys that crack software do the same thing: they remove copy protection, product activation, serial number requirements ... all in all, making the pirated versions much more usable products. I can install a pirated Windows and never have to worry about calling Microsoft to beg for a reactivation because my hard disk blew or I upgraded my motherboard. The irony is that the pirates are more concerned about their customers than Microsoft is about its own customer base.
The people who pirate brought this whole mess upon themselves and they don't have the balls to take responsability for it.
You work for Comcast don't you?
The truth of the matter is this: the people that run our major ISPs brought this upon all of us by lying, cheating and stealing, and they're still doing it. Frankly, I want the 200 billion dollars the Feds gave them for network buildouts back, because they took the money and delivered nothing for it. Maybe if they refund that money they can talk about how the power users are hurting their bottom line.
Bloodsucking leeches. If you buy into their crap you deserve to pay ten bucks a gigabyte on your 256 kbps DSL line.
Personally, I think the risk of an all-inclusive DNA database, for the average citizen, is greater when it comes to insurance companies that from the government. Those assholes would just love to know all about the possible things that can go wrong with each one of us. Employers, too, would pay big bucks to get access to that data. On a day-to-day basis, law enforcement is probably the least of the threats we face from big biometric databases.
is that the FBI has a history of completely botching major systems upgrades (just like the IRS, the FAA, and a number of other big Federal organizations.)
Have we been bought and sold again fellow netizens?
... it's the undue influence that's causing most of the problems.
Left to themselves Congresspeople generally aren't too bad
Here we are stuck between slow and evil.
You mean stuck between evil and evil, with one evil being a little faster.
they're going to find out just how little we really need what they have to offer. Broadband is a fairly recent phenomenon, and I don't believe it's as entrenched in our society as they seem to think it is, nor are they as important to us as they think they are. Furthermore, obnoxiously anti-competitive efforts designed to kill off the major reason millions of us have broadband in the first place is just stupid. So, fine. They win. If I need to use the Web for anything I'll do it after hours at work. They can shove it.
It is possible to have a life without Time-Warner or Comcast in it.
But there's no case where a non-programmer should be responsible for the quality of the software.
... that, my friend, is the purview of the MBA. Many of them, I might add, do a piss poor job of it. That's because quality costs lots of money, and there are many things upon which money can be spent which have nothing to do with product quality. Like that MBA's salary, for example.
... management decides that.
... yeah, that's right. The engineer, who was probably doing his best to work with whatever crumbs they gave him. Seems like you hardly ever see the MBAs going to jail, or losing their certifications, when it's usually their fault.
I don't know as that's necessarily true. As a software developer myself, I have to say that many (maybe most) top managers aren't programmers or engineers. Rather than having programming ability (which does not, in and of itself, mean anything so far as overall product quality is concerned) I'd say it's more important to have an excellent grasp of the design/development and quality control processes, and understand the care and feeding of engineers. Push upper management to spend money on testing, then push them some more. Watch the engineering staff, be aware of when they're starting to go off the beam, and most of all use them to check and monitor each other so they can't stray too far. In other words, an efficient organization designed around the production of good software.
In any event, my point is that when it comes to an organizational structure that consistently supports good design (and good designers), and the allocation of resources to ensure that said design is verified, reviewed and double-checked, and then checked again, and also that adequate quality control is applied to the final product
Sure, you can have a senior engineer whose reputation is on the line, who goes down in flames when something goes wrong. However, if the organization backing him up is lacking, a string of disasters is in the making no matter how good he is at his job. The truth is, engineers rarely have the authority to determine how such things are set up
Then, when they screw up royally and get some people killed, guess who gets the blame
If they can just eliminate the transmission aspect
So I'm guessing sex is out, then.
That's just not true. Developers have gotten in deep shit over serious bugs ... when people have died you better believe the lawyers will go after anyone and everyone. However, you're right that in most cases that doesn't happen and I'll tell you why.
... management: the guys in the corner offices that make three times the pay of the people who work for them. Also, in the case of a building or other major physical structure, there's no real way to test it until you've built it, which is why mechanical engineering tends to be so conservative. With software, that's just not the case. Software can be tested, before a customer ever sees it, can be tested continually while it is under development. If it's not tested, or not tested well enough, that is not the developer's responsibility. It is management's for not devoting sufficient resources to quality control.
See, most of the time the software developer is not where the responsibility lies. Nobody is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and it is management's responsibility to make sure that the organization is capable of spotting such errors and correcting them. You know
Sure, you can point to specific areas where a program can't be fully tested until it's actually used (the Space Shuttle control systems come to mind) but in no case is a single developer or engineer solely responsible for a problem. There are layers of checks and balances that code (and its architecture) must go through before it ever gets near a Shuttle computer. That's also true in major engineering tasks of any kind, whether we're talking a bridge, a skyscraper or a passenger jet. If you can point to a decision made by a single engineer and lay all the blame at his feet, it means the organization itself was deficient.
Not genies ... that would be magic, and everyone knows there's no such thing as magic. However, I do believe that Gremlins are involved somehow. White Gremlins, the ones that try to fix things rather than break them. There aren't enough of them to go around, unfortunately, so things still break now and then.
A software developer must be part writer and poet, part salesperson and public speaker, part artist and designer, and always equal parts logic and empathy.
Would you like some cheese with that whine? I think I'm going to be sick.
Gagh.
All he's saying is that progress, by and large, is evolutionary, not revolutionary
Obvious to most technical people, of course, but it can be damned hard to convince upper management of that.
Let us also not forget that the ultimate responsibility for a major team effort failing is usually managerial. There are processes that any professional engineering team's leadership puts in place in order to make sure the end result is as expected. That's because nobody is perfect and mistakes get made. So, it's easy to pick on a single individual, like the aforementioned civil engineer. One should ask why there was no proper design review (and if there was, why did they sign off on it?) In any event, a properly structured real-world project has layers of checks and balances. Modern engineering projects may have hundreds of individuals working on them, and for anything other then chaos to result, there has to be direction, there has to be oversight, there has to be management.
... it was management that hired him in the first place, and failed to manage him effectively in the second.
When you get right down to it, when a big project fails the grade (like, say, Vista) it's the people who get the big paychecks that should be held accountable. That's why they get the big paychecks! They're supposed to make certain that the development and support staff are competent, and set up systems that provide adequate assurance of quality. Failure to do that is not the fault of the individual engineer, but is a systemic issue with all the fingers pointing to the top. Managers (particularly incompetent ones) will usually find a scapegoat in the form of an engineer, who they can point to and say, "See? It was all his fault!" That conveniently ignores that fact that, even if said engineer is a total bumblefuck
I remember when it used to be 55 a year and now its near 70, I am not willing to pay any more. This sucks!
... in a crunch, I guess there's always Gnutella. Pricing is better than most, I understand, even if the quality is somewhat uneven.
Yes, well
The parallels between the Weimar Republic in post-World War I Germany prior to the rise of the Third Reich and the last few decades of U.S. history are eerily similar in some ways.
The interesting thing is going to be whether Google successfully monetizes technological forays outside their core competence. Microsoft has been trying for decades to come up with a major moneymaker other than the Windows/Office duo and has largely failed.
Don't forget, among the other recent RIAA college sins, their quickly pulled back "audit package" based on GPL'd software for the colleges to use in tracking song swapping. It was another clear low point in the RIAA's campaign of terror and extortion.
Actually, I believe that monitoring software was released by the MPAA, not the RIAA.
It should take an afternoon, and cost no more than a few hundred dollars, which the record labels have to pay after you are found innocent.
Do you have even the slightest idea what you're talking about? This is the American legal system we're talking about here: there are traffic tickets that cost more than a few hundred dollars. Defending yourself against a lawsuit (frivolous or otherwise) takes a hell of a lot more than that.
Seriously, you should take a look at my sig (not that I expect such an obnoxious remark as yours to actually get modded up.) I find people like you that see all Americans in the same light, regardless of who they are and what they stand for, to be just as repulsive.
At the time, I thought that the Max Headroom future was rather unbelievable (even though I enjoyed the show immensely) but after twenty years I've come to realize that it was, in fact, prophetic.
{sigh} you, like most other posters here, completely missed the point. What I'm trying to get across is that laws will not get changed in any intelligent way unless we stop calling each other names, stop trying to scare each other, and look at what's really going on. I don't care what particular issue you want to talk about: immigration, stem-cells, abortion, foreign policy, War on Drugs, War in Iraq, TSA, Copyright/Patent Reform, you name it.
... do what you can to get them changed! Don't go around saying that it's okay to break them just because you think they might be racist. As a general principle, the Rule of Law is better than no law at all. So far as laws against Sodomy and Suicide, and unenforceable laws is concerned, the answer is that they're unenforceable and consequently irrelevant to this discussion.
... but don't expect me to agree.
So excuse me, but the fact that those immigration laws are on the books means they're on the goddamn books until Congress decides to change them. You sir, are going to have to come up with a better argument as to why those laws should be blatantly ignored other than that certain people happen to disagree with them. Those who disagree, oddly enough, are those who benefit the most economically by breaking them, at considerable cost to the rest of society. The burden is on you to show why that is a good thing, not on those that are simply calling for proper enforcement. Should you feel that the laws are unjust
Furthermore, I don't really understand how you can call a nation that accepts people from literally every country on the planet as being in any way racist. The truth is that some people (for very self-serving reasons) want the flood of illegal Mexican immigrants to continue, and the best way they can find to do that is to shout down any opposition by calling them racist. By doing so, they immediately smear said opposition, forcing them to defend themselves against a charge that in this society is arguably worse than calling them child molesters, and shuts down any possibility of rational discourse. That, of course, is the whole point: to prevent the idea that maybe America doesn't want to give away the candy store from being openly talked about.
Who knows, perhaps we really should just fire all the border guards and just open up completely. Let everyone in that wants to be here, forget about such nonsense as cultural assimilation, and citizenship, forget about our traditions and forget about what it means to be an American. Because, you know, who the hell needs those? Really, we're just a nation of foreigners, right? Being an American is no different from being a Mexican or a Canadian or a German or a Frenchman or anyone else, and besides, they're entitled to pig a share of our goodies, since after all they're people too and have a right to take whatever they want because we Americans just don't deserve it anymore. Does that sound a bit ridiculous to you? It does to me too, but it's seems to be the prevailing attitude nowadays. It's one Hell of a way to run a country, let me tell you.
Regardless, if that's how you think our laws and politics should work, fine