I give the guy credit for his mea culpa, which is more than we got from some of the other "journalists" that covered SCO. They all thought it was the bee's knees when it presented no evidence at all and then expected IBM to pay it $1B... no, $3B!... no, $5B!... all while giving lame non-excuses for why they couldn't reveal their evidence. Dan Lyons was a valid target of our criticism at the time, but admitting he was wrong changed my impression of him. I actually read his articles.
Now, there are plenty of journalists we can still make fun of for their evidence-free SCO cheerleading. First in line: Maureen O'Gara. She not only hasn't admitted she was wrong like Lyons did, but was recently revealed to have got an e-mail from the SCO brass asking her to trash PJ of Groklaw. This came out in court documents and might get interesting. No need to keep harping on Lyons.
The sales department sometimes need to know things before other departments.
I've seen this before. Management is obviously the first to know, and the first department that Management tells is Sales, followed by HR (since HR needs to plan the transition). Marketing finds out next because a guy from HR wants an excuse to talk to all the hot chicks at once, and this news provides that excuse. The information then gradually trickles down through the other departments in a largely uncontrolled way. Finally it occurs to someone to tell IT. "We need to fail over your servers to another country this afternoon because the office is closing. Sorry, should have mentioned it in January. That won't be a problem, will it?"
Re:I will go for this when....
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 2, Insightful
One? You're joking.
How about the Rural Electrification Administration, without which much of the US would still be in the nineteenth century because electrical utilities companies weren't expanding beyond cities? Or the federal prison system? The government runs that. There's also the Eisenhower Interstate System, which believe it or not was created by the government and not some "Eisenhower Interstate Corporation."
If you care more about healthcare specifically, Medicare is the reason our elderly and disabled have medical coverage, particularly useful to the elderly if their personal savings were invested in Enron or MCI or one of the many companies that were walloped over the past few years (particularly in 2008). Medicare is a great example because it provides healthcare coverage more cheaply than private insurance companies do. So does the VA system, which covers our veterans. They do excellent cost control according to the CBO.
Or was the point of your comment that it "has worked as planned?" That's a tall order. Name some private company initiatives that have worked as planned. Most don't. I've worked for private companies most of my adult life and I see the same waste and errors people complain about in government.
is bigger than the Health care bill. Who has time to read it?
Probably not anyone in Congress.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Government is why these things cost so much. And yet we are about to add MORE government into the system?
Your point of view makes complete sense to me. Also, I have never heard of other countries in the world besides the United States. Are there any? No? Then since there are no other countries, we'll just have to guess whether involving government in healthcare can work.
Sorry, sarcasm is sometimes the best remedy. There are other countries in the world, and that makes the world a giant healthcare laboratory. I've lived in a country with actual socialized medicine and it works great. Then again, the silly notion that my sarcasm was about (government controlling healthcare!) doesn't apply here: the reconciliation bill doesn't create a new healthcare system. It does make changes to Medicare and increases doctor payments for Medicaid to bring them in line with Medicare, but I wouldn't call that "more government." The hospitals will still be owned by the organizations that own them now, the insurance companies will still be insurance companies. This is the most right-wing healthcare reform I've ever seen in a modern industrialized nation. And guess which side of the political spectrum is complaining more?
I think confirmation bias doesn't exist at all. In fact, after cherry picking some posts above that avoid confirmation bias, I remain 100% convinced it's bunk.
While we're on the topic of rude things I must ask: Do Americans give standing ovations to particularity loud or interesting farts or is there some minimum standard of quality I can't ascertain?
I base this question on at least two reports of ovations at this weeks TED for mildly insightful talks and seeing ovations in almost every musical ever produced and moved to DVD for the rest of the world to see.
Hear hear! Everyone give it up for cloricus (691063)! And thanks to biryokumaru (822262), for giving cloricus a post to which to reply! Huzzah!!!!!
Oh, the tyranny!!!
Here's a wild idea: Plan ahead and buy your booze on Saturday!!
What a novel concept!
Yeah! I suppose we could also repeal the First Amendment's establishment clause through a new amendment and be free to pass laws requiring Americans to declare themselves Christians! And here's another wild idea for all you pesky naysayers: just say you're a Christian and you'll get full recognition as a citizen. No problem!
Yeah, your logic is scary (unless you were just joking). There are surely workarounds for may aspects of bad governance, but they don't substitute for having rational governance instead.
No way am I going near South Carolina while my plans to become Emperor of Charleston are progressing. (Of course, once the plans succeed, I'll only need to avoid the rest of the state.)
The big names in networking (AT&T, Charter, etc.) are going to sue Google on antitrust grounds because it is easier to hire lawyers than to upgrade failing and obsolete networks.
Perhaps they will. But consider: this is not a profit engine for Google, in much the same way that Android isn't a profit engine. Google says this service is to test new high-bandwidth technologies, and I don't doubt that's true, but it's probably also true that they're just trying to upset this market because the established cable companies are a threat to their other businesses, both because of their slowness to raise the bandwidth bar and because of their marriages to legacy content distribution.
Because of this, Google probably doesn't care whether they own this service or not. I bet if the big networking dinosaurs sued Google, Google could settle with them by agreeing to spin off the fiber Internet company, yet still accomplish all of the original project goals. It would be like if Google had to cut Android free - it would still satisfy Google's main goal of creating an open platform that's more friendly to their mobile web services than Apple's or Microsoft's is likely to be.
They drank the koolaid, and the piper's come a calling. Shortcuts inevitably wind up costing you sooner or later, and that's what web sites created solely for IE6 are.
Yeah, sooner or... nine years later.
Seriously, there's no excuse for IT departments in businesses of any size to enforce IE6 in 2010. It's not like there hasn't been time to test modern browsers, upgrade web apps, and roll out newer software. Let me say it again: Nine Effin' Years. I understand that keeping user desktops cutting edge can't be an IT department's priority. But... NINE YEARS isn't a few steps behind the cutting edge. It's technology for a different era.
Of course I can't blame businesses that design websites for supporting IE6, since they have to maximize sales by supporting as many customers as they can. But the actual companies using IE6 deserve serious criticism. Nine years! Those of us not selling products on the web should go out of our way to make fun of them. Here, let's start in this post:
Hey IE6 users, do you think President Bush will ever get interested in foreign policy, or will he stick to domestic issues like his recent 2001 tax cuts? Boy, it's quick and easy to get through airport security these days, isn't it? Glad we're not in any wars! You dick.
Totally agreed, OEM users have chosen this pain, even if they haven't realized what they were choosing. That said, the core issue here is that WGA is not a critical security update by any stretch of the imagination. From my limited reading about this suit, its class action status (and the suit itself) sound completely valid to me. Nothing against Microsoft generally, but this was misleading. WGA is a lame excuse for copy protection, not a means for the end user to secure their data, and not a critical patch for anyone - even Microsoft.
They still sell the Enquirer? I haven't actually SEEN a copy in ages.
They still exist, including online. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that the reason tabloids are still around is that people BUY them. That's the real tragedy. Remember that cultural crap doesn't exist in a vacuum - people create a market for it. (This is ss even true in politics.)
Wait - I get it. Man evolves slowly, because he retarded. Or, at least experiencing retarded evolution.
Shhhhhhh! You'll anger Sarah Palin. Better call it mentally challenged evolution.
Yeah, I'm not 100% vehemently against this bill either. To some degree it's harmless. It's not like they removed anonymity from the ballot box, where it's particularly important to the democratic process. Nor does this law criminalize any of the things these suddenly non-anonymous posters will say. I appreciate anonymity, but I'm not sure anything fundamentally important has been lost.
Having said all that, I don't see how it's enforceable. And it's one of the marks of a stupid law that it doesn't really accomplish anything meaningful. Consider: you or I could study South Australian politics for little more than a few minutes on Wikipedia and be able to make a reasonably intelligible comment or two on a South Australian political site. This law wouldn't apply to us. Now extrapolate that to the scale of (a) this particular Australian state, and (b) everyone else in the English speaking world. There are only about 1.6 million people in South Australia, less than half the population of Sydney alone. If even a fraction of the rest of the rest of the world (let alone Australia) flooded their forums with comments it would make this law impossible to enforce. The locals would be needles in the haystack, giving them virtual anonymity.
Of course, I'm happy to have someone lecture me on why anonymity is more important than I think it is, but from what I've seen it has at least as many downsides as it has benefits, and is not fundamental to a working democracy.
The right time to stop using IE6 is not with this new exploit. It's circa 2003. I find all this perplexing because from what I hear, the people who keep thrusting IE6 on people like a poisoned dagger are IT departments, but aren't IT departments supposed to be staffed by, you know, techies? The kind of people who go to nerdy sites like/. and should know IE6 sucks rat balls?
I understand that other browsers like Firefox might have been hard to push out and manage back when the world first discovered that browsing can improve as long as you avoid Microsoft, but what about IE7? That came out over two years ago and it definitely sucks slightly less. Can we revoke Geek status from IT staff that are still pushing IE6? Ban them from this site? Cut off their Internets until they appologize?
(Special consideration would of course be extended to those techies who were unjustly forbidden from upgrading IE in their infrastructure because of web apps that only worked on IE6; the web app developers should have their Geek status revoked instead.)
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity - of artistic monopoly -- goes away."
I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity). It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers.etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.
It's worth noting that grandparent does not criticize artificial scarcity, just calls it what it is in order to contradict the novelist's claim that it is a form of property. Whatever grandparent's opinion on the value of copyright may be, the statement that it is not like physical property under US law is correct.
I rather like copyright, particularly as I'm an aspiring novelist, but I have no illusions that it's a type of property or that my novel should be "mine" forever should I be fortunate enough to get it published. I recognize that copyright is just a limited right that I'll get to exercise for a long span after the work is released.
So what religions are legally recognized in Ireland?
If both Christianity and Islam are recognized in Ireland then the adherents of both religions have serious challenges ahead - at least as serious as those of any atheist. Christianity's basic premise is that Jesus was divine, whereas Jesus's existence as a decidedly non-divine prophet is a core component of Islam. Either claim is blasphemous to the other religion, so all Muslims and Christians should probably be fined if they speak out about these beliefs. (I know, this sounds bad on free speech grounds, but think of the revenue potential!)
Hokey work ethics and obsolete tools are no match for a good Linux LiveCD at your side, kid. I've worked from one side of this industry to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe your all-powerful "instinct" can control your destiny.
I mean, that one's right up there with the one about two disk shaped devices connected in their center by a rod.
Hey, don't make fun of the method of fashioning a two-circled axle device - Nokia holds the rights to that one and is defending it in no less a venue than Texas.
Last time I checked the MS-friendly/. clone was called ActiveDot (News for suits, Stuff that blue-screens). Actually, I haven't checked it in about ten years and now that I think about it, I think they renamed it Dot2000, and then MSNDot, and then DotDotNet, and then LiveDot. So maybe it is BingDot by now.
I agree, I've never figured out why people get so hung up about midichlorians. Such a minor detail, and the mention of it in the third film was a nice callback. The big issues with TPM were the cardboard central characters, the annoying add-on character Jar-Jar, the complex plot and the over reliance on CGI. A film that had genuine characters and a classic Star Wars plot could have been called The Midichlorian Menace for all I care.
They were going to call it: Microsoft Active Live Artificially Intelligent Search Engine
This actually impressed me a lot. MSN Search and Live Search were part of broader corporate branding strategies (like "Active" was before Microsoft was into search). They both failed. Bing takes a page from Microsoft's XBox development, which is, ignore the broader strategy and try to make something people want. Competitors in any industry should be very afraid if Microsoft figures out how to do this in other ways.
Slashdot Mirror
I give the guy credit for his mea culpa, which is more than we got from some of the other "journalists" that covered SCO. They all thought it was the bee's knees when it presented no evidence at all and then expected IBM to pay it $1B ... no, $3B! ... no, $5B! ... all while giving lame non-excuses for why they couldn't reveal their evidence. Dan Lyons was a valid target of our criticism at the time, but admitting he was wrong changed my impression of him. I actually read his articles.
Now, there are plenty of journalists we can still make fun of for their evidence-free SCO cheerleading. First in line: Maureen O'Gara. She not only hasn't admitted she was wrong like Lyons did, but was recently revealed to have got an e-mail from the SCO brass asking her to trash PJ of Groklaw. This came out in court documents and might get interesting. No need to keep harping on Lyons.
The sales department sometimes need to know things before other departments.
I've seen this before. Management is obviously the first to know, and the first department that Management tells is Sales, followed by HR (since HR needs to plan the transition). Marketing finds out next because a guy from HR wants an excuse to talk to all the hot chicks at once, and this news provides that excuse. The information then gradually trickles down through the other departments in a largely uncontrolled way. Finally it occurs to someone to tell IT. "We need to fail over your servers to another country this afternoon because the office is closing. Sorry, should have mentioned it in January. That won't be a problem, will it?"
What exactly are u alluding 2?
One? You're joking.
How about the Rural Electrification Administration, without which much of the US would still be in the nineteenth century because electrical utilities companies weren't expanding beyond cities? Or the federal prison system? The government runs that. There's also the Eisenhower Interstate System, which believe it or not was created by the government and not some "Eisenhower Interstate Corporation."
If you care more about healthcare specifically, Medicare is the reason our elderly and disabled have medical coverage, particularly useful to the elderly if their personal savings were invested in Enron or MCI or one of the many companies that were walloped over the past few years (particularly in 2008). Medicare is a great example because it provides healthcare coverage more cheaply than private insurance companies do. So does the VA system, which covers our veterans. They do excellent cost control according to the CBO.
Or was the point of your comment that it "has worked as planned?" That's a tall order. Name some private company initiatives that have worked as planned. Most don't. I've worked for private companies most of my adult life and I see the same waste and errors people complain about in government.
is bigger than the Health care bill. Who has time to read it?
Probably not anyone in Congress.
Government is why these things cost so much. And yet we are about to add MORE government into the system?
Your point of view makes complete sense to me. Also, I have never heard of other countries in the world besides the United States. Are there any? No? Then since there are no other countries, we'll just have to guess whether involving government in healthcare can work.
Sorry, sarcasm is sometimes the best remedy. There are other countries in the world, and that makes the world a giant healthcare laboratory. I've lived in a country with actual socialized medicine and it works great. Then again, the silly notion that my sarcasm was about (government controlling healthcare!) doesn't apply here: the reconciliation bill doesn't create a new healthcare system. It does make changes to Medicare and increases doctor payments for Medicaid to bring them in line with Medicare, but I wouldn't call that "more government." The hospitals will still be owned by the organizations that own them now, the insurance companies will still be insurance companies. This is the most right-wing healthcare reform I've ever seen in a modern industrialized nation. And guess which side of the political spectrum is complaining more?
I think confirmation bias doesn't exist at all. In fact, after cherry picking some posts above that avoid confirmation bias, I remain 100% convinced it's bunk.
While we're on the topic of rude things I must ask: Do Americans give standing ovations to particularity loud or interesting farts or is there some minimum standard of quality I can't ascertain? I base this question on at least two reports of ovations at this weeks TED for mildly insightful talks and seeing ovations in almost every musical ever produced and moved to DVD for the rest of the world to see.
Hear hear! Everyone give it up for cloricus (691063)! And thanks to biryokumaru (822262), for giving cloricus a post to which to reply! Huzzah!!!!!
Oh, the tyranny!!! Here's a wild idea: Plan ahead and buy your booze on Saturday!! What a novel concept!
Yeah! I suppose we could also repeal the First Amendment's establishment clause through a new amendment and be free to pass laws requiring Americans to declare themselves Christians! And here's another wild idea for all you pesky naysayers: just say you're a Christian and you'll get full recognition as a citizen. No problem!
Yeah, your logic is scary (unless you were just joking). There are surely workarounds for may aspects of bad governance, but they don't substitute for having rational governance instead.
No way am I going near South Carolina while my plans to become Emperor of Charleston are progressing. (Of course, once the plans succeed, I'll only need to avoid the rest of the state.)
The big names in networking (AT&T, Charter, etc.) are going to sue Google on antitrust grounds because it is easier to hire lawyers than to upgrade failing and obsolete networks.
Perhaps they will. But consider: this is not a profit engine for Google, in much the same way that Android isn't a profit engine. Google says this service is to test new high-bandwidth technologies, and I don't doubt that's true, but it's probably also true that they're just trying to upset this market because the established cable companies are a threat to their other businesses, both because of their slowness to raise the bandwidth bar and because of their marriages to legacy content distribution.
Because of this, Google probably doesn't care whether they own this service or not. I bet if the big networking dinosaurs sued Google, Google could settle with them by agreeing to spin off the fiber Internet company, yet still accomplish all of the original project goals. It would be like if Google had to cut Android free - it would still satisfy Google's main goal of creating an open platform that's more friendly to their mobile web services than Apple's or Microsoft's is likely to be.
They drank the koolaid, and the piper's come a calling. Shortcuts inevitably wind up costing you sooner or later, and that's what web sites created solely for IE6 are.
Yeah, sooner or ... nine years later.
Seriously, there's no excuse for IT departments in businesses of any size to enforce IE6 in 2010. It's not like there hasn't been time to test modern browsers, upgrade web apps, and roll out newer software. Let me say it again: Nine Effin' Years. I understand that keeping user desktops cutting edge can't be an IT department's priority. But ... NINE YEARS isn't a few steps behind the cutting edge. It's technology for a different era.
Of course I can't blame businesses that design websites for supporting IE6, since they have to maximize sales by supporting as many customers as they can. But the actual companies using IE6 deserve serious criticism. Nine years! Those of us not selling products on the web should go out of our way to make fun of them. Here, let's start in this post:
Hey IE6 users, do you think President Bush will ever get interested in foreign policy, or will he stick to domestic issues like his recent 2001 tax cuts? Boy, it's quick and easy to get through airport security these days, isn't it? Glad we're not in any wars! You dick.
Totally agreed, OEM users have chosen this pain, even if they haven't realized what they were choosing. That said, the core issue here is that WGA is not a critical security update by any stretch of the imagination. From my limited reading about this suit, its class action status (and the suit itself) sound completely valid to me. Nothing against Microsoft generally, but this was misleading. WGA is a lame excuse for copy protection, not a means for the end user to secure their data, and not a critical patch for anyone - even Microsoft.
They still sell the Enquirer? I haven't actually SEEN a copy in ages.
They still exist, including online. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that the reason tabloids are still around is that people BUY them. That's the real tragedy. Remember that cultural crap doesn't exist in a vacuum - people create a market for it. (This is ss even true in politics.)
Wait - I get it. Man evolves slowly, because he retarded. Or, at least experiencing retarded evolution.
Shhhhhhh! You'll anger Sarah Palin. Better call it mentally challenged evolution.
who would get the cash prize? Please don't tell me it's "anonymous". I hate that guy.
I think it's obvious that we'd all get a cut.
Yeah, I'm not 100% vehemently against this bill either. To some degree it's harmless. It's not like they removed anonymity from the ballot box, where it's particularly important to the democratic process. Nor does this law criminalize any of the things these suddenly non-anonymous posters will say. I appreciate anonymity, but I'm not sure anything fundamentally important has been lost.
Having said all that, I don't see how it's enforceable. And it's one of the marks of a stupid law that it doesn't really accomplish anything meaningful. Consider: you or I could study South Australian politics for little more than a few minutes on Wikipedia and be able to make a reasonably intelligible comment or two on a South Australian political site. This law wouldn't apply to us. Now extrapolate that to the scale of (a) this particular Australian state, and (b) everyone else in the English speaking world. There are only about 1.6 million people in South Australia, less than half the population of Sydney alone. If even a fraction of the rest of the rest of the world (let alone Australia) flooded their forums with comments it would make this law impossible to enforce. The locals would be needles in the haystack, giving them virtual anonymity.
Of course, I'm happy to have someone lecture me on why anonymity is more important than I think it is, but from what I've seen it has at least as many downsides as it has benefits, and is not fundamental to a working democracy.
The right time to stop using IE6 is not with this new exploit. It's circa 2003. I find all this perplexing because from what I hear, the people who keep thrusting IE6 on people like a poisoned dagger are IT departments, but aren't IT departments supposed to be staffed by, you know, techies? The kind of people who go to nerdy sites like /. and should know IE6 sucks rat balls?
I understand that other browsers like Firefox might have been hard to push out and manage back when the world first discovered that browsing can improve as long as you avoid Microsoft, but what about IE7? That came out over two years ago and it definitely sucks slightly less. Can we revoke Geek status from IT staff that are still pushing IE6? Ban them from this site? Cut off their Internets until they appologize?
(Special consideration would of course be extended to those techies who were unjustly forbidden from upgrading IE in their infrastructure because of web apps that only worked on IE6; the web app developers should have their Geek status revoked instead.)
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity - of artistic monopoly -- goes away."
I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity). It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers .etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.
It's worth noting that grandparent does not criticize artificial scarcity, just calls it what it is in order to contradict the novelist's claim that it is a form of property. Whatever grandparent's opinion on the value of copyright may be, the statement that it is not like physical property under US law is correct.
I rather like copyright, particularly as I'm an aspiring novelist, but I have no illusions that it's a type of property or that my novel should be "mine" forever should I be fortunate enough to get it published. I recognize that copyright is just a limited right that I'll get to exercise for a long span after the work is released.
So what religions are legally recognized in Ireland?
If both Christianity and Islam are recognized in Ireland then the adherents of both religions have serious challenges ahead - at least as serious as those of any atheist. Christianity's basic premise is that Jesus was divine, whereas Jesus's existence as a decidedly non-divine prophet is a core component of Islam. Either claim is blasphemous to the other religion, so all Muslims and Christians should probably be fined if they speak out about these beliefs. (I know, this sounds bad on free speech grounds, but think of the revenue potential!)
Hokey work ethics and obsolete tools are no match for a good Linux LiveCD at your side, kid. I've worked from one side of this industry to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe your all-powerful "instinct" can control your destiny.
I mean, that one's right up there with the one about two disk shaped devices connected in their center by a rod.
Hey, don't make fun of the method of fashioning a two-circled axle device - Nokia holds the rights to that one and is defending it in no less a venue than Texas.
Last time I checked the MS-friendly /. clone was called ActiveDot (News for suits, Stuff that blue-screens). Actually, I haven't checked it in about ten years and now that I think about it, I think they renamed it Dot2000, and then MSNDot, and then DotDotNet, and then LiveDot. So maybe it is BingDot by now.
Actually they get their new stories via their Blackberry's.
via their Blackberry's what ?
Maybe he died while he was dictating his post from the Castle Aaaaaaagggg.
I agree, I've never figured out why people get so hung up about midichlorians. Such a minor detail, and the mention of it in the third film was a nice callback. The big issues with TPM were the cardboard central characters, the annoying add-on character Jar-Jar, the complex plot and the over reliance on CGI. A film that had genuine characters and a classic Star Wars plot could have been called The Midichlorian Menace for all I care.
They were going to call it: Microsoft Active Live Artificially Intelligent Search Engine
This actually impressed me a lot. MSN Search and Live Search were part of broader corporate branding strategies (like "Active" was before Microsoft was into search). They both failed. Bing takes a page from Microsoft's XBox development, which is, ignore the broader strategy and try to make something people want. Competitors in any industry should be very afraid if Microsoft figures out how to do this in other ways.