The problem really comes down to tit-for-tat. Most bills don't have national implications, so you end up with regional senators pushing for things that are good for their regions. Some of it is pork, some of it is pork-ish, and some of it is really important (e.g. money for levies/disaster relief/etc).
So you go to bat for things that you need, and other senators turn to you and say, "I understand that you have needs, I also have needs, let's see if we can both get what we want," and in about 2 days you have a bill that no one will vote for, full of crap that everyone wants.
Then the horse trading starts. They can't all get what they want, but some people can get what they want, and those people need the support of other people, who may not be getting anything that they want, but who will expect to have their needs addressed at a later date.
The way it's been working, one party takes charge, and rams what they want down the other parties throat until people get sick of them, elect the other party, and it reverses itself.
The way it needs to work, people make compromises and try to get everyone some of what they want, without going on a massive spending binge every time their party happens to be in power.
Nothing would ever get done if everyone in Congress refused to vote for anything that contained a provision that they didn't agree with. You have to compromise occasionally.
I'm not a fan of the FISA bill, but it pretty much kills the illicit "authorized by the executive" wiretapping (the FISA court is better than that), and it sets up actual congressional oversight for the program. FISA itself has been around forever, and there was no chance in hell it wasn't going to get reapproved.
There was also no chance in hell that the Telecoms were going to be held accountable. Considering the amount that they would have been liable for, their PAC money probably flowed like water, and with the executive supporting immunity as well? No chance.
As for the whole Obama thing, he'd have lost a lot more voters to the inevitable right wing "Obama voted against the tools we need to prevent terrorists from raping your children" attack ads, than he will from a bunch of libertarian Ron Paul supporters who probably wouldn't have voted for him anyway.
I love reading legal documents where it's clear that the person being deposed is batshit crazy, and they're trying not to use pejorative language while stating the facts.
As an example, the line "During his testimony, the undersigned Referee asked for clarification of Mr. Thompson as to which of the four binders of exhibits in evidence he was referring. Once clarified, Mr. Thompson spoke at length, before re-addressing the issues" is footnoted with the following:
What followed the Court's inquiry regarding clarification as to in which binder the document was located, is twenty-three (23) pages of testimony by Mr. Thompson involving matters such as: why he had not shaved that day for court; referring to the "Twinkie" case about the killing of a Mayor in San Francisco; a lawsuit filed by him in Kentucky in 1999 involving allegations regarding a video game entitled, 'Doom'; an interview with Matt Lauer from NBC's Today show; the killings in Columbine; information about a Lt. Colonel David Grossman regarding his book, On Killing; information regarding addressing the American Bar Association and his shared Christian values with David Grossman; former President Bill Clintonâ(TM)s radio address regarding David Grossman (sometime during the Clinton administration years); an appearance with now deceased CBS reporter Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes; comments by Peggy Noonan-former President Ronald Reagan's speech writer-and an article she wrote for The Wall Street Journal; comments about the movie starring actors Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, called The Insider; issues regarding products liability and 'Big Tobacco'; the alleged targeting by Mr. Thompson by Blank Rome; information about Doug Lowenstein described as the president and chief lobbyist for the parent company of the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board)--which Mr. Thompson alleges now "represents gun running cartels." T 1068, line 7; an article published in Reader's Digest with actor Tom Hanks on the cover; Mr. Thompson's meeting with convicted murderer Devin Moore on death row; a contention of a racial component in defendant Moore's case, "they certainly have it to contend with in Alabama being a slave state," T 1070, line 15, 1071, line 1; information that allegedly occurred the week of the Final Hearing in this disciplinary matter regarding comments made by a law enforcement officer in Australia and New Zealand equating a spike in teen violence with interactive violent video games; an article which purportedly appeared in Time magazine quoting David Grossman; the connection of violence towards law enforcement officers and interactive video games that simulate the killing of officers; and the numerous civil lawsuits filed across the country in various jurisdictions which lead to the filing of the Strickland case in Fayette, Alabama.
I'm almost going to miss the crazy bastard. This stuff is too good to be fake.
Not necessarily; usually the whole IT department isn't outsourced, just specific functions, so you still have your basic maintenance dudes.
The real problem is with long term systems changes. The sort of stuff you can make your salaried guys do on top of their regular work, requires you to contract specific services with an outsourcing company. That can cost a ton.
You also lose internal R you can test stuff out, see if it's worth deploying, see if its going to be cost effective. When you're outsourced, you get to listen to sales pitches which are inevitably slanted to favor the good points and obscure the bad points.
Hate to agree with the AC, but it's best to be prepared for the worst. Getting a job with the company your company outsourced to is a crapshoot.
They offer those positions so their people can pick your brain, let you keep things running well while their staff get up to speed, and then they'll drop you a few years later.
Or they'll find out you sold yourself well, but really your skills are inferior to someone they've already got, and they'll let you go sooner.
Or they're keeping you around to maintain some system that they've decided is going to be replaced, and when it's gone, so are you.
The only good option is that they may be impressed with your skills and offer you a position. But that is never going to be their first thought.
You're a terrorist, and you managed to get FUCKING SEMTEX on a PLANE and you're worried about the COCKPIT? If they can get a bunch of semtex, an explosive specially formulated to be chemically detectable, on a plane, then they can get anything on the plane. Why not just pack a rocket launcher? - Seriously. Way back in the halcyon days before 9/11 and the mandatory cavity search, the only thing the hijackers thought that they could get on the plane was a few box cutters. Semtex? Right.
Well, I'll admit that the only 100+ level course that had "programming" in the title was "Principles of Programming Languages." But still, I don't know how I would have made it through the rest of the courses without failing if I couldn't program.
Of course, I had a group in "Operating Systems Design" out of which only 2 (of 4) people were capable of any programming, and that was a senior level course. Little bastards leeched an 'A' programming grade on 3 projects before we managed to kick them out of our group.
Check the cost on the book. If it's cheap, it's possible that the prof whose class you're taking is actually one of the better living authorities on the subject, and that book is commonly assigned everywhere.
I once had a class where I mocked the prof for requiring his own book, then I went to visit a friend at another school and found out she had the same book, and was blown away that I actually had CLASSES with the guy.
The clue was that the book, a nice trade paperback, only went for 18 bucks. A prof whose book is a personal ego project that only he would assign usually costs about 60 for the same trade paperback.
If you can, NEVER sell back to the school buyback program. My school had a "Guaranteed Buyback" program on some books...If you had one of those books you were guaranteed to get 30-40% of your purchase price back! As opposed to the rest of the books, which generally only netted you 15-20% of the cover price.
Then, next semester, the same books would be in the used section for 80% of the cost of a new book. That's just pure evil. Put it on ebay for 60% of the original cost, and you'll make more, and save someone else a buck.
I once bought a textbook for physics I, without realizing that it was the "physics I" portion of a larger text book. Cost 80 bucks, was a paperback.
Next semester, I went to buy the Physics II book, and found that this time they had the whole book in hardcover for 120, and the physics II part for 80 again. I sold the physics I part to some student for 40 bucks, bought the complete book, and I loaned it to a different person every semester for 3 more years, a process I mentally dubbed, "Fucking the bookstore out of 80 bucks a semester."
I still have the textbook, though of course there is a semi-identical "new" edition out now.
I wouldn't call it a "small" part, not at the BS level.
You're going to be taking a class about about computer architecture, have a class on databases, a couple of classes on algorhythms and complexity, and about ten classes that involve a ton of programming...Even my advanced networking class had a full 5 programming assignments; build a proxy server, build a chat server, build a web spider, etc. The rest of it is physics and calculus.
Saying that CS is more than programming is true. Saying that it is mostly not programming is untrue.
I would hope there aren't glaring security weaknesses at the IRS, but why steal from the IRS when you can hit the local tax assessors office and probably get information without being caught?
It's all very well to say, "This is how we do it" but the reality is, most people don't do it that way, and for the most part, that level of security would be problematic for smaller organizations.
I knew a lot of people in CS who couldn't code competently. If there are enough of them in one place, it drags down the curve enough that you can make it through with good test scores.
Likewise I knew a lot of coders who are terrible at the theory. I'm not myself much of a math person, having moved into coding from pure logic, and not being a math person is probably worse for your grades overall in CS than being a crappy coder, despite the fact that coding is more central to most CS than math.
Well, everyone else has been saying "systems administration" and the only thing I had less of in school than hardware, was OS administration.
I don't know. Lot of people will say, "there is more to CS than programming" but if you can't program, you're going to have problems. It's like being a physicist and not being good at math.
I'd recommend going back to school and tacking on an MBA or something. Or you could go out and get certified in some of the networking stuff, but even there, a good sysadmin is expected to do a decent amount of scripting.
Yea. The best defense is limiting the harm that can be done on the network, defining everyones permissions, prohibiting full network access from unsecured rooms, etc.
But there is no good way to take people out of the loop.
Actually, that's not as good as telling them you're selling photocopiers. Don't remind people about security when you're trying to steal stuff; sometimes it jogs their memory to the boring security lectures they sat through during their first week of work.
The absolute best way to go about it is to be in a semi-authority position where you need information, and you have a right to information. If you need it, and you are perceived to have a right to it, then people will go out of their way to find it for you.
The "carrying a box of junk" thing works pretty well too; it's considered rude as hell to block someone when they're struggling under a heavy weight. Grab a big ass server and lug it into the building, and everyone will hold doors for you, then take it into a conference room, plug it in, and start looking for stuff. Bring a projector as well, and you can sit there all day, and people will assume you're there for a reason, or that someone else must know why you're there.
It's a oddity of human nature that, the more people there are around, the more likely that people are to dismiss your presence because "someone must know them, and know what they're doing" otherwise someone would be acting, right?
I don't know if you can say it's related to online identity theft though; this sort of social engineering predated that by decades, and its always worked well.
So much of it is about knowing the right number to call, or the right person to approach.
People just need to be suspicious, but suspicious is massively unhelpful to people who legitimately need help. No one ever calls me for security credentials because I am the documentation gestapo; instead they approach one of the other people who can set them up, because they know that those people won't ask as many questions.
On the one hand, I know I don't need to be as thorough as I am, on the other hand I know that the one time I'm not, I'll give access to the wrong person.
Agree with sibling post. The only time any FF install I've got crashes it's the Linux one, whenever I try to kill a flash video before the system is done processing it.
Otherwise it never blips, and I'm a hardcore tab whore: if I can hit CTRL-T I will.
Well, I was going to say, "Go to your preferences and turn off the 'Reparent highly rated comments' option" but I can't fucking find it for some reason, probably because the new preferences are screwed up.
It'd be LTJM, which is even worse (T for "Tomcat", not Apache). I guess you could throw in Ant to get a vowel, but you're still screwed in yer acronym, because you have too few vowels.
I guess if Oracle goes insane at opensources their database, you could do "JOLTA"; that's about as good as it gets.
Meh. If you were really using Java, and you were using an OS that included gcj or some other free java compiler/interpreter, the first thing you did was rip that crap out of the OS and replace it with "real" Java, which has always been available (for the distros I use), at least as a binary, and was much less likely to have unexpected behaviors...I always did the same with Windows as well.
Having a distro come with "real" java and pre-installed Tomcat is a big deal for people who've had to set up that crap since the dawn of time (or you know, a decade or so).
I'm not seeing a problem, frankly. Right now you could do that as well, you'd just have to add ".com" on the end of a url with a bunch of subdomains, though I'm sure someone has "ass.com", so that might put a crimp in things.
The obsession over having a unique, short, domain name with a dot com tld is annoying. That's the only thing I really like about the so-called awesomebar; it makes it a lot easier to never have to type a url.
The whole "everything ends in.com" is a serious issue. That's one of the things that keeps domain name squatting profitable, and forces all these bizarre corporate naming conventions on people.
I'm hardly advocating a zillion TLDs but having everything that doesn't end in.com be a ghetto is pretty lame as well.
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The problem really comes down to tit-for-tat. Most bills don't have national implications, so you end up with regional senators pushing for things that are good for their regions. Some of it is pork, some of it is pork-ish, and some of it is really important (e.g. money for levies/disaster relief/etc).
So you go to bat for things that you need, and other senators turn to you and say, "I understand that you have needs, I also have needs, let's see if we can both get what we want," and in about 2 days you have a bill that no one will vote for, full of crap that everyone wants.
Then the horse trading starts. They can't all get what they want, but some people can get what they want, and those people need the support of other people, who may not be getting anything that they want, but who will expect to have their needs addressed at a later date.
The way it's been working, one party takes charge, and rams what they want down the other parties throat until people get sick of them, elect the other party, and it reverses itself.
The way it needs to work, people make compromises and try to get everyone some of what they want, without going on a massive spending binge every time their party happens to be in power.
Nothing would ever get done if everyone in Congress refused to vote for anything that contained a provision that they didn't agree with. You have to compromise occasionally.
I'm not a fan of the FISA bill, but it pretty much kills the illicit "authorized by the executive" wiretapping (the FISA court is better than that), and it sets up actual congressional oversight for the program. FISA itself has been around forever, and there was no chance in hell it wasn't going to get reapproved.
There was also no chance in hell that the Telecoms were going to be held accountable. Considering the amount that they would have been liable for, their PAC money probably flowed like water, and with the executive supporting immunity as well? No chance.
As for the whole Obama thing, he'd have lost a lot more voters to the inevitable right wing "Obama voted against the tools we need to prevent terrorists from raping your children" attack ads, than he will from a bunch of libertarian Ron Paul supporters who probably wouldn't have voted for him anyway.
I love reading legal documents where it's clear that the person being deposed is batshit crazy, and they're trying not to use pejorative language while stating the facts.
As an example, the line "During his testimony, the undersigned Referee asked for clarification of Mr. Thompson as to which of the four binders of exhibits in evidence he was referring. Once clarified, Mr. Thompson spoke at length, before re-addressing the issues" is footnoted with the following:
What followed the Court's inquiry regarding clarification as to in which binder the document was located, is twenty-three (23) pages of testimony by Mr. Thompson involving matters such as: why he had not shaved that day for court; referring to the "Twinkie" case about the killing of a Mayor in San Francisco; a lawsuit filed by him in Kentucky in 1999 involving allegations regarding a video game entitled, 'Doom'; an interview with Matt Lauer from NBC's Today show; the killings in Columbine; information about a Lt. Colonel David Grossman regarding his book, On Killing; information regarding addressing the American Bar Association and his shared Christian values with David Grossman; former President Bill Clintonâ(TM)s radio address regarding David Grossman (sometime during the Clinton administration years); an appearance with now deceased CBS reporter Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes; comments by Peggy Noonan-former President Ronald Reagan's speech writer-and an article she wrote for The Wall Street Journal; comments about the movie starring actors Russell Crowe and Al Pacino, called The Insider; issues regarding products liability and 'Big Tobacco'; the alleged targeting by Mr. Thompson by Blank Rome; information about Doug Lowenstein described as the president and chief lobbyist for the parent company of the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board)--which Mr. Thompson alleges now "represents gun running cartels." T 1068, line 7; an article published in Reader's Digest with actor Tom Hanks on the cover; Mr. Thompson's meeting with convicted murderer Devin Moore on death row; a contention of a racial component in defendant Moore's case, "they certainly have it to contend with in Alabama being a slave state," T 1070, line 15, 1071, line 1; information that allegedly occurred the week of the Final Hearing in this disciplinary matter regarding comments made by a law enforcement officer in Australia and New Zealand equating a spike in teen violence with interactive violent video games; an article which purportedly appeared in Time magazine quoting David Grossman; the connection of violence towards law enforcement officers and interactive video games that simulate the killing of officers; and the numerous civil lawsuits filed across the country in various jurisdictions which lead to the filing of the Strickland case in Fayette, Alabama.
I'm almost going to miss the crazy bastard. This stuff is too good to be fake.
Not necessarily; usually the whole IT department isn't outsourced, just specific functions, so you still have your basic maintenance dudes.
The real problem is with long term systems changes. The sort of stuff you can make your salaried guys do on top of their regular work, requires you to contract specific services with an outsourcing company. That can cost a ton.
You also lose internal R you can test stuff out, see if it's worth deploying, see if its going to be cost effective. When you're outsourced, you get to listen to sales pitches which are inevitably slanted to favor the good points and obscure the bad points.
Hate to agree with the AC, but it's best to be prepared for the worst. Getting a job with the company your company outsourced to is a crapshoot.
They offer those positions so their people can pick your brain, let you keep things running well while their staff get up to speed, and then they'll drop you a few years later.
Or they'll find out you sold yourself well, but really your skills are inferior to someone they've already got, and they'll let you go sooner.
Or they're keeping you around to maintain some system that they've decided is going to be replaced, and when it's gone, so are you.
The only good option is that they may be impressed with your skills and offer you a position. But that is never going to be their first thought.
You're a terrorist, and you managed to get FUCKING SEMTEX on a PLANE and you're worried about the COCKPIT? If they can get a bunch of semtex, an explosive specially formulated to be chemically detectable, on a plane, then they can get anything on the plane. Why not just pack a rocket launcher?
-
Seriously. Way back in the halcyon days before 9/11 and the mandatory cavity search, the only thing the hijackers thought that they could get on the plane was a few box cutters. Semtex? Right.
Well, I'll admit that the only 100+ level course that had "programming" in the title was "Principles of Programming Languages." But still, I don't know how I would have made it through the rest of the courses without failing if I couldn't program.
Of course, I had a group in "Operating Systems Design" out of which only 2 (of 4) people were capable of any programming, and that was a senior level course. Little bastards leeched an 'A' programming grade on 3 projects before we managed to kick them out of our group.
Check the cost on the book. If it's cheap, it's possible that the prof whose class you're taking is actually one of the better living authorities on the subject, and that book is commonly assigned everywhere.
I once had a class where I mocked the prof for requiring his own book, then I went to visit a friend at another school and found out she had the same book, and was blown away that I actually had CLASSES with the guy.
The clue was that the book, a nice trade paperback, only went for 18 bucks. A prof whose book is a personal ego project that only he would assign usually costs about 60 for the same trade paperback.
If you can, NEVER sell back to the school buyback program. My school had a "Guaranteed Buyback" program on some books...If you had one of those books you were guaranteed to get 30-40% of your purchase price back! As opposed to the rest of the books, which generally only netted you 15-20% of the cover price.
Then, next semester, the same books would be in the used section for 80% of the cost of a new book. That's just pure evil. Put it on ebay for 60% of the original cost, and you'll make more, and save someone else a buck.
I once bought a textbook for physics I, without realizing that it was the "physics I" portion of a larger text book. Cost 80 bucks, was a paperback.
Next semester, I went to buy the Physics II book, and found that this time they had the whole book in hardcover for 120, and the physics II part for 80 again. I sold the physics I part to some student for 40 bucks, bought the complete book, and I loaned it to a different person every semester for 3 more years, a process I mentally dubbed, "Fucking the bookstore out of 80 bucks a semester."
I still have the textbook, though of course there is a semi-identical "new" edition out now.
I wouldn't call it a "small" part, not at the BS level.
You're going to be taking a class about about computer architecture, have a class on databases, a couple of classes on algorhythms and complexity, and about ten classes that involve a ton of programming...Even my advanced networking class had a full 5 programming assignments; build a proxy server, build a chat server, build a web spider, etc. The rest of it is physics and calculus.
Saying that CS is more than programming is true. Saying that it is mostly not programming is untrue.
I would hope there aren't glaring security weaknesses at the IRS, but why steal from the IRS when you can hit the local tax assessors office and probably get information without being caught?
It's all very well to say, "This is how we do it" but the reality is, most people don't do it that way, and for the most part, that level of security would be problematic for smaller organizations.
I knew a lot of people in CS who couldn't code competently. If there are enough of them in one place, it drags down the curve enough that you can make it through with good test scores.
Likewise I knew a lot of coders who are terrible at the theory. I'm not myself much of a math person, having moved into coding from pure logic, and not being a math person is probably worse for your grades overall in CS than being a crappy coder, despite the fact that coding is more central to most CS than math.
Well, everyone else has been saying "systems administration" and the only thing I had less of in school than hardware, was OS administration.
I don't know. Lot of people will say, "there is more to CS than programming" but if you can't program, you're going to have problems. It's like being a physicist and not being good at math.
I'd recommend going back to school and tacking on an MBA or something. Or you could go out and get certified in some of the networking stuff, but even there, a good sysadmin is expected to do a decent amount of scripting.
Yea. The best defense is limiting the harm that can be done on the network, defining everyones permissions, prohibiting full network access from unsecured rooms, etc.
But there is no good way to take people out of the loop.
Actually, that's not as good as telling them you're selling photocopiers. Don't remind people about security when you're trying to steal stuff; sometimes it jogs their memory to the boring security lectures they sat through during their first week of work.
The absolute best way to go about it is to be in a semi-authority position where you need information, and you have a right to information. If you need it, and you are perceived to have a right to it, then people will go out of their way to find it for you.
The "carrying a box of junk" thing works pretty well too; it's considered rude as hell to block someone when they're struggling under a heavy weight. Grab a big ass server and lug it into the building, and everyone will hold doors for you, then take it into a conference room, plug it in, and start looking for stuff. Bring a projector as well, and you can sit there all day, and people will assume you're there for a reason, or that someone else must know why you're there.
It's a oddity of human nature that, the more people there are around, the more likely that people are to dismiss your presence because "someone must know them, and know what they're doing" otherwise someone would be acting, right?
I don't know if you can say it's related to online identity theft though; this sort of social engineering predated that by decades, and its always worked well.
So much of it is about knowing the right number to call, or the right person to approach.
People just need to be suspicious, but suspicious is massively unhelpful to people who legitimately need help. No one ever calls me for security credentials because I am the documentation gestapo; instead they approach one of the other people who can set them up, because they know that those people won't ask as many questions.
On the one hand, I know I don't need to be as thorough as I am, on the other hand I know that the one time I'm not, I'll give access to the wrong person.
Horse. Shit.
If you can't own up to the fact that racism still exists, you've got serious issues.
I'm white, I'm from the south, and I approve this message.
I'm about to upgrade flash, so I'll give that a shot and see what it does. Thanks for the info.
Wow I didn't.
*click*
*click*
*click*
*click**click**click**click**click**click**click**click**click**click*
Mmmmmmm. I need a moment...alone...
Agree with sibling post. The only time any FF install I've got crashes it's the Linux one, whenever I try to kill a flash video before the system is done processing it.
Otherwise it never blips, and I'm a hardcore tab whore: if I can hit CTRL-T I will.
Well, I was going to say, "Go to your preferences and turn off the 'Reparent highly rated comments' option" but I can't fucking find it for some reason, probably because the new preferences are screwed up.
=P
It'd be LTJM, which is even worse (T for "Tomcat", not Apache). I guess you could throw in Ant to get a vowel, but you're still screwed in yer acronym, because you have too few vowels.
I guess if Oracle goes insane at opensources their database, you could do "JOLTA"; that's about as good as it gets.
Meh. If you were really using Java, and you were using an OS that included gcj or some other free java compiler/interpreter, the first thing you did was rip that crap out of the OS and replace it with "real" Java, which has always been available (for the distros I use), at least as a binary, and was much less likely to have unexpected behaviors...I always did the same with Windows as well.
Having a distro come with "real" java and pre-installed Tomcat is a big deal for people who've had to set up that crap since the dawn of time (or you know, a decade or so).
I'm not seeing a problem, frankly. Right now you could do that as well, you'd just have to add ".com" on the end of a url with a bunch of subdomains, though I'm sure someone has "ass.com", so that might put a crimp in things.
The obsession over having a unique, short, domain name with a dot com tld is annoying. That's the only thing I really like about the so-called awesomebar; it makes it a lot easier to never have to type a url.
That's a bit of a troll.
The whole "everything ends in .com" is a serious issue. That's one of the things that keeps domain name squatting profitable, and forces all these bizarre corporate naming conventions on people.
I'm hardly advocating a zillion TLDs but having everything that doesn't end in .com be a ghetto is pretty lame as well.