We didn't go bankrupt because we pulled the plug after a year of trying to implement and went back to our seven year old, EOLed and unsupported solution. And no one has looked back.
He's going to get away free. There's nothing that can be done to Bush himself in any practical sense. Possibly some lawsuits after he leaves office, but I doubt even that. It sucks, I know, but that's life.
That's not to say nothing can or will be done. The Democrats have finally started making hay out of wreckage of the Bush administration--letting the surveillance bill lapse because it contained retroactive immunity for the telecoms is a good start. That allows lawsuits to proceed against them that, over the next few years, will make clear the scope of the domestic spying that was going on.
To the extent that anything will change, it will be because a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress will look for a lot of legislative achievements in the first 100 days, riding a still-fresh wave of disgust, that have to do with (very loudly) making certain things illegal, restoring and strengthening FISA, and cleaning up the civil service. More than impeaching or imprisoning Bush, suing and jailing the civil servants who carried out his orders will put the fear into those who happily break the law under colour of executive authority.
It's not grounds for impeachment because impeachment would take longer than Bush has left in office. That was true after the 2006 elections, which is why Pelosi said "impeachment is off the table". As a practical matter, it's just not doable, so threats of impeachment are empty.
They're not unintelligent. But smart people make different errors than dumb people do. They reason their way into idiocies, rather than just accept them. And geniuses make mistakes unique to themselves.
Sex Freak has admitted to eight murders to police, but hasn't been charged with any. That tends to suggest that they looked into it and concluded that he's a total nutbar.
The cookie case is far too simplistic and common to draw analogies to Mr. Reiser's case.
The cookie case was illustrative, not analogous. I'm impressed with how seriously you took it, though.
Nowhere do I suggest that the standard of evidence should be lower than "beyond a reasonable doubt"; nor that the jury shouldn't be very careful about inferring guilt from circumstantial evidence. My point was speculative, about how (assuming he's guilty) Reiser or his lawyer could argue that all the circumstantial evidence does not add up to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt--i.e., a miscalculation on the part of someone very smart about what's believable and what's not.
Honestly, from what I know of the case, I think Reiser did it--I have trouble believing that much damning circumstantial evidence couldn't indicate guilt. However, I'm well aware that I'm not on the jury, and there's probably lots I don't know about it, so I don't go around saying "GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY". But I won't be surprised if that's the verdict.
The guy is a total loon based on what has come out
I suspect that's why they dismissed him as a suspect--after investigating him, they decided he was a total whackjob. The fact that he hasn't been charged with the eight murders to which he confessed (AFAIK) suggests that they don't find him credible.
I will observe that this exact scheme, winnowing it down to one person, is cited as a virtue of the U.S. government, not a flaw. At the end of the day, there's one candidate, and after the election, one president, with very little ambiguity (usually).
It's a very good point that the two parties each have deep factionalism inside them. The problem is that the U.S. system winnows it down to one person representing all those factions. When it's a California Democrat candidate, the Wyoming Democrat is faced with a binary choice: vote for someone who's not really representative of them, or don't.
The visible result of this dilemma is that Christian Coalition now gets zero representation in their president. Because they supported Mike Huckabee, Romney lost to McCain, and now they have to either vote for McCain or stay home. On the left, those who would be greens perenially get stuck with voting for a more centrist Democrat than they prefer, or throwing away a vote on Nader. Likewise, the Libertarians.
The virtue of a parliamentary system is that factions retain their relative power after the election, and a continual process of compromising with them is required. In the U.S., once you've elected someone who doesn't really agree with you, you have very little leverage except the threat of taking it out on their successor. As the Republicans have demonstrated repeatedly since Reagan with respect to the Christian Coalition, that threat carries very little weight.
The basic problem is that the voters are too lazy to elect people based on their values and ideals. Getting rid of the neocons and Jesus people would be easy if the people wanted it.
Actually, this illustrates my point. The neocons and Jesus freaks are not numerically superior, but because they mobilized in 2000 and 2004, they outweighed other factions like the paleocons and the libertarians, and thus had political power far greater than the portion their numbers should grant them. But if, as you suggest, the paleocons and libertarians had mobilized sufficiently to block them, then those factions would be overrepresented.
Congress, with its informal caucuses, is halfway there. But balanced against the power of the president, proportional representation is diluted to almost nothing.
Assuming he killed Nina (a pretty safe assumption, on the face of it), I suspect he's making an error of reasoning that hyper intelligent people and small children are prone to: Because there's no direct evidence, he can't logically conclude his own guilt from his actions, therefore no one else can.
It's like a child hiding cookies behind his back and assuming that, since Mom can't see what's in his hands, she can't know that he's got cookies.
There's a quote about how circumstantial evidence *is* evidence to smart people, because smart people of capable of making inferences and deductions.
To me there should only be one party, American Citizens
All this would accomplish is to make the U.S. like the Soviet Union with its one-party system. The end result is informal parties called factions. You'd just be moving the factional politics inside the party itself.
What the U.S. needs is a parliamentary system with the possibility of coalition governments so that candidates aren't forced into one of two molds.
You misunderstood that the whole debate was about what a root user could do from within a chroot jail. A properly limited user account can be secured in a chroot jail (i.e., not simply chrooting but configuring a jailed environment).
The devs were correct that chroot alone was not designed for the purpose of security and can't be used alone to provide any.
They're not secure for root users. That was the issue identified in the recent "read" you mention--someone was pointing out that root can break out in a particular way, and the kernel devs responded that 1) that was by design, and 2) locking that down left an infinite number of other ways to break out if you're root.
For regular user accounts, a properly configured chroot jail is still a very useful security tool.
It's not a bad idea, but Quickbooks and TurboTax aren't enough. They'd have to port the top ten apps, starting with Excel, and it would have to have a way to enable continued use of existing Excel worksheets with as little frission as possible to users--ideally some situation where the IT department dumps all spreadsheets into a folder and the new system serves them a converted version that seems like the same thing they've known all along.
There's an installed base of software that has to be overcome. But more importantly, there's an installed base of data that's ad hoc and poorly organized. The latter is the bigger barrier to overcome, I think.
Businesses buy Windows because that's what you run Excel on. It was true fifteen years ago, and it's true today because it was true fifteen years ago. The barriers to entry that prevent Joe Sixpack from switching also exist for business owners and VPs making purchasing decisions.
It's not because Linux is free, it's because businesses don't put Linux on their desktops.
For a really large number of people, their main experience with computers is at work--that's what they learn on, that's what they come to understand. Deviation from what they know is a barrier to entry.
Couple that with virtually no vendors selling computers with Linux pre-installed, and you have a huge barrier to entry. The vast majority of users use what's put in front of them, either by their employer or Dell or Walmart, and see little to no incentive to switch.
It doesn't take courage to tempt fate for fame. It doesn't take courage to pursue one adrenaline rush after another, or another moment in front of the cameras. It takes willful blindness and a profound disrespect for the value of a human life.
You know what your "this is no tragedy" reminds me of? That seven year old girl who died taking off into a thunderstorm with her father and flight instructor, trying to become the youngest cross-continental pilot in America. That's exactly what her mother said on camera as grief fought with the realization that her family's thrillseeking had cost her a daughter and a husband.
Any sum over $5,000 is excessive when viewed in terms of her costs. But do you think Best Buy would even notice a $5,000 judgement? How much of a judgement against them is required, do you think, for them to substantially change the corporate policy about deliberately lying to customers (amply documented in the rest of the thread)?
The problem for New Line is that 7.5% of gross revenues is around $500 million. A lot of powerful lawyers will take that case on contingency, expecting a $200 million payout at the end. For that kind of payoff, I'm sure the Tolkien Trust has no shortage of serious law talent looking to help them for free.
Actually, taking points on the gross, not the net, is the smart thing. On a net basis, no film has ever been profitable--that's why the author of Forest Gump got nothing but the up-front fee.
You're still defining success as huge sales and the company that goes along with that. That's not where Spolsky wants to work. He makes tons of money selling some niche products (really, just bug tracking and easy-remote-desktop for consumers). He gets to run his own business, with no interference from VCs. Because profitability is so lopsided for him, he gets to live the executive life of a much larger company (architect designed Manhattan office, junkets to the far east) with fewer than twenty employees. He also doesn't compete with anyone who might decide to crush him with sheer corporate mass. And he's free to experiment with new business ideas.
Perhaps I've misestimated./ers definition of success, but that's one I'd be totally happy with.
Spolsky made enough from Microsoft and Juno that he doesn't need to work. Fog Creek is what he wants to do. I imagine that comes from his non-open-source career--his dream is having his own perfect ISV, rather than contributing to research or open source.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly, you don't know what science is, or religion for that matter.
We didn't go bankrupt because we pulled the plug after a year of trying to implement and went back to our seven year old, EOLed and unsupported solution. And no one has looked back.
He's going to get away free. There's nothing that can be done to Bush himself in any practical sense. Possibly some lawsuits after he leaves office, but I doubt even that. It sucks, I know, but that's life.
That's not to say nothing can or will be done. The Democrats have finally started making hay out of wreckage of the Bush administration--letting the surveillance bill lapse because it contained retroactive immunity for the telecoms is a good start. That allows lawsuits to proceed against them that, over the next few years, will make clear the scope of the domestic spying that was going on.
To the extent that anything will change, it will be because a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress will look for a lot of legislative achievements in the first 100 days, riding a still-fresh wave of disgust, that have to do with (very loudly) making certain things illegal, restoring and strengthening FISA, and cleaning up the civil service. More than impeaching or imprisoning Bush, suing and jailing the civil servants who carried out his orders will put the fear into those who happily break the law under colour of executive authority.
It's not grounds for impeachment because impeachment would take longer than Bush has left in office. That was true after the 2006 elections, which is why Pelosi said "impeachment is off the table". As a practical matter, it's just not doable, so threats of impeachment are empty.
They're not unintelligent. But smart people make different errors than dumb people do. They reason their way into idiocies, rather than just accept them. And geniuses make mistakes unique to themselves.
Sex Freak has admitted to eight murders to police, but hasn't been charged with any. That tends to suggest that they looked into it and concluded that he's a total nutbar.
The cookie case was illustrative, not analogous. I'm impressed with how seriously you took it, though.
Nowhere do I suggest that the standard of evidence should be lower than "beyond a reasonable doubt"; nor that the jury shouldn't be very careful about inferring guilt from circumstantial evidence. My point was speculative, about how (assuming he's guilty) Reiser or his lawyer could argue that all the circumstantial evidence does not add up to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt--i.e., a miscalculation on the part of someone very smart about what's believable and what's not.
Honestly, from what I know of the case, I think Reiser did it--I have trouble believing that much damning circumstantial evidence couldn't indicate guilt. However, I'm well aware that I'm not on the jury, and there's probably lots I don't know about it, so I don't go around saying "GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY". But I won't be surprised if that's the verdict.
I suspect that's why they dismissed him as a suspect--after investigating him, they decided he was a total whackjob. The fact that he hasn't been charged with the eight murders to which he confessed (AFAIK) suggests that they don't find him credible.
I will observe that this exact scheme, winnowing it down to one person, is cited as a virtue of the U.S. government, not a flaw. At the end of the day, there's one candidate, and after the election, one president, with very little ambiguity (usually).
Oh come fucking on. Modded 'troll' into oblivion? What's trollish about my post?
It's a very good point that the two parties each have deep factionalism inside them. The problem is that the U.S. system winnows it down to one person representing all those factions. When it's a California Democrat candidate, the Wyoming Democrat is faced with a binary choice: vote for someone who's not really representative of them, or don't.
The visible result of this dilemma is that Christian Coalition now gets zero representation in their president. Because they supported Mike Huckabee, Romney lost to McCain, and now they have to either vote for McCain or stay home. On the left, those who would be greens perenially get stuck with voting for a more centrist Democrat than they prefer, or throwing away a vote on Nader. Likewise, the Libertarians.
The virtue of a parliamentary system is that factions retain their relative power after the election, and a continual process of compromising with them is required. In the U.S., once you've elected someone who doesn't really agree with you, you have very little leverage except the threat of taking it out on their successor. As the Republicans have demonstrated repeatedly since Reagan with respect to the Christian Coalition, that threat carries very little weight.
Actually, this illustrates my point. The neocons and Jesus freaks are not numerically superior, but because they mobilized in 2000 and 2004, they outweighed other factions like the paleocons and the libertarians, and thus had political power far greater than the portion their numbers should grant them. But if, as you suggest, the paleocons and libertarians had mobilized sufficiently to block them, then those factions would be overrepresented.
Congress, with its informal caucuses, is halfway there. But balanced against the power of the president, proportional representation is diluted to almost nothing.
Assuming he killed Nina (a pretty safe assumption, on the face of it), I suspect he's making an error of reasoning that hyper intelligent people and small children are prone to: Because there's no direct evidence, he can't logically conclude his own guilt from his actions, therefore no one else can.
It's like a child hiding cookies behind his back and assuming that, since Mom can't see what's in his hands, she can't know that he's got cookies.
There's a quote about how circumstantial evidence *is* evidence to smart people, because smart people of capable of making inferences and deductions.
You misunderstood that the whole debate was about what a root user could do from within a chroot jail. A properly limited user account can be secured in a chroot jail (i.e., not simply chrooting but configuring a jailed environment).
The devs were correct that chroot alone was not designed for the purpose of security and can't be used alone to provide any.
They're not secure for root users. That was the issue identified in the recent "read" you mention--someone was pointing out that root can break out in a particular way, and the kernel devs responded that 1) that was by design, and 2) locking that down left an infinite number of other ways to break out if you're root.
For regular user accounts, a properly configured chroot jail is still a very useful security tool.
It's not a bad idea, but Quickbooks and TurboTax aren't enough. They'd have to port the top ten apps, starting with Excel, and it would have to have a way to enable continued use of existing Excel worksheets with as little frission as possible to users--ideally some situation where the IT department dumps all spreadsheets into a folder and the new system serves them a converted version that seems like the same thing they've known all along.
There's an installed base of software that has to be overcome. But more importantly, there's an installed base of data that's ad hoc and poorly organized. The latter is the bigger barrier to overcome, I think.
Businesses buy Windows because that's what you run Excel on. It was true fifteen years ago, and it's true today because it was true fifteen years ago. The barriers to entry that prevent Joe Sixpack from switching also exist for business owners and VPs making purchasing decisions.
It's not because Linux is free, it's because businesses don't put Linux on their desktops.
For a really large number of people, their main experience with computers is at work--that's what they learn on, that's what they come to understand. Deviation from what they know is a barrier to entry.
Couple that with virtually no vendors selling computers with Linux pre-installed, and you have a huge barrier to entry. The vast majority of users use what's put in front of them, either by their employer or Dell or Walmart, and see little to no incentive to switch.
It doesn't take courage to tempt fate for fame. It doesn't take courage to pursue one adrenaline rush after another, or another moment in front of the cameras. It takes willful blindness and a profound disrespect for the value of a human life.
You know what your "this is no tragedy" reminds me of? That seven year old girl who died taking off into a thunderstorm with her father and flight instructor, trying to become the youngest cross-continental pilot in America. That's exactly what her mother said on camera as grief fought with the realization that her family's thrillseeking had cost her a daughter and a husband.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Dubroff
Any sum over $5,000 is excessive when viewed in terms of her costs. But do you think Best Buy would even notice a $5,000 judgement? How much of a judgement against them is required, do you think, for them to substantially change the corporate policy about deliberately lying to customers (amply documented in the rest of the thread)?
The problem for New Line is that 7.5% of gross revenues is around $500 million. A lot of powerful lawyers will take that case on contingency, expecting a $200 million payout at the end. For that kind of payoff, I'm sure the Tolkien Trust has no shortage of serious law talent looking to help them for free.
Actually, taking points on the gross, not the net, is the smart thing. On a net basis, no film has ever been profitable--that's why the author of Forest Gump got nothing but the up-front fee.
A businessman runs a business. An entrepreneur creates one. He created his from scratch, with a partner. The scale isn't relevent.
You're still defining success as huge sales and the company that goes along with that. That's not where Spolsky wants to work. He makes tons of money selling some niche products (really, just bug tracking and easy-remote-desktop for consumers). He gets to run his own business, with no interference from VCs. Because profitability is so lopsided for him, he gets to live the executive life of a much larger company (architect designed Manhattan office, junkets to the far east) with fewer than twenty employees. He also doesn't compete with anyone who might decide to crush him with sheer corporate mass. And he's free to experiment with new business ideas.
./ers definition of success, but that's one I'd be totally happy with.
Perhaps I've misestimated
Spolsky made enough from Microsoft and Juno that he doesn't need to work. Fog Creek is what he wants to do. I imagine that comes from his non-open-source career--his dream is having his own perfect ISV, rather than contributing to research or open source.