Debate is healthy, and it leads to better research, fantastic ideas, and every once in a while, something revolutionary.
But if all the negative armchair scientists out there actually buckled down and did some actual research of their instead of spending their time trying to knock down somebody who accomplished something we would be in a much better place.
An open mind isn't something terribly difficult to cultivate.
90% of the useful knowledge gained in college is not gained in an actual classroom. Your chances of early success in your field have more to do with that external knowledge, your desire, and your work ethic, than where you attended school or what your major was.
Getting into MIT will impress your family, and graduating might even score you an interview at a company with an impressive name and no idea how to keep you interested in work.
The guy who went to a JC, learned C before he took the class because he didn't want to wait until his prereqs were complete, attended OSCon and DefCon, committed updates to 8 open source projects, and took an extension class on how to interview before he even applied to a 4 year college will have a lot more doors open for him.
I haven't done it myself since I've been self-employed for... well what seems like forever, but I have seen several people leave their jobs only to come back as contractors days later with a 300% bump in their pay. A company of any size will have limits on what they pay people internally. Those rules generally don't apply to contractors with very specialized knowledge.
It's not the fact that you have a hammer that gets you paid, it's the fact that you know what, where, when, why, and how to whack whatever it is that needs fixing.
There was a time when a headline like this never would have made the front page of slashdot. It's because of this kind of thing that I only come back to slashdot on the rare occasion that I have run out of other things to read on the internet. And what's this? Addthis.com showing up in noscript? Please, bring back the quality!
You are better off with commodity hardware and a data layer with a code base that can be referenced. All high end hardware will get you is dollars out the door and a fraction of additional QA that may or may not be worth while.
All licensing costs for a commercial db will get you is access to a knowledge base and increased costs to run it.
You run into tougher road blocks with less (and sometimes no) solutions available with DB/2 and Oracle. On something the scale of Facebook, that simply will not work.
That makes sense for everything. But when the consultants don't know the product, the client doesn't know the product, and the sales rep doesn't know the product, it's impossible to know what the requirements should be. Mix in the fact that the consultants need projects to move forward because they need the money, and sales people need projects to grow because they need the money, and the client needs projects to move forward because their current state of operations is overwhelming and obviously inefficient at all levels of the chain from the lowest worker level to the highest executive and you get a special set of wrong.
Throw in offshore development of the base product that goes untested, requirement and development priorities in the product base that are mismanaged, and a support structure that is designed for profit and CYA instead of support and you have an SAP project.
That's funny to me. I'm stoked when I get Mexico on the line. Sometimes I end up pressing 3 for spanish so I can get Mexico because they speak better english and handle problems better than the indian call centers.
I fly frequently as well. In many small airports, they try to push ALL people through the rape-scanners. The same policy is in effect at major airports depending on the terminal.
I also have dark skin.
Ever gone 7 flights in a row and get "randomly selected" for further screening? Ever had your genitals grabbed by a TSA agent? 4 times during one screening?
Ever been kicked out of an airport for refusing to be scanned? Had your flight cancelled by the police? Been surrounded by police and TSA for refusing a scan?
I have. Believe me, it's not fun.
Dosimeters are not that expensive, and they would go a long way towards making people feel more comfortable, but regardless of cancer risk or radiation risk, the TSA creates a violation of personal privacy, security, and comfort. They do so without providing even a fraction of a security improvement. I would even go so far as to say that security is worse with TSA in place.
Because eventually, facebook will go the way of MySpace, Friendster, et all, and completely lose it's value. Whereas the Winklevii will have cash that they pulled out of facebook, zuckerberg will have a lot of paper that's worth nothing.
You can't do it because ITunes leverages napster data.
I know this because I have some obscure tastes in music. I have a tape and a cd of an old band. I downloaded one of the songs that's only on the tape from napster. I was disappointed with the recording because of three glitches in the track. Years later, itunes pops up. I buy the song from itunes. Low and behold, same three glitches are in the itunes version.
This happened for not just one song, but two songs from two different artists in two different genres. One was a single glitch, which I would have dismissed as chance, but four glitches at the same timestamps from two different songs in two different genres?
I think the assumption is that he'd have more sales if it was sold by a publisher. Sure, he would have. But he shopped the idea and it was rejected. Even if his sales quadrupled, it probably wouldn't have been a book that traditional publishers would have been looking to publish.
Selling 1800+ copies of a book no publisher would touch is an achievement, and not an easy one to reproduce.
If you can come up with a really good idea 4 times a year and follow through to completion within a reasonable deadline you're only looking at a $36k income. That's not very good as a full time job. However - if you can do that in the evenings it's a heck of a side income, and the more you can consistently perform, the more you'll sell.
There's also the question of investment. Amazon's options are zero or minimal investment. Spend a little bit of money and have 100 or 1000 copies printed at a time and handle the delivery yourself and you can double your profits - plus you have the capability of handing over copies to local booksellers to see if they'll sell in store.
For every person looking to go down this path, there are a lot of paths you can go down. The easiest path and most potentially successful is a publisher. They have marketing plans, distribution contracts, and above all else - talent on hand who are pretty good at determining the sell-ability of a given book. They aren't the only answer, though. 2000 copies sold is nothing to a publisher, but for an individual it can be huge. Personally, I think that before writing anything you have to determine your target market and how to communicate with them.
I'm remiss to discover that no open source browser can be compiled for windows without Visual Studio. Most of them can't be compiled with the current version of Visual Studio. If I want to make updates and try them out, I have to go through the trouble of setting up a virtual environment specifically geared towards browser development. I'm pretty disappointed all around. It's no wonder that so many bugs remain unaddressed for so long.
Well rested and happy people are far more productive than tired and unhappy people. A successful focus would be on motivation and efficiency, not on length of workday.
The geo location on my ip has always been pretty accurate - within 25 miles. Running my own dns server alleviates the problem and keeps me away from relying on my ISP. (which accounts for at least half the downtimes I experienced prior to spending the 15 minutes it took to set it up in the first place.
It contains no specific penalties for non-compliance with the law, but could open the door to lawsuits or legal actions by the state’s attorney general. Source
I don't think you can call a law "tough" when there are no penalties.
Slashdot Mirror
Right on target (and it's not just slashdot).
Debate is healthy, and it leads to better research, fantastic ideas, and every once in a while, something revolutionary.
But if all the negative armchair scientists out there actually buckled down and did some actual research of their instead of spending their time trying to knock down somebody who accomplished something we would be in a much better place.
An open mind isn't something terribly difficult to cultivate.
90% of the useful knowledge gained in college is not gained in an actual classroom. Your chances of early success in your field have more to do with that external knowledge, your desire, and your work ethic, than where you attended school or what your major was.
Getting into MIT will impress your family, and graduating might even score you an interview at a company with an impressive name and no idea how to keep you interested in work.
The guy who went to a JC, learned C before he took the class because he didn't want to wait until his prereqs were complete, attended OSCon and DefCon, committed updates to 8 open source projects, and took an extension class on how to interview before he even applied to a 4 year college will have a lot more doors open for him.
Does anybody actually have a hard time learning Hadoop? In my experience its pretty easy to pick up and go with.
I haven't done it myself since I've been self-employed for ... well what seems like forever, but I have seen several people leave their jobs only to come back as contractors days later with a 300% bump in their pay. A company of any size will have limits on what they pay people internally. Those rules generally don't apply to contractors with very specialized knowledge.
It's not the fact that you have a hammer that gets you paid, it's the fact that you know what, where, when, why, and how to whack whatever it is that needs fixing.
I read the advisory, chose a course of action, then it took about a minute to make my server not vulnerable. It's great that they made the disclosure.
There was a time when a headline like this never would have made the front page of slashdot. It's because of this kind of thing that I only come back to slashdot on the rare occasion that I have run out of other things to read on the internet. And what's this? Addthis.com showing up in noscript? Please, bring back the quality!
You are better off with commodity hardware and a data layer with a code base that can be referenced. All high end hardware will get you is dollars out the door and a fraction of additional QA that may or may not be worth while.
All licensing costs for a commercial db will get you is access to a knowledge base and increased costs to run it.
You run into tougher road blocks with less (and sometimes no) solutions available with DB/2 and Oracle. On something the scale of Facebook, that simply will not work.
And that's exactly what people use RDBMS's for 95% of the time.
Very few DB implementations leverage more than data storage and basic querying capabilities, and even fewer require real scalability.
That makes sense for everything. But when the consultants don't know the product, the client doesn't know the product, and the sales rep doesn't know the product, it's impossible to know what the requirements should be. Mix in the fact that the consultants need projects to move forward because they need the money, and sales people need projects to grow because they need the money, and the client needs projects to move forward because their current state of operations is overwhelming and obviously inefficient at all levels of the chain from the lowest worker level to the highest executive and you get a special set of wrong.
Throw in offshore development of the base product that goes untested, requirement and development priorities in the product base that are mismanaged, and a support structure that is designed for profit and CYA instead of support and you have an SAP project.
This should be modded insightful.
That's funny to me. I'm stoked when I get Mexico on the line. Sometimes I end up pressing 3 for spanish so I can get Mexico because they speak better english and handle problems better than the indian call centers.
That was eye opening.
why exactly would this help? All ID requirements do is disenfranchise lower income voters. It has nothing to do with protecting vote data.
And...
So the story planting begins.
You'd think they would at least try a new strategy.
And how many problems happened on Domestic flights the decade prior to 9/11?
I fly frequently as well. In many small airports, they try to push ALL people through the rape-scanners. The same policy is in effect at major airports depending on the terminal.
I also have dark skin.
Ever gone 7 flights in a row and get "randomly selected" for further screening? Ever had your genitals grabbed by a TSA agent? 4 times during one screening?
Ever been kicked out of an airport for refusing to be scanned? Had your flight cancelled by the police? Been surrounded by police and TSA for refusing a scan?
I have. Believe me, it's not fun.
Dosimeters are not that expensive, and they would go a long way towards making people feel more comfortable, but regardless of cancer risk or radiation risk, the TSA creates a violation of personal privacy, security, and comfort. They do so without providing even a fraction of a security improvement. I would even go so far as to say that security is worse with TSA in place.
Because eventually, facebook will go the way of MySpace, Friendster, et all, and completely lose it's value. Whereas the Winklevii will have cash that they pulled out of facebook, zuckerberg will have a lot of paper that's worth nothing.
You can't do it because ITunes leverages napster data.
I know this because I have some obscure tastes in music. I have a tape and a cd of an old band. I downloaded one of the songs that's only on the tape from napster. I was disappointed with the recording because of three glitches in the track. Years later, itunes pops up. I buy the song from itunes. Low and behold, same three glitches are in the itunes version.
This happened for not just one song, but two songs from two different artists in two different genres. One was a single glitch, which I would have dismissed as chance, but four glitches at the same timestamps from two different songs in two different genres?
I think the assumption is that he'd have more sales if it was sold by a publisher. Sure, he would have. But he shopped the idea and it was rejected. Even if his sales quadrupled, it probably wouldn't have been a book that traditional publishers would have been looking to publish.
Selling 1800+ copies of a book no publisher would touch is an achievement, and not an easy one to reproduce.
If you can come up with a really good idea 4 times a year and follow through to completion within a reasonable deadline you're only looking at a $36k income. That's not very good as a full time job. However - if you can do that in the evenings it's a heck of a side income, and the more you can consistently perform, the more you'll sell.
There's also the question of investment. Amazon's options are zero or minimal investment. Spend a little bit of money and have 100 or 1000 copies printed at a time and handle the delivery yourself and you can double your profits - plus you have the capability of handing over copies to local booksellers to see if they'll sell in store.
For every person looking to go down this path, there are a lot of paths you can go down. The easiest path and most potentially successful is a publisher. They have marketing plans, distribution contracts, and above all else - talent on hand who are pretty good at determining the sell-ability of a given book. They aren't the only answer, though. 2000 copies sold is nothing to a publisher, but for an individual it can be huge. Personally, I think that before writing anything you have to determine your target market and how to communicate with them.
I'm remiss to discover that no open source browser can be compiled for windows without Visual Studio. Most of them can't be compiled with the current version of Visual Studio. If I want to make updates and try them out, I have to go through the trouble of setting up a virtual environment specifically geared towards browser development. I'm pretty disappointed all around. It's no wonder that so many bugs remain unaddressed for so long.
Well rested and happy people are far more productive than tired and unhappy people. A successful focus would be on motivation and efficiency, not on length of workday.
The one thing facebook has going for it is media attention. Outside of that, they are a very easy market to attack.
The geo location on my ip has always been pretty accurate - within 25 miles. Running my own dns server alleviates the problem and keeps me away from relying on my ISP. (which accounts for at least half the downtimes I experienced prior to spending the 15 minutes it took to set it up in the first place.
To answer my own question
I don't think you can call a law "tough" when there are no penalties.
What is the penalty for violating the law?