Can machine-age law be applied fairly to rapidly developing technology? Is [printing a gun] the same as [manufacturing] it? Is he being strung out in a Kafkaesque nightmare as a warning to others? Some [government] officials concede that it's too late to keep [it] from spreading and say that intimidating distributors is the only way they can hope to deter code makers.
Those words were written in US News and World Report more than 23 years ago about the investigation into Phil Zimmerman for having given away PGP. Here is the real text (with the original words I changed in bold):
Can machine-age law be applied fairly to rapidly developing technology? Is putting software on a computer the same as exporting it? Is he being strung out in a Kafkaesque nightmare as a warning to others? Some intelligence officials concede that it's too late to keep cryptography from spreading and say that intimidating distributors is the only way they can hope to deter code makers.
I only had to change 8 words to make it a nearly perfect fit for the situation today.
I know it is fashionable to hate guns here, but the reality is that lots of bad people have guns and have a complete disregard for the law. So, ridiculous laws (we have plenty, just look at Washington DC and California) only serve to ensure that law abiding citizens cannot get guns. It is the same as it was for cryptography. Criminals were getting it and using anyway, only people who respect the law were actually harmed by the law.
As far as guns go, there are plenty of people who legitimately fear for their lives because of abusive relationships, living in bad neighborhoods, and countless other reasons. They need to be able to protect themselves because the police so often cannot or will not. There are lots of problems to fix, but more laws will not do the job when we so often fail to enforce the laws that we have now.
The Xperia Compact phones are the only decent size phones with decent specs. Larger phones are a colossal pain since dealing with the extra weight and size is not worth it when I don't use the phone to consume media, browse the web much (maybe when I am not right near a computer, but that is it), or spend the day on social media apps. In decreasing order of importance, I need a phone that: makes phone calls, lets me text, acts as a hotspot, has GPS/maps for navigation, and a browser for the occasional quick search on the go. I don't need a Galaxy whatever or a phone with a ~6.5 inch display for that.
The Xperia Compact phones are a bit overpriced for what you get, but they are otherwise very high quality and nice to use. Every other phone I have seen with a ~4.5 inch display is rubbish (assuming you can even find a current year model, as that is getting to be more difficult), and every other decent phone nowadays is ~5.5 or larger.
I really hope they manage to stick around since they are servicing a part of the market nobody else seems to be interested in servicing.
Now just because light is in the terahertz range does not mean it's not radio.
I am not arguing that light is not radio. I am saying that "light detection and ranging radar" is not a thing, just like "American League NL" would be meaningless in the context of baseball. There is an American League (AL) and a National League (NL), but concatenating the two would be nonsensical.
How is important. In fact, it is probably more important than what.
For example, would you be OK with the state department of transportation awarding highway maintenance contracts based on who the current secretary's best friends were in college? Or should criminal sentences be "adjusted" based on sexual favors granted by or coerced from the defendant to the judge? Of course not. Those things are ridiculous. Yet, they have happened and they demonstrate the great need for transparency in so many functions of government.
But open government advocates fear they are being misused by public officials to conduct business in secret and evade transparency laws.
Before the digital age, the government employees would have meetings in person and just not write down what was said. That doesn't make restaurants and bars somehow complicit or instrumental in government officials' malfeasance.
Face it, there is generally a de facto expectation that private meetings and discussions in person are not automatically subject to transparency requirements. I mean, should a government official be required to record every single meal they have and with whom and what, if anything, was discussed?
Granted, there is a blurring of the lines with things like Twitter. Everyone wondered whether President Obama would blur that line, though he did a very good job separating himself from his personal social media presence once he became president. On the other hand, President Trump has not done the same and Hillary Clinton most definitely acted wrongly with her private email setup (she was not the only, but by far the most willful and egregious example). In any event, the discussion needs to be had because of the nature of social media and other technological means of communication.
A vote, on the floor, by the entire House - that actually passes. Until then, this is nothing more to the Net Neutrality cause than fruitless posturing.
You are conflating the sincerity of an individual with the inertia of a legislative body. This individual Rep and others no doubt will look at this and sincerely believe it is the right thing to do. The challenge will be if enough them do that overcome the inertia of the status quo.
Besides this is already more than Democrats have done to try to fix immigration.
Where "frowns" equals "has killed tens of thousands of people in the name of political correctness"
Which makes me wonder...
All the people upset about Trump in Helsinki, where were they when Obama was cozying up to Castro and reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba without so much a stern word about their appalling human rights practices?
Mozilla, one of Silicon Valley's greatest success stories
You're funny.
If you are not aware of the history, then it might seem somewhat humorous to consider them a great success story. However, Mozilla came out of the wreck that sank Netscape. As the WWW was fast becoming important to both businesses and the general public, they decided to stop rewrite their entire application. This strategic error allowed Microsoft completely dominate the WWW for the better part of a decade (go read Spolsky's Things You Should Never Do postings for a very insightful analysis of the whole thing). Recall the Use IE for best experience with this site and other such things that were common until even a few years ago.
Mozilla came from that, clawed their way back into the fight and today they are driver for practically every useful and interesting privacy-oriented feature in just about every web browser. Either because they first implemented or because the popularized it.
I cannot think of another company (Mozilla has both a non-profit arm and a for-profit corporation under the same umbrella) that has managed to rise from the ashes after being pulverized by Microsoft in the way that they (or really their predecessors) were.
I'm trying to think of what other possible purpose is served for it to have an electronic screen at all, and am coming up blank
Suppose you manage a large vehicle fleet, like UPS, FedEx or a large trucking company. Having something like this would be very handy as it would allow you integrate some handy location tracking, along with perhaps the ability to blank the plate if the vehicle is stolen (makes it it stick out more to law enforcement, for example). You already have to track your vehicle locations and something like this has the potential to simplify the whole operation since the DMV-registered plate identifier would automatically be associated with the device providing the location data. No need to manually enter things like plate identifiers into the fleet management software any longer.
People are going crazy about the price and privacy implications, but I cannot really think that the maker of this is targeting individuals. That would simply not make sense.
Google cloud isn't supposed to be enterprise grade? I bet that's news to google.
... it says that some robot shut them down when it detected "suspicious activity". No review was done, nobody at google called the customer, nothing.
Those two statements seem, at least to me, clearly contradictory. I can understand summarily shutting down a customer on a residential Internet connection, or a small business shared web hosting provider. However when providing an "enterprise grade" service, you should be prepared to give your customers the benefit of the doubt. About the only instances I can think of for an enterprise service to shut down a customer is if they are greatly exceeding their allocated resources and/or the activity associated with the customer is actively in the process of harming other customers. In both of those instances, though, the right thing to do is attempt to contact the customer first. Of course, if Google attempted to contact the customer and could not get a hold of him (perhaps because the contact person was listed as someone who has changed employ, or because their phone was off, etc.) we would not know that from this individual.
This is clearly 100% Google's fault.
Based on what we know, that seems like an accurate statement.
I came here to say essentially the same thing. Three letters come to mind: S....L....A....
If you do not have an agreement with the provider that indicates the measures they will take to restore service in the event of an outage, and the escalating penalties on the provider if they fail to restore service according to the agreement, then you really have no business running a revenue-generating production service with that provider. Or, you don't have a business at all, just a hobby.
Somewhere people can go when they have a solution designed in-house with documented requirements and are in need of a competent engineer(s) to assist with implementation. Where timelines and price estimates and rates are well defined and enforced. If they like me, and agree to the terms, we can proceed with the project -- expecting solid deliveries at each milestone....
Have you tried Ask Slashdot? Could you give it a shot and report back on how it works out for you?
If your code is so complex that you need significant amounts of work just to maintain it, you have done something wrong.
As with many things, it depends. If the code in question is a static HTML content generator, a GUI toolkit, a media streaming library, maybe a database driver, etc. then you are correct. However, if the code in question is a cryptography library, an authentication library, or an image processing library (a good one with lots of capabilities like ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick), then the domain will dictate a great deal of the complexity.
I have been involved in some security work and I can tell you that not all code is created equal. Some developers do a good job of making difficult code easy to work on, while others make easy code difficult to work on. Sometimes, it is just difficult and complex all around.
As far as software being too complex robbing users of the possibility of maintaining a fork, it cannot always be avoided. For example, as a developer, do you know the first rule of cryptography and authentication? Don't develop your own, because you will do it wrong. In cases like that, you want to go with a trusted library with a good reputation for security and you don't want to mess with it yourself. In domains like that, even the experts get wrong sometimes (go browse the CVE descriptions at MITRE if you don't believe me).
It logically stands to reason that one successful contract leads to another. This is google engineers taking a stand now before the company they work for becomes the next Raytheon making missiles we sell to the Saudis that wind up hitting Doctors Without Boarders sites in Yemen.
I hope you understand that prefacing the sentence with "It logically stands to reason" does not make the argument here any less of a slippery slope argument.
A slippery slope argument (SSA), in logic, critical thinking, political rhetoric, and caselaw, is a consequentialist logical device[1] in which a party asserts that a relatively small first step leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant (usually negative) effect.[2] The core of the slippery slope argument is that a specific decision under debate is likely to result in unintended consequences.
Your argument is literally a perfect textbook example of a slippery slope argument.
Now, if only we could have the same thing happen in our military, too, the world would be in a lot better shape.
I am going make a wild guess here: you completely lack perspective.
First, when people in the military do that sort of thing you describe (disobey lawful orders from superiors) there are typically disciplinary repercussions. Thankfully, the vast majority of people in the military obey their orders and the vast majority of those giving orders do so with great care and diligence for the law and regulations.
Of course, if you allow your opinion of the military to be dictated by the portrayals of Hollywood and what makes the news, you are likely to have an opinion like the one you seem to possess. That is, that most of the people in the military are scumbags with no regard for the law. Incidentally, if you allow Hollywood and news media to dictate your opinions of police, then you would consider all of them to be corrupt, and medical personnel are all incompetent, teachers are all drug dealers or child molesters, businesspeople are all greedy thieves, etc.
I urge you to grow up and get to know some military personnel, law enforcement personnel, medical professionals, etc. While most large organizations or populations tend to be microcosms of society at large, the populations of military, police, medical, educators, etc., tend to be held to much higher standards than society in general, whether it be by laws, professional organizations, their own internal processes, or society itself.
So, if you give the military the benefit of the doubt for a moment and you look at the issue to which those Google engineers objected, you will see that they basically acted like petulant children. Their refusal to work had to do with a capability that might have helped Google get more military contracts. That means that there was nothing to which they could point and say "we object to Google as a company or ourselves as individuals being asked to do this because it is immoral." Their objection was, "we do not like military contracts, we do not want Google to seek more military contracts, and therefore we refuse to do this work because it will make us more competitive for military contracts." Many businesses would fire employees who actively work to harm the company in such a way. In fact, being the Google is a publicly traded company, I am surprised that they did not do just that, because the executives are responsible to the shareholders for the financial performance of the company.
Now, if Google was specifically asked by the military to something that was morally questionable (which they have not), or if Google was on its own decide to do something morally questionable to win military contracts (which they have not), then the situation would be different.
Bedrock under Antarctica is rising more swiftly than ever recorded -- about 1.6 inches (41 millimeters) upward per year. And thinning ice in Antarctica may be responsible.
Given how my work days lately have seemed longer and longer, I was going to say that Earth is probably rotating more slowly and so assuming a more perfectly spherical shape.
We can test my hypothesis by measuring to see if there is a corresponding subsidence at the equator.
There is a reason why experiments carried out at Nazi concentration camps advanced medical knowledge in ways that are simply not possible when morality and life are respected in a manner to which we in modern society have become accustomed.
Replying to myself here.
As I thought about this some more, I realized that I left out the experiments by the US government at Tuskegee (infecting servicemen with Syphilis, as I recall), and the CIA experiments with LSD.
Come to think of it, there are enough examples out there of people in authority of some sort brutalizing other human beings for "good reasons" that it does not really seem to matter whether the Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham or not. No matter how you slice it, there are plenty of people out there willing to do terrible things.
Any study that actually removed the barriers between the guards and the inmates would be inherently immoral.
Which raises some interesting questions about advancing certain areas of medicine and science.
Vaccines are one example that immediately springs to mind. There are anti-vaxxers who are against the combined MMR vaccine. Supposing that someone wanted to go about studying that in a clinical trial, how would it be done morally? A typical medical clinical trial would involve a control group and one or more experimental groups. To preserve the integrity of the study, the recipients cannot feasibly know to which group they belong. Additionally, MMR is a childhood vaccine, so the parents would have to make the decision to participate on behalf of the child. Would our society tolerate a study where the parents voluntarily subject their children to a possibility of unknowingly what is essentially a required vaccine (required for the health of the individual child as well as the public health in general).
Another area might be studies of pain tolerance. It might be a bit different because that would be one where the participant makes a decision for himself or herself, but it would still be questionable.
Yet another is designer drugs which seem to be gaining popularity. I do not recall the specifics, but there was a recent case of a BioTech company founder that injected himself with some untested drug or some such that he had developed. As I recall, he died not long after. However, would his results have been considered valid if he had succeeded? I believe it is considered highly questionable from a medical ethics standpoint to experiment on yourself or someone to whom you are closely related.
There is a reason why experiments carried out at Nazi concentration camps advanced medical knowledge in ways that are simply not possible when morality and life are respected in a manner to which we in modern society have become accustomed.
I like to download my Javascript Framework and have it linked to the internal web-server.
That is not old school. It is the difference between being an amateur programmer and a professional software developer/engineer. To be clear, deploying anything meaninfgul into production based on drawing dependencies form a source which do not trust or directly control is an amateur move.
For anything more complex than school/hobby project, and for every professional project, I make it a point to ensure the stability and availability of the dependencies. In some cases that might be as simple as ensuring the libraries are available and suitable as is in the Linux distro package repo (I generally trust Debian, RHEL, and Suse for stuff like this). In the case where the packages are not available or they are only available from a potentially unreliable source (Fedora, NPM, CPAN, Maven central, RubyForge, etc.) I make sure to make a local copy (either stand up my own repository or incorporate the depednecny into source control directly). That way I can be assured that the dependency continues to be available to and working when I need.
Granted, doing that means that one accepts the burden/responsibility of keeping the depedency up to date and tracking the vendor/upstream security advisories. But then, that is why (good) software developers/engineers get paid well.
European regulations tend to be more common-sense, and less nanny-state than the US
So, could you direct me to a good memorabilia shop in Germany where I could purchase some old Wermacht pins?
Or what about domestic UK media coverage of the ongoing trial of the child grooming ring? Or better yet, domestic UK media coverage of the reporter that was arrested for covering the trial?
I think we have very different ideas of "common sense".
It's been years since I've seen a brick house, but strangely a lot of the new condo buildings in Seattle have brick facades on the first floor which seems like a problem.
I am not sure about how it works in Seattle, but I will bet that it is not structural brick they are using. I have seen some taller buildings (not single family homes) going up and the structural components are all steel it seems nowadays. The outer walls of the buildings are curtain walls. The Wikipedia article mentions stone veneer of marble, granite, etc, mounted on an aluminum honeycomb backing. A few years ago I saw one go up that hade some brick veneer, no more than an inch or two thick on a backing. It probably weighed nothing at all (relatively speaking with respect to full bricks), and if I understand the engineering correctly, those panels are attached to structural components in such a way that they would be quite resistant to motion, even that of an earthquake (assuming the building were properly engineered).
It appears that their payment processing was down too. So, not just retail customers with accounts at NAB, but also merchants who use them for payment processing were not able to accept payments. The article I read does not state that clearly, but the taxi patron seemed to complain that it was the inability of the cabbie to accept a card payment that was the problem, rather than that his own individual card did not work.
It sucks when you are the customer and the service fails, but moreso when you are the collateral damage.
A better question is why the NRA is so vehemently opposed to gun laws. You don't see the Auto makers campaigning against driver's licenses and insurance.
Maybe you don't see it because those are state level issues, while lots of firearm-related legistlation is national. Even state-level firearm-related legislation receives media attention because it is a political hot-button. What you do see folks like the NRA advocating for is the enforcement of current laws. The church shooter in Texas from some months ago comes to mind. The Air Force failed to report his convinction to the FBI, so he was never stopped from purchasing a gun. In fact, most new proposed legislation related to firearms would not help matters in any way that would not be helped by simply enforcing the existing laws.
My guess is they're worried stronger laws would bite into impulse buys.
Right, because gun makers are out there just hoping for people to make impulse buys. I think you don't understand how most businesses work. The ideal is to get repeat customers. If you make something consumable, like toothpaste or razors, you have a built-in incentive for people to buy more (it runs out). There is a certain amount of that with guns (ammunition). What they really want is for people to buy firearms, responsibly use them, then buy more in the future. However, the manufacturers know that bad publicity hurts their business. Just like what happened to the beef industry with Oprah. In fact, while we are guessing, I would bet that the marketshare of firearms purchased on impulse is approaching a rounding error compared to thoughtfully purchased firearms.
A coworker the other day went to buy a pistol for target shooting and home defense and go excited and walked out with an AR-15 and several boxes of ammo. His wife was pissed. If he'd had 7 days to think it over he'd have cancelled the order and settled for the $400 pistol over the $1000 AR-15.
Since cars kill far more people in the US than firearms every year, what would you think of a 7 day waiting period on the purchase of any sportscar?
Slashdot Mirror
Can machine-age law be applied fairly to rapidly developing technology? Is [printing a gun] the same as [manufacturing] it? Is he being strung out in a Kafkaesque nightmare as a warning to others? Some [government] officials concede that it's too late to keep [it] from spreading and say that intimidating distributors is the only way they can hope to deter code makers.
Those words were written in US News and World Report more than 23 years ago about the investigation into Phil Zimmerman for having given away PGP. Here is the real text (with the original words I changed in bold):
Can machine-age law be applied fairly to rapidly developing technology? Is putting software on a computer the same as exporting it? Is he being strung out in a Kafkaesque nightmare as a warning to others? Some intelligence officials concede that it's too late to keep cryptography from spreading and say that intimidating distributors is the only way they can hope to deter code makers.
I only had to change 8 words to make it a nearly perfect fit for the situation today.
I know it is fashionable to hate guns here, but the reality is that lots of bad people have guns and have a complete disregard for the law. So, ridiculous laws (we have plenty, just look at Washington DC and California) only serve to ensure that law abiding citizens cannot get guns. It is the same as it was for cryptography. Criminals were getting it and using anyway, only people who respect the law were actually harmed by the law.
As far as guns go, there are plenty of people who legitimately fear for their lives because of abusive relationships, living in bad neighborhoods, and countless other reasons. They need to be able to protect themselves because the police so often cannot or will not. There are lots of problems to fix, but more laws will not do the job when we so often fail to enforce the laws that we have now.
The Xperia Compact phones are the only decent size phones with decent specs. Larger phones are a colossal pain since dealing with the extra weight and size is not worth it when I don't use the phone to consume media, browse the web much (maybe when I am not right near a computer, but that is it), or spend the day on social media apps. In decreasing order of importance, I need a phone that: makes phone calls, lets me text, acts as a hotspot, has GPS/maps for navigation, and a browser for the occasional quick search on the go. I don't need a Galaxy whatever or a phone with a ~6.5 inch display for that.
The Xperia Compact phones are a bit overpriced for what you get, but they are otherwise very high quality and nice to use. Every other phone I have seen with a ~4.5 inch display is rubbish (assuming you can even find a current year model, as that is getting to be more difficult), and every other decent phone nowadays is ~5.5 or larger.
I really hope they manage to stick around since they are servicing a part of the market nobody else seems to be interested in servicing.
Now just because light is in the terahertz range does not mean it's not radio.
I am not arguing that light is not radio. I am saying that "light detection and ranging radar" is not a thing, just like "American League NL" would be meaningless in the context of baseball. There is an American League (AL) and a National League (NL), but concatenating the two would be nonsensical.
light detection and ranging radar known as LiDAR
LiDAR (or LIDAR, or lidar, etc.) = light detection and ranging
RADAR (or radar) = radio detection and ranging
"light detection and ranging radar" is not a thing.
HOW isn't important.
How is important. In fact, it is probably more important than what.
For example, would you be OK with the state department of transportation awarding highway maintenance contracts based on who the current secretary's best friends were in college? Or should criminal sentences be "adjusted" based on sexual favors granted by or coerced from the defendant to the judge? Of course not. Those things are ridiculous. Yet, they have happened and they demonstrate the great need for transparency in so many functions of government.
But open government advocates fear they are being misused by public officials to conduct business in secret and evade transparency laws.
Before the digital age, the government employees would have meetings in person and just not write down what was said. That doesn't make restaurants and bars somehow complicit or instrumental in government officials' malfeasance.
Face it, there is generally a de facto expectation that private meetings and discussions in person are not automatically subject to transparency requirements. I mean, should a government official be required to record every single meal they have and with whom and what, if anything, was discussed?
Granted, there is a blurring of the lines with things like Twitter. Everyone wondered whether President Obama would blur that line, though he did a very good job separating himself from his personal social media presence once he became president. On the other hand, President Trump has not done the same and Hillary Clinton most definitely acted wrongly with her private email setup (she was not the only, but by far the most willful and egregious example). In any event, the discussion needs to be had because of the nature of social media and other technological means of communication.
A vote, on the floor, by the entire House - that actually passes. Until then, this is nothing more to the Net Neutrality cause than fruitless posturing.
You are conflating the sincerity of an individual with the inertia of a legislative body. This individual Rep and others no doubt will look at this and sincerely believe it is the right thing to do. The challenge will be if enough them do that overcome the inertia of the status quo.
Besides this is already more than Democrats have done to try to fix immigration.
Where "frowns" equals "has killed tens of thousands of people in the name of political correctness"
Which makes me wonder ...
All the people upset about Trump in Helsinki, where were they when Obama was cozying up to Castro and reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba without so much a stern word about their appalling human rights practices?
Asking for a friend.
Mozilla, one of Silicon Valley's greatest success stories
You're funny.
If you are not aware of the history, then it might seem somewhat humorous to consider them a great success story. However, Mozilla came out of the wreck that sank Netscape. As the WWW was fast becoming important to both businesses and the general public, they decided to stop rewrite their entire application. This strategic error allowed Microsoft completely dominate the WWW for the better part of a decade (go read Spolsky's Things You Should Never Do postings for a very insightful analysis of the whole thing). Recall the Use IE for best experience with this site and other such things that were common until even a few years ago.
Mozilla came from that, clawed their way back into the fight and today they are driver for practically every useful and interesting privacy-oriented feature in just about every web browser. Either because they first implemented or because the popularized it.
I cannot think of another company (Mozilla has both a non-profit arm and a for-profit corporation under the same umbrella) that has managed to rise from the ashes after being pulverized by Microsoft in the way that they (or really their predecessors) were.
I'm trying to think of what other possible purpose is served for it to have an electronic screen at all, and am coming up blank
Suppose you manage a large vehicle fleet, like UPS, FedEx or a large trucking company. Having something like this would be very handy as it would allow you integrate some handy location tracking, along with perhaps the ability to blank the plate if the vehicle is stolen (makes it it stick out more to law enforcement, for example). You already have to track your vehicle locations and something like this has the potential to simplify the whole operation since the DMV-registered plate identifier would automatically be associated with the device providing the location data. No need to manually enter things like plate identifiers into the fleet management software any longer.
People are going crazy about the price and privacy implications, but I cannot really think that the maker of this is targeting individuals. That would simply not make sense.
Google cloud isn't supposed to be enterprise grade? I bet that's news to google.
... it says that some robot shut them down when it detected "suspicious activity". No review was done, nobody at google called the customer, nothing.
Those two statements seem, at least to me, clearly contradictory. I can understand summarily shutting down a customer on a residential Internet connection, or a small business shared web hosting provider. However when providing an "enterprise grade" service, you should be prepared to give your customers the benefit of the doubt. About the only instances I can think of for an enterprise service to shut down a customer is if they are greatly exceeding their allocated resources and/or the activity associated with the customer is actively in the process of harming other customers. In both of those instances, though, the right thing to do is attempt to contact the customer first. Of course, if Google attempted to contact the customer and could not get a hold of him (perhaps because the contact person was listed as someone who has changed employ, or because their phone was off, etc.) we would not know that from this individual.
This is clearly 100% Google's fault.
Based on what we know, that seems like an accurate statement.
I came here to say essentially the same thing. Three letters come to mind: S....L....A....
If you do not have an agreement with the provider that indicates the measures they will take to restore service in the event of an outage, and the escalating penalties on the provider if they fail to restore service according to the agreement, then you really have no business running a revenue-generating production service with that provider. Or, you don't have a business at all, just a hobby.
Somewhere people can go when they have a solution designed in-house with documented requirements and are in need of a competent engineer(s) to assist with implementation. Where timelines and price estimates and rates are well defined and enforced. If they like me, and agree to the terms, we can proceed with the project -- expecting solid deliveries at each milestone....
Have you tried Ask Slashdot? Could you give it a shot and report back on how it works out for you?
You think 'Big Oil' is a thing, like a group that holds meetings and makes decisions.
There was even a documentary about that selfsame group trying to influence US energy policy in the early '90s. They even had an official meeting.
If your code is so complex that you need significant amounts of work just to maintain it, you have done something wrong.
As with many things, it depends. If the code in question is a static HTML content generator, a GUI toolkit, a media streaming library, maybe a database driver, etc. then you are correct. However, if the code in question is a cryptography library, an authentication library, or an image processing library (a good one with lots of capabilities like ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick), then the domain will dictate a great deal of the complexity.
I have been involved in some security work and I can tell you that not all code is created equal. Some developers do a good job of making difficult code easy to work on, while others make easy code difficult to work on. Sometimes, it is just difficult and complex all around.
As far as software being too complex robbing users of the possibility of maintaining a fork, it cannot always be avoided. For example, as a developer, do you know the first rule of cryptography and authentication? Don't develop your own, because you will do it wrong. In cases like that, you want to go with a trusted library with a good reputation for security and you don't want to mess with it yourself. In domains like that, even the experts get wrong sometimes (go browse the CVE descriptions at MITRE if you don't believe me).
This isn't a 'slippery slope' argument.
OK
It logically stands to reason that one successful contract leads to another. This is google engineers taking a stand now before the company they work for becomes the next Raytheon making missiles we sell to the Saudis that wind up hitting Doctors Without Boarders sites in Yemen.
I hope you understand that prefacing the sentence with "It logically stands to reason" does not make the argument here any less of a slippery slope argument.
Here is the first part of the Wikipedia article:
A slippery slope argument (SSA), in logic, critical thinking, political rhetoric, and caselaw, is a consequentialist logical device[1] in which a party asserts that a relatively small first step leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant (usually negative) effect.[2] The core of the slippery slope argument is that a specific decision under debate is likely to result in unintended consequences.
Your argument is literally a perfect textbook example of a slippery slope argument.
Now, if only we could have the same thing happen in our military, too, the world would be in a lot better shape.
I am going make a wild guess here: you completely lack perspective.
First, when people in the military do that sort of thing you describe (disobey lawful orders from superiors) there are typically disciplinary repercussions. Thankfully, the vast majority of people in the military obey their orders and the vast majority of those giving orders do so with great care and diligence for the law and regulations.
Of course, if you allow your opinion of the military to be dictated by the portrayals of Hollywood and what makes the news, you are likely to have an opinion like the one you seem to possess. That is, that most of the people in the military are scumbags with no regard for the law. Incidentally, if you allow Hollywood and news media to dictate your opinions of police, then you would consider all of them to be corrupt, and medical personnel are all incompetent, teachers are all drug dealers or child molesters, businesspeople are all greedy thieves, etc.
I urge you to grow up and get to know some military personnel, law enforcement personnel, medical professionals, etc. While most large organizations or populations tend to be microcosms of society at large, the populations of military, police, medical, educators, etc., tend to be held to much higher standards than society in general, whether it be by laws, professional organizations, their own internal processes, or society itself.
So, if you give the military the benefit of the doubt for a moment and you look at the issue to which those Google engineers objected, you will see that they basically acted like petulant children. Their refusal to work had to do with a capability that might have helped Google get more military contracts. That means that there was nothing to which they could point and say "we object to Google as a company or ourselves as individuals being asked to do this because it is immoral." Their objection was, "we do not like military contracts, we do not want Google to seek more military contracts, and therefore we refuse to do this work because it will make us more competitive for military contracts." Many businesses would fire employees who actively work to harm the company in such a way. In fact, being the Google is a publicly traded company, I am surprised that they did not do just that, because the executives are responsible to the shareholders for the financial performance of the company.
Now, if Google was specifically asked by the military to something that was morally questionable (which they have not), or if Google was on its own decide to do something morally questionable to win military contracts (which they have not), then the situation would be different.
Bedrock under Antarctica is rising more swiftly than ever recorded -- about 1.6 inches (41 millimeters) upward per year. And thinning ice in Antarctica may be responsible.
Given how my work days lately have seemed longer and longer, I was going to say that Earth is probably rotating more slowly and so assuming a more perfectly spherical shape.
We can test my hypothesis by measuring to see if there is a corresponding subsidence at the equator.
There is a reason why experiments carried out at Nazi concentration camps advanced medical knowledge in ways that are simply not possible when morality and life are respected in a manner to which we in modern society have become accustomed.
Replying to myself here.
As I thought about this some more, I realized that I left out the experiments by the US government at Tuskegee (infecting servicemen with Syphilis, as I recall), and the CIA experiments with LSD.
Come to think of it, there are enough examples out there of people in authority of some sort brutalizing other human beings for "good reasons" that it does not really seem to matter whether the Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham or not. No matter how you slice it, there are plenty of people out there willing to do terrible things.
Any study that actually removed the barriers between the guards and the inmates would be inherently immoral.
Which raises some interesting questions about advancing certain areas of medicine and science.
Vaccines are one example that immediately springs to mind. There are anti-vaxxers who are against the combined MMR vaccine. Supposing that someone wanted to go about studying that in a clinical trial, how would it be done morally? A typical medical clinical trial would involve a control group and one or more experimental groups. To preserve the integrity of the study, the recipients cannot feasibly know to which group they belong. Additionally, MMR is a childhood vaccine, so the parents would have to make the decision to participate on behalf of the child. Would our society tolerate a study where the parents voluntarily subject their children to a possibility of unknowingly what is essentially a required vaccine (required for the health of the individual child as well as the public health in general).
Another area might be studies of pain tolerance. It might be a bit different because that would be one where the participant makes a decision for himself or herself, but it would still be questionable.
Yet another is designer drugs which seem to be gaining popularity. I do not recall the specifics, but there was a recent case of a BioTech company founder that injected himself with some untested drug or some such that he had developed. As I recall, he died not long after. However, would his results have been considered valid if he had succeeded? I believe it is considered highly questionable from a medical ethics standpoint to experiment on yourself or someone to whom you are closely related.
There is a reason why experiments carried out at Nazi concentration camps advanced medical knowledge in ways that are simply not possible when morality and life are respected in a manner to which we in modern society have become accustomed.
I like to download my Javascript Framework and have it linked to the internal web-server.
That is not old school. It is the difference between being an amateur programmer and a professional software developer/engineer. To be clear, deploying anything meaninfgul into production based on drawing dependencies form a source which do not trust or directly control is an amateur move.
For anything more complex than school/hobby project, and for every professional project, I make it a point to ensure the stability and availability of the dependencies. In some cases that might be as simple as ensuring the libraries are available and suitable as is in the Linux distro package repo (I generally trust Debian, RHEL, and Suse for stuff like this). In the case where the packages are not available or they are only available from a potentially unreliable source (Fedora, NPM, CPAN, Maven central, RubyForge, etc.) I make sure to make a local copy (either stand up my own repository or incorporate the depednecny into source control directly). That way I can be assured that the dependency continues to be available to and working when I need.
Granted, doing that means that one accepts the burden/responsibility of keeping the depedency up to date and tracking the vendor/upstream security advisories. But then, that is why (good) software developers/engineers get paid well.
European regulations tend to be more common-sense, and less nanny-state than the US
So, could you direct me to a good memorabilia shop in Germany where I could purchase some old Wermacht pins?
Or what about domestic UK media coverage of the ongoing trial of the child grooming ring? Or better yet, domestic UK media coverage of the reporter that was arrested for covering the trial?
I think we have very different ideas of "common sense".
It's been years since I've seen a brick house, but strangely a lot of the new condo buildings in Seattle have brick facades on the first floor which seems like a problem.
I am not sure about how it works in Seattle, but I will bet that it is not structural brick they are using. I have seen some taller buildings (not single family homes) going up and the structural components are all steel it seems nowadays. The outer walls of the buildings are curtain walls. The Wikipedia article mentions stone veneer of marble, granite, etc, mounted on an aluminum honeycomb backing. A few years ago I saw one go up that hade some brick veneer, no more than an inch or two thick on a backing. It probably weighed nothing at all (relatively speaking with respect to full bricks), and if I understand the engineering correctly, those panels are attached to structural components in such a way that they would be quite resistant to motion, even that of an earthquake (assuming the building were properly engineered).
The Reuters article is lacking details. news.com.au has a story with more details.
It appears that their payment processing was down too. So, not just retail customers with accounts at NAB, but also merchants who use them for payment processing were not able to accept payments. The article I read does not state that clearly, but the taxi patron seemed to complain that it was the inability of the cabbie to accept a card payment that was the problem, rather than that his own individual card did not work.
It sucks when you are the customer and the service fails, but moreso when you are the collateral damage.
A better question is why the NRA is so vehemently opposed to gun laws. You don't see the Auto makers campaigning against driver's licenses and insurance.
Maybe you don't see it because those are state level issues, while lots of firearm-related legistlation is national. Even state-level firearm-related legislation receives media attention because it is a political hot-button. What you do see folks like the NRA advocating for is the enforcement of current laws. The church shooter in Texas from some months ago comes to mind. The Air Force failed to report his convinction to the FBI, so he was never stopped from purchasing a gun. In fact, most new proposed legislation related to firearms would not help matters in any way that would not be helped by simply enforcing the existing laws.
My guess is they're worried stronger laws would bite into impulse buys.
Right, because gun makers are out there just hoping for people to make impulse buys. I think you don't understand how most businesses work. The ideal is to get repeat customers. If you make something consumable, like toothpaste or razors, you have a built-in incentive for people to buy more (it runs out). There is a certain amount of that with guns (ammunition). What they really want is for people to buy firearms, responsibly use them, then buy more in the future. However, the manufacturers know that bad publicity hurts their business. Just like what happened to the beef industry with Oprah. In fact, while we are guessing, I would bet that the marketshare of firearms purchased on impulse is approaching a rounding error compared to thoughtfully purchased firearms.
A coworker the other day went to buy a pistol for target shooting and home defense and go excited and walked out with an AR-15 and several boxes of ammo. His wife was pissed. If he'd had 7 days to think it over he'd have cancelled the order and settled for the $400 pistol over the $1000 AR-15.
Since cars kill far more people in the US than firearms every year, what would you think of a 7 day waiting period on the purchase of any sportscar?