I'm sorry to re-post the same comment from another story, but in this case it seems very apropos:
Agreed. As someone who's worked for the U.S. federal government, the amount of effort required to comply with various directives, even to accomplish the most basic of tasks, is maddening.
For example, suppose you needed to order some laptops for your developers, and some compilers as well. Private sector: 4 hours to shop around, and you'd have the order fulfilled in about 3 weeks. Most of that delay would be for custom builds of the laptops by Dell, HP, etc.
In the government: 20 man-hours gathering competitive bids from 3 vendors who agree to work under the pricing schedule your agency requires. 4 man-hours / 2 calendar days ensuring the order complies with Clinger-Cohen and Section 508 regulations. 20 man-hours / 2 calendar weeks getting permission to place the order from one approving authority. Another month going back-and-forth with another approving authority. Then the order gets placed.
The opportunity costs and labor costs associated with the effort and delays in getting s**t done in the federal government is mind-numbing. When feds get bashed for having, in some cases, more costly compensation packages than the private sector, there's one factor that rarely comes up in conversation: any competent software developer will demand a pay premium in exchange for putting up with this soul-sucking crap on a daily basis.
Agreed. As someone who's worked for the U.S. federal government, the amount of effort required to comply with various directives, even to accomplish the most basic of tasks, is maddening.
For example, suppose you needed to order some laptops for your developers, and some compilers as well. Private sector: 4 hours to shop around, and you'd have the order fulfilled in about 3 weeks. Most of that delay would be for custom builds of the laptops by Dell, HP, etc.
In the government: 20 man-hours gathering competitive bids from 3 vendors who agree to work under the pricing schedule your agency requires. 4 man-hours / 2 calendar days ensuring the order complies with Clinger-Cohen and Section 508 regulations. 20 man-hours / 2 calendar weeks getting permission to place the order from one approving authority. Another month going back-and-forth with another approving authority. Then the order gets placed.
The opportunity costs and labor costs associated with the effort and delays in getting s**t done in the federal government is mind-numbing. When feds get bashed for having, in some cases, more costly compensation packages than the private sector, there's one factor that rarely comes up in conversation: any competent software developer will demand a pay premium in exchange for putting up with this soul-sucking crap on a daily basis.
If you've put your/home directory in it's own partition, then it's straight-forward to avoid losing your personal data / settings when changing which version of Linux is installed.
But unfortunately, that also means that you'll have to tell Ubuntu's / Mint's installer that you're using a custom partitioning scheme. So you'll need to get a little more involved during the installation process than if you hadn't used a separate partition for your/home directory.
My laptop was dual-boot Win7 and Mint 12 (Ubuntu-based). What I noticed during installation / use:
1) Installed left me with an unbootable system. GRUB had the right menu items, but none worked. I needed to boot from the live Mint 13 installation CD, install a package for repairing the boot loader, and run the program that came with it. Worked pretty well, but not sure if it's fixed yet. And even now, I have two GRUB entries for Win7. Only the first one works.
2) Screen locking doesn't work, at least for me.
3) Sometimes when I log in, wifi is disabled. I have to manually enable it from the icon, then it works fine.
4) As with the previous release, the built-in installed for the proprietary ATI graphics driver didn't work. I had to manually download ATI's script for building the approPriate.deb packages, and install those. Not the end of the world, but a bit of a hassle. Prior to doing this, my desktop graphics worked okay, just slow as you'd expect from the open-source driver. I've got a Dell M6500 laptop, and the chip is a ATI FirePro m7740.
Anyway, maybe these things are fixed in the final release.
I believe you're mistaken in calling the parent a "sheltered fool".
We've suspended Habeus Corpus for anyone branded a terrorist. We've suspended the 4th Amendment any time the NSA wants to wiretap all phone traffic. We torture people. We have secret evidence in trials, which defense attorneys can't see. And National Security Letters can make it a crime to even talk about what the government is up to, even if it's illegal.
So we have a government capable of *exactly* what Iran did to this guy.
And if you're arguing that America isn't as bad because we don't to it as often, there are two points to be made. First, Bigby never talked about how the relative frequency of this kind of trial in the U.S. vs. Iran; just that the U.S. has done these things at least once in recent history. Secondly, given that our our handling of alleged terrorism is secret, none of us has real information on how often the U.S. conducts "trials" of the sort Iran did with this guy.
The problem is that if just one person acts on principle like you describe, he'll get the downsides of his protest but ultimately will be ineffective. I.e., irrational.
Boycotts need some particular critical mass to be effective.
Yes, but in this case, there's a cartell of grocery suppliers, and any store that wishes to sell groceries must hold up the the sign for 20 seconds. And if they don't, the U.S. government will kick in the doors with guns.
The issue is that their approach to security requires tracking every substance and object that enters the secure area.
This current bust demonstrates that for very small amounts of money, outside agents could get their packages into the secure area with very low risk of detection.
The net result is that literally billions of dollars, and probably several cases of cancer per year, were wasted. Because if drug dealers could do this, so could would-be terrorists.
Seriously, if companies were to get fined for every bad piece of code or stupid bobby tables vulnerability (obligatory xkcd reference), they would all go out of existence
Or they could slow down, and write less code, more carefully.
But there's an important distinction being made, and I think you're missing it:
You're arguing the every person with the authority to hire, regardless of whether or not he's aware of it, can have bias.
"rwven" gave a reasonable accounting of why, if there is bias going on, it's not clearly attributable to him. That is, if he gets very few female applicants, it's pretty reasonable that he hire few female employees.
Your argument appeals to a general psychological condition to which most of us may be subject. "rwven" points out that regardless of some potential he has for unintentional bias, he's not really getting a chance to exercise it, because whatever leads to fewer women than men in his line of business appears to be happening "upstream" from him.
It's actually worse than you suppose for many U.S. federal government employees. It's often so much work to fire them for incompetence, that they're just allowed to stay in their jobs. Although this varies from agency to agency within the government.
Agreed. However, this copyright issue can be decoupled from the other freedom issues. That is, I see no reason America couldn't drastically reduce copyright, while still retaining our other freedoms.
I believe this is a terrible indictment against our Congress.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry to re-post the same comment from another story, but in this case it seems very apropos:
Agreed. As someone who's worked for the U.S. federal government, the amount of effort required to comply with various directives, even to accomplish the most basic of tasks, is maddening.
For example, suppose you needed to order some laptops for your developers, and some compilers as well. Private sector: 4 hours to shop around, and you'd have the order fulfilled in about 3 weeks. Most of that delay would be for custom builds of the laptops by Dell, HP, etc.
In the government: 20 man-hours gathering competitive bids from 3 vendors who agree to work under the pricing schedule your agency requires. 4 man-hours / 2 calendar days ensuring the order complies with Clinger-Cohen and Section 508 regulations. 20 man-hours / 2 calendar weeks getting permission to place the order from one approving authority. Another month going back-and-forth with another approving authority. Then the order gets placed.
The opportunity costs and labor costs associated with the effort and delays in getting s**t done in the federal government is mind-numbing. When feds get bashed for having, in some cases, more costly compensation packages than the private sector, there's one factor that rarely comes up in conversation: any competent software developer will demand a pay premium in exchange for putting up with this soul-sucking crap on a daily basis.
And the Shire is named, prophetically, after sh!
And New Hampshire is named from the English county of Hampshire.
Agreed. As someone who's worked for the U.S. federal government, the amount of effort required to comply with various directives, even to accomplish the most basic of tasks, is maddening.
For example, suppose you needed to order some laptops for your developers, and some compilers as well. Private sector: 4 hours to shop around, and you'd have the order fulfilled in about 3 weeks. Most of that delay would be for custom builds of the laptops by Dell, HP, etc.
In the government: 20 man-hours gathering competitive bids from 3 vendors who agree to work under the pricing schedule your agency requires. 4 man-hours / 2 calendar days ensuring the order complies with Clinger-Cohen and Section 508 regulations. 20 man-hours / 2 calendar weeks getting permission to place the order from one approving authority. Another month going back-and-forth with another approving authority. Then the order gets placed.
The opportunity costs and labor costs associated with the effort and delays in getting s**t done in the federal government is mind-numbing. When feds get bashed for having, in some cases, more costly compensation packages than the private sector, there's one factor that rarely comes up in conversation: any competent software developer will demand a pay premium in exchange for putting up with this soul-sucking crap on a daily basis.
It's not quite that easy, AFAIK.
If you've put your /home directory in it's own partition, then it's straight-forward to avoid losing your personal data / settings when changing which version of Linux is installed.
But unfortunately, that also means that you'll have to tell Ubuntu's / Mint's installer that you're using a custom partitioning scheme. So you'll need to get a little more involved during the installation process than if you hadn't used a separate partition for your /home directory.
No, proper nerds enter their own creation when boot-strapping a PDP-8.
Thanks! That fixed it.
My laptop was dual-boot Win7 and Mint 12 (Ubuntu-based). What I noticed during installation / use:
1) Installed left me with an unbootable system. GRUB had the right menu items, but none worked. I needed to boot from the live Mint 13 installation CD, install a package for repairing the boot loader, and run the program that came with it. Worked pretty well, but not sure if it's fixed yet. And even now, I have two GRUB entries for Win7. Only the first one works.
2) Screen locking doesn't work, at least for me.
3) Sometimes when I log in, wifi is disabled. I have to manually enable it from the icon, then it works fine.
4) As with the previous release, the built-in installed for the proprietary ATI graphics driver didn't work. I had to manually download ATI's script for building the approPriate .deb packages, and install those. Not the end of the world, but a bit of a hassle. Prior to doing this, my desktop graphics worked okay, just slow as you'd expect from the open-source driver. I've got a Dell M6500 laptop, and the chip is a ATI FirePro m7740.
Anyway, maybe these things are fixed in the final release.
I believe you're mistaken in calling the parent a "sheltered fool".
We've suspended Habeus Corpus for anyone branded a terrorist. We've suspended the 4th Amendment any time the NSA wants to wiretap all phone traffic. We torture people. We have secret evidence in trials, which defense attorneys can't see. And National Security Letters can make it a crime to even talk about what the government is up to, even if it's illegal.
So we have a government capable of *exactly* what Iran did to this guy.
And if you're arguing that America isn't as bad because we don't to it as often, there are two points to be made. First, Bigby never talked about how the relative frequency of this kind of trial in the U.S. vs. Iran; just that the U.S. has done these things at least once in recent history. Secondly, given that our our handling of alleged terrorism is secret, none of us has real information on how often the U.S. conducts "trials" of the sort Iran did with this guy.
The problem is that if just one person acts on principle like you describe, he'll get the downsides of his protest but ultimately will be ineffective. I.e., irrational.
Boycotts need some particular critical mass to be effective.
Yes, but in this case, there's a cartell of grocery suppliers, and any store that wishes to sell groceries must hold up the the sign for 20 seconds. And if they don't, the U.S. government will kick in the doors with guns.
Not to be a curmudgeon, but does twitter really contribute anything to the world?
Most models are invalid in some regard. The trick is to know when you can live with the particular ways in which a given model is invalid.
The issue is that their approach to security requires tracking every substance and object that enters the secure area.
This current bust demonstrates that for very small amounts of money, outside agents could get their packages into the secure area with very low risk of detection.
The net result is that literally billions of dollars, and probably several cases of cancer per year, were wasted. Because if drug dealers could do this, so could would-be terrorists.
You don't need historical analysis. I've seen first-hand that buying a woman steak or lobster helps me reproduce.
Or they could slow down, and write less code, more carefully.
But there's an important distinction being made, and I think you're missing it:
You're arguing the every person with the authority to hire, regardless of whether or not he's aware of it, can have bias.
"rwven" gave a reasonable accounting of why, if there is bias going on, it's not clearly attributable to him. That is, if he gets very few female applicants, it's pretty reasonable that he hire few female employees.
Your argument appeals to a general psychological condition to which most of us may be subject. "rwven" points out that regardless of some potential he has for unintentional bias, he's not really getting a chance to exercise it, because whatever leads to fewer women than men in his line of business appears to be happening "upstream" from him.
What, precisely, is "the problem", in your view?
Beats the hell out of software development, too. I mean, at least you get to sleep all night.
It's actually worse than you suppose for many U.S. federal government employees. It's often so much work to fire them for incompetence, that they're just allowed to stay in their jobs. Although this varies from agency to agency within the government.
And Dick Cheney is once again hiding in an undisclosed location.
F16 shoots down space shuttle approaching White House!
Agreed. However, this copyright issue can be decoupled from the other freedom issues. That is, I see no reason America couldn't drastically reduce copyright, while still retaining our other freedoms.
I believe this is a terrible indictment against our Congress.
I never expected, in my lifetime, to wish I had some of the freedoms enjoyed by Chinese citizens.
Fair point. I didn't justify my conclusion with the one data point I offered up.
I have other reasons for making the broader generalization, but I didn't take the time to put them in my post. My mistake.