Microsoft ended up in hot water for tying a !@#$ing BROWSER to their operating system and everyone cheered for their defeat. If Apple's market share wasn't so comparatively small, they'd be torn to shreds by the DOJ over this.
If you know a famine is coming, clearly the first thing you should do is slaughter your own herds, plow through your fields with salt and drain your wells. Why wait or, you know, stock up? Krazy talk.
They've plastered the Pentagon with banners practically claiming they single-handedly brought down GhostNet when they were at best on the periphery of the rather large collection of organizations responsible for it.
The parents are usually the ones who barely got out of 9th grade, couldn't now pass the sixth and think they're more qualified to teach K-12, start to finish, than a dozen people who collectively have more years of tertiary education than said parents have walked the earth.
Besides, a major component of schooling is in fact/just being in school/ so you'll be, hopefully, a vaguely functional human being who can navigate all the various and sundry organizations of life and put up with all the other dysfunctional members of the species with a minimum quantity of blood spilling.
The problem is in what sort of crimes the people commit. We're/already/ giving [not so] nice cushy white boxes with 3 [also not so] hots and a cot to most of these people. We already structure our sentencing such that repeat behavior -- even very minor, nearly inconsequential to any other person, 'violations' -- locks them away for progressively longer periods of time.
The problem here is the terms are so heavily charged. You hear 'sociopath' or 'psychopath' and picture horrendous crimes. The reality is that this is already and will increasingly be applied to people who are ultimately little more than annoying and causing damage primarily to themselves and people like themselves, but what gets them locked up is damaging the moral superiority of people with whom they've never crossed paths before they go to business school where their pretermined nature magically becomes virtuous and society treats them with kid gloves instead of handcuffs.
The topic could be about summer heat and the angle of the earth relative to the sun and we'd still have to endure this tiresome, hackneyed thread. It's like having a constant supply of 6th graders proudly parroting their first science lesson as some great feat of mental prowess.
This is astroturfing. It is no accident that the South Capitol Metro station (beneath the U.S. House offices) in Washington DC is currently wallpapered with PRO-Cancer-Screening posters.
Considering a $100 test, a $1k treatment and a 5% actual frequency in the population, per $1K you're spending about $50k on +/+, $100K on -/- and an inconsequential amount on BOTH false positives AND false negatives.
HOWEVER, outside of that you have untested treatment, often prophylactic. This happens a lot with my insurance carrier. Diagnostic testing denied coverage almost 100%, treatment denied without diagnostic testing or overt presentation of symptoms. Now, given the same frequency, uncovered, untested conditions would account for about the same $50K in expenditure for +/+ and if just 10% opted to go ahead with treatment prior to becoming symptomatic, it would generate the same $100K in prophylactic treatment -- out of pocket. The false-negatives in that case become VERY cheap indeed, being, well, dead.
Yes, there are well meaning people there providing useful information, but in general it is an echo chamber of people caught up in the excitement who are VASTLY overestimating their positive contributions as much as they visciously disregard their potential to do extraordinary harm with mind numbing platitudes about freedom and revolution while accepting little, if any, risk or responsibility themselves. The egos are so jealously guarded to protect that sense of involvement that the constant astroturfing essentially by Haaretz is taken as the ne plus ultra of all factual sources on the topic and 99.9999% of the people taking it as practically Talmudic haven't the foggiest idea of the source save for seven-letter nickname.
Using that environment to engage in direct action is frightfully dangerous.
Nowhere in my statements did I discredit anyone. I've been in many of the threads over the last few days. I've read Tatsuma's rather extensive contributions. Many people on there have provided very insightful analysis.
However, as the moderators there have had to continuously deal with, there is a bandwagon effect that is driving many people to act without much regard to sometimes rather obvious consequences. DDOS'ing Iranian government servers being a prime example. Blindly setting up open proxies with little regard to security and following instructions of random strangers on the net with nothing but nicknames to go on.
That is extremely dangerous psychology and I've not seen nearly enough caution accompanying calls for action. We're not talking about marching in solidarity. We're talking about utterly green novices setting up potentially lethal botnets and engaging in activity that is illegal and could be interpreted as coordinated, destructive espionage. That is not something to brush off lightly with platitudes about freedom because everyone is getting off on the fervor of the moment.
You may not be sending guns or ammunition, but you may be helping point those guns.
If you want to help, join up with an organization of people who really know what the hell is going on and can in some reasonable way ensure you aren't actually helping the wrong side. Blindly doing something with no sense of context beyond high-minded platitudes is NOT the right thing to do. In fact, it's reckless.
The problem, of course, is that sites like Fark are full of well-intentioned people who do not really know the first thing about what is going on or what they really should do -- they just want to do something, anything they can think of to feel like they are helping, while not even being very sure of WHAT they are helping.
So, being net-savvy, they think that forwarding every piece of information they receive (with no way bar VERY few exceptions of vetting that information) is helping, when they could very likely be opening themselves up to being used for propaganda from just about any imaginable source -- including the Mousavi campaign which 99.9% of those trying to help didn't even know existed before last Thursday, much less know anything about what it really means. They just know it's not Ahmadinejad and that has to be just splendid, so anything masquerading as not-being-Ahmadinejad must be your new BFF in Iran.
This is incredibly dangerous.
The urge to help, be part of history and change the world is strong, but it is extremely easy to exploit. Unless you _really_ are actively involved and _know_ your contacts and know what the hell you are doing, you stand a very high chance of hurting instead of helping -- and, let's face it, with no risk of danger sitting at a computer terminal in the U.S. and blind faith that everything you do is helping the cause, considering the conflict, you could end up contributing to people being killed.
Our department is about a dozen people serving a few hundred. We negotiated with the rest of the company and got two tracks: that which can be done within 48 hours and that which must be negotiated as a longer-term project. Anything more critical than that has to be escalated by management. We have a proxy who filters the incoming tickets and eliminates direct "drive-bys" of people working the queues and throws back tickets that are not refined enough to finish inside two hours without further communication.
By enforcing quality on the requests, well defined triage and uniform turn-around windows, we've pretty well eliminated BOFH syndrome--on both sides--almost overnight. So far, everyone is happier and our queues empty about twice as fast.
For the vast, vast majority of 21st century humans, Turin and Tokyo are just names of far away places and if Jaywalking is any indication, they likely won't have heard much if anything about them either.
In highschool I went on a trip to France and Italy. The girl next to me, at the age of 17, had never been further than 30 miles from her home, and neither had her parents. As the plane was taking off, clutching her pillow in terror, she asked me where we were going first. When I told her "Paris," she became confused. She was certain we were going to see France first.
I imagine for her, up to that moment, the travel time of a 747-400 arriving in Paris from Los Angeles was about as meaningful as the travel time of a photon arriving from Proxima Centauri.
What is it with Apple products that when you have a criticism people smugly inform you that "you're doing it wrong," when the criticism is over the product smugly assuming "you're doing it wrong" and consequently doing it wrong itself.
Here: If I sell the satellite connection to begin with?
When you become the actual distributor of content. In all the other cases, you're essentially an apartment landlord renting furnished apartments with TV and VCR, but requiring the renters to establish their own cable accounts.
I have a GT Ultra with ATT for $62.98/month. I almost always go over 10GB/month and have never been charged an overage fee for data and I have never had my service cut off.
Having worked on a project where we considered using VISTA...the interface is truly god awful and coding MUMPS over CACHE doesn't offer a terribly attractive platform over which to attempt writing a user interface any actual practitioner is going to want to touch.
It's a thorough system, but it's just horribly unmanageable by anyone who isn't already deeply entrenched -- and getting end users to buy into an interface that barely passes as 1980's technology just isn't going to happen.
It also proves beyond a doubt that you could withstand an average length of association requiring the constant navigation of byzantine and plainly absurd, arbitrary and obstructing policies and procedures involving intensely egomaniacal petty infighting sadists and their droves of attendant sycophants competing for favor all the while being forced into insane and conflicting schedules designed explicitly to prevent you from accomplishing anything, yet degree in hand, you've proven that somehow you did and still had the composure to not get arrested at your commencement in a cathartic act of domestic terrorism.
Your average high-school dropout realizes this is insane and simply wanders off in frustration, but someone with a degree has been highly conditioned to see it as acceptable, normal human behavior...which, sadly, it is.
"I'd bet on a front organization with a vague but nice-sounding name."
Which would itself be subject to reporting requirements. There's a reason the site is called "open secrets." The buying and selling of political influence is done pretty openly in this country. When 3/4 of a billion dollars of campaign bribes are openly reported, it's pretty hair-splitting to start mincing over some speculative b.s. for which you have precisely zero direct evidence.
There's more value in political horsetrading than blatant palm greasing. If you're looking for conspiracies, don't waste your time looking at the books. Look at the legislation.
Given that 51% of your population generally gets to re-cast "your vote" as if it were theirs (regardless of if it's your entire state in a presidential election or your district for the House), yes, "your vote counts", but the value of that vote ultimately isn't necessarily what you intended. Say you're even vaguely left of center and living in the 6th district of Minnesota, how the hell could you consider that "your vote" counts when Michelle Bachmann is voting on your behalf?
Yeah, "your vote counts" in choosing your rep, but once that rep is chosen, your vote doesn't mean squat. With proportional systems, ten groups each representing 3% of the population suddenly give voice to 30% that are silenced in the US system -- and then those politicians and parties who are used to fighting only for the 2% margin they need to be first-past-the-post start having to actually listen to the other 98%, regardless of which side of center they find themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I am going to guess this had something to do with certain officials owing a favor or two to something relating to this:
"This short-range service is entirely separate from the wireless broadband being deployed throughout the county by Lightspeed."
Microsoft ended up in hot water for tying a !@#$ing BROWSER to their operating system and everyone cheered for their defeat. If Apple's market share wasn't so comparatively small, they'd be torn to shreds by the DOJ over this.
If you know a famine is coming, clearly the first thing you should do is slaughter your own herds, plow through your fields with salt and drain your wells. Why wait or, you know, stock up? Krazy talk.
They've plastered the Pentagon with banners practically claiming they single-handedly brought down GhostNet when they were at best on the periphery of the rather large collection of organizations responsible for it.
The parents are usually the ones who barely got out of 9th grade, couldn't now pass the sixth and think they're more qualified to teach K-12, start to finish, than a dozen people who collectively have more years of tertiary education than said parents have walked the earth.
Textbook cases of...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
Besides, a major component of schooling is in fact /just being in school/ so you'll be, hopefully, a vaguely functional human being who can navigate all the various and sundry organizations of life and put up with all the other dysfunctional members of the species with a minimum quantity of blood spilling.
The problem is in what sort of crimes the people commit. We're /already/ giving [not so] nice cushy white boxes with 3 [also not so] hots and a cot to most of these people. We already structure our sentencing such that repeat behavior -- even very minor, nearly inconsequential to any other person, 'violations' -- locks them away for progressively longer periods of time.
The problem here is the terms are so heavily charged. You hear 'sociopath' or 'psychopath' and picture horrendous crimes. The reality is that this is already and will increasingly be applied to people who are ultimately little more than annoying and causing damage primarily to themselves and people like themselves, but what gets them locked up is damaging the moral superiority of people with whom they've never crossed paths before they go to business school where their pretermined nature magically becomes virtuous and society treats them with kid gloves instead of handcuffs.
The topic could be about summer heat and the angle of the earth relative to the sun and we'd still have to endure this tiresome, hackneyed thread. It's like having a constant supply of 6th graders proudly parroting their first science lesson as some great feat of mental prowess.
Just take a cue from the Chinese
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSPEK2206820070710
This is astroturfing. It is no accident that the South Capitol Metro station (beneath the U.S. House offices) in Washington DC is currently wallpapered with PRO-Cancer-Screening posters.
Considering a $100 test, a $1k treatment and a 5% actual frequency in the population, per $1K you're spending about $50k on +/+, $100K on -/- and an inconsequential amount on BOTH false positives AND false negatives.
HOWEVER, outside of that you have untested treatment, often prophylactic. This happens a lot with my insurance carrier. Diagnostic testing denied coverage almost 100%, treatment denied without diagnostic testing or overt presentation of symptoms. Now, given the same frequency, uncovered, untested conditions would account for about the same $50K in expenditure for +/+ and if just 10% opted to go ahead with treatment prior to becoming symptomatic, it would generate the same $100K in prophylactic treatment -- out of pocket. The false-negatives in that case become VERY cheap indeed, being, well, dead.
Is it any wonder they are discouraging testing?
Yes, there are well meaning people there providing useful information, but in general it is an echo chamber of people caught up in the excitement who are VASTLY overestimating their positive contributions as much as they visciously disregard their potential to do extraordinary harm with mind numbing platitudes about freedom and revolution while accepting little, if any, risk or responsibility themselves. The egos are so jealously guarded to protect that sense of involvement that the constant astroturfing essentially by Haaretz is taken as the ne plus ultra of all factual sources on the topic and 99.9999% of the people taking it as practically Talmudic haven't the foggiest idea of the source save for seven-letter nickname.
Using that environment to engage in direct action is frightfully dangerous.
Nowhere in my statements did I discredit anyone. I've been in many of the threads over the last few days. I've read Tatsuma's rather extensive contributions. Many people on there have provided very insightful analysis.
However, as the moderators there have had to continuously deal with, there is a bandwagon effect that is driving many people to act without much regard to sometimes rather obvious consequences. DDOS'ing Iranian government servers being a prime example. Blindly setting up open proxies with little regard to security and following instructions of random strangers on the net with nothing but nicknames to go on.
That is extremely dangerous psychology and I've not seen nearly enough caution accompanying calls for action. We're not talking about marching in solidarity. We're talking about utterly green novices setting up potentially lethal botnets and engaging in activity that is illegal and could be interpreted as coordinated, destructive espionage. That is not something to brush off lightly with platitudes about freedom because everyone is getting off on the fervor of the moment.
You may not be sending guns or ammunition, but you may be helping point those guns.
If you want to help, join up with an organization of people who really know what the hell is going on and can in some reasonable way ensure you aren't actually helping the wrong side. Blindly doing something with no sense of context beyond high-minded platitudes is NOT the right thing to do. In fact, it's reckless.
The problem, of course, is that sites like Fark are full of well-intentioned people who do not really know the first thing about what is going on or what they really should do -- they just want to do something, anything they can think of to feel like they are helping, while not even being very sure of WHAT they are helping.
So, being net-savvy, they think that forwarding every piece of information they receive (with no way bar VERY few exceptions of vetting that information) is helping, when they could very likely be opening themselves up to being used for propaganda from just about any imaginable source -- including the Mousavi campaign which 99.9% of those trying to help didn't even know existed before last Thursday, much less know anything about what it really means. They just know it's not Ahmadinejad and that has to be just splendid, so anything masquerading as not-being-Ahmadinejad must be your new BFF in Iran.
This is incredibly dangerous.
The urge to help, be part of history and change the world is strong, but it is extremely easy to exploit. Unless you _really_ are actively involved and _know_ your contacts and know what the hell you are doing, you stand a very high chance of hurting instead of helping -- and, let's face it, with no risk of danger sitting at a computer terminal in the U.S. and blind faith that everything you do is helping the cause, considering the conflict, you could end up contributing to people being killed.
BE CAREFUL.
Our department is about a dozen people serving a few hundred. We negotiated with the rest of the company and got two tracks: that which can be done within 48 hours and that which must be negotiated as a longer-term project. Anything more critical than that has to be escalated by management. We have a proxy who filters the incoming tickets and eliminates direct "drive-bys" of people working the queues and throws back tickets that are not refined enough to finish inside two hours without further communication.
By enforcing quality on the requests, well defined triage and uniform turn-around windows, we've pretty well eliminated BOFH syndrome--on both sides--almost overnight. So far, everyone is happier and our queues empty about twice as fast.
For the vast, vast majority of 21st century humans, Turin and Tokyo are just names of far away places and if Jaywalking is any indication, they likely won't have heard much if anything about them either.
In highschool I went on a trip to France and Italy. The girl next to me, at the age of 17, had never been further than 30 miles from her home, and neither had her parents. As the plane was taking off, clutching her pillow in terror, she asked me where we were going first. When I told her "Paris," she became confused. She was certain we were going to see France first.
I imagine for her, up to that moment, the travel time of a 747-400 arriving in Paris from Los Angeles was about as meaningful as the travel time of a photon arriving from Proxima Centauri.
What is it with Apple products that when you have a criticism people smugly inform you that "you're doing it wrong," when the criticism is over the product smugly assuming "you're doing it wrong" and consequently doing it wrong itself.
That's like, META-smug or something.
most of the way over toward E, and the previous two letters were T-H, so I'm going to go ahead and make it an E.
That is the single most aggravating "feature" of the iPhone keyboard. To he'll with that ducking shot.
Allegedly.
At what point is it no longer legal?
Here: If I sell the satellite connection to begin with?
When you become the actual distributor of content. In all the other cases, you're essentially an apartment landlord renting furnished apartments with TV and VCR, but requiring the renters to establish their own cable accounts.
I have a GT Ultra with ATT for $62.98/month. I almost always go over 10GB/month and have never been charged an overage fee for data and I have never had my service cut off.
Coding "MUMPS over Cache" provides hooks to any kind of UI you'd care to create.
That's great, but it ceases to be an option when you want to implement a system inside one to five years, not five to ten.
Having worked on a project where we considered using VISTA...the interface is truly god awful and coding MUMPS over CACHE doesn't offer a terribly attractive platform over which to attempt writing a user interface any actual practitioner is going to want to touch.
It's a thorough system, but it's just horribly unmanageable by anyone who isn't already deeply entrenched -- and getting end users to buy into an interface that barely passes as 1980's technology just isn't going to happen.
It also proves beyond a doubt that you could withstand an average length of association requiring the constant navigation of byzantine and plainly absurd, arbitrary and obstructing policies and procedures involving intensely egomaniacal petty infighting sadists and their droves of attendant sycophants competing for favor all the while being forced into insane and conflicting schedules designed explicitly to prevent you from accomplishing anything, yet degree in hand, you've proven that somehow you did and still had the composure to not get arrested at your commencement in a cathartic act of domestic terrorism.
Your average high-school dropout realizes this is insane and simply wanders off in frustration, but someone with a degree has been highly conditioned to see it as acceptable, normal human behavior...which, sadly, it is.
"I'd bet on a front organization with a vague but nice-sounding name."
Which would itself be subject to reporting requirements. There's a reason the site is called "open secrets." The buying and selling of political influence is done pretty openly in this country. When 3/4 of a billion dollars of campaign bribes are openly reported, it's pretty hair-splitting to start mincing over some speculative b.s. for which you have precisely zero direct evidence.
There's more value in political horsetrading than blatant palm greasing. If you're looking for conspiracies, don't waste your time looking at the books. Look at the legislation.
Given that 51% of your population generally gets to re-cast "your vote" as if it were theirs (regardless of if it's your entire state in a presidential election or your district for the House), yes, "your vote counts", but the value of that vote ultimately isn't necessarily what you intended. Say you're even vaguely left of center and living in the 6th district of Minnesota, how the hell could you consider that "your vote" counts when Michelle Bachmann is voting on your behalf?
Yeah, "your vote counts" in choosing your rep, but once that rep is chosen, your vote doesn't mean squat. With proportional systems, ten groups each representing 3% of the population suddenly give voice to 30% that are silenced in the US system -- and then those politicians and parties who are used to fighting only for the 2% margin they need to be first-past-the-post start having to actually listen to the other 98%, regardless of which side of center they find themselves.