What do you do to protect your employees interests in not having their own data annihilated by accident?
At my old job, we would highly recommend that employees take the option of using a company-issued Blackberry, which was just paid for directly and that the company didn't really care how you used as long as you weren't calling international with it or something; they even came with a generous data plan that, as far as I know, nobody ever managed to go over (not even the people who figured out (or were shown) how to tether their Blackberry to a laptop). That way, when you left the company and we issued a general "wipe everything on all external devices" command, you'd still have everything you wanted saved on your personal phone.
That's how. Work phone for work, personal phone for personal stuff. Yes it's clunky, but how is an automated system going to know "oh these files are from work and should be deleted, but those files are personal information that should be left alone"?
Bleh, I originally had Polish on there, but then I decided to Google it just to double check. What did I get?
CD Projekt announces that as of April 29, 2010, CD Projekt Czech S.R.O, a Prague-based company...
So I said Czech.
What was the rest of that sentence?
CD Projekt announces that as of April 29, 2010, CD Projekt Czech S.R.O, a Prague-based company, which operates in Czech Republic and Slovakia, and CD Projekt Magyarorszag KFT, Budapest-based company, which operates in Hungary, have changed ownership as a result of sale and are no longer part of the CD Projekt group.
CD Projekt is a Czech company, so it's entirely possible that the meaning of "torrent sneaking companies" got lost in the translation. I can think of a few ways you could identify the IP addresses of people downloading torrents without uploading any material yourself, so they might be using some of those.
Or, you know, they're a Czech company - copyright law doesn't mean the same thing over there as it does here*, so this may be above-board in certain countries.
There are those who are of the opinion that these leaks are costing lives of both Western and Middle Eastern Soldiers AND Citizens - and thus releasing this information to the public essentially gives it to our enemies who then use it against us.
And all they have is their opinion, because even the Department of Defense was forced to admit that the facts do not back that position.
So that's one leg of your dichotomy taken out. All that's left is that Wikileaks is doing a good thing. Funny, who would have thought that freedom of speech could actually work?
So? Who cares? If there ever was a use for Plato's noble lie, it's this. I'm spreading that shit around, because maybe it'll make people wake up a little bit.
Also: your chances of dying in a hijacking are something like one in a million or less. What are your chances of getting skin cancer from this device? If they're greater than one in a million (which is entirely possible), then it is not worthwhile to use these devices.
This is the same reason why the new breast cancer screening recommendations for women over age 50 say that they should get mammograms only once every two years, instead of once a year - the chances of detecting breast cancer are outweighed by the chances of causing breast cancer when you take a mammogram once a year.
Tribes is kinda sorta being remade - it's not really a Tribe remake so much as the clumsy, bastard offspring of Tribes and Planetside with some antlions mixed in for kicks. The in-game footage I've seen has none of Tribes' grace, though apparently there are some Tribes devs on the team so it might not turn out to be completely bad.
They're calling it Firefall, and I am prepared to be disappoint.
Well that's the thing, they're not even questioning him - just read the letter from Mr. Assange's attorney a couple of posts up. What's been happening is that the Swedish prosecutors, in contravention of good taste and (apparently) Swedish law, have been announcing "We're going to arrest Assange for rape!", and then not doing anything about it, not telling him what the charges are, and not bringing him in for questioning. They even said he was free to leave the country!
That's not the behavior of someone who wants to prosecute a criminal in the court of justice; if they had a case, they would fucking bring it, and Assange would go to jail for rape. This is the behavior of someone who wants to hang an innocent person in the court of public opinion.
You're talking about two different things here; the grandparent poster was talking about effective terrorists, and you're talking about real terrorists. What does that tell you?
Oh really? Pray tell, where does the submitter acknowledge the possibility that he's wrong? Was it when he titled his Slashdot submission "The story of my as-yet unverified impact crater"? Was it when he flat out stated that "Either the mother of all caves is down there, or a large object smashed into this place a long, long time ago"? Was it when he found some random lumps of metal that could literally have been from anything, and then named the picture "meteroid"? Was it when he asked an expert's opinion, and then flat out ignored it?
I think you are imputing far more modesty onto the submitter than he has actually shown. I mean I would love to be wrong about the submitter, I really would, but as far as I can tell all the evidence he has provided points to my conclusion and nobody else has said anything that points to a different one.
That sounds like work. The original submitter clearly prefers to spend his time tromping around in the pit collecting "weird metals" and "strange rocks that react to water" and making sensationalistic Slashdot posts over doing some actual science that would help him better understand the area he spent so much time in as a child.
Oh you're looking for gentle encouragement? I'm so sorry, this is Slashdot - we only offer abuse and Soviet Russia jokes. Oh and sharks with lasers on their heads. Okay, we offer three things...
As I said to a sibling poster: if this dude was actually looking to understand what is going on, he wouldn't be making up stories like this - he would be actually researching the area. Instead, he takes pictures of lumps of rock and names the image file "meteor"; he's clearly far more interested in telling a made-up story about the place than in actually doing the research and finding out what's happening there. I mean, really, more power to you if you want to do that - but don't demand that everyone else respect you for your made up bullshit, and refrain from pointing out how you're being dumb.
You might be right at most of your points but there is no need to talk an enthusiastic person down like that. I for one am glad that people who haven't even studied this matter take interest in their local area and try to find out what it actually is.
But that's the thing! He's not taking an interest! He's literally in the process of making up an urban legend.
I mean the parts are all there - "I've known about a place where weird stuff happens since I was a kid. I went to a well-established authority figure and he laughed me out of his office! Then I went back to the place where weird things happen and I found all sorts of strange artifacts! Oh my gosh! Tickets are $5 a person."
Seriously, give this guy another couple of years and he'll have found ancient Mayan ruins (nevermind the fact that the Mayans never came up here) complete with alien doohickies.
It's like this: taking an interest is looking at what's actually there. This guy is clearly only looking at what he wants to see. The overblown, sensationalist Slashdot summary is just a symptom of underlying delusions of mystery, and honestly fits perfectly with the generic urban legend narrative.
In fact, I bet you anything the geologist did absolutely nothing even remotely like laughing the poster out of his office - the poster e-mailed the geologist some pictures; physically being inside someone's office is a prerequisite for being laughed out of it, and honestly it doesn't work that at all if you interpret the sentence as a metaphor (I mean how do you know the geologist was laughing at you in an e-mail? Is it perhaps because at some level you know that your claims are, in and of themselves, laughable?). However, that phrase fit the story so perfectly we're expected to overlook this detail.
He pretty much laughed me out of his office, saying that it was a sinkhole. He did wish me luck, however. It may be sinkhole.
You know why he laughed you out of his office? Because you went in there saying "Look! I've got an as-yet undiscovered crater in my backyard! Or maybe it's a big cave or something!"
It makes you sound like some easily-impressed idiot who doesn't know the first thing about rocks, which is probably what you are - something that irregular and in soil that looks that soft is almost certainly not a crater. I mean, just compare it to a picture of an actual crater; they're nothing alike.
And then you go off about "oooh when I put water on these rocks they bubble!", like you've never heard of limestone (and it sounds like you probably haven't), and "I found weird lumps of metal!" like you've never heard of (oh I don't know) humans leaving shit around.
Seriously, you sound like the worst sort of credulous idiot. There's a reason why they say "ten hours in the lab will save you an hour in the library" - do some reading up on even the most basic geology first (and I mean fucking basic, not the awesome stuff like impact craters or mega sinkholes or what have you), then start telling people about how awesome it is. I'm sure that formation is, actually, very interesting - you don't get areas with (apparently) a lot of water and a lot of limestone without at least some neat stuff happening - but you don't need to start by making shit up!
There's a really good blog post here about why Wolfram Alpha is really hard to use. Fundamentally, the Alpha control interface tries to be intelligent; when it works, it's nice, but when it doesn't its output is not consistent. Unfortunately, because of this, you can't form a mapping between input -> output - in your example, for instance, you thought that "tensile strength of [whatever]" would give consistent results, so you formed a mapping in your head ("tensile strength of [whatever] results in the tensile strength of a material"). Then it turns out that this control mapping doesn't actually exist, which is incredibly frustrating.
Google, on the other hand, doesn't do any of that shit. You just get something that's kinda sorta like what you wanted. You don't expect anything beyond a certain probabilistic accuracy, so you don't form any control mappings beyond a general "if I search for [whatever] I'll get results related to [whatever]". When they do provide a control, it's very well defined; for instance searching for "site:[some site] [whatever]", which always work the way you expect it to.
Fundamentally, Google lets you build a model in your head of how their tool works, even if there's a gray unknown area where the results are; as an example, when you throw a ball, you have a mental model of how Newtonian physics works, so you have a general idea of where the ball is going to end up.
Alpha makes you think you're building a model, and then the model breaks somehow - like if when you threw a ball, it occasionally turned into a dove and crapped on you.
People don't like it when you break their models or crap on them.
Judging from the article, this amounts to some fairly rich integration with Wolfram Alpha.
Now why would it make sense to, in essence, turn Mathematica into a partially cloud-based application? Could it be because of all the millions of college students around the world who have pirate copies? Surely not!
Seriously! Just look at that thing's primary manipulation appendage at about 0:22 to 0:25 - the wrist is completely wrong, the hand is not the hand of a thing that has ever lived. It's just plain horrifying.
Faces are one thing, and a lot of researchers have focused on getting those really good, so as long as the thing isn't moving it's actually passable. Hands, however, seem to currently be completely unreproducible. (even in games! Most NPCs have what seem to be sticky blobs with tendrils on the ends of their arms, even in the most ultra-realistic recent games)
Really? When last I checked, terrorists were also attacking federal buildings, abortion clinics, and meat packing plants, right here in the United States. Worldwide, terrorists seem to be attacking markets, schools, government buildings, and so forth.
Actually I think you'll find that, by and large, terrorists aren't attacking anything in the USA. There have been no genuine terrorist attacks on the United States since 9/11 (I mean seriously, the underwear bomber? The shoe bomber? Those fuckers don't count), and before that not only was terrorism in the United States rare, it was largely domestic.
Honestly, I almost wish we had a real endemic terrorist threat, like the UK did or Isreal does - right now, our social immune system is going through a really nasty bout of allergies because it was exposed to a teeny little irritant, and we have no way of measuring the effectiveness of our countermeasures because nobody's testing them.
You do realize that there are other things teachers do outside of classtime, right? Like, say, meeting with parents, staff meetings (you know those things? The same kind of bureaucratic meetings you have in an office? Teachers have those too - they don't just disappear as soon as school ends), meeting with students, and of course someone has to run detention though you can grade during that.
And then you're assuming that it takes a trivial amount of time to grade homework. It seriously doesn't. Most classrooms nowadays are pushing 30 students. Assuming he teaches five periods worth of class per day, that's 150 pieces of homework to grade. Assuming each piece of homework takes two minutes to grade (tip: it doesn't*), that's a full five hours of grading to do once a week, again assuming there's only homework once a week (in a lot of classes it's assigned more often than that)
And then there's all of the bureaucratic busywork to do. There's all sorts of continuing education, advancing education (a lot of teachers are working on a masters in something or other, since free tuition somewhere is often one of the few perks of the job), and God only knows what else the administration comes up with.
And then, when you're done with all that, you need to go over your lesson plan for tomorrow one last time, just to try and teach them a little bit better.
*it probably averages more like five minutes even for simple math assignments - sure, marking something right is easy, and marking something wrong is easy, but what about partial credit? What about bad handwriting? These are kids who've just barely learned how to write a few years ago scribbling shit down in the few minutes between classes because they forgot to do it last night - it doesn't lead to legible handwriting
You forgot part of it - "to foreigners with money". When the government stops funding our universities, they have to look elsewhere for cash. It's not their fault that foreigners are willing to trade vast sums of money for the prestige of having an American education.
Slashdot Mirror
At my old job, we would highly recommend that employees take the option of using a company-issued Blackberry, which was just paid for directly and that the company didn't really care how you used as long as you weren't calling international with it or something; they even came with a generous data plan that, as far as I know, nobody ever managed to go over (not even the people who figured out (or were shown) how to tether their Blackberry to a laptop). That way, when you left the company and we issued a general "wipe everything on all external devices" command, you'd still have everything you wanted saved on your personal phone.
That's how. Work phone for work, personal phone for personal stuff. Yes it's clunky, but how is an automated system going to know "oh these files are from work and should be deleted, but those files are personal information that should be left alone"?
Bleh, I originally had Polish on there, but then I decided to Google it just to double check. What did I get?
So I said Czech.
What was the rest of that sentence?
That'll teach me to not to trust Google.
CD Projekt is a Czech company, so it's entirely possible that the meaning of "torrent sneaking companies" got lost in the translation. I can think of a few ways you could identify the IP addresses of people downloading torrents without uploading any material yourself, so they might be using some of those.
Or, you know, they're a Czech company - copyright law doesn't mean the same thing over there as it does here*, so this may be above-board in certain countries.
*cue ACTA lobbyist saying "Yet"
And all they have is their opinion, because even the Department of Defense was forced to admit that the facts do not back that position.
So that's one leg of your dichotomy taken out. All that's left is that Wikileaks is doing a good thing. Funny, who would have thought that freedom of speech could actually work?
Well, to be fair - it's kind of hard to become an experienced suicide bomber, if you're any good at it.
So? Who cares? If there ever was a use for Plato's noble lie, it's this. I'm spreading that shit around, because maybe it'll make people wake up a little bit.
Also: your chances of dying in a hijacking are something like one in a million or less. What are your chances of getting skin cancer from this device? If they're greater than one in a million (which is entirely possible), then it is not worthwhile to use these devices.
This is the same reason why the new breast cancer screening recommendations for women over age 50 say that they should get mammograms only once every two years, instead of once a year - the chances of detecting breast cancer are outweighed by the chances of causing breast cancer when you take a mammogram once a year.
Tribes is kinda sorta being remade - it's not really a Tribe remake so much as the clumsy, bastard offspring of Tribes and Planetside with some antlions mixed in for kicks. The in-game footage I've seen has none of Tribes' grace, though apparently there are some Tribes devs on the team so it might not turn out to be completely bad.
They're calling it Firefall, and I am prepared to be disappoint.
I was going to go for "... Microsoft EOLs Linux", myself.
Well that's the thing, they're not even questioning him - just read the letter from Mr. Assange's attorney a couple of posts up. What's been happening is that the Swedish prosecutors, in contravention of good taste and (apparently) Swedish law, have been announcing "We're going to arrest Assange for rape!", and then not doing anything about it, not telling him what the charges are, and not bringing him in for questioning. They even said he was free to leave the country!
That's not the behavior of someone who wants to prosecute a criminal in the court of justice; if they had a case, they would fucking bring it, and Assange would go to jail for rape. This is the behavior of someone who wants to hang an innocent person in the court of public opinion.
You're talking about two different things here; the grandparent poster was talking about effective terrorists, and you're talking about real terrorists. What does that tell you?
Browser? Who needs a browser? I just invoke piazzaparty from the command line.
Oh really? Pray tell, where does the submitter acknowledge the possibility that he's wrong? Was it when he titled his Slashdot submission "The story of my as-yet unverified impact crater"? Was it when he flat out stated that "Either the mother of all caves is down there, or a large object smashed into this place a long, long time ago"? Was it when he found some random lumps of metal that could literally have been from anything, and then named the picture "meteroid"? Was it when he asked an expert's opinion, and then flat out ignored it?
I think you are imputing far more modesty onto the submitter than he has actually shown. I mean I would love to be wrong about the submitter, I really would, but as far as I can tell all the evidence he has provided points to my conclusion and nobody else has said anything that points to a different one.
That sounds like work. The original submitter clearly prefers to spend his time tromping around in the pit collecting "weird metals" and "strange rocks that react to water" and making sensationalistic Slashdot posts over doing some actual science that would help him better understand the area he spent so much time in as a child.
Oh you're looking for gentle encouragement? I'm so sorry, this is Slashdot - we only offer abuse and Soviet Russia jokes. Oh and sharks with lasers on their heads. Okay, we offer three things...
As I said to a sibling poster: if this dude was actually looking to understand what is going on, he wouldn't be making up stories like this - he would be actually researching the area. Instead, he takes pictures of lumps of rock and names the image file "meteor"; he's clearly far more interested in telling a made-up story about the place than in actually doing the research and finding out what's happening there. I mean, really, more power to you if you want to do that - but don't demand that everyone else respect you for your made up bullshit, and refrain from pointing out how you're being dumb.
But that's the thing! He's not taking an interest! He's literally in the process of making up an urban legend.
I mean the parts are all there - "I've known about a place where weird stuff happens since I was a kid. I went to a well-established authority figure and he laughed me out of his office! Then I went back to the place where weird things happen and I found all sorts of strange artifacts! Oh my gosh! Tickets are $5 a person."
Seriously, give this guy another couple of years and he'll have found ancient Mayan ruins (nevermind the fact that the Mayans never came up here) complete with alien doohickies.
It's like this: taking an interest is looking at what's actually there. This guy is clearly only looking at what he wants to see. The overblown, sensationalist Slashdot summary is just a symptom of underlying delusions of mystery, and honestly fits perfectly with the generic urban legend narrative.
In fact, I bet you anything the geologist did absolutely nothing even remotely like laughing the poster out of his office - the poster e-mailed the geologist some pictures; physically being inside someone's office is a prerequisite for being laughed out of it, and honestly it doesn't work that at all if you interpret the sentence as a metaphor (I mean how do you know the geologist was laughing at you in an e-mail? Is it perhaps because at some level you know that your claims are, in and of themselves, laughable?). However, that phrase fit the story so perfectly we're expected to overlook this detail.
You know why he laughed you out of his office? Because you went in there saying "Look! I've got an as-yet undiscovered crater in my backyard! Or maybe it's a big cave or something!"
It makes you sound like some easily-impressed idiot who doesn't know the first thing about rocks, which is probably what you are - something that irregular and in soil that looks that soft is almost certainly not a crater. I mean, just compare it to a picture of an actual crater; they're nothing alike.
And then you go off about "oooh when I put water on these rocks they bubble!", like you've never heard of limestone (and it sounds like you probably haven't), and "I found weird lumps of metal!" like you've never heard of (oh I don't know) humans leaving shit around.
Seriously, you sound like the worst sort of credulous idiot. There's a reason why they say "ten hours in the lab will save you an hour in the library" - do some reading up on even the most basic geology first (and I mean fucking basic, not the awesome stuff like impact craters or mega sinkholes or what have you), then start telling people about how awesome it is. I'm sure that formation is, actually, very interesting - you don't get areas with (apparently) a lot of water and a lot of limestone without at least some neat stuff happening - but you don't need to start by making shit up!
There's a really good blog post here about why Wolfram Alpha is really hard to use. Fundamentally, the Alpha control interface tries to be intelligent; when it works, it's nice, but when it doesn't its output is not consistent. Unfortunately, because of this, you can't form a mapping between input -> output - in your example, for instance, you thought that "tensile strength of [whatever]" would give consistent results, so you formed a mapping in your head ("tensile strength of [whatever] results in the tensile strength of a material"). Then it turns out that this control mapping doesn't actually exist, which is incredibly frustrating.
Google, on the other hand, doesn't do any of that shit. You just get something that's kinda sorta like what you wanted. You don't expect anything beyond a certain probabilistic accuracy, so you don't form any control mappings beyond a general "if I search for [whatever] I'll get results related to [whatever]". When they do provide a control, it's very well defined; for instance searching for "site:[some site] [whatever]", which always work the way you expect it to.
Fundamentally, Google lets you build a model in your head of how their tool works, even if there's a gray unknown area where the results are; as an example, when you throw a ball, you have a mental model of how Newtonian physics works, so you have a general idea of where the ball is going to end up.
Alpha makes you think you're building a model, and then the model breaks somehow - like if when you threw a ball, it occasionally turned into a dove and crapped on you.
People don't like it when you break their models or crap on them.
Can you ever really "agree on" something with the company that is currently giving you the money that goes towards your rent?
Judging from the article, this amounts to some fairly rich integration with Wolfram Alpha.
Now why would it make sense to, in essence, turn Mathematica into a partially cloud-based application? Could it be because of all the millions of college students around the world who have pirate copies? Surely not!
It's a good story, but I could make up one just like it in five minutes.
So? If it fools Googlebot while still providing significant value to humans, then mission fucking accomplished.
Seriously! Just look at that thing's primary manipulation appendage at about 0:22 to 0:25 - the wrist is completely wrong, the hand is not the hand of a thing that has ever lived. It's just plain horrifying.
Faces are one thing, and a lot of researchers have focused on getting those really good, so as long as the thing isn't moving it's actually passable. Hands, however, seem to currently be completely unreproducible. (even in games! Most NPCs have what seem to be sticky blobs with tendrils on the ends of their arms, even in the most ultra-realistic recent games)
Actually I think you'll find that, by and large, terrorists aren't attacking anything in the USA. There have been no genuine terrorist attacks on the United States since 9/11 (I mean seriously, the underwear bomber? The shoe bomber? Those fuckers don't count), and before that not only was terrorism in the United States rare, it was largely domestic.
Honestly, I almost wish we had a real endemic terrorist threat, like the UK did or Isreal does - right now, our social immune system is going through a really nasty bout of allergies because it was exposed to a teeny little irritant, and we have no way of measuring the effectiveness of our countermeasures because nobody's testing them.
You do realize that there are other things teachers do outside of classtime, right? Like, say, meeting with parents, staff meetings (you know those things? The same kind of bureaucratic meetings you have in an office? Teachers have those too - they don't just disappear as soon as school ends), meeting with students, and of course someone has to run detention though you can grade during that.
And then you're assuming that it takes a trivial amount of time to grade homework. It seriously doesn't. Most classrooms nowadays are pushing 30 students. Assuming he teaches five periods worth of class per day, that's 150 pieces of homework to grade. Assuming each piece of homework takes two minutes to grade (tip: it doesn't*), that's a full five hours of grading to do once a week, again assuming there's only homework once a week (in a lot of classes it's assigned more often than that)
And then there's all of the bureaucratic busywork to do. There's all sorts of continuing education, advancing education (a lot of teachers are working on a masters in something or other, since free tuition somewhere is often one of the few perks of the job), and God only knows what else the administration comes up with.
And then, when you're done with all that, you need to go over your lesson plan for tomorrow one last time, just to try and teach them a little bit better.
*it probably averages more like five minutes even for simple math assignments - sure, marking something right is easy, and marking something wrong is easy, but what about partial credit? What about bad handwriting? These are kids who've just barely learned how to write a few years ago scribbling shit down in the few minutes between classes because they forgot to do it last night - it doesn't lead to legible handwriting
You forgot part of it - "to foreigners with money". When the government stops funding our universities, they have to look elsewhere for cash. It's not their fault that foreigners are willing to trade vast sums of money for the prestige of having an American education.