Perverts have been forcing it on children for thousands of years!
The sickness must stop!
Hitler studied to be a Catholic Priest.
Stalin studied to be an Orthadox Priest.
Almost everyone convicted of a violent crime in the US is religious. Worldwide, every single major terrorist incident was committed by religious people.
So again, if we are going to ban something for the good of everyone it should be the Bible, not comic books.
And Al Gore studied at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
With the advent of always-on internet connections and mobile devices with wi-fi, etc, plus easy to implement encryption, I wonder if we may not be far from being able to create something new, kind of like a cross of usenet and fido-net, but without the centralization that fido has with controlling nodes.
Design it so that each generator source get paid for what it generates and each consumer pays for what it takes, and can not get what is not there?
The only information needed is quantity produced vs. consumed, with a dumb port to release power flow upon demand to a request. If there is not enough to satisfy a request, nothing gets distributed.
Seems like this could be done easily with old technology in a way that would be more difficult to hack than new technology with everything run by centralized servers running complicated windows or unix OS's.
Just because you can do something does not mean it is a good thing to do. New technology for the sake of new technology is not in itself justification for that new technology. Unless it does something better or cheaper just being new is not enough. Increasing your vulnerability to a DOS attack does not seem to fit the idea of 'doing it better' to me.
so far as storage goes, yeah, that is a problem. But if enough people have reason to work on the problem, someone will come up with a solution, perhaps many solutions. Just having higher prices during peak usage, paid by consumers and paid to producers is an incentive. Right now that incentive does not really exist with our centrally controlled and regulated infrastructure.
This demonstrates the weakness of centralized power grids, like big hydro, big nukes, big coal, big solar arrays beaming power down to Earth, Big solar arrays covering the desert, or any other huge centralized 'answer' to our power generation problems. They are all vulnerable to DOS attacks or attacks on central points of weakness like power lines. It takes just one well crafted weapon, whether kinetic, EMP, radiological, chemical-explosive, cyber-viral-worm, etc., to plunge large populations into darkness and chaos.
Monolithic thinking leads to monolithic engineering, (not to mention monolithic politics), that concentrate your vulnerabilities and limit your flexibility in responding to problems.
Better to have many smaller, locally distributed sources. They make it far more difficult to attack them. Looks like Edison was right and Westinghouse was wrong. At least partially. Too bad we went with Westinghouse, at least so far as the centralized generator is concerned.
This is a challenge that evolution, free markets and democracy all respond to with good answers. Authoritarian structures like organized religions, socialism/communism and autocracy in general all respond poorly to.
This is also a vulnerability of the Internet, with its centralized DNS name servers. I wish I was knowledgeable enough to come up with a solution to that one.
...is a longstanding liberal tradition. Unless you know your action perfectly safe, you should be warned and even prevented from doing it. Why would anyone have a problem with this? What are you, some kind of expert?
I just tried to enter a word to find the definition and pronunciation, and saw that Wikipedia and wiki dictionary and all other sites are listed as potentially harmful.
So long as they fix it and leave places like the Discovery Institute and PETA with this warning, we should be OK.
Come on. Don't they know the reason we all listen to the half-hour-out-of-date traffic reports from the helicopter reporters is the same as why we watch Nascar and Indy car races? The chances of a crash and the anticipation of mayhem are the whole idea. Not to mention the cheesy chopper sound track they add.
This takes all that out of it. It guarantees a daily fender-bender on I-95 while drivers fiddle with the app. Whoop-de-doo.
Well, maybe if they keep the chopper sound effects.
These folks are in the perfect spot to offer colo hosting, data-processing and event site hosting for Girls Gone Wild, Shane's World and other college-age oriented pr0n producers.
They'll make a mint and the students can "work" their way through school without even leaving campus.
These kinds of proposals all ignore the potential damage that drivers do already, and yet seek to extend the ability to inflict that damage, without any increase in holding people accountable for that damage or misuse in general.
I used to teach driving, I know how bad many drivers are. I have also been hit by cars while riding my bicycle many times, and hauled away in an ambulance twice. The drivers never even got a ticket for running stop signs or failing to yield on a left turn, which were the causes of the two near-fatal "accidents".
A big part of the problem is that we perceive that driving is now so safe, with seat belts, air-bags, etc., we do not need to be concerned about it any more. Something Hans Monderman started to question: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html, with some success.
Drivers are also shielded from public reaction to bad behavior, behind sheet metal, glass, sound-proofing, which pedestrians are not. Ever notice how polite most people are when walking around? How often do you hear "pardon me", "Go ahead, you first" and other niceties between folks just walking around? Even in NYC I rarely ever see people give the finger or shout obscenities to between pedestrians. Between drivers, I se this all the time.
There is a quote somewhere that best safety feature in a car would be a steel spike sticking out of the steering wheel pointed directly at the drivers chest. I agree. If drivers actually faced the same likely hood of death and injury those outside the cars do, we would all be safer. At least after Darwin got caught up.
Trains, ships and planes are all safer than automobiles, yet we hold the drivers of automobiles to a far lower standard than we do the other three, while studiously ignoring the carnage autos cause.
If anything, we should make driving autos far MORE dangerous to the driver, to increase perceived danger, thereby increasing the caution drivers employ, at the same time raising the level of accountability to levels in proportion to the dangers autos represent when compared to other forms of transportation.
Make all cars convertibles, with open windows so that drivers are not shielded from public ridicule or anger when they do something stupid, require name and address posted on all cars just like is required for commercial vehicles. Wnat to be anonymous? Fine, hire a car and driver owned by someone else, that has that owners name and address on it, who in turn will be held responsible.
Get involved in a collision on a public road: Suspend all driving privileges until fault is assigned. Then continue the suspension for all at fault in proportion to that fault once assigned. Get involved in a fatal crash: Revoke all driving privileges for life for those found at fault.
Travel is a right, using a lethal machine to do so is not. Extending the ability to use that machinery by increasing perceived safety for the drivers, and shielding drivers from the consequences of misuse, without also holding people accountable for misuse will only make things worse.
...bullied from an early age in elementary and high school, that it seems normal in adult life. We even rationalize it and justify it.
Why else acquiesce to being treated differently under wage and hour laws, being segregated from the rest of the companies - often in a separate building with a substandard environment.
Being socially ostracized, over-worked, underpaid is just what we have come to expect.
For two, my main point, if you had read the post, was that Linux was too much work for most people.
For three. so far as small business server goes, you are bringing in another OS, a server os no less, to a post about desktop OS's. Nonsequiter.
For four, again if you had read my post, you would see that I HAVE used Linux for years, and found it lacking compared to windows, again for most users.
I have installed SLED, Fedora and Ubuntu on various PC's. I agree that Ubuntu is the farthest along in making Linux usable for the average person, but it is still not as easy as even win 3.1 was almost 20 or so years ago. I have had upgrades break things in the system, and things fail for no apparent reason, especially wireless.
When a Linux distro can work on any pc as robustly as WinXP does, then they will be ready for prime-time.
A couple of months ago I decided to try a Lenovo with Linux. I was shopping for a new laptop to replace an Hp ZD8000, which had dual boot Ubuntu/XP.
The Lenovo was very well done. SuSe worked perfectly as did everything installed. Even wireless! Heaven Forfend!
But the installation was very lean, having only the minimal software needed to run what was pre-installed, like open office, etc.
Video? Nope. Not a chance. and other things.
trying to figure out the required packages and configuration settings was way too much work. after a few days, including reinstalling it using the included disk, I bough a copy of XP from NewEgg and installed it over the SuSe.
I was able to get the various windows drivers directly from Lenovo, though I did have to get the first few using a different PC, as the LAN and wireless cards were not supported right on the XP disk. If I had a land line I could have used the modem, but I don't.
But with about an hour of searching and downloading I had everything working. Firefox, embedded and streaming video, MS Office as well as open office, wireless set up, Avast installed and downloading Windows updates to bring everything up to date. Which, by the way, broke nothing.
If I was going to order a bunch of machines for a corporate distribution, with Linux pre-installed, using a standardized, uniform set of add on software, with the machines so tightly locked down that users could not change ANYTHING, I would order a truckload of these Linux-T61's.
But for any other purpose, heck no.
I gave up on Linux after a couple years trying to use it, both dual boot on the HP, and solo on desktops. I even went about 6 months without booting Windows at home.
But Linux is not ready for use by anyone but serious hobbyists. For anyone that just wants something the works, choose Windows.
In Windows, everything works good enough on a clean install that you can boot up. Updates to the system software rarely if ever break something. drivers are available for everything. video, mice with more than 3 buttons, wireless, bluetooth, PIM manager software and syncing with a PDA all work.
You can NOT say that about Linux.
When you can, I'll take another look.
Call me in 5 years.
Re:federal law change, not unions, that's needed
on
Should IT Unionize?
·
· Score: 1
Not likely that our hourly rate would go down much at all. Plus, if they can't get free time out of us, they will either have to pay us for the extra time or hire more people to fill the slack. Increase in demand causes an increase in price, in this case wages. Or off-shoring, but I think it has been shown that off-shoring does not work very well in most cases.
Even if it did cause a decrease in wages, after decades of working in various industries, in and out of IT, I can tell you that managers will try to abuse employee time, union or not, over time or not.
It is the nature of the way things work in any hierarchical institution. Management puts pressure on lower management to do more with less, and closes it's eyes to how it is accomplished. The lower managers are usually not savvy enough to think of anything more than the simple solution of just piling on more work on fewer people.
I would rather get paid for every hour, even at a lower rate. At least there would be an incentive then for managers to NOT try to get free work hours out of us. There is no such incentive now.
Right now we IT workers are forced by federal law to offer an all you can eat for one price buffet to employers, whether we want to or not. As a result, the employers just try to eat up every minute of our time they can. Our only option is to do it, or change jobs.
In addition, is there any reason why IT, which is just a trade after all, and not much more creative that designing a plumbing or lighting system, should be treated differently under wage laws than other trades are?
Yes, IT is a trade. When you can get into it without licensing, or union credentials, with no advanced degree, with only on the job experience or at most a trade school certificate from the old Chubb or ITT institutes or theier like, it is a trade.
It should be treated the same as other trades.
The only reason i can see why it is not is the continuation of geek-hate from high school and college right on into public policy.
pay for every hour would just be revenge of the nerd writ in real life.
federal law change, not unions, that's needed
on
Should IT Unionize?
·
· Score: 1
The reason we in IT get abused with work hours is due to Federal law that exempts us from overtime payment.
No unions are needed, or even professional organizations.
All that is needed is to remove I.T. workers from the list of jobs that are exempt from the overtime wage laws.
As soon as employers have to pay for all those hours, the overtime will stop real fast.
A few years ago I was on an SAP conversion project. I calculated that if I have been paid straight time, never mind overtime, for all the extra hours I had logged, I would have been paid over $35,000, JUST FOR THAT YEAR, and the year wasn't over yet.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Only one, just below the Elephants.
It's all in there!
Perverts have been forcing it on children for thousands of years!
The sickness must stop!
Hitler studied to be a Catholic Priest.
Stalin studied to be an Orthadox Priest.
Almost everyone convicted of a violent crime in the US is religious. Worldwide, every single major terrorist incident was committed by religious people.
So again, if we are going to ban something for the good of everyone it should be the Bible, not comic books.
And Al Gore studied at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
I sense a pattern here...
With the advent of always-on internet connections and mobile devices with wi-fi, etc, plus easy to implement encryption, I wonder if we may not be far from being able to create something new, kind of like a cross of usenet and fido-net, but without the centralization that fido has with controlling nodes.
Since I swapped to all LED and CF lighting I have been able to downsize to chipmunks
Actually, I was thinking of both and conflated them.
Why control it centrally at all?
Design it so that each generator source get paid for what it generates and each consumer pays for what it takes, and can not get what is not there?
The only information needed is quantity produced vs. consumed, with a dumb port to release power flow upon demand to a request. If there is not enough to satisfy a request, nothing gets distributed.
Seems like this could be done easily with old technology in a way that would be more difficult to hack than new technology with everything run by centralized servers running complicated windows or unix OS's.
Just because you can do something does not mean it is a good thing to do. New technology for the sake of new technology is not in itself justification for that new technology. Unless it does something better or cheaper just being new is not enough. Increasing your vulnerability to a DOS attack does not seem to fit the idea of 'doing it better' to me.
so far as storage goes, yeah, that is a problem. But if enough people have reason to work on the problem, someone will come up with a solution, perhaps many solutions. Just having higher prices during peak usage, paid by consumers and paid to producers is an incentive. Right now that incentive does not really exist with our centrally controlled and regulated infrastructure.
This demonstrates the weakness of centralized power grids, like big hydro, big nukes, big coal, big solar arrays beaming power down to Earth, Big solar arrays covering the desert, or any other huge centralized 'answer' to our power generation problems. They are all vulnerable to DOS attacks or attacks on central points of weakness like power lines. It takes just one well crafted weapon, whether kinetic, EMP, radiological, chemical-explosive, cyber-viral-worm, etc., to plunge large populations into darkness and chaos.
Monolithic thinking leads to monolithic engineering, (not to mention monolithic politics), that concentrate your vulnerabilities and limit your flexibility in responding to problems.
Better to have many smaller, locally distributed sources. They make it far more difficult to attack them. Looks like Edison was right and Westinghouse was wrong. At least partially. Too bad we went with Westinghouse, at least so far as the centralized generator is concerned.
This is a challenge that evolution, free markets and democracy all respond to with good answers. Authoritarian structures like organized religions, socialism/communism and autocracy in general all respond poorly to.
This is also a vulnerability of the Internet, with its centralized DNS name servers. I wish I was knowledgeable enough to come up with a solution to that one.
If you did this on one of ATT's data plans, like Blackberry, I-Phone, PDA, etc, it costs $0.00048/KB. Sounds cheap till you multiply it out.
Guess I won't be using Netflicks over it, never mind games.
... ,a bit more like imitating a chicken:
bg-ARRRR!!! bg-bg-bg-ARRRRRRRR!!!!
into a negative term or is it still positive?
'Damn, whatever that guy gave me last week seems to be sponge-worthy, better go to the clinic'
'course, it'd go for guys too now...
'Damn girl, you're so hot you're Sponge-Worthy!'
...is a longstanding liberal tradition. Unless you know your action perfectly safe, you should be warned and even prevented from doing it. Why would anyone have a problem with this? What are you, some kind of expert?
I just tried to enter a word to find the definition and pronunciation, and saw that Wikipedia and wiki dictionary and all other sites are listed as potentially harmful.
So long as they fix it and leave places like the Discovery Institute and PETA with this warning, we should be OK.
IBM vindicated!
...the modern way.
After all, cakes are so analog.
Come on. Don't they know the reason we all listen to the half-hour-out-of-date traffic reports from the helicopter reporters is the same as why we watch Nascar and Indy car races? The chances of a crash and the anticipation of mayhem are the whole idea. Not to mention the cheesy chopper sound track they add.
This takes all that out of it. It guarantees a daily fender-bender on I-95 while drivers fiddle with the app. Whoop-de-doo.
Well, maybe if they keep the chopper sound effects.
but the real question is how many are registered to vote in Chicago?
"turn the page by swiping their finger across the screen" ...
Leaving smeary, Cheetos marks across my books.
Wait, that isn't really a change.
If I stop surfing pr0n will it detect that anomaly and halt my browser?
Will that crash my gnome desktop too?
Oh NO!
These folks are in the perfect spot to offer colo hosting, data-processing and event site hosting for Girls Gone Wild, Shane's World and other college-age oriented pr0n producers.
They'll make a mint and the students can "work" their way through school without even leaving campus.
Win-Win as far as I can see.
These kinds of proposals all ignore the potential damage that drivers do already, and yet seek to extend the ability to inflict that damage, without any increase in holding people accountable for that damage or misuse in general.
I used to teach driving, I know how bad many drivers are. I have also been hit by cars while riding my bicycle many times, and hauled away in an ambulance twice. The drivers never even got a ticket for running stop signs or failing to yield on a left turn, which were the causes of the two near-fatal "accidents".
A big part of the problem is that we perceive that driving is now so safe, with seat belts, air-bags, etc., we do not need to be concerned about it any more. Something Hans Monderman started to question: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html, with some success.
Drivers are also shielded from public reaction to bad behavior, behind sheet metal, glass, sound-proofing, which pedestrians are not. Ever notice how polite most people are when walking around? How often do you hear "pardon me", "Go ahead, you first" and other niceties between folks just walking around? Even in NYC I rarely ever see people give the finger or shout obscenities to between pedestrians. Between drivers, I se this all the time.
There is a quote somewhere that best safety feature in a car would be a steel spike sticking out of the steering wheel pointed directly at the drivers chest. I agree. If drivers actually faced the same likely hood of death and injury those outside the cars do, we would all be safer. At least after Darwin got caught up.
Trains, ships and planes are all safer than automobiles, yet we hold the drivers of automobiles to a far lower standard than we do the other three, while studiously ignoring the carnage autos cause.
If anything, we should make driving autos far MORE dangerous to the driver, to increase perceived danger, thereby increasing the caution drivers employ, at the same time raising the level of accountability to levels in proportion to the dangers autos represent when compared to other forms of transportation.
Make all cars convertibles, with open windows so that drivers are not shielded from public ridicule or anger when they do something stupid, require name and address posted on all cars just like is required for commercial vehicles. Wnat to be anonymous? Fine, hire a car and driver owned by someone else, that has that owners name and address on it, who in turn will be held responsible.
Get involved in a collision on a public road: Suspend all driving privileges until fault is assigned. Then continue the suspension for all at fault in proportion to that fault once assigned. Get involved in a fatal crash: Revoke all driving privileges for life for those found at fault.
Travel is a right, using a lethal machine to do so is not. Extending the ability to use that machinery by increasing perceived safety for the drivers, and shielding drivers from the consequences of misuse, without also holding people accountable for misuse will only make things worse.
...bullied from an early age in elementary and high school, that it seems normal in adult life. We even rationalize it and justify it.
Why else acquiesce to being treated differently under wage and hour laws, being segregated from the rest of the companies - often in a separate building with a substandard environment.
Being socially ostracized, over-worked, underpaid is just what we have come to expect.
Well, for one the T61 came with SLED, not Ubuntu.
For two, my main point, if you had read the post, was that Linux was too much work for most people.
For three. so far as small business server goes, you are bringing in another OS, a server os no less, to a post about desktop OS's. Nonsequiter.
For four, again if you had read my post, you would see that I HAVE used Linux for years, and found it lacking compared to windows, again for most users.
I have installed SLED, Fedora and Ubuntu on various PC's. I agree that Ubuntu is the farthest along in making Linux usable for the average person, but it is still not as easy as even win 3.1 was almost 20 or so years ago. I have had upgrades break things in the system, and things fail for no apparent reason, especially wireless.
When a Linux distro can work on any pc as robustly as WinXP does, then they will be ready for prime-time.
"Obvious troll is obvious."
Yes, you are.
A couple of months ago I decided to try a Lenovo with Linux. I was shopping for a new laptop to replace an Hp ZD8000, which had dual boot Ubuntu/XP.
The Lenovo was very well done. SuSe worked perfectly as did everything installed. Even wireless! Heaven Forfend!
But the installation was very lean, having only the minimal software needed to run what was pre-installed, like open office, etc.
Video? Nope. Not a chance. and other things.
trying to figure out the required packages and configuration settings was way too much work. after a few days, including reinstalling it using the included disk, I bough a copy of XP from NewEgg and installed it over the SuSe.
I was able to get the various windows drivers directly from Lenovo, though I did have to get the first few using a different PC, as the LAN and wireless cards were not supported right on the XP disk. If I had a land line I could have used the modem, but I don't.
But with about an hour of searching and downloading I had everything working. Firefox, embedded and streaming video, MS Office as well as open office, wireless set up, Avast installed and downloading Windows updates to bring everything up to date. Which, by the way, broke nothing.
If I was going to order a bunch of machines for a corporate distribution, with Linux pre-installed, using a standardized, uniform set of add on software, with the machines so tightly locked down that users could not change ANYTHING, I would order a truckload of these Linux-T61's.
But for any other purpose, heck no.
I gave up on Linux after a couple years trying to use it, both dual boot on the HP, and solo on desktops. I even went about 6 months without booting Windows at home.
But Linux is not ready for use by anyone but serious hobbyists. For anyone that just wants something the works, choose Windows.
In Windows, everything works good enough on a clean install that you can boot up. Updates to the system software rarely if ever break something. drivers are available for everything. video, mice with more than 3 buttons, wireless, bluetooth, PIM manager software and syncing with a PDA all work.
You can NOT say that about Linux.
When you can, I'll take another look.
Call me in 5 years.
Not likely that our hourly rate would go down much at all. Plus, if they can't get free time out of us, they will either have to pay us for the extra time or hire more people to fill the slack. Increase in demand causes an increase in price, in this case wages. Or off-shoring, but I think it has been shown that off-shoring does not work very well in most cases.
Even if it did cause a decrease in wages, after decades of working in various industries, in and out of IT, I can tell you that managers will try to abuse employee time, union or not, over time or not.
It is the nature of the way things work in any hierarchical institution. Management puts pressure on lower management to do more with less, and closes it's eyes to how it is accomplished. The lower managers are usually not savvy enough to think of anything more than the simple solution of just piling on more work on fewer people.
I would rather get paid for every hour, even at a lower rate. At least there would be an incentive then for managers to NOT try to get free work hours out of us. There is no such incentive now.
Right now we IT workers are forced by federal law to offer an all you can eat for one price buffet to employers, whether we want to or not. As a result, the employers just try to eat up every minute of our time they can. Our only option is to do it, or change jobs.
In addition, is there any reason why IT, which is just a trade after all, and not much more creative that designing a plumbing or lighting system, should be treated differently under wage laws than other trades are?
Yes, IT is a trade. When you can get into it without licensing, or union credentials, with no advanced degree, with only on the job experience or at most a trade school certificate from the old Chubb or ITT institutes or theier like, it is a trade.
It should be treated the same as other trades.
The only reason i can see why it is not is the continuation of geek-hate from high school and college right on into public policy.
pay for every hour would just be revenge of the nerd writ in real life.
The reason we in IT get abused with work hours is due to Federal law that exempts us from overtime payment.
No unions are needed, or even professional organizations.
All that is needed is to remove I.T. workers from the list of jobs that are exempt from the overtime wage laws.
As soon as employers have to pay for all those hours, the overtime will stop real fast.
A few years ago I was on an SAP conversion project. I calculated that if I have been paid straight time, never mind overtime, for all the extra hours I had logged, I would have been paid over $35,000, JUST FOR THAT YEAR, and the year wasn't over yet.
http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/regs/compliance/hrg.htm#8