> Update: 09/26 20:03 GMT by KD : In the comments, anyaristow notes that this wasn't > the first such wedding; Rob Landly and Fade were married at Penguicon in 2007, with > Steve Jackson officiating and Eric Raymond as best man.
True; it was, however, the first such event at the Ohio LinuxFest. I missed the actual wedding, but at the End after Douglas McIlroy's closing keynote address, one of the organizers (I think it was Beth Eicher; I was sitting a little too far back to see) told everyone and cheers went up.
> As some have already pointed out here, blogs do still rely on the > professional journalism that comes out of newspapers and television > networks. Amateurs can't hope to have the access or clout that > professional organizations do, and locally we can't sit around > and hope that someone in the community will make it to every city > council meeting and write it up. If you've got a local journalism > buff who likes to blog and has the time, great. If you don't, you > need to get someone to do it, and that means paying them.
All true, but...
One problem is that many newspapers and television stations have stopped doing professional journalism. I agree that the work you're talking about is important; but in many markets the media no longer bother covering council meetings or other "non- sexy" stories.
They rely on the official record and just report on it if someone starts a fight or something.
A few reasons several major stories were broken by amateurs on the web in the last few years is because (a) the news organizations are jettisoning investigative and reporting staff in favor of "on-air personalities" and (b) they're getting a little too cozy with the powers that be in some very ugly areas.
During a lot of recent violent protests, the big media outlets had people on the scene...from whom no reports were filed, because they complied with official order to stay confined to their hotels. The reports came in from Twitter and other web outlets.
And the same thing holds true in the Western nations, where they don't ask tough questions or report on abuses because they need to protect the press passes and the sanctioned relationships that generate revenue streams.
> If advertising doesn't work then journalism needs new > revenue streams. Non-profits are one idea if they can get > enough grants and donations and whatnot.
Excellent point; NPR has been covering a lot of important stories in far greater depth than either the other radio, television, and print news outlets the last several years.
> A government service like the BBC and CBC is also an idea, > but probably won't go over very well in America.
Hard to say. It does feel like a relationship that can be abused much to easily.
> But I think journalism is very important to this country, > as important as health care and sanitation and all the > rest, and something will have to be done.
Agreed; I just like to point out that, contrary to what big media likes to pretend:
Journalism is defined by what you do, not the official credentials or the official offices or the official press passes. And a lot of the media outlets killed journalism in their organizations years ago as an unprofitable expense that distracts from the business of publication.
>...women most dislike about geeks is their lack of personal style/confidence
Confidence and style; also breadth and depth.
The grandparent suggested a motorcycle, but that's just one way to appear confident. Become competent in a few areas outside computer tech; learn and practice things that will give you confidence about your abilities.
Martial arts is one; as you progress, it naturally gives you more confidence. But so does softball and playing a musical instrument. Pick something(s) non-geeky. Try several to find out what you like.
If you are weak in conversational skills, spend time learning and practicing them. Don't overlook Dale Carnegie's books.
Also shift enough of your focus away from tech to be able to converse in some depth about subjects that appeal to non-geeks. That's the depth part.
Don't substitute one obsession for another. Be able to discuss a number of subjects in fair depth. That's the breadth part.
As you acquire greater conversational skills, you learn how to listen and learn from the conversations. You learn how to participate in discussions about subjects you don't know a lot about, because you demonstrate that you are willing and able to listen and learn.
As far as style, avoid the temptation to shortcut by adopting someone else's style; don't just copy someone. Learn a bit about what works for you, and what you're comfortable with.
A portly 5'6" man won't look good in the same style as a lean 6 footer, and he wont look good in the same styles as a 300 pound body-builder.
If you adopt suits and ties but aren't comfortable in them, it shows. Being comfortable, in clothes and situations, is part of being confident.
> 1.Set your send format to Plain Text other rational humans will thank you.
In some cases, "rational" might be strectching it. The IT staff recently spent the better of a full -day- twiddling our signature files. The -content- met corporate standards completely. We got critical emails saying the spacing was off, the fonts were wrong... nitpicky little b.s., down to the level of, "you have a 12 point gap between these two lines, it's supposed to be 9 points..."
> 2.Don't use word as your mail editor.
I agree, but I'm the only one in the company, I think.
> 3.This is optional but good for your own security, set the message display type to clear text.
Same as #1. Nitpicky formatting orders and rules. I would have to spend a ridiculous amount of time explaining to people why the formatting changed...
Yeah; right now at work, I often need to put SQL queries copied from the query window in SQL Server into an Outlook mail message; but Outlook doesn't support "Paste As..." so I get horrendously formatted RTF.
I keep a cygwin bash terminal open anyway, so I type:
> Young people need to be able to do stupid things > within a context of safety and forgetting in order to > learn about themselves and the world.
I have problem with this statement: which stupid things and what context of safety?
This was a burglary. What about rape? What about felonious assault resulting in permanent damage? What about repeated drunk driving convictions?
Some parents have let underage kids drink at home becuase it's "safer". Sometimes that has backfired, resulting in fatalities. What is the "safety" part of being in a school environment, which I would argue is far less safe than a parental home environment?
> If someone's every action will be on record for the > rest of their life, then they will feel unnecessary > pressure to stay neatly within the lines and remain > naive and unworldly for fear of the consequences.
That's an interesting assertion; I would want to see actual analysis of real-world data before I accept it as a proposition. But just to look at one point:
> If someone's every action will be on record for the > rest of their life....
I would agree that not everyone's every action should be on record for the rest of their lives, but the truth is, long before public databases and the internet, people's actions tend to be remembered if they are embarassing or illegal or unethical. You've never been able to pick and choose which parts of the public memory are preserved.
Anyone who in their forties and fifties is still called by a childhood nickname, or introduced to new people by their friends as "the guy I told you about, who got drunk and stripped naked in the quad, and we duct taped him to the statue of Thomas Jefferson" will understand what I mean.
> It would stifle their creativity, their adventurousness, > and consequently their outlook on the world and everything > affected by that.
I would suggest that neither "creativity", nor "adventurousness" is a universal good nor a universal bad. Some killers, rapists, assorted psychopaths sociopaths and assholes (the guys who created Enron, Bernie Madoff, the guys running AIG) are very creative. Any number of brutal criminals are adventurous. Those are not necessarily good things.
I would agree that creativity and adventurousness should be encouraged, within certain educational and parenting contexts. And even some business contexts.
But I would argue that indescrimate petty crimes (and serious crimes), drug and alcohol binging, and casual sex are not desirable nor should they be in these contexts.
Exactly; this is their moment to shine. They've been perfecting crippled operating systems for years. They have more experience than anyone in this area.
Primarily, I believe that is useful for sites that reset the password when you request it. Some do that and send you a new password, instead of looking it up. This is mostly if they encrypted it and discarded the original password. That way some random person is less likely to unset your password unexpectedly.
My bank uses similar logic, for an authorized computer designation. They track the computer I'm logged in from, and if I change computers, I have to click to email (or text message) a secondary key for that machine, to my previously registered email/cellphone.
I don't need to provide the secondary key if I'm logging in from the same computer as last time. But when I change computers, they invalidate the secondary key for the previous computer.
>...here in Denmark, you get to blow on a mobile device, if it shows up as drunk you are taken > to the hospital for a blood sample and only that blood sample will be used against you. > > Are only the mechanical readings being used in the US?
Note: IANAL. Typically, yes. There are a number of practical reasons for this, not the least of which is the difficulty is large cities of promptly transporting a drunk to a hospital, and getting the overworked staff to take a blood sample while the suspect is still intoxicated.
>> Can't it be assumed by virtue of the ads being placed >> on the site to begin with that the owner wishes they be shown?
> I imagine it can be so assumed. And can it not also be assumed by virtue of Adblock Plus > being loaded into a browser that the owner does not intend to grant that wish?
> I don't see the point of this at all. Adblock Plus asks me if I want it to display ads? Well... no. > No I don't. That's why I installed Adblock Plus in the first place. The clue's in the name. > My answer will be no, every single time. If it was ever going to be yes, I would have > whitelisted the site myself already.
I think that's the main thing driving this; you whitelist, so do I, so do others. Most people don't bother, -unless- the site breaks. Some sites lose revenue because people overblock.
The real problems I have with this are [1] the popup (I prefer non-instrusive notifications), and [2] the fact that there is no distinguishing the sites that show -intrusive-animated-flashy-bogus-bullshit- and those that just want you to view relatively benign ads for relatively benign products.
And certain ad providers I -always- want to block, regardless of the site displaying them. Others I don't.
> You can name a file anything you want and its content based md5 will stay the same. Also, you can rename a > jpeg to a.doc and the first 4 bits of the file will still reveal it as a jpeg. Every piece of modern > forensics software is capable of doing the above, and most do them automatically.
It's a bit silly, but since Word docs are OLE Compound Documents, you could write a -very- simple vbScript macro what would create a Word doc with the same name, doc extension. Then the script could embed the mp3 in the doc, save and close, and delete the mp3.
It would take a while to run, but it would make the file a true Word doc and still leave the mp3 trivially recoverable.
I would expect it would have a good, if not certain chance to prevent detecting the signatures.
> The association between Jews and money lending was formed in medieval Europe, well > after Islamic law was written. In medieval Europe, Jews were not allowed to own land, > or into most of the professions that were protected by guilds, so they found other > ways to make a living
IIRC, Catholics were in a similar position in Protestant nations and turned to the same ways of making a living.
Back people into a corner and they'll do what they feel they have to.
> Maybe developing software should require a license, or at least an independent review > before it is released.
Independent review is not something that the "intellectual property" types would tolerate. Consider how hard voting machine makers, the firms working on DRM, and all those "enterprisey" app makers fight to -prevent- any review.
As far as licensing goes, my big objection is that as things stand now, the folks granting the licenses would be the same folks I mentioned above. The lawmakers requiring licensing won't talk to the professional bodies that actually have standards; they'll grab the guy who's a friend of a friend. Someone whose knowledge of code begins and ends with a course in Dartmouth BASIC a couple of decades ago.
You bring up some real problems; I don't have the solutions, but I don't think licensing is either.
> Because they need to plug you into said basic cable system anyway. They don't have the hardware > to filter out their "basic" channels from any box with a live cable feed, so they just make it > part of the basic connection.
It's more than that, though. One of the big driving factors for bundles is the licensing. Nickelodeon and MTV are owned by the same company. Since revenues are ad-driven, if you want the kid's programming on Nickelodeon, you get force-fed all the garbage on the several MTV channels.
Many of the other channels also involve licensing restrictions. I once listened to a former cable company exec discuss it; it's not (entirely) that the cable firms won't sell individual channels; a big part is that the content providers won't license the content that way, at ANY cost.
> So we should break up the large banks, and replace them with an untold number of smaller, > local banks that each follow their own strategy ?
I didn't view the recommendation that way. I took it as meaning that radical experiments (like the experiments in home mortgage valuation that triggered the financial meltdown), should be performed by smaller, redundant entities. That would prevent experiments like this from taking down key "too big to fail" parts of the structure.
It would be okay for larger entities to experiment in this way, but only to the extent that they contain the risk to a small portion of the companies core business. Probably in one, smaller division.
> I declined to take the elective COBOL classes. > I knew enough about COBOL then to know that I > could not drag myself out of bed in the morning > to make a living with it.
COBOL also encourages "heroic" programming. At a shop I worked at, they were very disparaging of the new systems using relational databases, and proud of the mainframe COBOL stuff, because it never went down.
If you don't count the 4 times in one year a hardware failure caused critical business systems to go offline for 2 days to 3 weeks at a time while teams of COBOL coders used tools to manually delete and rebuild tables and indexes when various failures caused -extensive data corruption-.
And the corrupt data caused by operator errors in nightly batch processing.
And the recoding to fix a major financials bug that went undetected for 10 years until we compared the numbers on the external PC system.
You see, that was "normal operations." by contrast, when a network failure occurred and the relational systems we built went offline for 45 minutes, and data recovery was "re-run the job", -that- was a disaster caused by the "sloppy PC programmers and their tinkertoy PC systems."
COBOL's great stuff...if you like being paged at all hours to manually fix data.
Excellent advice. You can't use them for the purpose for which you originally acquired them; but alternate uses are excellent. I've got a smaller USB drive I keep some handy utilities on; sometimes from PortableApps.com (Windows), others are cygwin or linux versions of GNU utilities. All they have in common is that they are handy and don't require installation. Just run them off the thumb drive.
I'm sure there are lots of ways to use these devices; just not as you originally planned.
> They tried doing security the "correct" way with Vista, only for the loudmouths > of the world to run around telling everyone else that Vista sucked > because they kept getting "those damned prompts."
Can't agree.
"Correct" would be to plan security proactively. Vista UAC was entirely reactive. The "Correct" way of preventing a car accident is not to invest in the best, top of the line anti-lock brakes with the best computer technology to prevent collisions...it's to not follow the car ahead of you too closely.
Which is not to say that *nix is perfect. Merely that sudo is fundamentally different is requiring you to decide -before- running the install whether you want to escalate privileges.
Vista UAC waits until after you start the install and then throws up a message box, which users have already been conditioned to click "yes" on.
"Buy this [wotzit] for $20" is not the same request as "You can receive your free [wotzit] for only a $20 shipping fee". That's why scammers always use the second form; it's a loaded question.
> This isn't something that's going to be fixed. It's a design choice. > It's what the people - in all their infinite stupidity - want.
Also have to disagree. You -may- be right. But since the people - in all their stupidity - have never been given a fair choice, but only the chance to select from a few deliberately stacked options, the question is, in my view, still unanswered.
One potential workaround is to change the spelling of your name on the resume and application; use a middle initial, use your full first name or a shortened form; something like that.
There was a case I saw where someone who had the same name as someone on the no-fly list (very common name) used this to prevent recurring delays.
> "I'm the IT manager for a west coast design company that has > a small branch office in Beijing with 5 employees, a few > workstations and a couple of servers. Recently, it came to > my attention that the Beijing office has been routinely > installing and using pirated software on their computers -- > MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite, mostly....
If this is an actual branch office; owned by the US firm rather than a partner or other more complex arrangement, the US office is legally responsible for the activities of the Beijing office. Copyright law and, increasingly, Intellectual Property rights law, are internationally enforceable by treaty. Violations that occur in China can be taken to court in the US, and your office's assets seized, as I understand it. If MS or Adobe becomes aware of this, they can get damages from the US office, which may be heavy.
You became aware of this; you reported it to your superiors. If they choose to disregard this, consider two things: covering your own tail, and suggesting strongly that your superiors check the advisability of their decision with the company lawyers, and document this (and consider checking with your own attorney).
It has long been the rule under US law that US firms breaking US law in foreign countries "because everyone does it" can be dealt with by the DOJ. This is often applied in cases or bribery, but the precedent would also apply here.
I'm not a lawyer, so check these suggestions with one. Slashdot is not the best place for legal advice.
There's a good point there. I've been reading a lot lately about "managing upward". While Steve was doing a good job managing his relationships with his subordinates, maybe he was remiss in managing his relationship with his boss.
And, while one poster pointed out that Kelly's decision to hang tough after all the team says they'll leave with Steve is almost sure to bite her on the tail, a lot of managers who aren't bad managers or bad guys would make the same decision, based on the idea that the staff needs to realize once decisions are made, pressure isn't going to unmake them.
From the article, it does seem that Steve fumbled with respect to communicating with Kelly. He did have an obligation to communicate with her and help her to make her decisions with the best information possible.
>...IT is still the industry that refuses any form of > unionization. Everybody is too smart and too privileged > because of the technicality of what they do to see the > benefits of working together to make things better for us.
I have spoken with people who are trying to discuss the sense of forming IT unions, and with people who are representing organizations trying to unionize IT people.
They are two different groups. Many of the people in the first group are intelligent, rational, and legitimately worried about real problems that could be resolved by collective bargaining.
The people I have met from the second group; the folks saying "here is our group, join us" have ranged from the cluelessly optimistic to the hopelessly incompetent.
Note that I am specifically referring to those I, personally, have met. I'm not saying everyone falls into those categories; just everyone I have met.
The clueless optimists all represent new organizations; they have no real membership, no real history, and no real plan, but are sure that if we just work together, we have the power. How will we organize? They don't know. How will we compete with offshoring? They don't know. How do we need to proceed beyond recruiting IT workers and beginning to bargain? They don't know.
The hopeless incompetents all come from existing unions; the Communications Workers of America being the one from which I have met the most representatives. But others I have met have the same attitude.
I've spent a fair amount of time talking to them, asking questions. Here is a sample of the kind of conversation I've had:
CWA: Join our union; we'll stop offshoring and get you the compensation you deserve.
Me: I am concerned with Quality of life. IT people are expected to be on call and work long hours; what do you propose to do to reduce or eliminate this?
CWA: We will bargain for contractual definitions that will guarantee you more pay for on-call and double time for overtime hours.
Me: I don't want more pay, I want less hours and less (or no) on call, as does everyone I know. What can you do to reduce hours?
CWA: Nothing; it's not in our plan to reduce hours; we want to bargain for more money.
Me: What about what we want?
CWA: We don't care what you think you want now; when conditions get bad enough, you'll come crawling to us. We can wait. We don't need you, you need us.
================
If a Ford salesman offered to sell you a car you didn't want, at a price you didn't want to pay, and when you refused said, "we'll wait; when you get good and desperate, you'll crawl to us," you'd tell him to go to hell and no one would tell you you're wrong.
When union organizers do the same, the reaction I always hear is, "you're arrogant techie jerks and you'll come around; just you wait!"
I'm not pissed about guys trying to unionize IT. I think collective bargaining could be very beneficial. But I think the people trying to organize it -really- need to see that this is 2009, not 1936.
Trying to do all your bargaining based on (A) overtime pay for working ridiculous hours and (B) guaranteed jobs for doing shitty work stupidly instead of automating it, rather than improved quality of life, is a huge stumbling block in the attempt to unionize.
It's not that IT folks are too smart, too cool, too technical to unionize; it's that we want something no one is offering.
In addition to the point noted by one reply, that only males are legally required to register, Selective Service only tracks individuals young enough to serve as military recruits. While I registered with Selective Service at 18, they stopped maintining my information at 30.
The result is that they track only a relatively small minority of potential voters.
> Opening a closed but not locked door and entering a building without permission is still > against the law. It is called breaking and entering.
No, it's not. IANAL, but...
Opening a closed but not locked door and entering an evidently private residence is arguably "illegal entry." It's only "breaking" if you work to bypass locks.
Opening a closed but not locked door and entering a public building of any sort is an "oops." If you go to the bank and open the door and walk in after hours because someone forgot to lock the door, you've committed no crime (although you may have to defend yourself in court).
Slashdot Mirror
> Update: 09/26 20:03 GMT by KD : In the comments, anyaristow notes that this wasn't
> the first such wedding; Rob Landly and Fade were married at Penguicon in 2007, with
> Steve Jackson officiating and Eric Raymond as best man.
True; it was, however, the first such event at the Ohio LinuxFest. I missed the actual wedding, but at the End after Douglas McIlroy's closing keynote address, one of the organizers (I think it was Beth Eicher; I was sitting a little too far back to see) told everyone and cheers went up.
It was fun.
Good comments.
> As some have already pointed out here, blogs do still rely on the
> professional journalism that comes out of newspapers and television
> networks. Amateurs can't hope to have the access or clout that
> professional organizations do, and locally we can't sit around
> and hope that someone in the community will make it to every city
> council meeting and write it up. If you've got a local journalism
> buff who likes to blog and has the time, great. If you don't, you
> need to get someone to do it, and that means paying them.
All true, but...
One problem is that many newspapers and television stations have
stopped doing professional journalism. I agree that the work
you're talking about is important; but in many markets the
media no longer bother covering council meetings or other "non-
sexy" stories.
They rely on the official record and just report on it if
someone starts a fight or something.
A few reasons several major stories were broken by amateurs
on the web in the last few years is because (a) the news
organizations are jettisoning investigative and reporting
staff in favor of "on-air personalities" and (b) they're
getting a little too cozy with the powers that be in some
very ugly areas.
During a lot of recent violent protests, the big media outlets
had people on the scene...from whom no reports were filed,
because they complied with official order to stay confined
to their hotels. The reports came in from Twitter and other
web outlets.
And the same thing holds true in the Western nations, where
they don't ask tough questions or report on abuses because
they need to protect the press passes and the sanctioned
relationships that generate revenue streams.
> If advertising doesn't work then journalism needs new
> revenue streams. Non-profits are one idea if they can get
> enough grants and donations and whatnot.
Excellent point; NPR has been covering a lot of important
stories in far greater depth than either the other radio,
television, and print news outlets the last several years.
> A government service like the BBC and CBC is also an idea,
> but probably won't go over very well in America.
Hard to say. It does feel like a relationship that can be
abused much to easily.
> But I think journalism is very important to this country,
> as important as health care and sanitation and all the
> rest, and something will have to be done.
Agreed; I just like to point out that, contrary to what big
media likes to pretend:
newspapers != journalism
news programming != journalism
bigger budgets != better journalism
Journalism is defined by what you do, not the official
credentials or the official offices or the official press
passes. And a lot of the media outlets killed journalism
in their organizations years ago as an unprofitable
expense that distracts from the business of publication.
> ...women most dislike about geeks is their lack of personal style/confidence
Confidence and style; also breadth and depth.
The grandparent suggested a motorcycle, but that's just one way to appear confident. Become competent in a few areas outside computer tech; learn and practice things that will give you confidence about your abilities.
Martial arts is one; as you progress, it naturally gives you more confidence. But so does softball and playing a musical instrument. Pick something(s) non-geeky. Try several to find out what you like.
If you are weak in conversational skills, spend time learning and practicing them. Don't overlook Dale Carnegie's books.
Also shift enough of your focus away from tech to be able to converse in some depth about subjects that appeal to non-geeks. That's the depth part.
Don't substitute one obsession for another. Be able to discuss a number of subjects in fair depth. That's the breadth part.
As you acquire greater conversational skills, you learn how to listen and learn from the conversations. You learn how to participate in discussions about subjects you don't know a lot about, because you demonstrate that you are willing and able to listen and learn.
As far as style, avoid the temptation to shortcut by adopting someone else's style; don't just copy someone. Learn a bit about what works for you, and what you're comfortable with.
A portly 5'6" man won't look good in the same style as a lean 6 footer, and he wont look good in the same styles as a 300 pound body-builder.
If you adopt suits and ties but aren't comfortable in them, it shows. Being comfortable, in clothes and situations, is part of being confident.
Good tips, but a few comments:
> 1.Set your send format to Plain Text other rational humans will thank you.
In some cases, "rational" might be strectching it. The IT staff recently spent the better of a full -day- twiddling our signature files. The -content- met corporate standards completely. We got critical emails saying the spacing was off, the fonts were wrong... nitpicky little b.s., down to the level of, "you have a 12 point gap between these two lines, it's supposed to be 9 points..."
> 2.Don't use word as your mail editor.
I agree, but I'm the only one in the company, I think.
> 3.This is optional but good for your own security, set the message display type to clear text.
Same as #1. Nitpicky formatting orders and rules. I would have to spend a ridiculous amount of time explaining to people why the formatting changed...
grin ;>
Yeah; right now at work, I often need to put SQL queries copied from the query window in SQL Server into an Outlook mail message; but Outlook doesn't support "Paste As..." so I get horrendously formatted RTF.
I keep a cygwin bash terminal open anyway, so I type:
getclip | putclip
and then paste into Outlook.
Stupid Windows tricks; gotta love 'em!
> Young people need to be able to do stupid things
> within a context of safety and forgetting in order to
> learn about themselves and the world.
I have problem with this statement: which stupid things and what context of safety?
This was a burglary. What about rape? What about felonious assault resulting in permanent damage? What about repeated drunk driving convictions?
Some parents have let underage kids drink at home becuase it's "safer". Sometimes that has backfired, resulting in fatalities. What is the "safety" part of being in a school environment, which I would argue is far less safe than a parental home environment?
> If someone's every action will be on record for the
> rest of their life, then they will feel unnecessary
> pressure to stay neatly within the lines and remain
> naive and unworldly for fear of the consequences.
That's an interesting assertion; I would want to see actual analysis of real-world data before I accept it as a proposition. But just to look at one point:
> If someone's every action will be on record for the
> rest of their life....
I would agree that not everyone's every action should be on record for the rest of their lives, but the truth is, long before public databases and the internet, people's actions tend to be remembered if they are embarassing or illegal or unethical. You've never been able to pick and choose which parts of the public memory are preserved.
Anyone who in their forties and fifties is still called by a childhood nickname, or introduced to new people by their friends as "the guy I told you about, who got drunk and stripped naked in the quad, and we duct taped him to the statue of Thomas Jefferson" will understand what I mean.
> It would stifle their creativity, their adventurousness,
> and consequently their outlook on the world and everything
> affected by that.
I would suggest that neither "creativity", nor "adventurousness" is a universal good nor a universal bad. Some killers, rapists, assorted psychopaths sociopaths and assholes (the guys who created Enron, Bernie Madoff, the guys running AIG) are very creative. Any number of brutal criminals are adventurous. Those are not necessarily good things.
I would agree that creativity and adventurousness should be encouraged, within certain educational and parenting contexts. And even some business contexts.
But I would argue that indescrimate petty crimes (and serious crimes), drug and alcohol binging, and casual sex are not desirable nor should they be in these contexts.
(Got my asbestos shorts on...)
Exactly; this is their moment to shine. They've been perfecting crippled operating systems for years. They have more experience than anyone in this area.
Primarily, I believe that is useful for sites that reset the password when you request it. Some do that and send you a new password, instead of looking it up. This is mostly if they encrypted it and discarded the original password. That way some random person is less likely to unset your password unexpectedly.
My bank uses similar logic, for an authorized computer designation. They track the computer I'm logged in from, and if I change computers, I have to click to email (or text message) a secondary key for that machine, to my previously registered email/cellphone.
I don't need to provide the secondary key if I'm logging in from the same computer as last time. But when I change computers, they invalidate the secondary key for the previous computer.
> ...here in Denmark, you get to blow on a mobile device, if it shows up as drunk you are taken
> to the hospital for a blood sample and only that blood sample will be used against you.
>
> Are only the mechanical readings being used in the US?
Note: IANAL. Typically, yes. There are a number of practical reasons for this, not the least of which is the difficulty is large cities of promptly transporting a drunk to a hospital, and getting the overworked staff to take a blood sample while the suspect is still intoxicated.
>> Can't it be assumed by virtue of the ads being placed
>> on the site to begin with that the owner wishes they be shown?
> I imagine it can be so assumed. And can it not also be assumed by virtue of Adblock Plus
> being loaded into a browser that the owner does not intend to grant that wish?
> I don't see the point of this at all. Adblock Plus asks me if I want it to display ads? Well... no.
> No I don't. That's why I installed Adblock Plus in the first place. The clue's in the name.
> My answer will be no, every single time. If it was ever going to be yes, I would have
> whitelisted the site myself already.
I think that's the main thing driving this; you whitelist, so do I, so do others. Most people don't bother, -unless- the site breaks. Some sites lose revenue because people overblock.
The real problems I have with this are [1] the popup (I prefer non-instrusive notifications), and [2] the fact that there is no distinguishing the sites that show -intrusive-animated-flashy-bogus-bullshit- and those that just want you to view relatively benign ads for relatively benign products.
And certain ad providers I -always- want to block, regardless of the site displaying them. Others I don't.
> You can name a file anything you want and its content based md5 will stay the same. Also, you can rename a .doc and the first 4 bits of the file will still reveal it as a jpeg. Every piece of modern
> jpeg to a
> forensics software is capable of doing the above, and most do them automatically.
It's a bit silly, but since Word docs are OLE Compound Documents, you could write a -very- simple vbScript macro what would create a Word doc with the same name, doc extension. Then the script could embed the mp3 in the doc, save and close, and delete the mp3.
It would take a while to run, but it would make the file a true Word doc and still leave the mp3 trivially recoverable.
I would expect it would have a good, if not certain chance to prevent detecting the signatures.
> The association between Jews and money lending was formed in medieval Europe, well
> after Islamic law was written. In medieval Europe, Jews were not allowed to own land,
> or into most of the professions that were protected by guilds, so they found other
> ways to make a living
IIRC, Catholics were in a similar position in Protestant nations and turned to the same ways of making a living.
Back people into a corner and they'll do what they feel they have to.
> Maybe developing software should require a license, or at least an independent review
> before it is released.
Independent review is not something that the "intellectual property" types would tolerate. Consider how hard voting machine makers, the firms working on DRM, and all those "enterprisey" app makers fight to -prevent- any review.
As far as licensing goes, my big objection is that as things stand now, the folks granting the licenses would be the same folks I mentioned above. The lawmakers requiring licensing won't talk to the professional bodies that actually have standards; they'll grab the guy who's a friend of a friend. Someone whose knowledge of code begins and ends with a course in Dartmouth BASIC a couple of decades ago.
You bring up some real problems; I don't have the solutions, but I don't think licensing is either.
> Because they need to plug you into said basic cable system anyway. They don't have the hardware
> to filter out their "basic" channels from any box with a live cable feed, so they just make it
> part of the basic connection.
It's more than that, though. One of the big driving factors for bundles is the licensing. Nickelodeon and MTV are owned by the same company. Since revenues are ad-driven, if you want the kid's programming on Nickelodeon, you get force-fed all the garbage on the several MTV channels.
Many of the other channels also involve licensing restrictions. I once listened to a former cable company exec discuss it; it's not (entirely) that the cable firms won't sell individual channels; a big part is that the content providers won't license the content that way, at ANY cost.
> So we should break up the large banks, and replace them with an untold number of smaller,
> local banks that each follow their own strategy ?
I didn't view the recommendation that way. I took it as meaning that radical experiments (like the experiments in home mortgage valuation that triggered the financial meltdown), should be performed by smaller, redundant entities. That would prevent experiments like this from taking down key "too big to fail" parts of the structure.
It would be okay for larger entities to experiment in this way, but only to the extent that they contain the risk to a small portion of the companies core business. Probably in one, smaller division.
Anyway, that's how I read it.
Shirley; as in "Shirley you jest"
> I declined to take the elective COBOL classes.
> I knew enough about COBOL then to know that I
> could not drag myself out of bed in the morning
> to make a living with it.
COBOL also encourages "heroic" programming. At a shop I worked at, they were very disparaging of the new systems using relational databases, and proud of the mainframe COBOL stuff, because it never went down.
If you don't count the 4 times in one year a hardware failure caused critical business systems to go offline for 2 days to 3 weeks at a time while teams of COBOL coders used tools to manually delete and rebuild tables and indexes when various failures caused -extensive data corruption-.
And the corrupt data caused by operator errors in nightly batch processing.
And the recoding to fix a major financials bug that went undetected for 10 years until we compared the numbers on the external PC system.
You see, that was "normal operations." by contrast, when a network failure occurred and the relational systems we built went offline for 45 minutes, and data recovery was "re-run the job", -that- was a disaster caused by the "sloppy PC programmers and their tinkertoy PC systems."
COBOL's great stuff...if you like being paged at all hours to manually fix data.
Excellent advice. You can't use them for the purpose for which you originally acquired them; but alternate uses are excellent. I've got a smaller USB drive I keep some handy utilities on; sometimes from PortableApps.com (Windows), others are cygwin or linux versions of GNU utilities. All they have in common is that they are handy and don't require installation. Just run them off the thumb drive.
I'm sure there are lots of ways to use these devices; just not as you originally planned.
> They tried doing security the "correct" way with Vista, only for the loudmouths
> of the world to run around telling everyone else that Vista sucked
> because they kept getting "those damned prompts."
Can't agree.
"Correct" would be to plan security proactively. Vista UAC was entirely reactive. The "Correct" way of preventing a car accident is not to invest in the best, top of the line anti-lock brakes with the best computer technology to prevent collisions...it's to not follow the car ahead of you too closely.
Which is not to say that *nix is perfect. Merely that sudo is fundamentally different is requiring you to decide -before- running the install whether you want to escalate privileges.
Vista UAC waits until after you start the install and then throws up a message box, which users have already been conditioned to click "yes" on.
"Buy this [wotzit] for $20" is not the same request as "You can receive your free [wotzit] for only a $20 shipping fee". That's why scammers always use the second form; it's a loaded question.
> This isn't something that's going to be fixed. It's a design choice.
> It's what the people - in all their infinite stupidity - want.
Also have to disagree. You -may- be right. But since the people - in all their stupidity - have never been given a fair choice, but only the chance to select from a few deliberately stacked options, the question is, in my view, still unanswered.
One potential workaround is to change the spelling of your name on the resume and application; use a middle initial, use your full first name or a shortened form; something like that.
There was a case I saw where someone who had the same name as someone on the no-fly list (very common name) used this to prevent recurring delays.
> "I'm the IT manager for a west coast design company that has
> a small branch office in Beijing with 5 employees, a few
> workstations and a couple of servers. Recently, it came to
> my attention that the Beijing office has been routinely
> installing and using pirated software on their computers --
> MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite, mostly....
If this is an actual branch office; owned by the US firm rather than a partner or other more complex arrangement, the US office is legally responsible for the activities of the Beijing office. Copyright law and, increasingly, Intellectual Property rights law, are internationally enforceable by treaty. Violations that occur in China can be taken to court in the US, and your office's assets seized, as I understand it. If MS or Adobe becomes aware of this, they can get damages from the US office, which may be heavy.
You became aware of this; you reported it to your superiors. If they choose to disregard this, consider two things: covering your own tail, and suggesting strongly that your superiors check the advisability of their decision with the company lawyers, and document this (and consider checking with your own attorney).
It has long been the rule under US law that US firms breaking US law in foreign countries "because everyone does it" can be dealt with by the DOJ. This is often applied in cases or bribery, but the precedent would also apply here.
I'm not a lawyer, so check these suggestions with one. Slashdot is not the best place for legal advice.
There's a good point there. I've been reading a lot lately about "managing upward". While Steve was doing a good job managing his relationships with his subordinates, maybe he was remiss in managing his relationship with his boss.
And, while one poster pointed out that Kelly's decision to hang tough after all the team says they'll leave with Steve is almost sure to bite her on the tail, a lot of managers who aren't bad managers or bad guys would make the same decision, based on the idea that the staff needs to realize once decisions are made, pressure isn't going to unmake them.
From the article, it does seem that Steve fumbled with respect to communicating with Kelly. He did have an obligation to communicate with her and help her to make her decisions with the best information possible.
I don't do that very well, myself.
Personal opinions; take 'em or leave 'em.
> ...IT is still the industry that refuses any form of
> unionization. Everybody is too smart and too privileged
> because of the technicality of what they do to see the
> benefits of working together to make things better for us.
I have spoken with people who are trying to discuss the sense of forming IT unions, and with people who are representing organizations trying to unionize IT people.
They are two different groups. Many of the people in the first group are intelligent, rational, and legitimately worried about real problems that could be resolved by collective bargaining.
The people I have met from the second group; the folks saying "here is our group, join us" have ranged from the cluelessly optimistic to the hopelessly incompetent.
Note that I am specifically referring to those I, personally, have met. I'm not saying everyone falls into those categories; just everyone I have met.
The clueless optimists all represent new organizations; they have no real membership, no real history, and no real plan, but are sure that if we just work together, we have the power. How will we organize? They don't know. How will we compete with offshoring? They don't know. How do we need to proceed beyond recruiting IT workers and beginning to bargain? They don't know.
The hopeless incompetents all come from existing unions; the Communications Workers of America being the one from which I have met the most representatives. But others I have met have the same attitude.
I've spent a fair amount of time talking to them, asking questions. Here is a sample of the kind of conversation I've had:
CWA: Join our union; we'll stop offshoring and get you the compensation you deserve.
Me: I am concerned with Quality of life. IT people are expected to be on call and work long hours; what do you propose to do to reduce or eliminate this?
CWA: We will bargain for contractual definitions that will guarantee you more pay for on-call and double time for overtime hours.
Me: I don't want more pay, I want less hours and less (or no) on call, as does everyone I know. What can you do to reduce hours?
CWA: Nothing; it's not in our plan to reduce hours; we want to bargain for more money.
Me: What about what we want?
CWA: We don't care what you think you want now; when conditions get bad enough, you'll come crawling to us. We can wait. We don't need you, you need us.
================
If a Ford salesman offered to sell you a car you didn't want, at a price you didn't want to pay, and when you refused said, "we'll wait; when you get good and desperate, you'll crawl to us," you'd tell him to go to hell and no one would tell you you're wrong.
When union organizers do the same, the reaction I always hear is, "you're arrogant techie jerks and you'll come around; just you wait!"
I'm not pissed about guys trying to unionize IT. I think collective bargaining could be very beneficial. But I think the people trying to organize it -really- need to see that this is 2009, not 1936.
Trying to do all your bargaining based on (A) overtime pay for working ridiculous hours and (B) guaranteed jobs for doing shitty work stupidly instead of automating it, rather than improved quality of life, is a huge stumbling block in the attempt to unionize.
It's not that IT folks are too smart, too cool, too technical to unionize; it's that we want something no one is offering.
That's my opinion, anyway; take it or leave it.
In addition to the point noted by one reply, that only males are legally required to register, Selective Service only tracks individuals young enough to serve as military recruits. While I registered with Selective Service at 18, they stopped maintining my information at 30.
The result is that they track only a relatively small minority of potential voters.
> Opening a closed but not locked door and entering a building without permission is still
> against the law. It is called breaking and entering.
No, it's not. IANAL, but...
Opening a closed but not locked door and entering an evidently private residence is arguably "illegal entry." It's only "breaking" if you work to bypass locks.
Opening a closed but not locked door and entering a public building of any sort is an "oops." If you go to the bank and open the door and walk in after hours because someone forgot to lock the door, you've committed no crime (although you may have to defend yourself in court).