I ran into this with writing, and it made a large difference. For most of my elementary years, I dreaded writing essays. Every time one was assigned, the teacher explained it like I was being given a chore of some sort.
Then, a little later in my schooling (fifth grade) someone asked me to write something outside of school unrelated to any assignments and I discovered I like writing. Since then, I was never bothered by essays. A similar thing applied to reading for me, and still does to some extent.
I'm naturally a writer and reader, but the point is still important to remember: Never tell kids work is going to be hard, they will believe you.
You know, I'm really getting irritated over the outrage I'm seeing against VOLUNTARY web services. Personally I don't have a problem with using Gmail when it's available, nor do I care of Amazon tracks my searches if it makes for a better and more efficient web experience.
People are going crazy over this stuff, but they forget the fact that these services are not required. If you're paranoid and concerned that Google and Amazon are going to sell you down the river, don't use it! It's that simple.
The outrage is as much about our society accepting this as it is about the service in-and-of itself. People see, quite rightly, a dangerous slide in our society towards people losing all of their privacy. Eternal vigilance is the only way that such things are prevented. In this case, perhaps people are overreacting a little. Possibly the same is true with Gmail. However, there is cause to be worried.
Where's the outrage against Microsoft for allowing all of this seething spyware to install itself so easily? Likewise, where's the bad press about companies that are hawking this garbage and actively selling your information without permission? I can't tell you how many machines I've had to clean out this sludge from. Thank G-d for Mozilla!
If you don't see outrage about MicroSoft's policies while posting about the atmosphere on Slashdot, you are blind. No, really. I mean it. Blind.
Likewise, people are outraged about companies selling information without permission and the general spyware situation.
And, on a completely unrelated note, what is the G-d thing? I'm not trying to be insulting, but what on Earth is the purpose of that? Is it a mangling of God? If you do not like an association with God in your text, just use another word. If you have a problem with the word God, use another word. If you don't care about God and are just being difficult, why do you care enough to not type God? No, seriously, I am confused as to what you mean by G-d and why you would ever use it. (Also, it can break funny because hyphens are valid break-points. Maybe G_d would be better.)
I quite agree. However, there is an unfortunate problem with making a new toolkit: Cross-Platform.
Qt is great because it is cross-platform. GTK has that too. The amount of things that will run native cross-platform are fewer than those that will run on a single platform.
Also, you are arguing for a widget server, which will work best when it is the dominant/only widget set. Windows can do this. Linux is still too diverse.
Still, I think you're right. Completely right. I just was noting a few things.
>>If you truly think no one cares about traffic accidents
>Please quote where I said that. Go ahead. It's not a very long post, it should be easy to find. I'll wait.
It was implied that you felt people were not paying attention to the issue of drunk driving. Clearly, clearly implied. You talked about accidents and followed with, "Why do we care so much about airplanes?" Not all things need to be quoted.
I stand by my response on that.
The reason your post is idiotic is that you act as if the topics are even slightly related. You act like, because we pay attention to airport security we stop paying attention to other things. We are intelligent beings! We can do more than one thing at a time!
> Are we really spending the 100 or 1000 times more effort to prevent automobile fatalities that the number of deaths would warrant?
The real questions are, would that extra funding actually prevent it, and is that funding preventing anything at the moment? For the second, I'd say no. For the first, also no. Funding isn't the issue with traffic accidents, general mentality is. If the government could agree on a plan, it would be fairly cheap to start implementing it.
You are like the person who flames KDE lists because they should have fixed the Konqueror rendering instead of adding tabbed browsing, as if the developer of one would have been working on the other.
The airport security measures need to be taken in their own light, individually. If they are appropriate, they should be done. If they are not, they should not. They are completely inappropriate, but the amount of deaths due to traffic has nothing to do with this.
His argument was that we were trying to deal with airplane issues when we should be trying to deal with traffic issues (and implied other issues, I think another poster mentioned health).
The reason this is stupid is that we are trying to deal with those problems. We may be failing, but arguing that we should be trying is just stupid. Organizations like MADD are very influential. There is a constant effort to reduce driving problems, from all directions.
You claim the driver's liscense should be revoked after the first offense, as it is in Europe (I think). First, I do agree. However, you should consider the situation in the US a little more deeply. Most of the nation has horrible public transportation (for some valid reasons) and a car is almost a requirement to live in many areas. Obviously, the situation needs work. It is getting work. A lot of work. Just not quite so high-publicity of work.
So, in short, I stand by my calling his argument faulty, but idiot may have been too harsh.
The page you linked to demonstrates something which has virtually no value what-so-ever.
I read some of their stuff, not too much. It wasn't worth my time, but maybe you can answer my question: What possible value does any of this have? Does it do anything besides add complexity and glitz?
If you truly think no one cares about traffic accidents, you should check the changes in drivers liscense restrictions. At least where I live, penalties for drunk driving have been steadily rising, the age limits on drivers liscenses have increased by a good margin, and the driving tests have gotten enormously harder. Also, safety standards in cars have been steadily increasing.
Currently, every state in the union is in a budget-crunch situation. The Federal government is likewise breaking its budget severely. State-by-state checkpoint simply aren't economically feasible, and won't be inside of twenty years. Even when it is feasible but expensive, no politician will be able to slip that kind of expense past the taxpayers.
Also, it would either need to be implemented by every state or by the federal government, and the states will really fight it if the feds try to do that.
They could have backups only going one month, or something like that. Then, they just shred/burn all the backups which are over a month old. They did say that the records would be kept for a short period. One month is fairly short.
Fact: For U.S. persons, information will only be kept for a short period after completion of the travel itinerary, and then it will be permanently destroyed. The prescreening process will be conducted anew each time you fly.
Sometime I hate my country. So, those of you who aren't from here: yet another reason to not come. Does the government not understand the manner in which science progresses? This is just going to destroy the US research community, which was once the greatest in the world. Goodbye, conferences.
For too long, the 37-member task force said, senior executives have ignored computer security or left it to their technology officers, who might not have the clout or inclination to make necessary changes.
The problem solution isn't the lack of CEO involvement, it's the lack of clout technology officers have. People seem to ignore the advice of technology advisers of all sorts. If a system administrator says something is insecure, one would think the people who hired them would listen, but they don't.
This is brilliantly demonstrated by electronic voting. Almost all security experts say it is a bad idea. Almost all technology websites trash the idea. When all the experts in a field so not to do it, the politicians still think it's a good idea. Thus, they are truly fools, for they do not know that they are fools.
The report is the latest in a series produced as part of an industry partnership [...] Members of the task force included representatives from technology companies
One of the main flaws to all this: they used representatives from technology companies. Did they never consider talking to security experts? Despite recent changes, the American higher education system has some of the best research institutes in the world, and amazingly enough, there are experts at those institutes! Even better, those experts are relatively unbiased! Oh, the possibilities!
...after heavy lobbying from technology companies, the initiative recommended no mandates on the private sector and left it up to the companies to work with the government to devise self-regulatory steps for improvement.
Strangely enough, that's not the problem. the problem is that there are too many governmental enablers. The government gives all sorts of help to companies who suffer losses from cybersecurity, so they have no motivation to secure themselves. What idiocy.
I guess that, in general, I would have to say most of these problems are caused by governmental stupidity and corporate vileness, but there is still hope for the future, as there are proposals to force businesses to have regular cyber-security audits, as well as other measures.
Internet filesystems work fine, if people bother to make them. The largest barrier is that most internet providers want to block everything under the sun, so nothing is ubiquitous.
If everyone could have an sftp server, this would all be much easier. Just tell a friend or co-worker a password, and things are shared. Presto! Problem solved!
As far as organization when you need to share with multiple people, well there's nothing preventing an sftp server from having multiple repositories and having different access to each. And, as far as you see it, everything is just in a standard file-tree, so there are plenty of tools to work with it.
And, of course, sftp is the old and not particularly good solution, and even it works just fine for most things. If virus writers weren't so damn prolific and hard to kill (They are like vampires: need stake through heart and sunlight, as well as a dose of silver!) someone would have made a good internet filesystem by now.
Yes, and collaboration is not simple. Hence the problem.
Databases have advanced very little with time. Collaboration methods change day-to-day. Sometimes the methods change due to whim, sometimes due to fashion, and sometimes due to technology. Whatever the reason, collaboration methods are hard to nail down reliably.
What I don't get is why the open source groupware projects aren't integrating wikis. It has been solidly proven that wikis can be powerful in certain situations. And, in a collaborative environment, there is virtually no alternative solution for what a wiki provides.
Also, if a good groupware system integrated an editor into the client and supported a slightly more extensive set of tags, this could result in easy to edit, good-looking documents made collaboratively.
Why are so many open source projects so densely certain that they must imitate proprietary crap?
Is there actually any proposal as to how this is done?
The manifesto makes grand claims about unifying our collaborative language, but totally understates how difficult this is. The problem usually is that we just do not have a solid model of what can and cannot be done, and we likely never will.
The author pointed at SQL as an incredibly important standard for how data is handled. However, relational databases are relatively simple. We know most everything they can do, so we can define it. And, even, with that, databases are not entirely standard. Most databases have their own little features, often not in the standard.
Look at another good example: filesystem structure. Despite how well defined the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is, distros still tend to be non-compliant. It's an incredibly simple system, and we can't even reliably follow it. Is aiming at standardized interfaces between collaborative applications truly reasonable?
Hopefully, a few things can be standardized, as they are recognized as being universally useful. Some basically are. For example, e-mail is e-mail. There's not too much more to it. Maybe we can slowly define those things which we understand and see the importance for, but moving much beyond that is likely infeasible.
They are not taking their sites down, they are posting banners on their front-pages. The GIMP and GNU have an entire screen to go through. I prefer KDE's method, which just has a banner on it. That would be like if SlashDot put a banner where the add normally is which said patents were vile.
That's a damn good point. Isn't the current state of patent law somewhat important to the "Open Source Development Network"?
So often, large organizations avoid taking politcal stances which are at all unpopular, and it is very sad. As we all know from the disgusting power of corporations, large organizations can often control the direction of the government. OSDN should take a position in this matter. It is relevant to OSDN and OSDN could help insitute change.
That sounds good, but it's not so true. Those games desensitize people to gunshots and similar cues, but real blood is totally different. Especially up-close-and-personal, real blood is much more disturbing.
They get desensitized to that because they are surgeons; the games don't count for shit.
I can't count the number of times I got in trouble for talking back to my mother with that. She'd tell me to get off the video games, that it was a waste of my time, and I say that she was just going to watch some cheesy soap opera's anyway, which didn't do anything for her, while my video games were training my coordination and reaction time.
With fully self-contained apps, we could do away with those silly shared libraries, and we could also just pitch reusing simple programs. Maybe, maybe if we ditched the fifo, we would have finally removed all the flaws in UNIX!
Slashdot Mirror
This is entirely true. Teachers say everything like it will be work, and the kids believe them. I posted a similar idea elsewhere.
I ran into this with writing, and it made a large difference. For most of my elementary years, I dreaded writing essays. Every time one was assigned, the teacher explained it like I was being given a chore of some sort.
Then, a little later in my schooling (fifth grade) someone asked me to write something outside of school unrelated to any assignments and I discovered I like writing. Since then, I was never bothered by essays. A similar thing applied to reading for me, and still does to some extent.
I'm naturally a writer and reader, but the point is still important to remember: Never tell kids work is going to be hard, they will believe you.
The outrage is as much about our society accepting this as it is about the service in-and-of itself. People see, quite rightly, a dangerous slide in our society towards people losing all of their privacy. Eternal vigilance is the only way that such things are prevented. In this case, perhaps people are overreacting a little. Possibly the same is true with Gmail. However, there is cause to be worried.
If you don't see outrage about MicroSoft's policies while posting about the atmosphere on Slashdot, you are blind. No, really. I mean it. Blind.
Likewise, people are outraged about companies selling information without permission and the general spyware situation.
And, on a completely unrelated note, what is the G-d thing? I'm not trying to be insulting, but what on Earth is the purpose of that? Is it a mangling of God? If you do not like an association with God in your text, just use another word. If you have a problem with the word God, use another word. If you don't care about God and are just being difficult, why do you care enough to not type God? No, seriously, I am confused as to what you mean by G-d and why you would ever use it. (Also, it can break funny because hyphens are valid break-points. Maybe G_d would be better.)
I quite agree. However, there is an unfortunate problem with making a new toolkit: Cross-Platform.
Qt is great because it is cross-platform. GTK has that too. The amount of things that will run native cross-platform are fewer than those that will run on a single platform.
Also, you are arguing for a widget server, which will work best when it is the dominant/only widget set. Windows can do this. Linux is still too diverse.
Still, I think you're right. Completely right. I just was noting a few things.
>>If you truly think no one cares about traffic accidents
>Please quote where I said that. Go ahead. It's not a very long post, it should be easy to find. I'll wait.
It was implied that you felt people were not paying attention to the issue of drunk driving. Clearly, clearly implied. You talked about accidents and followed with, "Why do we care so much about airplanes?" Not all things need to be quoted.
I stand by my response on that.
The reason your post is idiotic is that you act as if the topics are even slightly related. You act like, because we pay attention to airport security we stop paying attention to other things. We are intelligent beings! We can do more than one thing at a time!
> Are we really spending the 100 or 1000 times more effort to prevent automobile fatalities that the number of deaths would warrant?
The real questions are, would that extra funding actually prevent it, and is that funding preventing anything at the moment? For the second, I'd say no. For the first, also no. Funding isn't the issue with traffic accidents, general mentality is. If the government could agree on a plan, it would be fairly cheap to start implementing it.
You are like the person who flames KDE lists because they should have fixed the Konqueror rendering instead of adding tabbed browsing, as if the developer of one would have been working on the other.
The airport security measures need to be taken in their own light, individually. If they are appropriate, they should be done. If they are not, they should not. They are completely inappropriate, but the amount of deaths due to traffic has nothing to do with this.
His argument was that we were trying to deal with airplane issues when we should be trying to deal with traffic issues (and implied other issues, I think another poster mentioned health).
The reason this is stupid is that we are trying to deal with those problems. We may be failing, but arguing that we should be trying is just stupid. Organizations like MADD are very influential. There is a constant effort to reduce driving problems, from all directions.
You claim the driver's liscense should be revoked after the first offense, as it is in Europe (I think). First, I do agree. However, you should consider the situation in the US a little more deeply. Most of the nation has horrible public transportation (for some valid reasons) and a car is almost a requirement to live in many areas. Obviously, the situation needs work. It is getting work. A lot of work. Just not quite so high-publicity of work.
So, in short, I stand by my calling his argument faulty, but idiot may have been too harsh.
What are you talking about?
The page you linked to demonstrates something which has virtually no value what-so-ever.
I read some of their stuff, not too much. It wasn't worth my time, but maybe you can answer my question: What possible value does any of this have? Does it do anything besides add complexity and glitz?
If you truly think no one cares about traffic accidents, you should check the changes in drivers liscense restrictions. At least where I live, penalties for drunk driving have been steadily rising, the age limits on drivers liscenses have increased by a good margin, and the driving tests have gotten enormously harder. Also, safety standards in cars have been steadily increasing.
So, in short, you're an idiot.
I suspect you are wrong.
Currently, every state in the union is in a budget-crunch situation. The Federal government is likewise breaking its budget severely. State-by-state checkpoint simply aren't economically feasible, and won't be inside of twenty years. Even when it is feasible but expensive, no politician will be able to slip that kind of expense past the taxpayers.
Also, it would either need to be implemented by every state or by the federal government, and the states will really fight it if the feds try to do that.
So, I don't think that will be coming very soon.
It is possible.
They could have backups only going one month, or something like that. Then, they just shred/burn all the backups which are over a month old. They did say that the records would be kept for a short period. One month is fairly short.
From the Department of Homeland Security:
Sometime I hate my country. So, those of you who aren't from here: yet another reason to not come. Does the government not understand the manner in which science progresses? This is just going to destroy the US research community, which was once the greatest in the world. Goodbye, conferences.
The problem solution isn't the lack of CEO involvement, it's the lack of clout technology officers have. People seem to ignore the advice of technology advisers of all sorts. If a system administrator says something is insecure, one would think the people who hired them would listen, but they don't.
This is brilliantly demonstrated by electronic voting. Almost all security experts say it is a bad idea. Almost all technology websites trash the idea. When all the experts in a field so not to do it, the politicians still think it's a good idea. Thus, they are truly fools, for they do not know that they are fools.
One of the main flaws to all this: they used representatives from technology companies. Did they never consider talking to security experts? Despite recent changes, the American higher education system has some of the best research institutes in the world, and amazingly enough, there are experts at those institutes! Even better, those experts are relatively unbiased! Oh, the possibilities!
Strangely enough, that's not the problem. the problem is that there are too many governmental enablers. The government gives all sorts of help to companies who suffer losses from cybersecurity, so they have no motivation to secure themselves. What idiocy.
I guess that, in general, I would have to say most of these problems are caused by governmental stupidity and corporate vileness, but there is still hope for the future, as there are proposals to force businesses to have regular cyber-security audits, as well as other measures.
Internet filesystems work fine, if people bother to make them. The largest barrier is that most internet providers want to block everything under the sun, so nothing is ubiquitous.
If everyone could have an sftp server, this would all be much easier. Just tell a friend or co-worker a password, and things are shared. Presto! Problem solved!
As far as organization when you need to share with multiple people, well there's nothing preventing an sftp server from having multiple repositories and having different access to each. And, as far as you see it, everything is just in a standard file-tree, so there are plenty of tools to work with it.
And, of course, sftp is the old and not particularly good solution, and even it works just fine for most things. If virus writers weren't so damn prolific and hard to kill (They are like vampires: need stake through heart and sunlight, as well as a dose of silver!) someone would have made a good internet filesystem by now.
Yes, and collaboration is not simple. Hence the problem.
Databases have advanced very little with time. Collaboration methods change day-to-day. Sometimes the methods change due to whim, sometimes due to fashion, and sometimes due to technology. Whatever the reason, collaboration methods are hard to nail down reliably.
What I don't get is why the open source groupware projects aren't integrating wikis. It has been solidly proven that wikis can be powerful in certain situations. And, in a collaborative environment, there is virtually no alternative solution for what a wiki provides.
Also, if a good groupware system integrated an editor into the client and supported a slightly more extensive set of tags, this could result in easy to edit, good-looking documents made collaboratively.
Why are so many open source projects so densely certain that they must imitate proprietary crap?
Is there actually any proposal as to how this is done?
The manifesto makes grand claims about unifying our collaborative language, but totally understates how difficult this is. The problem usually is that we just do not have a solid model of what can and cannot be done, and we likely never will.
The author pointed at SQL as an incredibly important standard for how data is handled. However, relational databases are relatively simple. We know most everything they can do, so we can define it. And, even, with that, databases are not entirely standard. Most databases have their own little features, often not in the standard.
Look at another good example: filesystem structure. Despite how well defined the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is, distros still tend to be non-compliant. It's an incredibly simple system, and we can't even reliably follow it. Is aiming at standardized interfaces between collaborative applications truly reasonable?
Hopefully, a few things can be standardized, as they are recognized as being universally useful. Some basically are. For example, e-mail is e-mail. There's not too much more to it. Maybe we can slowly define those things which we understand and see the importance for, but moving much beyond that is likely infeasible.
I'd actually call it sad, pathetic, weak, and unfortunate.
They are not taking their sites down, they are posting banners on their front-pages. The GIMP and GNU have an entire screen to go through. I prefer KDE's method, which just has a banner on it. That would be like if SlashDot put a banner where the add normally is which said patents were vile.
That's a damn good point. Isn't the current state of patent law somewhat important to the "Open Source Development Network"?
So often, large organizations avoid taking politcal stances which are at all unpopular, and it is very sad. As we all know from the disgusting power of corporations, large organizations can often control the direction of the government. OSDN should take a position in this matter. It is relevant to OSDN and OSDN could help insitute change.
That sounds good, but it's not so true. Those games desensitize people to gunshots and similar cues, but real blood is totally different. Especially up-close-and-personal, real blood is much more disturbing.
They get desensitized to that because they are surgeons; the games don't count for shit.
I can't count the number of times I got in trouble for talking back to my mother with that. She'd tell me to get off the video games, that it was a waste of my time, and I say that she was just going to watch some cheesy soap opera's anyway, which didn't do anything for her, while my video games were training my coordination and reaction time.
Now, at long last, I am proven correct.
Go look at:
http://www.csis.gvsu.edu/~abreschm/uafhs/
If people start adopting that, some of your worries may be over. Plus, it doesn't destroy any old systems or make shared libraries messy.
With fully self-contained apps, we could do away with those silly shared libraries, and we could also just pitch reusing simple programs. Maybe, maybe if we ditched the fifo, we would have finally removed all the flaws in UNIX!
I think you also need a best-friend to ex first.
Nononono!
They have a media tax to fuck people over. All it really does is puts money in the pockets of a corporation.