I think it's definitely wrong when talking to or about a specific victim. They feel horrible enough already.
On the other hand, such talk probably has a useful place in rape (or violence in general) prevention education, for example. The advice can do good only when given in advance.
That's exactly the point that I, and others who feel the same as I do, are trying to make. There's nothing we can do for the current crop of victims. What we can do is to point out how bloody stupid their actions were, and how others need to not follow these same actions if they don't want to find themselves in this exact same situation.
The women featured in these leaks are already massively publicly famous. This isn't slut-shaming someone unknown, dragging them into the limelight. This is pointing out how the high and mighty have unwittingly assisted in bringing themselves down, and how conditions that they never thought of have led to this.
Nevertheless, women are raped at parties where they're blackout-drunk. To me, the solution is to not get drunk to the point that one loses all control of one's faculties.
Compare to this current debate. If naked pictures are being stolen from technology that is beyond the understanding and control of the user, don't take naked pictures with technology that's beyond the understanding and control of the user.
You know it would be less risky if I didn't carry cash in my wallet. But that doesn't make me even slightly responsible or to blame if I get mugged.
And to reply to this, since I forgot to in my previous reply, if you know a part of town at a particular time of day is known for muggings and you go there during that time of day and get mugged, then you bear some responsibility for not using that grey matter between your ears to evaluate and minimize risks to yourself. So yes, you are to blame if you knowingly put yourself into circumstances that lead to bad things happening to you.
There's nothing wrong with advice to people about what ways they can minimise risk. But the time for that is before the crime, and the people to do that to are people that are in danger. Raising it after the crime, amongst a group of people who are not renowned for having photogenic bodies, reveals that it is just reducing the blame allocated to the criminals, and that's wrong.
Then when is the appropriate time to raise it?
After that hacking incidents in 2012 when Blake Lively, Scarlett Johansson, and other actresses found their private naked pictures redistributed?
How about when Vanessa Hudgens' photos and Hayley Williams' photos were redistributed before that?
How about when Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian had video of them having sex released prior to that?
Be they technological faults or human failings that led to the information getting out, there's an established pattern that large portions of the public want to see this stuff, and that some who are motivated will go through significant amounts of effort to make it happen. If it exists it's at risk of being exposed. The only certain way to prevent it from being released is to not create it in the first place. The only close-to-acceptable way to create it and not have it be at risk is to not use a digital means.
It's the same argument as telling rape victims they shouldn't have worn short skirts.
Is it wrong to cite the bad choices that a rape victim may have made, in a specific circumstance, like getting blackout-drunk in a semi-private party while surrounded by people that the victim might not know very well, when the nature gathering itself has helped whip up those in attendance into a higher state of sexual interest?
In that kind of circumstance the rapist is 100% at fault for his actions, but that doesn't mean that one can't cite additional responsibility on the part of those that took away their own self-control. The expression, "boys will be boys," is misinterpreted. It's not an excuse, it's a warning. The only behavior that one can control is one's own. Regardless of how illegal, unethical, or immoral an act by another may be, their behavior is not something that you can control. If you don't want to be a victim, don't make it easy to become a victim, as the law will only serve to prosecute afterward, not to protect in advance.
In these circumstances, the very existence of the profession paparazzi combined with all of the tabloids that have significant circulation should already be a warning that like it or not, as far as the public's concerned their bodies are not off-limits. Add in previous incidents where private photos have been published and redistributed, and you already have a known threat. Throw in lessons that we're taught as children about the inherent untrustworthiness of others, the lack of knowledge and understanding of the technology that they're using, and the flaws in that technology that aren't even understood by those that developed the tech, and you've got the recipe for what happened. And while it's wrong, while it's immoral, unethical, and probably illegal, it will continue to happen as long as people want to see these stars without their clothes on. There's no excuse to make one's self vulnerable to this, and unfortunately without an understanding of the technology and vigilance with regard to it for as long as the images exist, this kind of thing will always be a risk.
In short, don't take naked pictures if you're not comfortable with them being exposed at some point. You cannot truly protect yourself from them being redistributed.
From what I can tell, he draws the line quite clearly. There is no place for traditional paid commercial software. It is okay to make money writing software, but it is never okay to keep even a single line of software secret from the general public.
I guess I don't see that view as being compatible with making a career out of writing software, as at some point one needs money for one's efforts, and being paid for one's software is how one makes money from the effort of writing it. It's similar to how authors make money through publishing and selling numerous copies of their books.
To my knowledge, basically everyone that makes a career in FOSS is being paid by a company that puts their own value-add proprietary software on to an FOSS platform, or else is employed by a university that feels it's their interests to have this individual on their faculty as it promotes either interest in their degree programs or in donations. Essentially no one makes money writing FOSS for either specific customers or for the public-at-large, they have to have a 'day job' writing commercial software and they volunteer to write FOSS in their spare time.
I look at FOSS' support as a platform for commercial software as the necessary tax to make the FOSS community possible in the first place, and I honestly don't see how it would be possible to make it happen without that.
One of the things that I've always been confused by with Stallman is where he draws the line between what in his view must be free open-source software and what can be free non-open-source, and what can be truly paid commercial software.
This confusion stems from his fairly regular changes as to what Linux distributions he's willing to endorse or criticize. At one point he was very happy with the Debian folks, but at some point decided that their making available non-GPL or other free-to-distribute-but-not-modify software was anathema, and last I looked (admittedly awhile ago) there were only a handful of very obscure Linux distributions that he actually endorsed. They're obscure because they don't have the software available that users want in order to have their computing experiences be the way they want them to be.
I get that the platform being open-source is a good thing, but I don't think that where he draws the line between platform and applications works well.
There have also been problems with the viability of format-conversion businesses, and many have closed their doors after having been paid by their customers and received their customers' tapes, and often because of property lease agreements and failure to maintain the lease, the business owner gets locked out and can't even get access to return customers' tapes even if he wants to.
In your shoes I'd do it myself, and as others have said I'd probably not be quite so picky about quality as you're being. If anything, you should spend your money looking for a commercial-grade VCR or a high-end consumer one with good audio, like a fancier S-VHS deck, to make the playback aspect of the copy as good as it can be. Depending on the inputs on the tuner card you can experiment with coaxial, composite, and S-video inputs to see which combination turns out the best quality (ie, if the comb filter on an S-VHS deck isn't as good as it should be, maybe composite makes the most sense, or maybe a very high quality RG-6 or RG-11 cable and RF transmission will be best) so it's worth some experimentation.
Bear in mind, that VHS resolution is about 330x480 when thought of in modern digital formats, and nothing is going to overcome that. Even S-VHS is only about 570x480, so you're still looking at poor quality even with some of the higher end S-VHS and S-VHS-C camcorders compared to anything modern. Don't expect miracles, you will be let-down.
So you never do anything in secret? I certainly don't want you or anyone else to know what I am doing. Fuck the the assholes in this world who try to tell me how to live my life. I wasn't born to be a slave or to follow your rules. My life is my own bitch.
Thing is, if you're using services or technology that communicates with third-party systems, then you're not doing things where that tech is involved that are truly secret. The argument against allowing that data to be accessed has been fought and lost.
If you want your activities to be secret, don't involve technology that communicates with anyone else.
Don't forget a lack of opportunity. It's very much easier to solicit young men for your cause that might kill them when they want a wife or girlfriend and cannot get one due to society's structure making that basically impossible for them. Suddenly the promise of women at the time of martyrdom becomes more appealing.
The United States is a bit of an aberration and we would do well to remember that. At our founding we were sparsely populated, had few neighbors who themselves were sparsely populated, and were facing large amounts of untamed wilderness. Our concept of manifest destiny effectively meant that if you wanted a say in affairs greater than your own, all you had to do was move west and set up your own place to govern, and if you look at the religious migrations that occurred, and the movement of immigrants that came through America's east-coast cities and kept traveling inland you can see how that played out.
Even still, we had our share of internal violence, with its strongest being the 1860s and the civil war. If you look at the propaganda from that war, The Battle Hymn of the Republic calls on men to fight for natural rights as a Godly cause; religion played a role in many of our decisions as a nation. Now I couldn't rightly say what Union or Confederate troops did to the civilian population beyond what we know about (ie, the burning of Atlanta) because I'm no historian, but given human nature I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of atrocities is simply a matter of documentation and no desire to show them off, versus them not occurring.
Back to my original point, Our country's creation and history is uniquely created by our geography, lack of population density, and the various mindsets of those that immigrated here and those that resettled. Our modern form of democratic republic reflects how disparate and diverse the perspectives and opinions are, and that abstraction layer in the form of elected representation is often overlooked in terms of how we feel and how we actually govern, and our most extreme citizens generally aren't represented in government. We're successful but we still have to pay attention to our fringe element, and fortunately that fringe element is fairly small.
We can't expect other countries to have the same circumstances as we do. Our kicking-over the anthill that was Iraq was a huge mistake, and while Saddam Hussein was not our friend, history has shown him to be the lesser of evils in the short term. He oppressed his people, and he killed those that sought to overthrow him, but he didn't kill those that simply believed in the same god but worshiped that god in a slightly different way. He couldn't have afforded to let religious extremism come out into the open because it was a threat to him, so he kept stomping it down. Don't get me wrong, he was a bad person, but not nearly so bad as what's spawned in his wake.
We need to remember the lessons of Iraq, and to not go around kicking over other dictators just because we don't like dictators. Take that cork out of the bottle and the whole thing explodes.
I expect that the point of an entirely new transmission protocol would be to get rid of all of the vulnerabilities in the current one, rather than having to try to work around them and possibly miss something.
It's not like TCP/IP is the only protocol to have existed, there have been several that people have heard of and quite a few that most people don't know about. Even the OSI model itself was originally intended to be an implementation, rather than an abstraction, but DARPANET was so successful and readily available that it made fleshing-out the OSI model unnecessary.
For someone that wants this kind of interoperability, they're going to be a lot better off having all of the various devices report to a centralized system, then letting that centralized system send notifications to the various clients like a cell phone or a computer. Also, given that the vast majority of the time the systems would be either idle or within expected parameters, there wouldn't be much of a need for excessive monitoring other than to verify keepalive. Only if the user wants explicit logging would there be a need for constant communication, and I don't think that most people would really find that useful.
I'm still not entirely convinced that the public will buy-in to this concept anyway. After all, we had RS-232-based devices for years and years, and yet most people didn't even link their AV system control ports to each other when all most of those took was a 1/8" phono cable.
I'll tell you what I'd want monitored... The washer and dryer for the laundry so that I know when to go move a load over. The doors on the workshop and the house garage door so that I don't forget to close them if I'm letting a heatsoaked engine vent a bit. The water softener, so that I know when I need to add more potassium chloride. The refrigerators and freezers so that food being stored doesn't spoil. The whole-house energy usage, and the usage on the major systems like the water heaters and the air conditioners, so I can track performance over time to see if a unit is starting to run suboptimally. The amount of data for each of these things is so small that I could do it with 2400 baud RS-232, which is effectively NOTHING compared to broadband speeds.
Sounds to me like you need to revise your access lists and either block it outright, or if it needs that connection to run, QoS it down to where it's not a problem.
If it's by programmers, for programmers, then why doesn't it have the array of killer apps written for it needed to make it successful in the general user marketplace? Hell, even Linux and BSD variants with their relatively small userbase relative to Microsoft have tens of thousands of decent applets, applications, and suites with lots of choice. I could set up a Linux machine for random users that would give them enough to handle basic professional productivity stuff and web access, even if they'd have trouble wrapping their heads around the nature of the filesystem compared to what they're used to.
Last time I looked into Plan 9, it reminded me of a MacOS 6 fresh install on a Mac Plus, with a puzzle, a clock, and a rudimentary file manager. I didn't see anything that would make the system actually useful to me.
Heh. We shouldn't let them, given the Citizens United ruling that says that corporations are people, this could literally be interpreted as suicide and that's a crime in a lot of places, and since they operate in a lot of places they should be prosecuted for suicide everywhere they commit it in!
At least it's not a Github project depedent on both Ruby and its package management system, node.js and its package management system, MySQL for at least one of those two, plus several third-party repositories and then its own DB requiring PostgreSQL...
Several opportunities could have averted the disaster that is Iraq...
Not left the country until we'd established a true core of military lifers with a culture to stand behind it.
Collected all of the previous Iraqi military's weapons and not left them with the ex-soldiers that we fired.
Not disbanded the previous Iraqi military, and instead molded them into the defense and Gendarmerie to actually keep the country from going into chaos post-defeat.
Put enough boots on the ground that the country wouldn't have gone into chaos post-defeat.
Not kicked-over the government so completely that its leader fled, leaving the power vacuum.
If I were a soldier for the US military or the legitimate owner of the equipment that I'm trying to use, I would be concerned that something would disable the equipment at exactly the wrong time, or that I couldn't use it when I needed it because of some snafu.
Humvees, tanks, planes, helicopters, even ATVs don't even have keys because when it's time to use it, you don't want to be fighting with the equipment itself, and trying to track down a key, or to enter a passcode, or to do other such things could mean the difference between life and death. Given how harsh a warzone can be to the equipment in the first place, there's no good reason to push your luck by adding more ways to disable stuff.
And you can't use something like personal credentials either, for many electronics, because you don't know who will end up using it. If two companies taking a break together are attacked, every man grabs whatever can to defend, even if it's not his humvee's.50 cal, or not his M72, or not his M60. They need to all be able to use any, and to use the military's organizational structure itself as the safety measure.
As for Iraq, I don't think they'll survive as a country for the next decade. They're bickering about who's in charge when the enemy is literally at the city gates. The Kurds will declare independence and are probably better equipped to fight ISIS than the official central government, and the Shia/Sunni divide will become more pronounced. That's the thing when removing strong-men from power, the power-vacuum is vast and simply wasn't well-enough accounted for, and the middle-east will be paying for that for a long, long time.
This is what he meant when he said, "never get involved in a land war in Asia".
I was. And it was limited to calculators like the TI81/82/83, and specifically excluded calculators with any kind of wireless communication capability, like the HP48 series and several Sharp and Casio models that had IR, or could use a PCMCIA card like the HP.
I agree with the original poster, the TI81-series does only one thing well, and does that one thing quite well. I do have a Sharp that does function-entry a little better (it reformats the expression as it's entered to look like it does on the page, assuming that the operator follows the proper order-of-operations) but the TI83 that I had was fast enough that letting it process the expression didn't require enough wait time to really matter, and it was easy to use.
I don't think that general-purpose computing equipment is a good thing for education. It's too easy to get distracted and very easy to do something other than one's assigned task. Even when I was a kid, the computers weren't networked and we still managed to get distracted. The only computers that we didn't get distracted by were those lacking a hard disk drive, one had to boot off of a floppy, and the program loaded from there. Couldn't do anything else with the computer except that which we were assigned to do. And funny enough, we still had a good time with it.
Having a college degree does help an employer see who was at least committed enough to run through a voluntary four-ish year program from start to finish. That's no small factor if a company wants to have mature products, including software products. That kind of ability to commit can be demonstrated through work experience, but if one is starting out, then the degree will be a leg-up to get in the door before other factors are considered.
The other side of it though, is that learning to write software through a college program is a top-down approach, where one should learn project management, cost/benefit analysis, group-interaction, and other non-coding parts of work that will affect how the programmer thinks about the task of coding. By contrast, a bottom-up approach, for self-taught programmers, may give the programmer good fundamentals of the language and an ability to play with idiocyncracies of that language to one's benefit, but might not get the rest of the picture.
It really depends on what's being written, for what audience, and how the company plans to further maintain the code (free updates, paid updates, paid full-new-releases, etc) and who will be doing that maintenance, and who will handle what aspects of the original design versus maintenance coding. A company might not want to hire a non-degreed person into a position where they're laying out the framework for the project as there could be condsiderations that the non-degreed person simply hasn't considered, but would hire them for the maintenance side because they're following an existing framework.
That being said, you can't really know what they'll want until the interview, and they might not even know what they want until they see it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly the point that I, and others who feel the same as I do, are trying to make. There's nothing we can do for the current crop of victims. What we can do is to point out how bloody stupid their actions were, and how others need to not follow these same actions if they don't want to find themselves in this exact same situation.
The women featured in these leaks are already massively publicly famous. This isn't slut-shaming someone unknown, dragging them into the limelight. This is pointing out how the high and mighty have unwittingly assisted in bringing themselves down, and how conditions that they never thought of have led to this.
Nevertheless, women are raped at parties where they're blackout-drunk. To me, the solution is to not get drunk to the point that one loses all control of one's faculties.
Compare to this current debate. If naked pictures are being stolen from technology that is beyond the understanding and control of the user, don't take naked pictures with technology that's beyond the understanding and control of the user.
Then I'm happy that a meteorite struck it!
Since when are we not responsible for our own choices?
And to reply to this, since I forgot to in my previous reply, if you know a part of town at a particular time of day is known for muggings and you go there during that time of day and get mugged, then you bear some responsibility for not using that grey matter between your ears to evaluate and minimize risks to yourself. So yes, you are to blame if you knowingly put yourself into circumstances that lead to bad things happening to you.
Then when is the appropriate time to raise it?
After that hacking incidents in 2012 when Blake Lively, Scarlett Johansson, and other actresses found their private naked pictures redistributed?
How about when Vanessa Hudgens' photos and Hayley Williams' photos were redistributed before that?
How about when Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian had video of them having sex released prior to that?
Be they technological faults or human failings that led to the information getting out, there's an established pattern that large portions of the public want to see this stuff, and that some who are motivated will go through significant amounts of effort to make it happen. If it exists it's at risk of being exposed. The only certain way to prevent it from being released is to not create it in the first place. The only close-to-acceptable way to create it and not have it be at risk is to not use a digital means.
Is it wrong to cite the bad choices that a rape victim may have made, in a specific circumstance, like getting blackout-drunk in a semi-private party while surrounded by people that the victim might not know very well, when the nature gathering itself has helped whip up those in attendance into a higher state of sexual interest?
In that kind of circumstance the rapist is 100% at fault for his actions, but that doesn't mean that one can't cite additional responsibility on the part of those that took away their own self-control. The expression, "boys will be boys," is misinterpreted. It's not an excuse, it's a warning. The only behavior that one can control is one's own. Regardless of how illegal, unethical, or immoral an act by another may be, their behavior is not something that you can control. If you don't want to be a victim, don't make it easy to become a victim, as the law will only serve to prosecute afterward, not to protect in advance.
In these circumstances, the very existence of the profession paparazzi combined with all of the tabloids that have significant circulation should already be a warning that like it or not, as far as the public's concerned their bodies are not off-limits. Add in previous incidents where private photos have been published and redistributed, and you already have a known threat. Throw in lessons that we're taught as children about the inherent untrustworthiness of others, the lack of knowledge and understanding of the technology that they're using, and the flaws in that technology that aren't even understood by those that developed the tech, and you've got the recipe for what happened. And while it's wrong, while it's immoral, unethical, and probably illegal, it will continue to happen as long as people want to see these stars without their clothes on. There's no excuse to make one's self vulnerable to this, and unfortunately without an understanding of the technology and vigilance with regard to it for as long as the images exist, this kind of thing will always be a risk.
In short, don't take naked pictures if you're not comfortable with them being exposed at some point. You cannot truly protect yourself from them being redistributed.
I guess I don't see that view as being compatible with making a career out of writing software, as at some point one needs money for one's efforts, and being paid for one's software is how one makes money from the effort of writing it. It's similar to how authors make money through publishing and selling numerous copies of their books.
To my knowledge, basically everyone that makes a career in FOSS is being paid by a company that puts their own value-add proprietary software on to an FOSS platform, or else is employed by a university that feels it's their interests to have this individual on their faculty as it promotes either interest in their degree programs or in donations. Essentially no one makes money writing FOSS for either specific customers or for the public-at-large, they have to have a 'day job' writing commercial software and they volunteer to write FOSS in their spare time.
I look at FOSS' support as a platform for commercial software as the necessary tax to make the FOSS community possible in the first place, and I honestly don't see how it would be possible to make it happen without that.
One of the things that I've always been confused by with Stallman is where he draws the line between what in his view must be free open-source software and what can be free non-open-source, and what can be truly paid commercial software.
This confusion stems from his fairly regular changes as to what Linux distributions he's willing to endorse or criticize. At one point he was very happy with the Debian folks, but at some point decided that their making available non-GPL or other free-to-distribute-but-not-modify software was anathema, and last I looked (admittedly awhile ago) there were only a handful of very obscure Linux distributions that he actually endorsed. They're obscure because they don't have the software available that users want in order to have their computing experiences be the way they want them to be.
I get that the platform being open-source is a good thing, but I don't think that where he draws the line between platform and applications works well.
There have also been problems with the viability of format-conversion businesses, and many have closed their doors after having been paid by their customers and received their customers' tapes, and often because of property lease agreements and failure to maintain the lease, the business owner gets locked out and can't even get access to return customers' tapes even if he wants to.
In your shoes I'd do it myself, and as others have said I'd probably not be quite so picky about quality as you're being. If anything, you should spend your money looking for a commercial-grade VCR or a high-end consumer one with good audio, like a fancier S-VHS deck, to make the playback aspect of the copy as good as it can be. Depending on the inputs on the tuner card you can experiment with coaxial, composite, and S-video inputs to see which combination turns out the best quality (ie, if the comb filter on an S-VHS deck isn't as good as it should be, maybe composite makes the most sense, or maybe a very high quality RG-6 or RG-11 cable and RF transmission will be best) so it's worth some experimentation.
Bear in mind, that VHS resolution is about 330x480 when thought of in modern digital formats, and nothing is going to overcome that. Even S-VHS is only about 570x480, so you're still looking at poor quality even with some of the higher end S-VHS and S-VHS-C camcorders compared to anything modern. Don't expect miracles, you will be let-down.
Thing is, if you're using services or technology that communicates with third-party systems, then you're not doing things where that tech is involved that are truly secret. The argument against allowing that data to be accessed has been fought and lost.
If you want your activities to be secret, don't involve technology that communicates with anyone else.
Don't forget a lack of opportunity. It's very much easier to solicit young men for your cause that might kill them when they want a wife or girlfriend and cannot get one due to society's structure making that basically impossible for them. Suddenly the promise of women at the time of martyrdom becomes more appealing.
The United States is a bit of an aberration and we would do well to remember that. At our founding we were sparsely populated, had few neighbors who themselves were sparsely populated, and were facing large amounts of untamed wilderness. Our concept of manifest destiny effectively meant that if you wanted a say in affairs greater than your own, all you had to do was move west and set up your own place to govern, and if you look at the religious migrations that occurred, and the movement of immigrants that came through America's east-coast cities and kept traveling inland you can see how that played out.
Even still, we had our share of internal violence, with its strongest being the 1860s and the civil war. If you look at the propaganda from that war, The Battle Hymn of the Republic calls on men to fight for natural rights as a Godly cause; religion played a role in many of our decisions as a nation. Now I couldn't rightly say what Union or Confederate troops did to the civilian population beyond what we know about (ie, the burning of Atlanta) because I'm no historian, but given human nature I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of atrocities is simply a matter of documentation and no desire to show them off, versus them not occurring.
Back to my original point, Our country's creation and history is uniquely created by our geography, lack of population density, and the various mindsets of those that immigrated here and those that resettled. Our modern form of democratic republic reflects how disparate and diverse the perspectives and opinions are, and that abstraction layer in the form of elected representation is often overlooked in terms of how we feel and how we actually govern, and our most extreme citizens generally aren't represented in government. We're successful but we still have to pay attention to our fringe element, and fortunately that fringe element is fairly small.
We can't expect other countries to have the same circumstances as we do. Our kicking-over the anthill that was Iraq was a huge mistake, and while Saddam Hussein was not our friend, history has shown him to be the lesser of evils in the short term. He oppressed his people, and he killed those that sought to overthrow him, but he didn't kill those that simply believed in the same god but worshiped that god in a slightly different way. He couldn't have afforded to let religious extremism come out into the open because it was a threat to him, so he kept stomping it down. Don't get me wrong, he was a bad person, but not nearly so bad as what's spawned in his wake.
We need to remember the lessons of Iraq, and to not go around kicking over other dictators just because we don't like dictators. Take that cork out of the bottle and the whole thing explodes.
Is it wrong that I don't want my home devices to be reachable from the outside unsolicited?
I expect that the point of an entirely new transmission protocol would be to get rid of all of the vulnerabilities in the current one, rather than having to try to work around them and possibly miss something.
It's not like TCP/IP is the only protocol to have existed, there have been several that people have heard of and quite a few that most people don't know about. Even the OSI model itself was originally intended to be an implementation, rather than an abstraction, but DARPANET was so successful and readily available that it made fleshing-out the OSI model unnecessary.
For someone that wants this kind of interoperability, they're going to be a lot better off having all of the various devices report to a centralized system, then letting that centralized system send notifications to the various clients like a cell phone or a computer. Also, given that the vast majority of the time the systems would be either idle or within expected parameters, there wouldn't be much of a need for excessive monitoring other than to verify keepalive. Only if the user wants explicit logging would there be a need for constant communication, and I don't think that most people would really find that useful.
I'm still not entirely convinced that the public will buy-in to this concept anyway. After all, we had RS-232-based devices for years and years, and yet most people didn't even link their AV system control ports to each other when all most of those took was a 1/8" phono cable.
I'll tell you what I'd want monitored... The washer and dryer for the laundry so that I know when to go move a load over. The doors on the workshop and the house garage door so that I don't forget to close them if I'm letting a heatsoaked engine vent a bit. The water softener, so that I know when I need to add more potassium chloride. The refrigerators and freezers so that food being stored doesn't spoil. The whole-house energy usage, and the usage on the major systems like the water heaters and the air conditioners, so I can track performance over time to see if a unit is starting to run suboptimally. The amount of data for each of these things is so small that I could do it with 2400 baud RS-232, which is effectively NOTHING compared to broadband speeds.
Sounds to me like you need to revise your access lists and either block it outright, or if it needs that connection to run, QoS it down to where it's not a problem.
If it's by programmers, for programmers, then why doesn't it have the array of killer apps written for it needed to make it successful in the general user marketplace? Hell, even Linux and BSD variants with their relatively small userbase relative to Microsoft have tens of thousands of decent applets, applications, and suites with lots of choice. I could set up a Linux machine for random users that would give them enough to handle basic professional productivity stuff and web access, even if they'd have trouble wrapping their heads around the nature of the filesystem compared to what they're used to.
Last time I looked into Plan 9, it reminded me of a MacOS 6 fresh install on a Mac Plus, with a puzzle, a clock, and a rudimentary file manager. I didn't see anything that would make the system actually useful to me.
Heh. We shouldn't let them, given the Citizens United ruling that says that corporations are people, this could literally be interpreted as suicide and that's a crime in a lot of places, and since they operate in a lot of places they should be prosecuted for suicide everywhere they commit it in!
What are we talking about again?
At least it's not a Github project depedent on both Ruby and its package management system, node.js and its package management system, MySQL for at least one of those two, plus several third-party repositories and then its own DB requiring PostgreSQL...
So now we know who to send the counseling bills to...
It would be more like, "the unauthorized duplication of files in contravention to copyright status bay". Doesn't have the same ring to it.
Several opportunities could have averted the disaster that is Iraq...
Not left the country until we'd established a true core of military lifers with a culture to stand behind it.
Collected all of the previous Iraqi military's weapons and not left them with the ex-soldiers that we fired.
Not disbanded the previous Iraqi military, and instead molded them into the defense and Gendarmerie to actually keep the country from going into chaos post-defeat.
Put enough boots on the ground that the country wouldn't have gone into chaos post-defeat.
Not kicked-over the government so completely that its leader fled, leaving the power vacuum.
Not invaded in the first place.
If I were a soldier for the US military or the legitimate owner of the equipment that I'm trying to use, I would be concerned that something would disable the equipment at exactly the wrong time, or that I couldn't use it when I needed it because of some snafu.
.50 cal, or not his M72, or not his M60. They need to all be able to use any, and to use the military's organizational structure itself as the safety measure.
Humvees, tanks, planes, helicopters, even ATVs don't even have keys because when it's time to use it, you don't want to be fighting with the equipment itself, and trying to track down a key, or to enter a passcode, or to do other such things could mean the difference between life and death. Given how harsh a warzone can be to the equipment in the first place, there's no good reason to push your luck by adding more ways to disable stuff.
And you can't use something like personal credentials either, for many electronics, because you don't know who will end up using it. If two companies taking a break together are attacked, every man grabs whatever can to defend, even if it's not his humvee's
As for Iraq, I don't think they'll survive as a country for the next decade. They're bickering about who's in charge when the enemy is literally at the city gates. The Kurds will declare independence and are probably better equipped to fight ISIS than the official central government, and the Shia/Sunni divide will become more pronounced. That's the thing when removing strong-men from power, the power-vacuum is vast and simply wasn't well-enough accounted for, and the middle-east will be paying for that for a long, long time.
This is what he meant when he said, "never get involved in a land war in Asia".
I was. And it was limited to calculators like the TI81/82/83, and specifically excluded calculators with any kind of wireless communication capability, like the HP48 series and several Sharp and Casio models that had IR, or could use a PCMCIA card like the HP.
I agree with the original poster, the TI81-series does only one thing well, and does that one thing quite well. I do have a Sharp that does function-entry a little better (it reformats the expression as it's entered to look like it does on the page, assuming that the operator follows the proper order-of-operations) but the TI83 that I had was fast enough that letting it process the expression didn't require enough wait time to really matter, and it was easy to use.
I don't think that general-purpose computing equipment is a good thing for education. It's too easy to get distracted and very easy to do something other than one's assigned task. Even when I was a kid, the computers weren't networked and we still managed to get distracted. The only computers that we didn't get distracted by were those lacking a hard disk drive, one had to boot off of a floppy, and the program loaded from there. Couldn't do anything else with the computer except that which we were assigned to do. And funny enough, we still had a good time with it.
Having a college degree does help an employer see who was at least committed enough to run through a voluntary four-ish year program from start to finish. That's no small factor if a company wants to have mature products, including software products. That kind of ability to commit can be demonstrated through work experience, but if one is starting out, then the degree will be a leg-up to get in the door before other factors are considered.
The other side of it though, is that learning to write software through a college program is a top-down approach, where one should learn project management, cost/benefit analysis, group-interaction, and other non-coding parts of work that will affect how the programmer thinks about the task of coding. By contrast, a bottom-up approach, for self-taught programmers, may give the programmer good fundamentals of the language and an ability to play with idiocyncracies of that language to one's benefit, but might not get the rest of the picture.
It really depends on what's being written, for what audience, and how the company plans to further maintain the code (free updates, paid updates, paid full-new-releases, etc) and who will be doing that maintenance, and who will handle what aspects of the original design versus maintenance coding. A company might not want to hire a non-degreed person into a position where they're laying out the framework for the project as there could be condsiderations that the non-degreed person simply hasn't considered, but would hire them for the maintenance side because they're following an existing framework.
That being said, you can't really know what they'll want until the interview, and they might not even know what they want until they see it.