Despite the name, entrapment doesn't have to do with being tricked,
It has everything to do with being tricked. Entrapment is a defense against criminal charges where the defendant claims that he wouldn't have dome whatever it is he's charged with if the police hadn't talked him into it. Personally, I've always thought that Abscam was blatant entrapment and that the federal agents involved were the ones who deserved to go to prison.
I recently bought a new laptop and put Fedora 11 on it. I'd picked one with 3 Gig of RAM installed to avoid potential problems with a 64 bit system and was a tad surprised to see that Fedora installed a PAE kernel by default. Recently, I showed it to some friends of mine (You can't really describe the multiple desktops and rotating cube to people; it's much better to show them.) He put this on his blog: "I have also been impressed with the performance of the latest Red Hat with Gnome as I saw it on a friend's fairly standard laptop; indeed, it was in many ways indistinguishable in operation from Windows XP, but was fast and crisp." [Actually, he used my name; I changed it here for obvious reasons.] There are two important points here: first, he didn't see a performance penalty from the PAE kernel and second, it implies either that XP is neither fast nor crisp, or if it is, Linux is faster and crisper. Of course, that might be because the PAE isn't really needed. I don't know; I don't do Windows.
I do tech support and I have access to the tools to fix most problems.
Unless you work for a small company, you are either very lucky or very senior. When I started work doing support for a small ISP, techs got access to as many tools as they could handle. By the time I left, almost eight years ago, the company was much bigger, much more regimented and techs were given as few tools as possible. Mind you, this wasn't the result of the managers growing pointy hair; it was simply because we needed so many techs that most of them were just about able to help the average caller by reading scripts and calling for help if anything didn't go as expected.
And you could certainly give your smarter junior techs read-only access to diagnostics.
They often do, but so what? Assuming they know how to use them, all that does is tell them what's wrong, it doesn't give them any way to do something about it.
But the script should actually be able to deal with unusual problems.
Yes, that would be nice. Alas, the more unusual a problem is, the less likely that somebody will have written a script to deal with it. And, the junior techs will probably try the script they're most familiar with first, then give up. I remember, once, being the fifth tech a caller spoke to about a connectivity issue with Win 98. The first four techs had removed and replaced Dial-Up Networking over and over, even though it never did any good. (What I like to call The Bullwinkle Syndrome: "This time, for sure!") I took one look at what was going on and did what they should have done in the first place: I went through both Network Control Panel and their connection's Properties and put all the settings back where they should have been. (There was a walk through for that, but I guess it wasn't as "glamorous" as the other because junior techs tended not to use it, even though it worked at least 90% of the time.) When I was finished, the caller was back on line and surfing away. Of course, by that time I was a Very Senior Tech, and had learned how to think for myself and do proper troubleshooting.
Let me tell you guys something, this is the tech's way of not dealing with you.
I take it that you've never done tech support. I have. Most of the time, the "phone firewall" doesn't have direct access to the files that need changing to clear up issues like yours. The most they can generally do is put in a request to have somebody in the NOC make the needed changes. Depending on how busy people are, how hard working they are and the phase of the moon, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days for your request to rise to the top of the list and get dealt with.
Techs decide what they can and cannot do in order to get off the phone with you as soon as possible, conveinently never having access to that part of the system that can FIX anything.
That's right. Their performance is judged, mostly, on how many calls per day they handle and their average call-time because managers have to have some sort of metric, and that's about all they have to work with. Junior techs don't have direct access to the files and programs needed to fix things because they're not expected to have the experience or know-how to use them properly. (Would you want to give that type of power to some kid just out of high school, or working his way through college? If so, you're a much more trusting soul than I am!)
Did you read my post, or just glance at it? AIUI, Mr. Miranda confessed to a crime because he was poorly educated and had no idea that he didn't have to answer the cop's questions or have an attorney present. Probably the latter, because if you did read it, you'd have seen that the highlighted part of the above quotation refers to what you wrote in your reply, making yours one of the most redundant posts I've seen in quite a while.
Not quite. The reason the cops have to tell you about your right to remain silent, and so on, is because of a ruling by SCOTUS, commonly referred to as Miranda, because that was the name of the accused in the case. AIUI, Mr. Miranda confessed to a crime because he was poorly educated and had no idea that he didn't have to answer the cop's questions or have an attorney present. SCOTUS ruled (quite reasonably, IMO) that you can't exercise a right you don't know you have and that Miranda was effectively deprived of his civil rights. IIRC, a fair number of other felons got their convictions overturned after the ruling for the same reason. This lead to the requirement for the police to "read you your rights" before questioning you, either after you've been arrested, or if you're considered a suspect. Generally, it's not right after they cuff you as they show on TV, but it is before they question you.
or right-wing zealots from removing negative aspects of their favorite political candidate.
For that matter, it can also prevent left-wing nutjobs from removing favorable aspects from the pages of their political opponents. In fact, it will slow down and possibly prevent the vandalism of pages by fruitcakes from all parts of the political spectrum.
I wonder if a "real" ISP would be able to partner with a spam-fighter to allow them to fight the good fight.
Why not? Just hire the spam fighter as a consultant to "look into" the problem of spam and to both suggest and implement policies designed to reduce the company's spam-load.
You tell him; his address is on the site I linked to. I'm sure he'll read it, and you may even get a response back giving you (among other things) a very precise definition of the term "sarcasm."
Should setting up shop in order to take advantage of a law against spamming be allowed? HELL YES it should!
I agree. And, if Mr. Gordon had actually set up shop as a mom-and-pop ISP he probably would have gotten away with it. Alas, he forgot that if he wants to be taken for a duck, calling himself a duck isn't enough; he has to waddle like a duck and quack like a duck, neither of which he did.
Honestly, do you *really* need some dweeb on Slashdot to do *all* your thinking for you?
No. But then, I don't expect highly complex problems to have simplistic solutions. In this case, not only don't I think we know the answer, I don't think that we're asking the right questions. Before we can ask what to do about AGW, we need to know if it's really happening (No, this isn't decided by consensus, it's decided by the facts, and I don't think we have enough of them.) especially because some of the "solutions" would cost more than we can probably afford for very questionable results. You do know, don't you, that at least some of the sensor readings showing a constant rise in temperature have been invalidated because their environment has gone from open fields to urban? How many? Damned if I know. Is anything being done about it? Probably not, because that's going to be a long, hard, thankless chunk of donkey-work, and it's unlikely that anybody's going to want to do it. (I can't blame them; I wouldn't want to be stuck with that either.) What we need, here, is an objective study of the facts, and what I'm seeing is a combination of appeals to the emotions and demonizing of any and all opposition. If nothing else, that would be enough to make me skeptical, because people with the facts on their side don't need to descend to such tactics.
I mentioned this to a friend of mine. His reply was, "I guess, then, that we didn't survive the Early Medieval Warm Period or the Roman Warm. Here's a hint for you: yes, the ocean's currrently climbing up the coast, but it's been doing that, as far as we can tell, for 12,000 years, possibly longer. AFAICT, we've survived so far, using less technology than we have now. I, at least, find it reasonable to expect us to continue to survive. YMMV and clearly does.
We've introduced a new source of greenhouse gasses into the equation - digging up and burning 100-million-year-old fossil fuels at such a rate that we'll have released a geological era's worth in a hundred years or so.
No argument there. However, I remember reading in Scientific American about a decade or so ago about an experiment with terrariums where the CO2 level was artificially heightened. The result was that the plants grew much bigger and heartier than normal. (surprise, surprise!) Alas, the researcher kept pumping in more CO2 to keep the level up until the end of the experiment. I'd like to see a similar experiment, but without adding anything to the terrarium after it starts, to see where the CO2 level ends up. Should be interesting.
BTW, there's one thing we agree on here: running an open-ended experiment by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere to see what happens probably isn't a good idea, AGW or no AGW.
The Slashdot tag-line of the moment is oddly apt: Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. -- Gandhi
It doesn't matter one jot how much of the normal level of greenhouse heating comes from which gas: increase any one of them and you increase the effect.
Sigh! Not only is water vapor a better greenhouse gas, there's so much more of it in the atmosphere than any other. (I'd say than all others combined, but I'm not sure of that.) CO2 is such a minor component that it's effect is almost buried in the noise. And, I might add for what it's worth, I've been seeing reports (no cite that I'm confident enough of to give) that although there's a correlation between rising temperature and rising CO2 levels, the CO2 level follows the temperature, not leads it. If so, the whole business about AGW goes out the window.
I didn't cite Wikipedia to support my claims as such; it was more as a reminder that The Early Medieval Warm Period is a well-documented fact and not the myth that some AGW fanbois try to pretend. I don't have a cite for the Scottish vineyards, although I'd love to find one. As far as the cheese, there's ample evidence if you look around to show that the Norse colony supported itself by dairy farming.
Actually they don't have to unless you ask. You see, what you bought wasn't a ticket for a specific flight from point A to point B, although that's how you think of it. What you bought was a ticket for a flight from point A to point B, and you also made a reservation to use that ticket on a specific flight. If for any reason you can't make that flight, you can always make a reservation for a later flight on that route and use the ticket you have. I learned that decades ago when circumstances (not involving the airline) forced me to reschedule.
I don't have to. The water vapor that's currently in the atmosphere is responsible for (I'm guessing here, but I don't think I'm that far off.) over 95% of the greenhouse heating. The only places that CO2 is more significant is in cool, dry places, such as deserts at night.
Here is a hint, there is no roof on the atmosphere. Heat energy radiates out without anything containing it. There is no coated glass roof or anything keeping it there. T
Here's the answer you're looking for couched in terms that even you should be able to understand. Greenhouse gases such as CO2 and, to a much greater extent water vapor trap heat in a way that's analogous to the roof on a greenhouse. That, in fact, is why they're called "greenhouse gases." Their presence in the atmosphere makes it act somewhat like a greenhouse without needing a solid roof.
Anybody who rejects AGW needs to come up with some theory that explains why that magically won't happen in the real world.
And, of course, anybody who embraces AGW needs to come up with a theory that explains why CO2 magically becomes a stronger and more significant greenhouse gas than H2O.
Personally, I'm not going to worry until and unless I can do so while sipping a nice, light wine from a Scottish vineyard and nibbling on a sharp Greenland Chedder. These were both possible during The Early Medieval Warm Period, but quickly became impossible during The Little Ice Age that followed. The climate is always changing; sometimes it's getting warmer, sometimes cooler. Deal with it and stop pretending that mankind has any meaningful effect on it.
Slashdot Mirror
It has everything to do with being tricked. Entrapment is a defense against criminal charges where the defendant claims that he wouldn't have dome whatever it is he's charged with if the police hadn't talked him into it. Personally, I've always thought that Abscam was blatant entrapment and that the federal agents involved were the ones who deserved to go to prison.
I recently bought a new laptop and put Fedora 11 on it. I'd picked one with 3 Gig of RAM installed to avoid potential problems with a 64 bit system and was a tad surprised to see that Fedora installed a PAE kernel by default. Recently, I showed it to some friends of mine (You can't really describe the multiple desktops and rotating cube to people; it's much better to show them.) He put this on his blog: "I have also been impressed with the performance of the latest Red Hat with Gnome as I saw it on a friend's fairly standard laptop; indeed, it was in many ways indistinguishable in operation from Windows XP, but was fast and crisp." [Actually, he used my name; I changed it here for obvious reasons.] There are two important points here: first, he didn't see a performance penalty from the PAE kernel and second, it implies either that XP is neither fast nor crisp, or if it is, Linux is faster and crisper. Of course, that might be because the PAE isn't really needed. I don't know; I don't do Windows.
Unless you work for a small company, you are either very lucky or very senior. When I started work doing support for a small ISP, techs got access to as many tools as they could handle. By the time I left, almost eight years ago, the company was much bigger, much more regimented and techs were given as few tools as possible. Mind you, this wasn't the result of the managers growing pointy hair; it was simply because we needed so many techs that most of them were just about able to help the average caller by reading scripts and calling for help if anything didn't go as expected.
They often do, but so what? Assuming they know how to use them, all that does is tell them what's wrong, it doesn't give them any way to do something about it.
But the script should actually be able to deal with unusual problems.
Yes, that would be nice. Alas, the more unusual a problem is, the less likely that somebody will have written a script to deal with it. And, the junior techs will probably try the script they're most familiar with first, then give up. I remember, once, being the fifth tech a caller spoke to about a connectivity issue with Win 98. The first four techs had removed and replaced Dial-Up Networking over and over, even though it never did any good. (What I like to call The Bullwinkle Syndrome: "This time, for sure!") I took one look at what was going on and did what they should have done in the first place: I went through both Network Control Panel and their connection's Properties and put all the settings back where they should have been. (There was a walk through for that, but I guess it wasn't as "glamorous" as the other because junior techs tended not to use it, even though it worked at least 90% of the time.) When I was finished, the caller was back on line and surfing away. Of course, by that time I was a Very Senior Tech, and had learned how to think for myself and do proper troubleshooting.
I take it that you've never done tech support. I have. Most of the time, the "phone firewall" doesn't have direct access to the files that need changing to clear up issues like yours. The most they can generally do is put in a request to have somebody in the NOC make the needed changes. Depending on how busy people are, how hard working they are and the phase of the moon, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days for your request to rise to the top of the list and get dealt with.
Techs decide what they can and cannot do in order to get off the phone with you as soon as possible, conveinently never having access to that part of the system that can FIX anything.
That's right. Their performance is judged, mostly, on how many calls per day they handle and their average call-time because managers have to have some sort of metric, and that's about all they have to work with. Junior techs don't have direct access to the files and programs needed to fix things because they're not expected to have the experience or know-how to use them properly. (Would you want to give that type of power to some kid just out of high school, or working his way through college? If so, you're a much more trusting soul than I am!)
Did you read my post, or just glance at it? AIUI, Mr. Miranda confessed to a crime because he was poorly educated and had no idea that he didn't have to answer the cop's questions or have an attorney present. Probably the latter, because if you did read it, you'd have seen that the highlighted part of the above quotation refers to what you wrote in your reply, making yours one of the most redundant posts I've seen in quite a while.
Not quite. The reason the cops have to tell you about your right to remain silent, and so on, is because of a ruling by SCOTUS, commonly referred to as Miranda, because that was the name of the accused in the case. AIUI, Mr. Miranda confessed to a crime because he was poorly educated and had no idea that he didn't have to answer the cop's questions or have an attorney present. SCOTUS ruled (quite reasonably, IMO) that you can't exercise a right you don't know you have and that Miranda was effectively deprived of his civil rights. IIRC, a fair number of other felons got their convictions overturned after the ruling for the same reason. This lead to the requirement for the police to "read you your rights" before questioning you, either after you've been arrested, or if you're considered a suspect. Generally, it's not right after they cuff you as they show on TV, but it is before they question you.
...and it felt good!
For that matter, it can also prevent left-wing nutjobs from removing favorable aspects from the pages of their political opponents. In fact, it will slow down and possibly prevent the vandalism of pages by fruitcakes from all parts of the political spectrum.
Why not? Just hire the spam fighter as a consultant to "look into" the problem of spam and to both suggest and implement policies designed to reduce the company's spam-load.
You tell him; his address is on the site I linked to. I'm sure he'll read it, and you may even get a response back giving you (among other things) a very precise definition of the term "sarcasm."
I agree. And, if Mr. Gordon had actually set up shop as a mom-and-pop ISP he probably would have gotten away with it. Alas, he forgot that if he wants to be taken for a duck, calling himself a duck isn't enough; he has to waddle like a duck and quack like a duck, neither of which he did.
It can be. Going against people with no regard for the law doesn't give you permission to ignore or misuse the law yourself.
No. But then, I don't expect highly complex problems to have simplistic solutions. In this case, not only don't I think we know the answer, I don't think that we're asking the right questions. Before we can ask what to do about AGW, we need to know if it's really happening (No, this isn't decided by consensus, it's decided by the facts, and I don't think we have enough of them.) especially because some of the "solutions" would cost more than we can probably afford for very questionable results. You do know, don't you, that at least some of the sensor readings showing a constant rise in temperature have been invalidated because their environment has gone from open fields to urban? How many? Damned if I know. Is anything being done about it? Probably not, because that's going to be a long, hard, thankless chunk of donkey-work, and it's unlikely that anybody's going to want to do it. (I can't blame them; I wouldn't want to be stuck with that either.) What we need, here, is an objective study of the facts, and what I'm seeing is a combination of appeals to the emotions and demonizing of any and all opposition. If nothing else, that would be enough to make me skeptical, because people with the facts on their side don't need to descend to such tactics.
I mentioned this to a friend of mine. His reply was, "I guess, then, that we didn't survive the Early Medieval Warm Period or the Roman Warm. Here's a hint for you: yes, the ocean's currrently climbing up the coast, but it's been doing that, as far as we can tell, for 12,000 years, possibly longer. AFAICT, we've survived so far, using less technology than we have now. I, at least, find it reasonable to expect us to continue to survive. YMMV and clearly does.
Oh, I see. That makes it all right, does it?
No argument there. However, I remember reading in Scientific American about a decade or so ago about an experiment with terrariums where the CO2 level was artificially heightened. The result was that the plants grew much bigger and heartier than normal. (surprise, surprise!) Alas, the researcher kept pumping in more CO2 to keep the level up until the end of the experiment. I'd like to see a similar experiment, but without adding anything to the terrarium after it starts, to see where the CO2 level ends up. Should be interesting.
BTW, there's one thing we agree on here: running an open-ended experiment by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere to see what happens probably isn't a good idea, AGW or no AGW.
The Slashdot tag-line of the moment is oddly apt: Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. -- Gandhi
Sigh! Not only is water vapor a better greenhouse gas, there's so much more of it in the atmosphere than any other. (I'd say than all others combined, but I'm not sure of that.) CO2 is such a minor component that it's effect is almost buried in the noise. And, I might add for what it's worth, I've been seeing reports (no cite that I'm confident enough of to give) that although there's a correlation between rising temperature and rising CO2 levels, the CO2 level follows the temperature, not leads it. If so, the whole business about AGW goes out the window.
I didn't cite Wikipedia to support my claims as such; it was more as a reminder that The Early Medieval Warm Period is a well-documented fact and not the myth that some AGW fanbois try to pretend. I don't have a cite for the Scottish vineyards, although I'd love to find one. As far as the cheese, there's ample evidence if you look around to show that the Norse colony supported itself by dairy farming.
Well, as I say, it was years ago; probably about thirty. Things may have changed, but if so, I'm not aware of how things are done now.
Actually they don't have to unless you ask. You see, what you bought wasn't a ticket for a specific flight from point A to point B, although that's how you think of it. What you bought was a ticket for a flight from point A to point B, and you also made a reservation to use that ticket on a specific flight. If for any reason you can't make that flight, you can always make a reservation for a later flight on that route and use the ticket you have. I learned that decades ago when circumstances (not involving the airline) forced me to reschedule.
I don't have to. The water vapor that's currently in the atmosphere is responsible for (I'm guessing here, but I don't think I'm that far off.) over 95% of the greenhouse heating. The only places that CO2 is more significant is in cool, dry places, such as deserts at night.
Here's the answer you're looking for couched in terms that even you should be able to understand. Greenhouse gases such as CO2 and, to a much greater extent water vapor trap heat in a way that's analogous to the roof on a greenhouse. That, in fact, is why they're called "greenhouse gases." Their presence in the atmosphere makes it act somewhat like a greenhouse without needing a solid roof.
And, of course, anybody who embraces AGW needs to come up with a theory that explains why CO2 magically becomes a stronger and more significant greenhouse gas than H2O.
Personally, I'm not going to worry until and unless I can do so while sipping a nice, light wine from a Scottish vineyard and nibbling on a sharp Greenland Chedder. These were both possible during The Early Medieval Warm Period, but quickly became impossible during The Little Ice Age that followed. The climate is always changing; sometimes it's getting warmer, sometimes cooler. Deal with it and stop pretending that mankind has any meaningful effect on it.