It's still a much lower bar than suing a governmental employee, which was the point.
The "I was just doing my job" argument essentially grants government employees blanket immunity from almost any type of action stemming from their employment. Just look at law enforcement. Even with beatings and killings caught on tape, "I was just doing my job" immunizes them from almost all legal consequences.
The implication of the original statement was that a private for-profit company cannot run anything better than the government, since they must cut corners in order to add profit. It was that implication I took issue with.
Examples of waste and corruption exist in both systems, so examples of problems in one must be endemic to be used as a rationale why the other is better.
The other issue is that private corruption usually has a lot of basis in government policy, so an indictment of one usually implicates the other by association.
I didn't call the profit motive evil. Profiting with a sociopathic outlook tends to be though, since it usually involves throwing people under the bus. "Profit" by itself is not evil. How people go about obtaining in can be. The two concepts need to be separated, since they are regularly conflated.
They only way you get more for less by privatizing is by cutting corners - and you've got to cut enough to satisfy the profit motive just to break even.
This is a blanket statement with no qualifiers. The implications should speak for themselves, but apparently don't do so loudly enough. If a private entity must cut corners to do something at a profit, then the implication is that government can do anything more efficiently by running it as a non-profit. The statement was in regard to security, but the concept is not limited to it. If it were, there must be some particular, unspoken reason why security is somehow different in that one entity must cut corners while another does not. That presupposition assumes there is nothing more to streamline, and no legitimate costs that can be cut, which is a pretty bold statement.
I'm not saying privatization is necessarily better. I'm simply saying both systems are subject to corruption, and an example of corruption in one doesn't automatically mean the other is better. (only person in this thread not making concrete judgments about which system is better. I have opinions on that matter, but they are not stated here.
Cable length is an issue for certain things, amongst them USB. I am currently at the spec limit for cable lengths. Since USB timing can get hairy when you exceed the limit on cabling, I have to make accommodations for that limit (chaining hubs is not something I will consider just to exceed it). I would like an external interconnect where this is not an issue. 15 feet is not a whole lot in many situations.
Powered extenders are expensive, because they have to integrate timing corrections to compensate for the signal delay. Optical has no such issues. I wish they'd just bite the bullet and develop a good external optical interconnect. Given the ubiquity of HBAs (at least in the enterprise), you'd think it wouldn't be THAT difficult to adapt the technology to support other types of signaling.
Yes. The main benefit of optics is that you don't have the same sort of signal loss as a result of resistance. The longer the distance the more important a consideration that becomes.
Short-run cabling probably isn't going to see much difference between the two transport mechanisms. Copper still has a lot of headroom.
That processing that's done at each end is done by very efficient short-run copper. Until they start making optical traces and transistors in IC-size, that's going to be a limitation which is not surmountable. Saying it's a limitation doesn't mean much right now though.
Yeah, I've got an Asus laptop that's like... 7 years old, and it has a hybrid copper-optical SPDIF port on it. Wasn't even a particularly expensive laptop at the time.
The zeros are still backward with that adapter. Now, if you got the Denon cable that also includes directional arrows, they'd come out the end in the proper orientation.
No it doesn't; I was merely pointing out that there are nearly foolproof methods of doing so if there were actually people intent on it. The fact that it hasn't happened is pretty good evidence that nobody is interested in repeating that method, for reasons other than TSA security.
My dad flew cross-country and went through three checkpoints and two baggage searches, only to find when he arrived at his destination that he had forgotten to take a 3-inch Spyderco folding knife out of his luggage before the trip. I've heard dozens of such stories, which further reinforces the "security theater" aspect of flying.
Anyone who actually wants to cause damage, and isn't a complete moron, can do so with relative ease.
It's incredibly easy to buy blades that are completely invisible to x-rays and body scanners.
Take a Zytel knife for example. It may not be sharp in the same manner as a metal or ceramic blade, but you can kill with it quite effectively. Properly aligned to present the lowest profile on an x-ray machine, they can be nearly impossible to spot even if someone knows it's there before-hand. That is, assuming it's not built-in to an innocuous item like a hairbrush. Then it moves into the "impossible to find except by sheer stupendous luck" category.
If the logic is extended, it appears you are an advocate of government running absolutely everything.
The reality is that there are evil people both in private enterprise and in government service, who are out to line their pockets as much as possible with no regard to the consequences as they apply to others. So, you can find arguments on both sides why they are evil and inefficient. Using such examples, unless the examples are comprehensive enough to be considered endemic, does little to advance an argument for either side.
Free market competition can't work or fail where it doesn't exist. The same can be said of representative democracy. We have neither, and have not for a long, long time.
Intel was contracting out to other companies fabs at least from the days of the 8088 (that's the oldest Intel CPU I am actually in possession of).
Intel's main rift with AMD came about as AMD started manufacturing compatible CPUs using the x386 architecture after Intel declined to renew their manufacturing contract. IIRC, AMD at one time manufactured the bulk of Intel's CPUs.
World of Warcraft is to Warcraft what a boat is to a train. They are superficially similar in that they move and are used to carry things, but aside from that they couldn't be more dissimilar.
They share a name, nothing more. That WoW is successful says nothing about changing genres and still keeping the spirit of the old game. There is nothing of substance from Warcraft that made the transition into WoW.
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It's still a much lower bar than suing a governmental employee, which was the point.
The "I was just doing my job" argument essentially grants government employees blanket immunity from almost any type of action stemming from their employment. Just look at law enforcement. Even with beatings and killings caught on tape, "I was just doing my job" immunizes them from almost all legal consequences.
Trying to compare the two is a joke.
You can sue a private employee even if they are just doing their job.
The implication of the original statement was that a private for-profit company cannot run anything better than the government, since they must cut corners in order to add profit. It was that implication I took issue with.
Examples of waste and corruption exist in both systems, so examples of problems in one must be endemic to be used as a rationale why the other is better.
The other issue is that private corruption usually has a lot of basis in government policy, so an indictment of one usually implicates the other by association.
I didn't call the profit motive evil. Profiting with a sociopathic outlook tends to be though, since it usually involves throwing people under the bus. "Profit" by itself is not evil. How people go about obtaining in can be. The two concepts need to be separated, since they are regularly conflated.
They only way you get more for less by privatizing is by cutting corners - and you've got to cut enough to satisfy the profit motive just to break even.
This is a blanket statement with no qualifiers. The implications should speak for themselves, but apparently don't do so loudly enough. If a private entity must cut corners to do something at a profit, then the implication is that government can do anything more efficiently by running it as a non-profit. The statement was in regard to security, but the concept is not limited to it. If it were, there must be some particular, unspoken reason why security is somehow different in that one entity must cut corners while another does not. That presupposition assumes there is nothing more to streamline, and no legitimate costs that can be cut, which is a pretty bold statement.
I'm not saying privatization is necessarily better. I'm simply saying both systems are subject to corruption, and an example of corruption in one doesn't automatically mean the other is better. (only person in this thread not making concrete judgments about which system is better. I have opinions on that matter, but they are not stated here.
This.
Cable length is an issue for certain things, amongst them USB. I am currently at the spec limit for cable lengths. Since USB timing can get hairy when you exceed the limit on cabling, I have to make accommodations for that limit (chaining hubs is not something I will consider just to exceed it). I would like an external interconnect where this is not an issue. 15 feet is not a whole lot in many situations.
Powered extenders are expensive, because they have to integrate timing corrections to compensate for the signal delay. Optical has no such issues. I wish they'd just bite the bullet and develop a good external optical interconnect. Given the ubiquity of HBAs (at least in the enterprise), you'd think it wouldn't be THAT difficult to adapt the technology to support other types of signaling.
Yes. The main benefit of optics is that you don't have the same sort of signal loss as a result of resistance. The longer the distance the more important a consideration that becomes.
Short-run cabling probably isn't going to see much difference between the two transport mechanisms. Copper still has a lot of headroom.
That processing that's done at each end is done by very efficient short-run copper. Until they start making optical traces and transistors in IC-size, that's going to be a limitation which is not surmountable. Saying it's a limitation doesn't mean much right now though.
Yeah, I've got an Asus laptop that's like ... 7 years old, and it has a hybrid copper-optical SPDIF port on it. Wasn't even a particularly expensive laptop at the time.
The zeros are still backward with that adapter. Now, if you got the Denon cable that also includes directional arrows, they'd come out the end in the proper orientation.
No it doesn't; I was merely pointing out that there are nearly foolproof methods of doing so if there were actually people intent on it. The fact that it hasn't happened is pretty good evidence that nobody is interested in repeating that method, for reasons other than TSA security.
My dad flew cross-country and went through three checkpoints and two baggage searches, only to find when he arrived at his destination that he had forgotten to take a 3-inch Spyderco folding knife out of his luggage before the trip. I've heard dozens of such stories, which further reinforces the "security theater" aspect of flying.
Anyone who actually wants to cause damage, and isn't a complete moron, can do so with relative ease.
Certainly, but they have to do that through practice (or at least bribery) rather than simply as a matter of course simply for existing at all.
No worries, we all have bad days. I've done it myself more than a few times. :)
That's because the calculation was performed on a Pentium.
It's incredibly easy to buy blades that are completely invisible to x-rays and body scanners.
Take a Zytel knife for example. It may not be sharp in the same manner as a metal or ceramic blade, but you can kill with it quite effectively. Properly aligned to present the lowest profile on an x-ray machine, they can be nearly impossible to spot even if someone knows it's there before-hand. That is, assuming it's not built-in to an innocuous item like a hairbrush. Then it moves into the "impossible to find except by sheer stupendous luck" category.
Terrorists caring about their own human assets? A handful of them maybe, but field assets? Not bloody likely.
Every major airline security incident I can recall in the last 10 years occurred after the plane took off. That says something right there.
If the logic is extended, it appears you are an advocate of government running absolutely everything.
The reality is that there are evil people both in private enterprise and in government service, who are out to line their pockets as much as possible with no regard to the consequences as they apply to others. So, you can find arguments on both sides why they are evil and inefficient. Using such examples, unless the examples are comprehensive enough to be considered endemic, does little to advance an argument for either side.
Free market competition can't work or fail where it doesn't exist. The same can be said of representative democracy. We have neither, and have not for a long, long time.
You can sue a private company. The TSA has sovereign immunity to most types of lawsuits.
Did you have your sense of humor sugically removed, or did you come from the factory that way?
I wasn't aware patents could be awarded fractionally...
The general public is going to reflash their BIOS at all anyway?
I'd like to know which "general public" you deal with.
Intel was contracting out to other companies fabs at least from the days of the 8088 (that's the oldest Intel CPU I am actually in possession of).
Intel's main rift with AMD came about as AMD started manufacturing compatible CPUs using the x386 architecture after Intel declined to renew their manufacturing contract. IIRC, AMD at one time manufactured the bulk of Intel's CPUs.
Nope, I avoid them too. There are only a handful that were ever worth playing for more than mindless pvp deathmatches.
This is why I no longer purchase games. It's the same repackaged crap, with very few new ideas.
They're not losing sales to piracy, they're losing sales to mediocrity.
World of Warcraft is to Warcraft what a boat is to a train. They are superficially similar in that they move and are used to carry things, but aside from that they couldn't be more dissimilar.
They share a name, nothing more. That WoW is successful says nothing about changing genres and still keeping the spirit of the old game. There is nothing of substance from Warcraft that made the transition into WoW.