No, the moral is that the idea of an internship is to help you get hired for a job in the IT industry.
Making yourself IT-lynch-mob-fodder is not necessarily the best way of going about doing that.
Had I had such a background (and for the protocol, you'd need to point a loaded gun at me to get me to do this), I most certainly would not advertise this on my resume.
This ain't serious, people. Yet again, they're aiming at inner-city-dwellers who earn more, pay for more expensive accomodation, need to commute smaller distances and are sometimes willing to pay a premium (most of whom use a prius, Merc SMART, bicycle or motorcycle anyway). Hell, segways will pro'lly outsell this.
This product further violates an agreement the general public have with their car - simply put, if you want mass adoption, your car needs to be a car. It needs to be a 5-seater you can pack your friends/family into, not a souped-up golf-cart. Which this is.
This is a gimick that will be dabbled with in a test site or two, and phased away.
GM are busy being the PALM of the automotive industry. We should be setting our eyes on the company that's busy being a Google or an Apple... way more serious and will pro'lly completely overhaul (read: improve on sufficiently for us to want it) how we see, buy and use cars:
This would be [a] a dedicated technology you need to explicitly buy gear for, rather than use what you implicitly get in nearly every device you buy - phone, lappie, printer, home SAN, what have you. [b] they wont sell as many radios as the wifi people do, so dont expect anywhere near the same price for a device with a radio on it. [c] Wifi would advance faster (in bandwidth and price primarily). As would Wireless USB, Bluetooth 4.0, etc. [d] you'd need to go back to the days of pointint irda devices. Consumer inconvenience.
This would have an advantage where you want to set up line-of-sight comms, wireless doesnt cut it (cuz you're in an appartment building in the middle of Hong Kong or something), and cabled ethernet is not good enough. AND the consumer is sufficiently inconvenienced by wifi to go through this hassle.
Which accounts for about 0.00000000000001% of the consumer base. (The vast majority of which, as stated, couldn't be f#@!%ed and will opt to use Wifi anyway)
If some words in the Geneva convention would allow perpetrators to wheel a bomb into the WTC in NY, I doubt the us should respect the Geneva convention and allow it to be wheeled in.
I'd argue that at that point the US should not follow the Geneva convention, but re-evaluate it.
Hezbollah smuggled ordance in ambulances. Hammas had "pregnant" women hide bombs (the kind you strap on and detonate, along with yourself, in a mall) under their clothes, as well as use ambulances on multiple occasions. Both organizations used schools, appartment blocks, UN compoundsas a source of mortar/rocket fire.
When you're Israel, and you SEE fire coming out of [name-your-geneva-outlawed-source-here], and that fire -is killing your civillians-, you go and eradicate the source. And if that source is a school, so be it. All you can do is try to be careful.
Unfortunately, armchair critics such as yourself cant really grasp the full meaning of "we need to make the incoming fire stop" and delve on shoulds and shouldnt's.
When my kid's bedroom gets bombed, I expect my government to make it stop, not come back and say "we can't. they're using their civilians as shields".
If it's the life of my kid or the life of theirs, so be it. It'll be theirs.
>> Not much of a contest is it? (emphasis mine) And therein lies my point. You see it as some form of contest. A "whoever hurts the most gets moral high-ground and becomes above-any-meaninful-criticism"
I call you a hypocrite. If it was YOUR toddlers that were blown up for having done nothing to anyone, you'd be singing a different tune.
Here's the real deal: BOTH sides hurt. If you say "whoever hurts the most gets a 007 license to go and kill the other's civilians and we legitimize it and call it "understandable", then you become a direct contributor to prolonging the conflict.
Both sides hurt, to various degrees. Note I'm not arguing the point that the palestinians hurt more. I'm arguing the point that they're above harsh criticism of the hammas for having shed any semblance of human morals/ethics.
Then why does the Hammas have Israel's entire land on its flag? Why does it continuously call for Israel's full destruction?
You have a valid point, there is a very justified side to the Palestinian struggle for independence. Only problem is that organizations like the Hammas deliberately blur the line between the bits that are justified, and the bits that are hate-mongering, impossible loony ideas (entirely displace a 7-million modern nation with access to money, all the technology it needs a big army? yeh, right) that are entirely outside any acceptable modern ethics/morals profile.
Killing someone who would otherwise kill your and my kids indiscriminately if they happen to be at the wrong place & the wrong time can be cheered, yes.
I applaud a proper judicial system & process in environments where it can be applied. When dealing with modern-day high-profile civilian-targeting combatants who travel on forged papers (which the assassination victim allegedly was) I'd rather see him taken out of action, permanently if possible, using whatever means necessary.
Israelis don't level apartment complexes arbitrarily. They do so when the apartment complexes in question get used in Palestinian attacks, or on the rare occurrence of a high-profile ticking-timebomb blood-on-hands type of persona rearing his head in a known place at a known time.
The Qassam "holes in walls", on the other hand, are conducted randomly, by weapons with very primitive targeting, into the heart of civilian population centers, with no other purpose than to harm civilians.
You have to decide whether you're handing out points for who has the better technology (bigger bombs/targeting systems) or who has the better ethical/moral; base.
It's not about the size of the hole in the wall. It's about whether you had a valid military target in your sights when you pulled the trigger.
And before we start a discussion on (Israel) firing on ambulances/UN schools et,remember the Geneva convention and wartime rules are only applicable so long as both sides respect them. When one side ignores them, they become a worthless piece of paper.
You will respect wartime rules and won't shoot at *my* ambulances, civilian shelters, schools etc, so long as I respect the same wartime rules and not misuse my ambulances, civilian shelters, schools etc.
If I get caught several times with my ambulances smuggling weapons and bombs, and it ends up costing you lives (and your government public criticism from your angry voters), you'll throw the wartime rules out the window same as everyone else who has had to face a similar situation ever did, and treat my ambulances as potential weapon-carrying-trucks (which, I remind you, in our example, they *are*).
Unfortunately (mainly to the Palestinian and Lebanese populations), the methods of the Iranian proxies Hammas and Hezbollah openly ignore wartime law. And when they dont respect it, it would be naive and totally unrealistic to expect their adversary (Israel in these two cases) to respect those same wartime laws.
I think what they were saying is that pistons in a V configuration (e.g. V6, V8, V12 etc) are not in a line, hence they are not inline engines. An engine can either be a V or an inline, not both, much like a line can't be straight and curved at the same time.
Better Place are rolling out here in Australia in two years.
I can and do maintain one fast car as part of my family's fleet of two (the other is a bush-going family-packing trip-ready diesel 4WD - A Patrol ST - and considering its required dimensions and weight electric is absolutely irrelevant for it for years to come).
Burning-stuff-wise, my choice for a fast-car/daily-driver is a Mini Cooper S. Handles remarkably and is solid German sports car in disguise.
But I really really really want to go electric for my daily driver.
I want the 'I run on the wind' sticker, the instant torque, the 4-year plan that helps subsudise the car. Those I will probably be able to get with any PHEV from Better Place, even if the car is not QuickDrop compatible.
But I also want quickdrop capability and not to own the bloody battery or ever have to worry about battery wear, replacing it, or its diminishing lifecycle. It's a hassle, a worry I don't need.
If BMW do what Tesla, Renault and Nissan are doing, withdraw head from rear orifice and make themselves compatible with Better Place batteries and infrastructure, I'll buy a Mini E the day it hits the dealership floor.
Otherwise I'll hang a Mini E poster on my wall but will be driving a Fluence ZE to work.
As Danish Oil and Natural Gas (DONG) utilities clearly figured out - put a REALLY big (distributed) battery on the grid to soak up the power when it's available and re-feed it into the grid when it's scarce. Not only can they produce more of the baseline power generation from renewable sources, they don't have to PAY the Germans to TAKE their excess power at night when they can't consume it. They can store it instead, use it at peak hour when kilowatt price is insane and drastically flatten the curve. Problem. Solution.
As an OT side-benefit, we get electric cars wrapped around said batteries. For what we already got used to paying for car's fuel, there's enough margin in the operator's plan to subsidize new cars for consumers (think free iPhone on a three-year-plan), we'll get a parallel 1-minute-battery-swap-station infrastructure to petrol stations to enable real (non-golfcart) electric cars to go as far as the stations reach (range limitation is station reach, not battery capacity/petrol tank) without hour-long-charges along the way, remove an entire country's addiction to oil, fix the environment by running every single car in the fleet off renewable, and actually allow everyone in town to plug their car in at 8AM without having the lights in office buildings go down (The 'Everyone owns a Chevy Volt' scenario), while not having to spend tens to hundreds of billions on new power plants to cater to the spike. (But hey, that's just a side benefit;))
Freenet is a hard target. Arguably, the hardest of them all today. It's also the least popular.
The studios are playing a money game. Bang for buck. They want maximal deterrence for minimal spend.
Much like virus-writers aim viruses at the highest targets on the "adoption-by-the-masses"/"soft-bellyness" index, RIAA go-getem's do the same thing.
FastTrack - high adoption, soft belly. Torrent - high adoption, not-so-soft... and segregated into lots of independent share-specific networks. Freenet - low adoption, practically impossible to break.
It's a no-brainer. They've got no reason to go for the last. They may be greedy scum, but they're not that stupid with their money. Freenet would need to be adopted by the masses and get a ridiculous amount of media exposure to even pop up on their radar. Their goal is not to technically "stop filesharing" altogether, they realize that's a waste of money and effort. Their goal is to mitigate it by taking pot-shots at just the targets that are easy to break, and leave the harder ones alone (for now).
Being an informed geek, that actually makes me really happy. In a nutshell, It means we won.
And how exactly would offline imply uncorrupt? Do other means available to a home user - DVD, cheap tape, hard-drive-on-a-shelf pose a solution to this problem?
I have some 3-4TB of old data backed up on optical media at home. Important stuff (photos, scanned documents) I burn in triplicate because of how un-dang-reliable optical media is 5 years after you pull it off a shelf, never mind decades, and have already had the dubious pleasure of having to copy one half of a file from one disk (where its second half is corrupted), and the other from another (where its first is corrupted).
Unless you can come up with something like home-affordable LTO tapes (which have data reliability problems of their own, never mind head-broke-where-the-fuck-do-I-get-a-new-head-for-less-than-4000$-so-I-can-recover-my-archives issue), offline media is just as bad.
If you're smart, you can do something simple akin (forgive obvious double-matching bugs:)
Have your rsync (or own hacked job) do the analogue of this:
for x in `find/`; do if [ `md5sum $x` eq `grep "$x"/last-md5sums|cut -d: -f2` ]; then
cp $x/backup/ else
cp/backup/$x $x done
See? Online media offers a solution to the very real problem whereas offline media does not.
Philosophy re offline backups is great. You just need to somehow tie it into real-world(tm) solutions.
Sure, "RAID is not backup" in the sense that your primary storage, if RAIDed, is only protected from disk failure, not file deletion or filesystem blowout.
RAID very mych is a backup if you've set up a second seperate box (maybe on a seperate power grid, better yet in another building, or perhaps on two sets of removable hard-drives that get swapped between your home and an offsite loaction (your drawer in the office? your mum's place?) routinely.
If you're willing to go the extra mile, here's my take on it:
Failure modes: [a] Single Hard-drive failure [b] I deleted a file accidentally, or a file got corrupted by an improper shutdown, or the filesystem got hosed. [c] Two Hard-drive failure [d] Machine blowout, or Major Filesystem blowout (>20% (or whatever % you put aside) of the blocks on the volume got changed),
Solutions: --------------- Failure Mode [a] -> RAID 5 Cost: Pay for 1 extra hard-drive whose volume you can't actively use (If you wanted 4TB, you gotta buy 5 x 1TB harddrives or a blackbox that incorporates these)
Failure Mode [b] -> Run linux on your fileserver, with LVM or LVM2, allocating 10%-20% (my figures) of your volume to snapshots (depending on how much change you expect) and having an automated scheduled job perform a snapshot weekly, mount it so it can be browsed anytime, and blow out redundant historic ones (while keeping, say, one from the beginning of every month for yay many months). Cost: * Have to run a linux box rather than off-the-shelf storage blackbox * Some linux work required to set up and work out what to do in a real-life failure mode. * Some linux scripting knowhow required to automate properly * 10-20% of your overall post-RAID volume allocated to snapshots (YMMV).
=== a bit about snapshots === To the uninitiated, a snapshot only "saves" the old versions of blocks that got changed when they actually got changed. It doesn't stress the machine for an hour duplicating your gazillion-terabytes at any stage, nor does it care about files or filesystems as it sits below the filesystem. Hence, If you took a snapshot on Jan 1st, nothing would physically get copied anywhere on Jan 1st. If, consequently, on January 4th, a single bit got changed due to corruption following an unclean shutdown in a 9GB DVD iso called/movie.iso, the entire block (4MB would be a good ballpark for an LVM block) that this naughty bit lived in will be replicated - the old (pre-corruption Jan01 copy) 4MB block will be copied onto the snapshot space (that 20% we set aside earlier), and the new (corrupted) one will be copied onto the live filesystem.
We now have the same thing we would have had without the snapshot (a corrupted file on the primary volume), except, the snapshot retains an uncorrupted version of a 9GB file, which is costing us just 4MB to retain. And even protects us from filesystem corruption.
In real-wold terms, since our Jan-1 snapshot has been read-only live-mounted since Jan01, say, under/snapshots/0101/movie.iso, we can go back to our historic snapshot once we discover the file is b0rked and copy the pre-corrupted one out of there. === end bit about snapshots ===
Failure Mode [c] -> RAID-6 Cost: * have to run a linux box rather than off-the-shelf storage blackbox * Some linux work required to set up and work out what to do in a real-life failure mode. * Buy 2 extra hard-drives whose volume you can't actively use (If you wanted 4TB, you gotta buy 6 x 1TB harddrives)
Failure Modes [a,c,d] Full copy on secondary storage array Cost: * Any Secondary storage. * Extreme inefficiency. If you're running a 4TB (post-RAID/LVM) array, you will invest in 4TB of disk and be able to retain one historic image, or pay for 8TB to retain two, etc. You can go fancy and do snapshots here too tho.
Failure Modes [a,b,c,d] Cost: * Linux with RAID + LVM on your primary storage. This gives me snapshots
Subscribing to a belief doesn't make you an incompetent thinker, regardless of whether you believe in Jesus, God or golf balls.
Subscribing to an institutionalized belief (more commonly referred to as religions), whereupon you subscribe to needing to be told what to believe and how to believe in it because you can't figure it out on your own and need to be herded like a flock... well, that does, by definition really, make you incompetent to do so on your own.
It's an unstable system. You can only be a follower and a competent independent thinker at the same time to a point, on the particular days of the week they don't disagree.
Namely, until conflict between the two comes around and you need to decide which way your vote swings.
If it swings just one way every time - then that's what you are.
If it swings in different ways on different occasions, you qualify for what the English language terms 'hypocrisy'.
The scientific method has a track record of weeding out wrong statements based on ever-accumulating evidence.
When did you ever see religion go back on its core beliefs and admit that it was wrong all along? Something big, say, "Oops, we were wrong. There is no god".
Science and religion are two approaches, one claiming everything is up for criticism, the other not. They therefore cannot be bridged by anything short of thick hypocricy.
But hey, if it makes you feel better and you don't hurt anyone doing it, power be to you.
We all need something to believe in, and much like people get the services of a hooker if they can't get laid yet really want sex (and we consider that to be socially acceptable), there's dang little wrong with subscribing to institutionalized belief - which is what religion boils down to - (where they tell you what to believe in and what actions to do in order to be considered "believing") if you're too incompetent to figure out a personal belief system and a code to live by.
Douglas Adams wasn't far off. We're too lazy to believe, so we hire an electronic monk? Not far-removed from the truth. In real world terms, we're too lazy to figure out what we believe in, so we hire a not-so-electronic religious men to point us in the right way.
And just to be clear, belief is not limited to god. It can be in values, in relative objectivity, in pragmatism, in "human spirit", in unstoppable can-do-attitude, in nothing meaning anything, in chaos, in chance and in a hell of other things. God has no monopoly on the word "belief".
Further, religions are not the only institutionalized beliefs around. Some anti-religious movements, as well as many movements who busy themselves with things other than religion altogether institutionalize belief equally well. These could range from Coca-cola advertisements to socially acceptable behavior, ethnic stereotypes or natinalistic brainwashing spiel.
It all depends on how much of an emotional toll said war has taken over the public you're selling your game(/movie/book/whatever) to.
An interesting huge thing that factors into that is who we perceive the "good guys" were in the real war - if we do so at all.
I don't really have any emotional connection with, say, either side of the wars Troy had.
Being a Jew and an Australian/Israeli I find it hard to watch films looking at the conflicts "my side" had a part in, tenfold so when viewed from the "wrong side".
There were several such works done over the years, and it's very interesting to see how the public accepts (or doesn't) a work of art (devoid of political message, I'm not referring to media created as propaganda) - such as Avanti Popolo (Israeli indie film that follows a squad of cut-off purposeless Egyptian soldiers through the desert as they're attempting to return home, simply painting them as human), or, if you want to go more extreme, stuff like Das Boot.
Das Boot was made some four decades(!) - that's just short of three generations - after WWII and the holocaust, and people - worldwide, not just holocaust survivors & families - had a huge problem accepting it (I relate, I watched it with a distressing sense of unease, my own family was cut down in the holocaust from some 50 people to under 10), mainly because it humanized the Nazis (and it did nothing provocative a-la 'what about all the good things Hitler did' statementa, it just followed a bunch of young (Nazi German) sailors on a U-boat whose main concern throughout the movie was getting back home in one piece, with pretty much piss-all politics or nazi agenda. Just human beings and immediate hardships common to us all. Acceptance? Rather bad (though the amount of controversy-spawned publicity they got was rather good... "as long as they spell my name right...")
To answer your question - depends on how loaded the conflict in question was. Depends on which side it's presented from. Depending on whether the people it's presented TO have made peace with the historic conflict or not... And that can take a good while.
As a curiosity relating closure on conflicts, here in Australia we devote a day each year - ANZAC day - to paying our respects to those who fought in our wars. There is a solemn march on this day, and in it march the veterans (or those related to them etc). Keep in mind we've taken an active part in nearly every conflict America was involved in since the start of the century.
And here's the kicker - it doesn't matter which side you fought on. It doesn't matter if back then you were "the enemy". Having come, myself, from a country that lacks anything even remotely resembling closure on past conflicts. I really think achieving closure thus is a genuinely cool thing.
I've also seen it with US/Allied WWII vets doing same with their German and Japanese vets.
And if you've got that and you can avoid carrying a political message that'll de-label you as art and label you as a form of propaganda, you can popularize it in media all you want.
It's a game for those who know their shit, CS degree or no CS degree. Causality and effect. Age is an observation, not a cause.
Younger people who know their shit (who're not - yet - in possession of a degree) come to work in this field in droves, yes. It's a field that lends itself well to it.
I've been in this industry for 15 years, been in (several) ISPs, been in the software industry, been in the financial industry, and I can honestly say older people don't get discriminated against if they know their shit and can deliver. Quite on the contrary, they typically carry around an aura of respect (think Sid in User Friendly;)). Other side of same coin is true as well - clueless young people get the whip as easily as clueless old. You just don't notice it as often.
Re degree - I'm 34 and in the middle of a biology BSc (my first degree) after 15 years as either a (self-taught) software engineer, systems engineer, or combinations thereof.
The first poster said it best - you're gonna hit 35 one way or another. Only question is whether you'll hit it with a CS degree or not.
What I can also advise you is to stay on top of your shit in those three/four years. Stay geek, cluey, in the know, in possession of a firm marketable skillset. If you 'let go' of the tech side (as many of my friends who went to management did) and get a degree in 4 years, it's debatable whether you'll be better or worse off without one yet with the other instead.
What's not up for debate is if you walk out at 35 holding both the paper and the geek-who-knows-his-shit-license.
Most interesting jobs are for people who can drive any car - whether it's a Toyota or a Renault.
We're a 50-50 linux shop (a big bank), and if you "I DON'T DO WINDOWS", we regard you as the same dogmatic crowd as "I'M SCARED OF LINUX, IT HAS A COMMAND LINE". The clueless crowd we don't hire.
If you're a professional systems engineer, you can manage anything (and code and script on it).
If you're dogmatic about a product, you're putting your religious beliefs (those that tack 'good' and 'evil' labels on things such as Microsoft, GNU or the open-source community) before the interests of your employer, and we wouldn't touch you with a 10-meter pole.
Best advice I can give is be ambivalent - get the fact you're a techie across. If you can sell yourself as an a-religious techie, you'll be in more demand. Make a potential employer understand you'll do what is best for him, and you won't let your decisions for him be dictated either by your fear of one thing or religious dogma favoring the other.
Back in a place I worked we used to name machines after people who got sacked. Beat that.
To be fair, we were asked by management to change it after a while.
Last places I've worked used functional, descriptive and expandable naming schemes, that, while lacking the tongue-in-cheek humor, tend to lend themselves much nicer to quickly getting-in-context with a machine, expecially when you're managing a shop with machines (including VMs) ranging in the hundreds and thousands.
And being the geek that I am, functionality beats presentation/aesthetics. Well, most of the time anyway:)
Israel builds bunkers for its kids. Hammas builds kassam rockets and surrounds its kids with combatants who fire this artillery from within the midst of kids into israeli cities.
That may explain the skewed kill ratio, that may explain where all the Hamas funding goes and why they don't have an economy or bunkers, and it totally explains why the palestinians are neck-deep in shite. Hurting Israel seems like a bigger priority to them then helping themselves.
They're getting *exactly* what they voted for (hence, yes, ***they actually do*** like a good scrap over christmas), and exactly what they want. Good'on'em. May all their wishes come true.
Mate, you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped, who can only channel his energy into self-pity and violence towards others. You can't tell him who to democratically elect. But if he hurts you over and over, you can totally lock him out of your house (the "act of war" if you fall for Hamas propaganda that justifies lobbing thousands of explosives at Israeli civilian targets). If they want to learn this the hard way - let'em.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the moral is that the idea of an internship is to help you get hired for a job in the IT industry.
Making yourself IT-lynch-mob-fodder is not necessarily the best way of going about doing that.
Had I had such a background (and for the protocol, you'd need to point a loaded gun at me to get me to do this), I most certainly would not advertise this on my resume.
... The first link was meant to be this one:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=AICCSydney&view=videos#play/uploads/4/x6CQU-M6cxU
(radio: http://www.brr.com.au/event/58986/a-global-energy-revolution-ending-our-dependence-on-oil)
This ain't serious, people.
Yet again, they're aiming at inner-city-dwellers who earn more, pay for more expensive accomodation, need to commute smaller distances and are sometimes willing to pay a premium (most of whom use a prius, Merc SMART, bicycle or motorcycle anyway). Hell, segways will pro'lly outsell this.
This product further violates an agreement the general public have with their car - simply put, if you want mass adoption, your car needs to be a car. It needs to be a 5-seater you can pack your friends/family into, not a souped-up golf-cart. Which this is.
This is a gimick that will be dabbled with in a test site or two, and phased away.
GM are busy being the PALM of the automotive industry. We should be setting our eyes on the company that's busy being a Google or an Apple... way more serious and will pro'lly completely overhaul (read: improve on sufficiently for us to want it) how we see, buy and use cars:
http://www.brr.com.au/event/58986/partner/theaustralian
(and several days ago, this: http://www.abc.net.au/insidebusiness/content/2010/s2851753.htm).
yanks: coming your way soon as well.
... you deserve to have your geek license revoked.
This would be
[a] a dedicated technology you need to explicitly buy gear for, rather than use what you implicitly get in nearly every device you buy - phone, lappie, printer, home SAN, what have you.
[b] they wont sell as many radios as the wifi people do, so dont expect anywhere near the same price for a device with a radio on it.
[c] Wifi would advance faster (in bandwidth and price primarily). As would Wireless USB, Bluetooth 4.0, etc.
[d] you'd need to go back to the days of pointint irda devices. Consumer inconvenience.
This would have an advantage where you want to set up line-of-sight comms, wireless doesnt cut it (cuz you're in an appartment building in the middle of Hong Kong or something), and cabled ethernet is not good enough. AND the consumer is sufficiently inconvenienced by wifi to go through this hassle.
Which accounts for about 0.00000000000001% of the consumer base. (The vast majority of which, as stated, couldn't be f#@!%ed and will opt to use Wifi anyway)
Who's funding this? PALM?
If some words in the Geneva convention would allow perpetrators to wheel a bomb into the WTC in NY, I doubt the us should respect the Geneva convention and allow it to be wheeled in.
I'd argue that at that point the US should not follow the Geneva convention, but re-evaluate it.
Hezbollah smuggled ordance in ambulances. Hammas had "pregnant" women hide bombs (the kind you strap on and detonate, along with yourself, in a mall) under their clothes, as well as use ambulances on multiple occasions. Both organizations used schools, appartment blocks, UN compoundsas a source of mortar/rocket fire.
When you're Israel, and you SEE fire coming out of [name-your-geneva-outlawed-source-here], and that fire -is killing your civillians-, you go and eradicate the source. And if that source is a school, so be it. All you can do is try to be careful.
Unfortunately, armchair critics such as yourself cant really grasp the full meaning of "we need to make the incoming fire stop" and delve on shoulds and shouldnt's.
When my kid's bedroom gets bombed, I expect my government to make it stop, not come back and say "we can't. they're using their civilians as shields".
If it's the life of my kid or the life of theirs, so be it. It'll be theirs.
>> Not much of a contest is it?
(emphasis mine)
And therein lies my point. You see it as some form of contest. A "whoever hurts the most gets moral high-ground and becomes above-any-meaninful-criticism"
I call you a hypocrite. If it was YOUR toddlers that were blown up for having done nothing to anyone, you'd be singing a different tune.
Here's the real deal: BOTH sides hurt. If you say "whoever hurts the most gets a 007 license to go and kill the other's civilians and we legitimize it and call it "understandable", then you become a direct contributor to prolonging the conflict.
Both sides hurt, to various degrees.
Note I'm not arguing the point that the palestinians hurt more. I'm arguing the point that they're above harsh criticism of the hammas for having shed any semblance of human morals/ethics.
I assure you, Israelis are just as pissed off.
Busses with 20 kids onboard blowing up, Discotheque bombings that kill dozens of teenage kids... Israel had its share of pain.
Are you suggesting their pain exonerates them?
Then why does the Hammas have Israel's entire land on its flag? Why does it continuously call for Israel's full destruction?
You have a valid point, there is a very justified side to the Palestinian struggle for independence. Only problem is that organizations like the Hammas deliberately blur the line between the bits that are justified, and the bits that are hate-mongering, impossible loony ideas (entirely displace a 7-million modern nation with access to money, all the technology it needs a big army? yeh, right) that are entirely outside any acceptable modern ethics/morals profile.
Killing someone who would otherwise kill your and my kids indiscriminately if they happen to be at the wrong place & the wrong time can be cheered, yes.
I applaud a proper judicial system & process in environments where it can be applied.
When dealing with modern-day high-profile civilian-targeting combatants who travel on forged papers (which the assassination victim allegedly was) I'd rather see him taken out of action, permanently if possible, using whatever means necessary.
Israelis don't level apartment complexes arbitrarily. They do so when the apartment complexes in question get used in Palestinian attacks, or on the rare occurrence of a high-profile ticking-timebomb blood-on-hands type of persona rearing his head in a known place at a known time.
The Qassam "holes in walls", on the other hand, are conducted randomly, by weapons with very primitive targeting, into the heart of civilian population centers, with no other purpose than to harm civilians.
You have to decide whether you're handing out points for who has the better technology (bigger bombs/targeting systems) or who has the better ethical/moral; base.
It's not about the size of the hole in the wall. It's about whether you had a valid military target in your sights when you pulled the trigger.
And before we start a discussion on (Israel) firing on ambulances/UN schools et,remember the Geneva convention and wartime rules are only applicable so long as both sides respect them. When one side ignores them, they become a worthless piece of paper.
You will respect wartime rules and won't shoot at *my* ambulances, civilian shelters, schools etc, so long as I respect the same wartime rules and not misuse my ambulances, civilian shelters, schools etc.
If I get caught several times with my ambulances smuggling weapons and bombs, and it ends up costing you lives (and your government public criticism from your angry voters), you'll throw the wartime rules out the window same as everyone else who has had to face a similar situation ever did, and treat my ambulances as potential weapon-carrying-trucks (which, I remind you, in our example, they *are*).
Unfortunately (mainly to the Palestinian and Lebanese populations), the methods of the Iranian proxies Hammas and Hezbollah openly ignore wartime law. And when they dont respect it, it would be naive and totally unrealistic to expect their adversary (Israel in these two cases) to respect those same wartime laws.
I think what they were saying is that pistons in a V configuration (e.g. V6, V8, V12 etc) are not in a line, hence they are not inline engines. An engine can either be a V or an inline, not both, much like a line can't be straight and curved at the same time.
Better Place are rolling out here in Australia in two years.
I can and do maintain one fast car as part of my family's fleet of two (the other is a bush-going family-packing trip-ready diesel 4WD - A Patrol ST - and considering its required dimensions and weight electric is absolutely irrelevant for it for years to come).
Burning-stuff-wise, my choice for a fast-car/daily-driver is a Mini Cooper S. Handles remarkably and is solid German sports car in disguise.
But I really really really want to go electric for my daily driver.
I want the 'I run on the wind' sticker, the instant torque, the 4-year plan that helps subsudise the car. Those I will probably be able to get with any PHEV from Better Place, even if the car is not QuickDrop compatible.
But I also want quickdrop capability and not to own the bloody battery or ever have to worry about battery wear, replacing it, or its diminishing lifecycle. It's a hassle, a worry I don't need.
If BMW do what Tesla, Renault and Nissan are doing, withdraw head from rear orifice and make themselves compatible with Better Place batteries and infrastructure, I'll buy a Mini E the day it hits the dealership floor.
Otherwise I'll hang a Mini E poster on my wall but will be driving a Fluence ZE to work.
As Danish Oil and Natural Gas (DONG) utilities clearly figured out - put a REALLY big (distributed) battery on the grid to soak up the power when it's available and re-feed it into the grid when it's scarce. Not only can they produce more of the baseline power generation from renewable sources, they don't have to PAY the Germans to TAKE their excess power at night when they can't consume it. They can store it instead, use it at peak hour when kilowatt price is insane and drastically flatten the curve. Problem. Solution.
As an OT side-benefit, we get electric cars wrapped around said batteries. For what we already got used to paying for car's fuel, there's enough margin in the operator's plan to subsidize new cars for consumers (think free iPhone on a three-year-plan), we'll get a parallel 1-minute-battery-swap-station infrastructure to petrol stations to enable real (non-golfcart) electric cars to go as far as the stations reach (range limitation is station reach, not battery capacity/petrol tank) without hour-long-charges along the way, remove an entire country's addiction to oil, fix the environment by running every single car in the fleet off renewable, and actually allow everyone in town to plug their car in at 8AM without having the lights in office buildings go down (The 'Everyone owns a Chevy Volt' scenario), while not having to spend tens to hundreds of billions on new power plants to cater to the spike. (But hey, that's just a side benefit ;))
The exodus is already here.
Freenet is a hard target. Arguably, the hardest of them all today. It's also the least popular.
The studios are playing a money game. Bang for buck. They want maximal deterrence for minimal spend.
Much like virus-writers aim viruses at the highest targets on the "adoption-by-the-masses"/"soft-bellyness" index, RIAA go-getem's do the same thing.
FastTrack - high adoption, soft belly.
Torrent - high adoption, not-so-soft... and segregated into lots of independent share-specific networks.
Freenet - low adoption, practically impossible to break.
It's a no-brainer. They've got no reason to go for the last. They may be greedy scum, but they're not that stupid with their money. Freenet would need to be adopted by the masses and get a ridiculous amount of media exposure to even pop up on their radar. Their goal is not to technically "stop filesharing" altogether, they realize that's a waste of money and effort. Their goal is to mitigate it by taking pot-shots at just the targets that are easy to break, and leave the harder ones alone (for now).
Being an informed geek, that actually makes me really happy. In a nutshell, It means we won.
Exactly, thank you for making my point.
And how exactly would offline imply uncorrupt?
Do other means available to a home user - DVD, cheap tape, hard-drive-on-a-shelf pose a solution to this problem?
I have some 3-4TB of old data backed up on optical media at home. Important stuff (photos, scanned documents) I burn in triplicate because of how un-dang-reliable optical media is 5 years after you pull it off a shelf, never mind decades, and have already had the dubious pleasure of having to copy one half of a file from one disk (where its second half is corrupted), and the other from another (where its first is corrupted).
Unless you can come up with something like home-affordable LTO tapes (which have data reliability problems of their own, never mind head-broke-where-the-fuck-do-I-get-a-new-head-for-less-than-4000$-so-I-can-recover-my-archives issue), offline media is just as bad.
If you're smart, you can do something simple akin (forgive obvious double-matching bugs:)
Have your rsync (or own hacked job) do the analogue of this:
for x in `find /`; do /last-md5sums|cut -d: -f2` ]; then /backup/ /backup/$x $x
if [ `md5sum $x` eq `grep "$x"
cp $x
else
cp
done
See? Online media offers a solution to the very real problem whereas offline media does not.
Philosophy re offline backups is great. You just need to somehow tie it into real-world(tm) solutions.
Whoa cowboy.
Sure, "RAID is not backup" in the sense that your primary storage, if RAIDed, is only protected from disk failure, not file deletion or filesystem blowout.
RAID very mych is a backup if you've set up a second seperate box (maybe on a seperate power grid, better yet in another building, or perhaps on two sets of removable hard-drives that get swapped between your home and an offsite loaction (your drawer in the office? your mum's place?) routinely.
If you're willing to go the extra mile, here's my take on it:
Failure modes:
[a] Single Hard-drive failure
[b] I deleted a file accidentally, or a file got corrupted by an improper shutdown, or the filesystem got hosed.
[c] Two Hard-drive failure
[d] Machine blowout, or Major Filesystem blowout (>20% (or whatever % you put aside) of the blocks on the volume got changed),
Solutions:
---------------
Failure Mode [a] -> RAID 5
Cost: Pay for 1 extra hard-drive whose volume you can't actively use (If you wanted 4TB, you gotta buy 5 x 1TB harddrives or a blackbox that incorporates these)
Failure Mode [b] -> Run linux on your fileserver, with LVM or LVM2, allocating 10%-20% (my figures) of your volume to snapshots (depending on how much change you expect) and having an automated scheduled job perform a snapshot weekly, mount it so it can be browsed anytime, and blow out redundant historic ones (while keeping, say, one from the beginning of every month for yay many months).
Cost:
* Have to run a linux box rather than off-the-shelf storage blackbox
* Some linux work required to set up and work out what to do in a real-life failure mode.
* Some linux scripting knowhow required to automate properly
* 10-20% of your overall post-RAID volume allocated to snapshots (YMMV).
=== a bit about snapshots === /movie.iso, the entire block (4MB would be a good ballpark for an LVM block) that this naughty bit lived in will be replicated - the old (pre-corruption Jan01 copy) 4MB block will be copied onto the snapshot space (that 20% we set aside earlier), and the new (corrupted) one will be copied onto the live filesystem.
To the uninitiated, a snapshot only "saves" the old versions of blocks that got changed when they actually got changed. It doesn't stress the machine for an hour duplicating your gazillion-terabytes at any stage, nor does it care about files or filesystems as it sits below the filesystem.
Hence, If you took a snapshot on Jan 1st, nothing would physically get copied anywhere on Jan 1st.
If, consequently, on January 4th, a single bit got changed due to corruption following an unclean shutdown in a 9GB DVD iso called
We now have the same thing we would have had without the snapshot (a corrupted file on the primary volume), except, the snapshot retains an uncorrupted version of a 9GB file, which is costing us just 4MB to retain. And even protects us from filesystem corruption.
In real-wold terms, since our Jan-1 snapshot has been read-only live-mounted since Jan01, say, under /snapshots/0101/movie.iso, we can go back to our historic snapshot once we discover the file is b0rked and copy the pre-corrupted one out of there.
=== end bit about snapshots ===
Failure Mode [c] -> RAID-6
Cost:
* have to run a linux box rather than off-the-shelf storage blackbox
* Some linux work required to set up and work out what to do in a real-life failure mode.
* Buy 2 extra hard-drives whose volume you can't actively use (If you wanted 4TB, you gotta buy 6 x 1TB harddrives)
Failure Modes [a,c,d] Full copy on secondary storage array
Cost:
* Any Secondary storage.
* Extreme inefficiency. If you're running a 4TB (post-RAID/LVM) array, you will invest in 4TB of disk and be able to retain one historic image, or pay for 8TB to retain two, etc. You can go fancy and do snapshots here too tho.
Failure Modes [a,b,c,d]
Cost:
* Linux with RAID + LVM on your primary storage. This gives me snapshots
Subscribing to a belief doesn't make you an incompetent thinker, regardless of whether you believe in Jesus, God or golf balls. Subscribing to an institutionalized belief (more commonly referred to as religions), whereupon you subscribe to needing to be told what to believe and how to believe in it because you can't figure it out on your own and need to be herded like a flock... well, that does, by definition really, make you incompetent to do so on your own. It's an unstable system. You can only be a follower and a competent independent thinker at the same time to a point, on the particular days of the week they don't disagree. Namely, until conflict between the two comes around and you need to decide which way your vote swings. If it swings just one way every time - then that's what you are. If it swings in different ways on different occasions, you qualify for what the English language terms 'hypocrisy'.
You're spot-on.
The scientific method has a track record of weeding out wrong statements based on ever-accumulating evidence.
When did you ever see religion go back on its core beliefs and admit that it was wrong all along?
Something big, say, "Oops, we were wrong. There is no god".
Science and religion are two approaches, one claiming everything is up for criticism, the other not. They therefore cannot be bridged by anything short of thick hypocricy.
But hey, if it makes you feel better and you don't hurt anyone doing it, power be to you.
We all need something to believe in, and much like people get the services of a hooker if they can't get laid yet really want sex (and we consider that to be socially acceptable), there's dang little wrong with subscribing to institutionalized belief - which is what religion boils down to - (where they tell you what to believe in and what actions to do in order to be considered "believing") if you're too incompetent to figure out a personal belief system and a code to live by.
Douglas Adams wasn't far off. We're too lazy to believe, so we hire an electronic monk? Not far-removed from the truth. In real world terms, we're too lazy to figure out what we believe in, so we hire a not-so-electronic religious men to point us in the right way.
And just to be clear, belief is not limited to god. It can be in values, in relative objectivity, in pragmatism, in "human spirit", in unstoppable can-do-attitude, in nothing meaning anything, in chaos, in chance and in a hell of other things. God has no monopoly on the word "belief".
Further, religions are not the only institutionalized beliefs around. Some anti-religious movements, as well as many movements who busy themselves with things other than religion altogether institutionalize belief equally well. These could range from Coca-cola advertisements to socially acceptable behavior, ethnic stereotypes or natinalistic brainwashing spiel.
It all depends on how much of an emotional toll said war has taken over the public you're selling your game(/movie/book/whatever) to.
An interesting huge thing that factors into that is who we perceive the "good guys" were in the real war - if we do so at all.
I don't really have any emotional connection with, say, either side of the wars Troy had.
Being a Jew and an Australian/Israeli I find it hard to watch films looking at the conflicts "my side" had a part in, tenfold so when viewed from the "wrong side".
There were several such works done over the years, and it's very interesting to see how the public accepts (or doesn't) a work of art (devoid of political message, I'm not referring to media created as propaganda) - such as Avanti Popolo (Israeli indie film that follows a squad of cut-off purposeless Egyptian soldiers through the desert as they're attempting to return home, simply painting them as human), or, if you want to go more extreme, stuff like Das Boot.
Das Boot was made some four decades(!) - that's just short of three generations - after WWII and the holocaust, and people - worldwide, not just holocaust survivors & families - had a huge problem accepting it (I relate, I watched it with a distressing sense of unease, my own family was cut down in the holocaust from some 50 people to under 10), mainly because it humanized the Nazis (and it did nothing provocative a-la 'what about all the good things Hitler did' statementa, it just followed a bunch of young (Nazi German) sailors on a U-boat whose main concern throughout the movie was getting back home in one piece, with pretty much piss-all politics or nazi agenda. Just human beings and immediate hardships common to us all. Acceptance? Rather bad (though the amount of controversy-spawned publicity they got was rather good... "as long as they spell my name right...")
To answer your question - depends on how loaded the conflict in question was. Depends on which side it's presented from. Depending on whether the people it's presented TO have made peace with the historic conflict or not... And that can take a good while.
As a curiosity relating closure on conflicts, here in Australia we devote a day each year - ANZAC day - to paying our respects to those who fought in our wars. There is a solemn march on this day, and in it march the veterans (or those related to them etc). Keep in mind we've taken an active part in nearly every conflict America was involved in since the start of the century.
And here's the kicker - it doesn't matter which side you fought on. It doesn't matter if back then you were "the enemy". Having come, myself, from a country that lacks anything even remotely resembling closure on past conflicts.
I really think achieving closure thus is a genuinely cool thing.
I've also seen it with US/Allied WWII vets doing same with their German and Japanese vets.
And if you've got that and you can avoid carrying a political message that'll de-label you as art and label you as a form of propaganda, you can popularize it in media all you want.
It's a game for those who know their shit, CS degree or no CS degree. Causality and effect. Age is an observation, not a cause.
Younger people who know their shit (who're not - yet - in possession of a degree) come to work in this field in droves, yes. It's a field that lends itself well to it.
I've been in this industry for 15 years, been in (several) ISPs, been in the software industry, been in the financial industry, and I can honestly say older people don't get discriminated against if they know their shit and can deliver. Quite on the contrary, they typically carry around an aura of respect (think Sid in User Friendly ;)).
Other side of same coin is true as well - clueless young people get the whip as easily as clueless old. You just don't notice it as often.
Re degree -
I'm 34 and in the middle of a biology BSc (my first degree) after 15 years as either a (self-taught) software engineer, systems engineer, or combinations thereof.
The first poster said it best - you're gonna hit 35 one way or another. Only question is whether you'll hit it with a CS degree or not.
What I can also advise you is to stay on top of your shit in those three/four years. Stay geek, cluey, in the know, in possession of a firm marketable skillset. If you 'let go' of the tech side (as many of my friends who went to management did) and get a degree in 4 years, it's debatable whether you'll be better or worse off without one yet with the other instead.
What's not up for debate is if you walk out at 35 holding both the paper and the geek-who-knows-his-shit-license.
Bullshit.
Most interesting jobs are for people who can drive any car - whether it's a Toyota or a Renault.
We're a 50-50 linux shop (a big bank), and if you "I DON'T DO WINDOWS", we regard you as the same dogmatic crowd as "I'M SCARED OF LINUX, IT HAS A COMMAND LINE". The clueless crowd we don't hire.
If you're a professional systems engineer, you can manage anything (and code and script on it).
If you're dogmatic about a product, you're putting your religious beliefs (those that tack 'good' and 'evil' labels on things such as Microsoft, GNU or the open-source community) before the interests of your employer, and we wouldn't touch you with a 10-meter pole.
Best advice I can give is be ambivalent - get the fact you're a techie across. If you can sell yourself as an a-religious techie, you'll be in more demand.
Make a potential employer understand you'll do what is best for him, and you won't let your decisions for him be dictated either by your fear of one thing or religious dogma favoring the other.
Back in a place I worked we used to name machines after people who got sacked. Beat that.
To be fair, we were asked by management to change it after a while.
Last places I've worked used functional, descriptive and expandable naming schemes, that, while lacking the tongue-in-cheek humor, tend to lend themselves much nicer to quickly getting-in-context with a machine, expecially when you're managing a shop with machines (including VMs) ranging in the hundreds and thousands.
And being the geek that I am, functionality beats presentation/aesthetics. Well, most of the time anyway :)
Heh, you're right.
Israel builds bunkers for its kids.
Hammas builds kassam rockets and surrounds its kids with combatants who fire this artillery from within the midst of kids into israeli cities.
That may explain the skewed kill ratio, that may explain where all the Hamas funding goes and why they don't have an economy or bunkers, and it totally explains why the palestinians are neck-deep in shite.
Hurting Israel seems like a bigger priority to them then helping themselves.
They're getting *exactly* what they voted for (hence, yes, ***they actually do*** like a good scrap over christmas), and exactly what they want. Good'on'em. May all their wishes come true.
Mate, you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped, who can only channel his energy into self-pity and violence towards others. You can't tell him who to democratically elect.
But if he hurts you over and over, you can totally lock him out of your house (the "act of war" if you fall for Hamas propaganda that justifies lobbing thousands of explosives at Israeli civilian targets).
If they want to learn this the hard way - let'em.