I think we're talking about the same thing. The disabling (reportedly at the time, anyway) of some of Saddam's military hardware because the French maker wouldn't give him the secret password needed to launch them. Something you'd think he'd have tested ahead of time. But at any rate the British seem to have learned from the example, as one would expect.
I really wish people would stop referring to Asimov's Laws of Robotics as if they had any external validity. They applied to FICTIONAL robots in his stories. They have no connection to the real world and real robots, as this article (and undoubtedly endless future warbots will) demonstrates. Breaking them is unremarkable, and referring to them in news stories serves only to perpetuate the idea in the minds of the ignorant that they have significance outside the context of sci-fi.
Bad advice. Letting off steam "in private and off-the-record" just gives your co-workers something to stab you in the back with. I speak from experience. Keep your mouth shut around ANYONE who might be able to use your words against you later.
Better advice: Be glad you have a high paying, physically easy job. Remember that since you have no power over the Big Choices, you are not responsible for them. As long as you do not alienate any managers, you have no need to fear reorg. It's a fact of life in most companies, just like the stupid PHB management that causes them.
Lastly, ignore advice to leave a job because you don't like it. It's usual to dislike your job. If it was enjoyable, they wouldn't be paying you to do it. At any rate, NEVER leave a job unless you have another one signed and sealed -- unless you want to live in the street. You don't get unemployment if you quit, so don't.
Don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet, but our country was founded in part by the reaction to anonymous letters printed in the Colonial newspapers by our Founding Fathers. So banning anonymous speech is utterly unamerican.
Morality should come before profits. Google has violated its Do No Evil policy, and time will tell if it matters in the real world. Probably not. But they still suck for doing it.
Shrug. Read 1984. It's all there, with slight changes in terminology and technology. But not much. What comes pretty soon is imprisonment for those who dispute the propaganda.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty." -- Thomas Jefferson
those of you who endorse this kind of brownshirt behavior make me want to puke. orwell's vision is well on its way, as this story confirms:
Federal authorities have acknowledged for the first time that Brandon Mayfield was the target of electronic surveillance and that agents secretly took DNA samples and other items from his home last year as part of the probe into a deadly bombing in Madrid.
The court documents filed last year detailed the information that originally raised suspicions about Mayfield. In those filings, federal prosecutors said agents had determined that Mayfield's computer was used to search for airline schedules for travel from Portland to Madrid. It also was used to search Web sites on rental housing in Spain and to surf a site "apparently sponsored" by the Spanish passenger rail system. The agents found a handwritten note with a Spanish telephone number.
The lawyers said the Internet research done on travel to Spain was his daughter's middle school class assignment. They said Mayfield's daughter also wrote a so-called pro-Taliban letter -- two sentences questioning U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. They said the so-called classified national defense document was a U.S. Army manual from Mayfield's days in the service.
when they come for you kissing bush's fascist behind, i won't shed many tears. you are contemptable quislings who have let the liberties that tens of thousands of our citizens gave their lives to protect be destroyed.
monster cable is for the same kind of people who buy special green felt pens and color the edges of their cds with them to "improve" the sound. i.e.: fools with too much money. get gold plated connectors if you must, but even that's of dubious value -- any properly made cable will have loss low enough you won't be able to tell the difference. marketing hype and rich fool delusions to the contrary not withstanding -- monster cable and the like have never and would never be proven "better" in double blind tests. there's obviously a difference between gold and non-gold, but it's too small to be audiable. especially by human ears.
while i find DRM an abomination in principle, if it was limited solely to ensuring (somehow) that my copy was legitimately purchased, i would accept it. but the crap itunes pulls with limiting how many personal use copies i can make, etc. is completely unacceptable. i'll buy audio cds and rip the tracks manually before i put up with that stuff.
1. sigh. 2. morally, copying something is not the same as taking the original. 3. if modern ip laws had existed at the dawn of civilization, most of us would be illiterate and living in blank walled caves eating poisonous plants. 4. sigh.
If only VB were a F/OSS project instead of a proprietary
if VB were an F/OSS project, the kind of phbs who endorse using it wouldn't. i feel sorry for the VB coders who are going to suffer from microsoft's profiteering, but i feel not at all sorry for the stupid managers who didn't mandate migrating to something less brain-damaged and proprietary a long time ago. now they can go to VC++ or C# or.NET and get ready to be screwed over again in a few years.
1. be anonymous or use an alias 2. avoid using personally related specifics 3. be ready to accept the consequences of being id'd
bloging about where you work in your own name breaks all three of these.
fwiw, an interesting historical fact is that the founding fathers used aliases when submitting letters to the colonial newspapers advocating revolution against england -- for obvious reasons. these days most newspapers will not accept letters without verification of identity, which is one reason online commentary is more popular and expresses more risky opinions.
don't read very well, do you? wtf do you think makes the budget choices at the white house? the "other places" are the comparatively pointless mars and dangerous militarization of orbital space missions, which are both bush pet projects. no war would equal billions more a month for other purposes, like scientifically useful space missions. i'm tired of wasting my time on you, so futher responses from you will be ignored. and as Mr. Malda apparently doesn't really care about mismoderation, i probably won't be bothering to respond to comments on mismoderated posts at all, since nobody will see them. fark off. and that goes double for the biased mismoderators, wtf you are.
dude, try reading the farking news. Here's a couple of links for you. my rant makes perfect sense, to anyone who actually knows wtf is going on, which obviously doesn't include you or the "humorous" mismoderator. my karma rating is well deserved, even if my posts tend to displease some. here's a couple of quote for you, too:
The White House has eliminated funding for a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope from its 2006 budget request and directed NASA to focus solely on deorbiting the popular spacecraft at the end of its life, according to government and industry sources.
The paper reports that NASA has binned its plans to send a robot to service the telescope so that it can focus its resources on Bush's Martian ambitions.
the argument that it is "too expensive" to salvage the hubble so bush can spend more on mars missions is laughable, and that's ignoring the billions he's flushing down the toilet in his oil war. the usefulness is hubble is indisputable if you ask the experts involved. and if you think nasa isn't going to be involved in the launching of the up-coming military space missions, you're living in fantasy land.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we're talking about the same thing. The disabling (reportedly at the time, anyway) of some of Saddam's military hardware because the French maker wouldn't give him the secret password needed to launch them. Something you'd think he'd have tested ahead of time. But at any rate the British seem to have learned from the example, as one would expect.
which semi-recent historical event made them aware of this possibility (the planes being switched off)?
I really wish people would stop referring to Asimov's Laws of Robotics as if they had any external validity. They applied to FICTIONAL robots in his stories. They have no connection to the real world and real robots, as this article (and undoubtedly endless future warbots will) demonstrates. Breaking them is unremarkable, and referring to them in news stories serves only to perpetuate the idea in the minds of the ignorant that they have significance outside the context of sci-fi.
Just wanted to remark that this comment is not offtopic. Mismoderators suck.
Bad advice. Letting off steam "in private and off-the-record" just gives your co-workers something to stab you in the back with. I speak from experience. Keep your mouth shut around ANYONE who might be able to use your words against you later.
Better advice: Be glad you have a high paying, physically easy job. Remember that since you have no power over the Big Choices, you are not responsible for them. As long as you do not alienate any managers, you have no need to fear reorg. It's a fact of life in most companies, just like the stupid PHB management that causes them.
Lastly, ignore advice to leave a job because you don't like it. It's usual to dislike your job. If it was enjoyable, they wouldn't be paying you to do it. At any rate, NEVER leave a job unless you have another one signed and sealed -- unless you want to live in the street. You don't get unemployment if you quit, so don't.
Don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet, but our country was founded in part by the reaction to anonymous letters printed in the Colonial newspapers by our Founding Fathers. So banning anonymous speech is utterly unamerican.
Of course, the oiligopoli will shortly be putting a stop to the technology, either by buying out, or by "other means". Doubt me? Wait and see.
Well put.
Morality should come before profits. Google has violated its Do No Evil policy, and time will tell if it matters in the real world. Probably not. But they still suck for doing it.
Shrug. Read 1984. It's all there, with slight changes in terminology and technology. But not much. What comes pretty soon is imprisonment for those who dispute the propaganda.
He warned us long ago. Of course, even now the masses will fail to be alarmed. "It's only a demo." Etc. "Boil 'em slow, they'll never know." Oh well.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty." -- Thomas Jefferson
those of you who endorse this kind of brownshirt behavior make me want to puke. orwell's vision is well on its way, as this story confirms:
Federal authorities have acknowledged for the first time that Brandon Mayfield was the target of electronic surveillance and that agents secretly took DNA samples and other items from his home last year as part of the probe into a deadly bombing in Madrid.
The court documents filed last year detailed the information that originally raised suspicions about Mayfield. In those filings, federal prosecutors said agents had determined that Mayfield's computer was used to search for airline schedules for travel from Portland to Madrid. It also was used to search Web sites on rental housing in Spain and to surf a site "apparently sponsored" by the Spanish passenger rail system. The agents found a handwritten note with a Spanish telephone number.
The lawyers said the Internet research done on travel to Spain was his daughter's middle school class assignment. They said Mayfield's daughter also wrote a so-called pro-Taliban letter -- two sentences questioning U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. They said the so-called classified national defense document was a U.S. Army manual from Mayfield's days in the service.
when they come for you kissing bush's fascist behind, i won't shed many tears. you are contemptable quislings who have let the liberties that tens of thousands of our citizens gave their lives to protect be destroyed.
mismoderators of this post will burn in hell.
a more useful target would be a sterling engine connected to a generator.
monster cable is for the same kind of people who buy special green felt pens and color the edges of their cds with them to "improve" the sound. i.e.: fools with too much money. get gold plated connectors if you must, but even that's of dubious value -- any properly made cable will have loss low enough you won't be able to tell the difference. marketing hype and rich fool delusions to the contrary not withstanding -- monster cable and the like have never and would never be proven "better" in double blind tests. there's obviously a difference between gold and non-gold, but it's too small to be audiable. especially by human ears.
while i find DRM an abomination in principle, if it was limited solely to ensuring (somehow) that my copy was legitimately purchased, i would accept it. but the crap itunes pulls with limiting how many personal use copies i can make, etc. is completely unacceptable. i'll buy audio cds and rip the tracks manually before i put up with that stuff.
1. sigh.
2. morally, copying something is not the same as taking the original.
3. if modern ip laws had existed at the dawn of civilization, most of us would be illiterate and living in blank walled caves eating poisonous plants.
4. sigh.
If only VB were a F/OSS project instead of a proprietary
.NET and get ready to be screwed over again in a few years.
if VB were an F/OSS project, the kind of phbs who endorse using it wouldn't. i feel sorry for the VB coders who are going to suffer from microsoft's profiteering, but i feel not at all sorry for the stupid managers who didn't mandate migrating to something less brain-damaged and proprietary a long time ago. now they can go to VC++ or C# or
a more disturbing aspect of this is the possibility of employers and insurers discriminating against people based on the test.
i will say i use 1024x768@70 on my (low end) monitor instead of 1280x1024@60 because the latter is annoying.
Obsoleting something that works so they can sell new things? It's another Microsoft innovation! And the plot of a recent movie.
didn't really think the plutocracy would not put a stop to free speech on the net? once the first amendment no longer applies, kiss it good-bye.
really think the plutocracy would not put a stop to free speech on the net? once the first amendment no longer applies . . .
1. be anonymous or use an alias
2. avoid using personally related specifics
3. be ready to accept the consequences of being id'd
bloging about where you work in your own name breaks all three of these.
fwiw, an interesting historical fact is that the founding fathers used aliases when submitting letters to the colonial newspapers advocating revolution against england -- for obvious reasons. these days most newspapers will not accept letters without verification of identity, which is one reason online commentary is more popular and expresses more risky opinions.
don't read very well, do you? wtf do you think makes the budget choices at the white house? the "other places" are the comparatively pointless mars and dangerous militarization of orbital space missions, which are both bush pet projects. no war would equal billions more a month for other purposes, like scientifically useful space missions. i'm tired of wasting my time on you, so futher responses from you will be ignored. and as Mr. Malda apparently doesn't really care about mismoderation, i probably won't be bothering to respond to comments on mismoderated posts at all, since nobody will see them. fark off. and that goes double for the biased mismoderators, wtf you are.
dude, try reading the farking news. Here's a couple of links for you. my rant makes perfect sense, to anyone who actually knows wtf is going on, which obviously doesn't include you or the "humorous" mismoderator. my karma rating is well deserved, even if my posts tend to displease some. here's a couple of quote for you, too:
The White House has eliminated funding for a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope from its 2006 budget request and directed NASA to focus solely on deorbiting the popular spacecraft at the end of its life, according to government and industry sources.
The paper reports that NASA has binned its plans to send a robot to service the telescope so that it can focus its resources on Bush's Martian ambitions.
the argument that it is "too expensive" to salvage the hubble so bush can spend more on mars missions is laughable, and that's ignoring the billions he's flushing down the toilet in his oil war. the usefulness is hubble is indisputable if you ask the experts involved. and if you think nasa isn't going to be involved in the launching of the up-coming military space missions, you're living in fantasy land.
lastly, here's a link to google news. learn to use it.