All laws that attempt to correct moral problems (or perceived moral problems) founder horribly. The world is far too complicated to be controlled by law. It's like trying to grasp the wind, it's a hopeless task and will always fall apart once it's implemented. Unfortunately, many people believe they can fix the world's problems.
Without it, "Affirmative Action" is just a tool to deepen divide in society, contrary to stated goals.
American politics is so simplistic and divided that anything but over-the-top praise of Affirmative Action will be met with fierce accusations that you are a white racist bigotted extremist Christian fanatical Nazi. And once you're labeled like that, you can forget any role in public life. That's why so many politicians and pundits dance around the issue, even though it's blindingly obvious to everybody.
During the 2004 presidential election, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who is from Mozambique, referred to herself in public as an "African-American." The fact that she was laughed to scorn for it demonstrates that the term was always meant to be an ideological shibboleth rather than an informative word.
Where I have seen success is in providing other add-on services. A premium charge for "clean pipes" meaning a connection with the ISP filtering out DoS attacks has been in high demand. I have heard of at least one provider that is nearing the limit of how large they can scale such a system, after trying to meet the demand of their existing customers. I foresee this type of value added charge being a lot more attractive to customers.
And the key word there is "customers." Charging your actual customers for services to make money seems to make a lot more sense than charging some tangentially-related third party.
I feel that Microsoft has actually made a reasonable effort to improve security in the operating system. But a vast number of users are uneducated on running as an unprivileged user. There is such a large installed base accustomed to running with full privileges that worms, trojans, and spyware quickly reach epidemic proportions. When we add to this the large number of uneducated developers and legacy software that don't take unprivileged users into account, it seems hopeless to fix the large-scale security problems, no matter how theoretically sound the architecture becomes.
Even some of Microsoft's products don't fully understand the issues of user separation. Visual C# 2005 Express is free to download and use but requires a registration to work past the first 30 days. OK, fine. I used "Run As" to install the application and enter the registration code. It started up, and everything was as expected. I closed it and started it as my regular unprivileged user and was asked for the registration code again, which now didn't work because it had already been sent to Microsoft. Winamp and Trillian also seem to store preferences in a place that isn't writable by unprivileged users.
Now, these things aren't the end of the world, but they do demonstrate that the mindset of developers isn't as well-trained on this issue as in the UNIX world, where user separation goes far back into the past. Is there any hope for educating enough developers and users to really negate the effect of malicious software on the network at large? Can Microsoft overcome what seems to be a serious case of not-invented-here syndrome and simply copy the most useful ideas from UNIX as directly as possible?
But I am a human being, and being told repeatedly that I suck tends to wear a human being down, especially when, on the whole, I think the work we do here is very good.
Just so you're encouraged, I've been reading Slashdot since the Fall of 1997 and appreciate your work and think you guys have done a pretty good job. I'm sometimes annoyed by the typos, spelling, and grammar issues but I don't send complaints because it's not worth my time or yours. There are probably plenty of people like me that never write to thank you. In fact, I'm sure we outnumber the complainers. And anyone who is rude isn't worth hearing.
I also appreciate the personal communication you have undertaken here and think you should do more of it. It adds a more personal touch.
In spoken language you don't get to see the letters. Yet you somehow easily distinguish "to," too," and "two." When it's written, suddenly it's impossible?
No. It breaks the flow of reading. It's annoying rather than confusing. And, of course, it makes the author look bad. Now, personally, I haven't submitted a complaint and don't intend to submit one because it's not worth my time. But I won't go as far as saying that it just doesn't matter or that people who are annoyed by it are "stupid."
You were moderated as funny, but it should've been insightful. I have a friend who describes the American political scene as two armies in trenches, shooting at straw men in no-man's-land.
That's the biggest problem with the stock market. Almost everyone sees it as little more than a state-sponsored lottery. You "bet" on some numbers and hope you win. There seems to be little understanding that the goal is to support a business you think has good chances for long-term success.
People don't go to restaurants or stores to listen to music. Take the music out and they'll still go eat or buy products. Take the food or products out and they won't go to listen to the music.
Also, the restaurant or business isn't making money from the playing of the radio station. I could see it if another radio station was rebroadcasting the original signal as their own, with new commercials in between songs.
But the whole Copyright regime is so convoluted now that there's really little point in trying to make sense of it. It's like the tax legislation in that regard, though not as extreme.
It hasn't been all that long. Most people writing about the industry, I would hope, still remember the difference. And it seems from some other comments here that JPL is still using a lot of Sun and SGI hardware on desktops.
I have to say, however, that my comment being moderated as "Informative" is rather worrying.:-)
Yeah, I might have understated it somewhat. My guess is that places like JPL are still quite "conservative" in terms of computing though. At least, that's the impression I got from one of the other posters here who claims to work there.
The term "workstation" has long been used to differentiate crappy IBM clones (or Macs) used to perform business-oriented tasks and boxes from Sun, IBM, HP, Dec, NeXT, or SGI that contain RISC processors, run UNIX-based operating systems, and are generally used to perform mathematically intensive engineering, visualization, and scientific tasks.
As the quality of desktops has improved in the last 10 years, the lines have begun to blur a bit. But I think most people who have been paying attention to the industry for any reasonable length of time know the difference.
The leaders of society send a very controversial message with policies like territorial locking: from one hand, they praise globalisation as a means to improve economies of countries, but on the other hand they use policies like territorial locking to enforce strict economic rules based on location.
You make two common mistakes here: (1) You believe that there are "leaders of society"; and (2) you believe that the MPAA has anything approaching an ideology on economics. Neither is true. In reality, there are no leaders, only a mass of competing interests. The MPAA's interest is in protecting the strategic interests of its members. They aren't in favor of globalization and they aren't against it. Gloablization is far too philosophical and academic for them.
You can as well get someone to watch over your shoulder and tell you when you have been spending too much time on the computer and offer to assign other tasks to you for a moderate fee
You seem to persist in thinking that I am a Roman Catholic (I'm not), that I want Intelligent Design taught in the classroom (I don't), or that I wrote a book about a panda (I didn't). Obviously, any attempt to discuss with you is impossible. Your emotional investment in this topic is simply too strong.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except this one was actually believed for longer than 2.38 seconds.
All laws that attempt to correct moral problems (or perceived moral problems) founder horribly. The world is far too complicated to be controlled by law. It's like trying to grasp the wind, it's a hopeless task and will always fall apart once it's implemented. Unfortunately, many people believe they can fix the world's problems.
American politics is so simplistic and divided that anything but over-the-top praise of Affirmative Action will be met with fierce accusations that you are a white racist bigotted extremist Christian fanatical Nazi. And once you're labeled like that, you can forget any role in public life. That's why so many politicians and pundits dance around the issue, even though it's blindingly obvious to everybody.
During the 2004 presidential election, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who is from Mozambique, referred to herself in public as an "African-American." The fact that she was laughed to scorn for it demonstrates that the term was always meant to be an ideological shibboleth rather than an informative word.
I always thought it was derived from brass players who have good "chops" (embouchure).
And the key word there is "customers." Charging your actual customers for services to make money seems to make a lot more sense than charging some tangentially-related third party.
Even some of Microsoft's products don't fully understand the issues of user separation. Visual C# 2005 Express is free to download and use but requires a registration to work past the first 30 days. OK, fine. I used "Run As" to install the application and enter the registration code. It started up, and everything was as expected. I closed it and started it as my regular unprivileged user and was asked for the registration code again, which now didn't work because it had already been sent to Microsoft. Winamp and Trillian also seem to store preferences in a place that isn't writable by unprivileged users.
Now, these things aren't the end of the world, but they do demonstrate that the mindset of developers isn't as well-trained on this issue as in the UNIX world, where user separation goes far back into the past. Is there any hope for educating enough developers and users to really negate the effect of malicious software on the network at large? Can Microsoft overcome what seems to be a serious case of not-invented-here syndrome and simply copy the most useful ideas from UNIX as directly as possible?
Just so you're encouraged, I've been reading Slashdot since the Fall of 1997 and appreciate your work and think you guys have done a pretty good job. I'm sometimes annoyed by the typos, spelling, and grammar issues but I don't send complaints because it's not worth my time or yours. There are probably plenty of people like me that never write to thank you. In fact, I'm sure we outnumber the complainers. And anyone who is rude isn't worth hearing.
I also appreciate the personal communication you have undertaken here and think you should do more of it. It adds a more personal touch.
No. It breaks the flow of reading. It's annoying rather than confusing. And, of course, it makes the author look bad. Now, personally, I haven't submitted a complaint and don't intend to submit one because it's not worth my time. But I won't go as far as saying that it just doesn't matter or that people who are annoyed by it are "stupid."
You were moderated as funny, but it should've been insightful. I have a friend who describes the American political scene as two armies in trenches, shooting at straw men in no-man's-land.
It seems to me that raising prices to something that complements their costs is the only reasonable thing to do.
That's the biggest problem with the stock market. Almost everyone sees it as little more than a state-sponsored lottery. You "bet" on some numbers and hope you win. There seems to be little understanding that the goal is to support a business you think has good chances for long-term success.
People don't go to restaurants or stores to listen to music. Take the music out and they'll still go eat or buy products. Take the food or products out and they won't go to listen to the music.
Not to mention that if the trick does work, it will only work once.
But the whole Copyright regime is so convoluted now that there's really little point in trying to make sense of it. It's like the tax legislation in that regard, though not as extreme.
Heh, I was just surprised that nobody else thought of the whole thing first. This is Slashdot after all...
I have to say, however, that my comment being moderated as "Informative" is rather worrying. :-)
Yeah, I might have understated it somewhat. My guess is that places like JPL are still quite "conservative" in terms of computing though. At least, that's the impression I got from one of the other posters here who claims to work there.
As the quality of desktops has improved in the last 10 years, the lines have begun to blur a bit. But I think most people who have been paying attention to the industry for any reasonable length of time know the difference.
You make two common mistakes here: (1) You believe that there are "leaders of society"; and (2) you believe that the MPAA has anything approaching an ideology on economics. Neither is true. In reality, there are no leaders, only a mass of competing interests. The MPAA's interest is in protecting the strategic interests of its members. They aren't in favor of globalization and they aren't against it. Gloablization is far too philosophical and academic for them.
In America, we get a large part of our gas from Mexican food.
Ah, a wife.
All the way up to 5? Let's not be excessive, here. 2 at the most.
I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!
You seem to persist in thinking that I am a Roman Catholic (I'm not), that I want Intelligent Design taught in the classroom (I don't), or that I wrote a book about a panda (I didn't). Obviously, any attempt to discuss with you is impossible. Your emotional investment in this topic is simply too strong.