If someone is able to buy all of the addresses and charge more for them later, then the addresses were underpriced to start with and this "scammer" is fixing the situation.
I don't think it's even fine for a typical workstation now.
I have to jump through so many hoops and deal with so much hassle to get through NAT issues with certain programs... maybe you'd say a typical workstation would just give up, but from where I'm standing NAT gets in the way of even some common workstation programs from voice/video over IP to cluster computing.
Through the years I hear story after story about Israel attacking the Palestinians and statement after statement from countries and NGOs that deplore Israel's actions against them. Generally I hear far more about the bad that Israel does to the Palestinians than the other way around. Yet through this all the reports aren't particularly moving, giving only the impression that the whole area of the world is lost.
Surely you're not claiming a conspiracy in which mediocre pro-Palestinian PR is planted to drown out good pro-Palestinian PR... or are you? Because that's what I end up hearing, a vast majority of pro-Palestinian stories that just aren't particularly good for them.
Yes, there are responsible and irresponsible ways to handle pension obligations, sound and unsound accounting, and good and bad financial decisions.
But that's all completely irrelevant.
The point is that the employee is betting that the employer WILL fund the pension, whatever that entails, and that bet, like all agreements, carries a level of risk with it.
So yeah, pensioners should not be dependent on the current state of the company? Great! Now design an employment agreement outlining how that is to happen and get both sides to agree to it. Oh, you didn't do that? Sorry, man. Better luck next time.
Comparing primary sources against the reporting of Fox News, CNN, NPR, and network news, Fox News is, again in my experience, the most accurate by a large margin with CNN and NPR competing for the bottom spot.
We're not talking about lobbying. We're talking about PR.
Yes, a powerful lobbying effort is hard for even a good PR campaign to overcome, but in my experience the Palestinians have quite a lot of people speaking for them--to the public, to governments, and to other organizations--but none making them look particularly good.
As far as I'm concerned it's fairly irrelevant that AIPAC is a powerful lobbying group because the group they lobby against can't stop shooting themselves in the foot.
Now, back to the previous point, for better or worse I'm able to get my news from a lot of primary sources--reading raw reports, watching press conferences and significant meetings live, seeing raw data--and the difference in quality of coverage offered by Fox News and CNN is night and day.
CNN skews the hell out of just about everything, routinely reporting the complete opposite of what actually happened and conclusions reached, apparently for the sake of making a good story. Breathlessly they reporting scary findings that were never actually found and trumped up versions of events that hardly made a blip on the radar, all on giant TV screens to send the watcher's heart racing. Talk about tacky!
As much as you may dislike the color schemes of Fox News, they are consistently far more accurate and professional in their reporting.
Right: the pension is a legal obligation on the company. And like all legal obligations, they're not expressions of divine truth but are instead dependent on very earthly circumstances... like the obligated being able to pay.
The government insures pensions because of precisely what I said: they are a gamble. The PBGC is precisely a government effort to cover the losses of a gambler.
But it's not really correct to claim that PBGC payouts are the same pension as the one the employee was originally promised. It's an entirely separate deal amounting to charity that we, the taxpayers, are handing over to the employee because he (presumably) made a mistake believing that the company would be around as long as he was.
We could change the law and pull the plug on the PBGC at any time... if only we had the political guts to do so.
From my point of view as a receiver of a whole lot of pro-Palestinian propaganda, it's not the pro-Zionism lobby groups that this good PR has to compete with... it's the bad PR that the cause already has.
Everywhere I turn it sounds like some international group or news organization is outlining the Palestinian point of view, but doing it in a way that doesn't exactly get me on my feet for their cause.
A pension is ALWAYS a gamble on the part of the pensioner. It's a deal whereby the company will pay the retiree as long as it's able to do so... which means at some point it may no longer be able to do so at which point the pensioner just plain loses.
So why should the pensioner pay for management's mistakes? Because that's the gamble he made. He gambled that management wouldn't make mistakes and that the company would be able to keep paying.
That's why one shouldn't plan out retirement based solely on promises.
Funny: you call them tacky, others call them down-to-earth and non-snobby. I mean, the electric guitar jingle they opened their network with? That was a serious departure from what there was before, and a sign that they were here on earth with their viewers.
That's as opposed to the head in the skies, divorced from reality reporting of CNN... reporting that is, frankly, quite tacky.
In the abstract sense the abstract and the practical aren't immiscible, but in the practical sense they sometimes are:)
For example, someone with a mindset of wanting to program Java immediately is not going to happily sit through Dijkstra's lectures on abstract philosophy of programming beginning with his made up, uncompilable language.
Such proposals are not without unintended consequences.
Sure it sounds fine at first blush: you're not forcing peering or requiring anything of the contracts, so it's not very invasive, right? The orgs are still free to peer all they want; they just have regulations on depeering.
Well, if you make it harder or more complicated to depeer it becomes disincentive to peer in the first place. In fact, it most serves to keep the little guys locked out, since the established companies would bear the brunt of the risk, both financially and in terms of PR.
I'm most reminded of past Slashdot stories about fights between programmers and state governments over the use of the term engineer.
The states were arguing that software developers shouldn't be allowed to call themselves engineers since many of them had no degree, no relationship with a professional organization, and in general no standards to maintain the integrity of the term that's so highly regarded in other disciplines.
The developers argued, among other things, that use of the term to describe software developers was well established and therefore above the law.
So yeah, I'm surprised the Wikipedia article doesn't mention the controversy over the term, but it's definitely a real issue and hilights use of the term as I've used it.
Of course there's a synergy between abstract and practical knowledge... but very important, informative, and enlightening areas of abstract knowledge are being sacrificed for the sake of the practical.
We're not suggesting teaching of these wondrous ideas just for the sake of knowledge (not that there's anything wrong with that), but for the sake of contributing something great to the practical task of "composing" software.
Right now the pursuit of immediately practical, "easy" bodies of knowledge like specific programming languages and environments is taking priority over the deeper insights, blocking that stuff out. The confusion between computer science and computer engineering creates a situation where departments are pressured to teach the industry state of the are instead of the larger truths that might serve students better in the long run.
Imagine if your math departments taught precisely the same curriculum to engineering or business and math majors. That's about the state I'm describing.
Various comments above reflect my thoughts on the matter: the mixture of extremes (really they're not particularly extreme) gets you the worst of both worlds.
Those who just want to learn Java, C, and C# are stuck with a half-assed attempt to teach formal mathematical methods--basically have their time wasted on brain teasers don't coalesce into real-world skills--while those who want to actually study the science behind data processing are bored to death installing eclipse and underserved in general.
The latter is certainly what happened to me, and why I jumped to physics. The computer science degree at my university had nothing to do with science.
At both universities whose programs I am/was familiar with, computer engineering was not hardware focused.
Then you get into various job titles along the lines of "software engineer", "computer engineer", "systems engineer", etc... all referring to a position dealing with writing code.
So yeah, in my experience quite a lot of "computer engineering" is software focused.
IMO there needs to be a starker contrast between computer science and computer engineering, just as there's a contrast between "real" engineering and, say, physics.
Those who just want to be able to program, who are focused purely on employability right out of college, can look for computer engineering courses teaching the popular programming languages. These people can be fine programmers, ready to start... so long as the language popularity hasn't changed by the time they graduate. It would be sort of advanced vocational program, just like any other engineering.
But the real scientists, those who want to experience and express code on deeper levels, should be looking for something very different, that which Dijkstra describes. Just as a scientist and an engineer can work on the same project contributing different skills, the computer scientist has his place even in the real world.
The two really are different mentalities, and it seems that the mixture of the two leads to situations that are non-ideal for either.
The ISP shuttles around signals which cannot be owned.
Not to mention that a private postal system would have every right to require the ability to inspect the contents of every package as part of the agreement. Don't like that arrangement? Find yourself a different postal system.
Same with ISPs.
It's their business and their property. Who are you to tell them what they can and cannot do with it while expecting preservation of your own property rights?
It may make absolutely no sense... but it's their ToS, and their right to be as eccentric as they wish, just as it's your right to use the electricity for senseless things if they don't ban it.
They get to propose conditions on the agreement, and we get to refuse the agreement if the conditions are too dumb. Such is the nature of free exchange.
Slashdot Mirror
Um... nothing?
If someone is able to buy all of the addresses and charge more for them later, then the addresses were underpriced to start with and this "scammer" is fixing the situation.
I don't think it's even fine for a typical workstation now.
I have to jump through so many hoops and deal with so much hassle to get through NAT issues with certain programs... maybe you'd say a typical workstation would just give up, but from where I'm standing NAT gets in the way of even some common workstation programs from voice/video over IP to cluster computing.
I'm reporting my personal experience.
Through the years I hear story after story about Israel attacking the Palestinians and statement after statement from countries and NGOs that deplore Israel's actions against them. Generally I hear far more about the bad that Israel does to the Palestinians than the other way around. Yet through this all the reports aren't particularly moving, giving only the impression that the whole area of the world is lost.
Surely you're not claiming a conspiracy in which mediocre pro-Palestinian PR is planted to drown out good pro-Palestinian PR... or are you? Because that's what I end up hearing, a vast majority of pro-Palestinian stories that just aren't particularly good for them.
That is all completely beside the point.
Yes, there are responsible and irresponsible ways to handle pension obligations, sound and unsound accounting, and good and bad financial decisions.
But that's all completely irrelevant.
The point is that the employee is betting that the employer WILL fund the pension, whatever that entails, and that bet, like all agreements, carries a level of risk with it.
So yeah, pensioners should not be dependent on the current state of the company? Great! Now design an employment agreement outlining how that is to happen and get both sides to agree to it. Oh, you didn't do that? Sorry, man. Better luck next time.
Just sharing my first-hand experience.
Comparing primary sources against the reporting of Fox News, CNN, NPR, and network news, Fox News is, again in my experience, the most accurate by a large margin with CNN and NPR competing for the bottom spot.
We're not talking about lobbying. We're talking about PR.
Yes, a powerful lobbying effort is hard for even a good PR campaign to overcome, but in my experience the Palestinians have quite a lot of people speaking for them--to the public, to governments, and to other organizations--but none making them look particularly good.
As far as I'm concerned it's fairly irrelevant that AIPAC is a powerful lobbying group because the group they lobby against can't stop shooting themselves in the foot.
There you go.
Now, back to the previous point, for better or worse I'm able to get my news from a lot of primary sources--reading raw reports, watching press conferences and significant meetings live, seeing raw data--and the difference in quality of coverage offered by Fox News and CNN is night and day.
CNN skews the hell out of just about everything, routinely reporting the complete opposite of what actually happened and conclusions reached, apparently for the sake of making a good story. Breathlessly they reporting scary findings that were never actually found and trumped up versions of events that hardly made a blip on the radar, all on giant TV screens to send the watcher's heart racing. Talk about tacky!
As much as you may dislike the color schemes of Fox News, they are consistently far more accurate and professional in their reporting.
Right: the pension is a legal obligation on the company. And like all legal obligations, they're not expressions of divine truth but are instead dependent on very earthly circumstances... like the obligated being able to pay.
The government insures pensions because of precisely what I said: they are a gamble. The PBGC is precisely a government effort to cover the losses of a gambler.
But it's not really correct to claim that PBGC payouts are the same pension as the one the employee was originally promised. It's an entirely separate deal amounting to charity that we, the taxpayers, are handing over to the employee because he (presumably) made a mistake believing that the company would be around as long as he was.
We could change the law and pull the plug on the PBGC at any time... if only we had the political guts to do so.
From my point of view as a receiver of a whole lot of pro-Palestinian propaganda, it's not the pro-Zionism lobby groups that this good PR has to compete with... it's the bad PR that the cause already has.
Everywhere I turn it sounds like some international group or news organization is outlining the Palestinian point of view, but doing it in a way that doesn't exactly get me on my feet for their cause.
Yes.
Believe it or not, there are people in the country who think differently than you, have different likes and dislikes, and different tastes.
You should look in to this diversity thing...
A pension is ALWAYS a gamble on the part of the pensioner. It's a deal whereby the company will pay the retiree as long as it's able to do so... which means at some point it may no longer be able to do so at which point the pensioner just plain loses.
So why should the pensioner pay for management's mistakes? Because that's the gamble he made. He gambled that management wouldn't make mistakes and that the company would be able to keep paying.
That's why one shouldn't plan out retirement based solely on promises.
Done. Now am I repeat the previous comment verbatim, or what?
Pay more attention in the future.
Or shut up.
Either way...
Funny: you call them tacky, others call them down-to-earth and non-snobby. I mean, the electric guitar jingle they opened their network with? That was a serious departure from what there was before, and a sign that they were here on earth with their viewers.
That's as opposed to the head in the skies, divorced from reality reporting of CNN... reporting that is, frankly, quite tacky.
Here's one for you:
In the abstract sense the abstract and the practical aren't immiscible, but in the practical sense they sometimes are :)
For example, someone with a mindset of wanting to program Java immediately is not going to happily sit through Dijkstra's lectures on abstract philosophy of programming beginning with his made up, uncompilable language.
Such proposals are not without unintended consequences.
Sure it sounds fine at first blush: you're not forcing peering or requiring anything of the contracts, so it's not very invasive, right? The orgs are still free to peer all they want; they just have regulations on depeering.
Well, if you make it harder or more complicated to depeer it becomes disincentive to peer in the first place. In fact, it most serves to keep the little guys locked out, since the established companies would bear the brunt of the risk, both financially and in terms of PR.
I'm most reminded of past Slashdot stories about fights between programmers and state governments over the use of the term engineer.
The states were arguing that software developers shouldn't be allowed to call themselves engineers since many of them had no degree, no relationship with a professional organization, and in general no standards to maintain the integrity of the term that's so highly regarded in other disciplines.
The developers argued, among other things, that use of the term to describe software developers was well established and therefore above the law.
So yeah, I'm surprised the Wikipedia article doesn't mention the controversy over the term, but it's definitely a real issue and hilights use of the term as I've used it.
You miss my and Dijkstra's point.
Of course there's a synergy between abstract and practical knowledge... but very important, informative, and enlightening areas of abstract knowledge are being sacrificed for the sake of the practical.
We're not suggesting teaching of these wondrous ideas just for the sake of knowledge (not that there's anything wrong with that), but for the sake of contributing something great to the practical task of "composing" software.
Right now the pursuit of immediately practical, "easy" bodies of knowledge like specific programming languages and environments is taking priority over the deeper insights, blocking that stuff out. The confusion between computer science and computer engineering creates a situation where departments are pressured to teach the industry state of the are instead of the larger truths that might serve students better in the long run.
Imagine if your math departments taught precisely the same curriculum to engineering or business and math majors. That's about the state I'm describing.
Various comments above reflect my thoughts on the matter: the mixture of extremes (really they're not particularly extreme) gets you the worst of both worlds.
Those who just want to learn Java, C, and C# are stuck with a half-assed attempt to teach formal mathematical methods--basically have their time wasted on brain teasers don't coalesce into real-world skills--while those who want to actually study the science behind data processing are bored to death installing eclipse and underserved in general.
The latter is certainly what happened to me, and why I jumped to physics. The computer science degree at my university had nothing to do with science.
Guess so.
At both universities whose programs I am/was familiar with, computer engineering was not hardware focused.
Then you get into various job titles along the lines of "software engineer", "computer engineer", "systems engineer", etc... all referring to a position dealing with writing code.
So yeah, in my experience quite a lot of "computer engineering" is software focused.
Of course, that's completely beside my point...
IMO there needs to be a starker contrast between computer science and computer engineering, just as there's a contrast between "real" engineering and, say, physics.
Those who just want to be able to program, who are focused purely on employability right out of college, can look for computer engineering courses teaching the popular programming languages. These people can be fine programmers, ready to start... so long as the language popularity hasn't changed by the time they graduate. It would be sort of advanced vocational program, just like any other engineering.
But the real scientists, those who want to experience and express code on deeper levels, should be looking for something very different, that which Dijkstra describes. Just as a scientist and an engineer can work on the same project contributing different skills, the computer scientist has his place even in the real world.
The two really are different mentalities, and it seems that the mixture of the two leads to situations that are non-ideal for either.
The post office moves your property around.
The ISP shuttles around signals which cannot be owned.
Not to mention that a private postal system would have every right to require the ability to inspect the contents of every package as part of the agreement. Don't like that arrangement? Find yourself a different postal system.
Same with ISPs.
It's their business and their property. Who are you to tell them what they can and cannot do with it while expecting preservation of your own property rights?
It may make absolutely no sense... but it's their ToS, and their right to be as eccentric as they wish, just as it's your right to use the electricity for senseless things if they don't ban it.
They get to propose conditions on the agreement, and we get to refuse the agreement if the conditions are too dumb. Such is the nature of free exchange.
Check out the launchpad PPA system.
They've been invited.
In the mean time, there's nothing circular about pointing to Flynn's work to address your concerns and the holes in your knowledge.
If you want to background on the claim it's perfectly reasonable to start with the claim itself.