Also there should be a (blech) next to Alex Trebek. Yeah, he has all the pronunciations down better than anyone in humankind, but he doesn't have to be so smug about it.
"Bulk e-mail" in this context means the transmission of an e-mail message within a short time frame to more than a small set of recipients who may not have elected voluntarily to receive the e-mail.
Upper limit 'Short time frames' are defined as 2 days.
It then goes to state right after the definition:
1. Prohibited uses. Bulk e-mailing may not be used for personal purposes, advertising or solicitations, or political statements or purposes.
Pretty clear that this should not be done.
The article also includes the email sent, but redacts the sender line. My guess is that she used a University created faculty listserv.
That article also supplies the allegations of their head of IT
which states Kara Spencer refused to stop using this listserv and said she was going to do it again. Also, she stated the head of IT should go ahead and file charges.
Now, in that statement it's his word against hers unless he has some witnesses.
But this is not a matter of free speech. It's not the message. It's how she broadcasted the message. It also pretty clear cut violation of misuse of university property (eg. the listserv) unless she can prove she created her own faculty listing from scratch. As for sending the bulk email it appears to be a clear violation based on the university policy.
A question I would have about Michigan State:
Does that University have a robust and timely mechanism for students to express ideas and address grievances?
Normally I would say the student newspaper or actual protest in the street, but these are not timely nor do they usually hit the target audience of faculty.
Yeah. What happened to the days when you could go out onto the terraces of Machu Pichu. Farm your terrace. Go to the temple and then chew on a few coca leaves to get through the afternoon.
I tell ya what happened. Conquistadors! That's what happened!
Ban the Conquistadors! And their inquisitions! I didn't expect those.
There are people who are goddamned convinced that they get the flu when they get vaccinated.
I'm one of those folks. I'm pretty healthy, but I've had bad reactions to vaccines as a child.
In an attempt to not get the flu as bad this year I got the vaccine. Result - flu which progressed into a sinus infection.
Before the camp from each side climbs down my throat or starts painting the banners for the anti-vaccine march here is what I can gather:
My flu symptoms were much less than last year when I had the actual flu.
In having the flu my immune system was weakened.
Everyone in my office space had some form of sinus infection already.
I have a son in daycare.
Based on my loose gathering of the facts I would like to say that I need to be vaccinated when my immune system can recover before being whacked by another major illness. Time will tell, but I'm going to speculate that I will be better in January and February when the non-vaccinated folks in my office get the full on, kick ass flu.
In terms of vaccines for kids. I had them as a child and my son is currently getting them.
My only concern is how many vaccines they pack into one session. He might get an MMR, DTaP and Varicella and one other in one visit.
My wife and I decided to breakdown the vaccinations into smaller chunks. He'll get all his shots before Kindergarden, but not enough to overwhelm his immune system before he gets there. In my area, high fever is not an uncommon event and is actually expected as part of the process. Although we get spooked when kids go to 105 deg fever. It's still not going to stop me taking my son for his vaccinations considering that if he gets a 105 deg fever on the vaccination, the real thing would probably kill him.
You still don't get it, do you? He'll find them. That's what he does. That's all he does! You can't stop him! He absolutely WILL NOT STOP UNTIL EVERY CHAIR IS THROWN!
From QuantumG WTF? She pretended to be an "internet boyfriend" and then told the girl she didn't want to talk to her anymore. She didn't put rat poison in her coffee. No-one is responsible for the death of a person who commits suicide, except the person who commits suicide. Oh, no, life is too hard. A boy I've never met (and didn't even really exist) doesn't like me anymore, where's the sleeping pills?
I think the prosecution would paint a picture like this.
It's the equivalent of handing a recovering pyromaniac a book of matches and a gas can then putting them under extreme stress. After some time they are going to break and start a fire. It's manipulating someone in an unstable mental state.
BUT! It is a crime to press someone who is mentally unstable and "cause" them to lose control? It's like winding up the office crank with conspiracy theories and setting him loose in the office. IANAL enough to know.
Regardless of the outcome. I'd seriously like to find out if this soldier gets his problem resolved.
eleventypie, if you actually have the chance to post a follow-up to all this advice that would be great.
Because if it doesn't get resolved, I'd like to be one of the first in line to pound on Dell for your behalf.
You and other soldiers are out there serving your country in serious danger. The least we could do is sacrifice a little time to help out and get a laptop through.
There has never been a better time to live on this planet than the present. We're living in the golden age of humanity; why do you insist on being so miserable?
Because this good life has a price tag. And it's our generation that has to pay for our share and the previous generations share. Upset yet? You should be.
There are very few inventors who have had the incredible mass market exposure that Kamen has enjoyed over the last ten years.
If his inventions during this interval have met with less than stellar success, it is certainly NOT because they were sheltered away.
They are super cool, but they just miss the market.
In my very humble opinion, this is one of Kamen's fatal flaws.
I've met the man personally and saw him speak at the local university where I work. Actually one of his earlier medical inventions helped my son through his premie time in a hospital NICU.
In the informal talk/Q&A he gave this is what I get. Of course he is a hardcore do-it-yourself uber geek. You got a problem? He will solve it. He has more motivation, energy and brainpower in his pinky that I will ever have in my entire being.
That being said he has the uncanny ability and charisma to surround himself with extremely intelligent people. He values education very highly regardless of how you obtain it. He doesn't feel that governments or organizations can solve problems. Just go out and do it. Like all geniuses, he has a problem dealing with or considering people who are not smart. If you are not smart I don't think he wants to deal with you aside from solving your problem. He's moving and shaking so much in the limelight I don't think he can see and apply things for the average person. In some aspect this is good otherwise he would not have the foresight to invent these devices. He started inventing medical devices. Health insured people can benefit from these devices, since the insurance foots the bill. Other inventions sometimes result in high costs that can't reach the average person to make their life better.
In the Q&A the topic of invention cost didn't really come up. On slashdot we decry business managers and PHBs, but they sometimes do help in lowering a product's cost that people can actually buy.
Now the Kamen groupies can proceed in verbally lynching me or burning me in effigy.
Remember the spider that lived inside that experiment habitat? Orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer, then one day there's a big egg in it. The egg hatched...
Hello AC. I am Agent Smith. This is Agent Holden.
Were are going to ask you a few questions.
Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Answer quickly as you can.
You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a...
Oh for crap's sake! Slashdot trots out this theme every so often. The white males are guilty and the women tell stories about being harassed.
This needs to stop. There is no mass male conspiracy going on to prevent women from entering Computer Science, Engineering or any of the other so called "hard sciences".
Stop with the special treatment. In merit based disciplines it hurts worse than it helps. Nothing wrong with scholarships, but the special quotas and support to help women aginst those nasty men who hold us back and look at us . . with their eyes.
As a man I have no intention of holding anyone back. If you have the interest and ability to go into the Computer field. Go for it! Having a mental diversity improves that discipline.
Even if you want to try it out. Go for it! Hell, it doesn't even require my say so.
I curious to see or hear from women who actually are in the field and WHY they are in the field. Probably the same or similar to the guys.
Y'know I agree with Chris Rock very rarely, but he said one thing about parenthood. Especially about being a father who has a daughter. Your main job in life is to keep her OFF THAT POLE!
If you live in America, he's your president. Live with it. You don't like it, move someplace else.
How do you like that?
I've spent 8 years with that dead raccoon corpse of a president, George W. Bush, stapled to me every time I talked to someone who lived outside of the US.
Feel embarrassed if you like, but don't ever pretend you're a US citizen and deny that you have a president.
There must be something in the water in Pennsylvania. Either that, or the standards of education in regards to social sciences have slipped. Badly. Perhaps Pennsylvanians haven't heard of something commonly referred to as 'the Vietnam War' aka 'the Vietnam Conflict' -- you know that lil' ol 'Police Action' that John McCain served in. No matter how you put it, no matter how you look it, there is no denying the fact that we either lost or at least did not win. And, more importantly, this wouldn't at all be the first time in American history.
"Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them."
-- George Santayana
I don't think Pennsylvanians believe we have never lost a war. We have many who fought in Vietnam and many who lost their lives and/or still missing over there.
The problem is all the people we call Pennsyltuckians. They all live in the spots between Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. It's also really prevalent in Western PA. These are the good ol' boys who grew up in the failed steel towns and industrial towns that dried up. Then they were drafted into Vietnam. These people are also still in these failed towns as they begin dying when the rest of the jobs move away or are shipped overseas. These are the same people who see all their children move away because there is nothing left. Or don't see their children move away because education is so terrible or they are THAT poor.
But these are also the same people who chant USA! USA! to any rube in a suit who talks well about the military. And they also blindly say "I'm not voting fer no nigger!" Even though the man they plan to vote for is going to do it to them again. I don't like to live in fear anymore, but I really hope whoever does get elected doesn't shaft these people regardless of how pig ignorant they are.
I'll do you one better. I was at Penn State when we didn't have the internet. You grabbed things from a 2400 baud modem or used R/NET to the University's CISC processor mainframe.
Whoa baby!
And I had to walk down High St. Along Beaver Ave. along College Dr. and up Shortlidge road to get to class. We liked it! We loved it! Even though it was 30 below zero with the windchill in 2ft of snow. 28 kbit/line? Penn State snow removal? Luxury.
Yes, and we survived college even then, but it's a brave new world. Students actually do other things than study. Sometimes people forget that. You do pay money to goto college, but it's also a life experience. Not everyone learns and studies the exact same way.
I would have killed to have an internet connection in my dorm room. Living a Spartan existence does not require others to also live it.
Before I left the Internet just started (should tell you close to when I was there) and we had guys running MatLab and Maple on their home PC to run simulations. Took awhile to move all that data. Although some was local data, other large datasets had to be acquired from the outside. This was also the same with the Geolabs some folks in the Ag department etc. etc. etc.
Sand ni... people living in caves, devising a more secure method of communication? I don't think so. They probably forgot to pay the dial-up bill.
I hate feeding the trolls, but this one has a kernel of truth with respect to American perception of Afghanis.
Sure the Taliban and Al-Queda might be backwards religious extremists,but they are extremists with a great deal of cash from the opium trade, hidden Muslim investors, and possibly other funding. My guess would be that they are retooling their communications. These are guys that know how to fight. I think we remember how well they did against the Russians. Their country may be destroyed, but fighting is all they know.
For all we know right now Al-Queda is bunkering down right along the Pakistan border, flush with cash and thinking new strategies to use against Coalition forces during the winter. It would be a good tactic to shut down your known communication lines and let your enemy guess what the hell is going on. Hell, they could be communicating locally by braiding the hair of their herded goats in cryptographic fashion. How's that for tinfoil hat wearing conspiracies! The point is we don't know when the lights go out. We're smart people. If you have to be out in the mountains for an extended period of time, what do you use to electronically communicate with the outside world? Cel phones? Satellite phones? Satellite broadband links? FTP riddles from the Qu'ran to your best buddy's blog?
As for V.P.s Sarah Palin, Joe Biden. Who would you pick as president? Chances are they are going to be president one way or another.
Wow....almost 8am central time (USA) and no comments? Is trek that dead?
Mebbe not, but it should be.
I know. I know. Before you flamebait mod me into oblivion hear me out.
It's too soon. We've collectively barely had the time to get the bad smell of Enterprise out of the air before Paramount starts lighting another Trek stogie.
Also, it is time for something else to come along. Star Trek had its time. It's been real fun riding around the galaxy in the Federation Universe, but new ideas need to happen for inspiring the next generations to go into space.
Isn't anyone tired of the rehash, retread and remakes Hollywood and TV have been making for the past couple decades? Enough with the homages.
"Cyberdyne, a new company in Tsukuba outside Tokyo, will mass-produce HAL. Two people demonstrated the suits at the company's headquarters on Tuesday."
Cyberdyne producing HAL!?
Good god, are they TRYING to tempt fate? Expect to see exhausted pensioners in Japan running around the street while their robotic suits are running rampant.
You beat me to it.
Humanity! We're just begging for it! Might as well have a company called the Seventh Seal run by a guy called Morningstar. When on the company's opening day he opens the large front doors that happened to be shaped like a large scroll with a wax seal. The company starts a large Web 2.0 AI network to control the entire defense system of the free world.
It depends on how far and how connected an IT workers union is made.
This should be a union not only of the programmers and help desk people, but hardware/system analysts, network designers, and telcom people.
Try outsourcing to India or China when the entire nation strikes and cuts off communications to the entire business world. Or if all the DNS servers in the US fail to find web addresses. Many other crucial systems are the lever for hard negotiation when taken on a nationwide scale. The might of such an organization would rival the power of something like say . . . the Spacing Guild in Dune. A problem business doesn't travel on the internet without us.
You could have two tracks to get into the union. Formal education or grandfathered in through work experience.
That brings in the folks who needed to work from the ground up when the industry began and covers the current workers who put in time through formal education. Have rotating spokesmen the for "Guild" or Union whatever you want to call it.
We know who has ability and who doesn't. Set some minimal standards and help people become members who really want to learn and belong. Only have fees when necessary for representation legal or otherwise. All the pitfalls of Unions needs not apply: Greedy entrenched Union bosses, nepotism, freeloaders, squeezing small businesses.
What are the big beefs of IT? [Listed in no particular order]
No budget. No time or training for new untested software. Treated like glorified janitors instead of being included as part of the business. Long hours, short on pay and high on stress and blame. Lack of even minimal staffing.
The big problem is trying to group IT workers into a cohesive group. Like herding cats on meth who hear an automatic can opener.
This Union can't be all things to all people, and that is why it hasn't formed earlier.
The lone hired guns won't give up competitive advantages compared to a union. Really sharp programmer/consultants are still making money while helpdesk and programming plebs get the outsourcing shaft.
Might want to stay away from government connections.
Slashdot Mirror
[SUPER NITPICK]
Doh! You listed Alanis Morisette twice.
Also there should be a (blech) next to Alex Trebek.
Yeah, he has all the pronunciations down better than anyone in humankind,
but he doesn't have to be so smug about it.
OK here's the skinny.
Michigan State defines SPAM in this policy
http://lct.msu.edu/guidelines-policies/bulkemail.html
Upper limit 'Short time frames' are defined as 2 days.
It then goes to state right after the definition:
Pretty clear that this should not be done.
The article also includes the email sent, but redacts the sender line.
My guess is that she used a University created faculty listserv.
That article also supplies the allegations of their head of IT
http://www.thefire.org/pdfs/ae43588d257a0fc64f512e2c99de1b35.pdf
which states Kara Spencer refused to stop using this listserv and said she was going to
do it again. Also, she stated the head of IT should go ahead and file charges.
Now, in that statement it's his word against hers unless he has some witnesses.
But this is not a matter of free speech. It's not the message. It's how she broadcasted the message.
It also pretty clear cut violation of misuse of university property (eg. the listserv) unless she can
prove she created her own faculty listing from scratch. As for sending the bulk email it appears to be a clear violation
based on the university policy.
A question I would have about Michigan State:
Does that University have a robust and timely mechanism for students to express ideas and address grievances?
Normally I would say the student newspaper or actual protest in the street, but these
are not timely nor do they usually hit the target audience of faculty.
Yeah. What happened to the days when you could go out onto the terraces of Machu Pichu. Farm your terrace.
Go to the temple and then chew on a few coca leaves to get through the afternoon.
I tell ya what happened. Conquistadors! That's what happened!
Ban the Conquistadors! And their inquisitions! I didn't expect those.
There are people who are goddamned convinced that they get the flu when they get vaccinated.
I'm one of those folks. I'm pretty healthy, but I've had bad reactions to vaccines as a child.
In an attempt to not get the flu as bad this year I got the vaccine.
Result - flu which progressed into a sinus infection.
Before the camp from each side climbs down my throat or starts painting the banners for the anti-vaccine march
here is what I can gather:
My flu symptoms were much less than last year when I had the actual flu.
In having the flu my immune system was weakened.
Everyone in my office space had some form of sinus infection already.
I have a son in daycare.
Based on my loose gathering of the facts I would like to say that I need to be vaccinated when
my immune system can recover before being whacked by another major illness.
Time will tell, but I'm going to speculate that I will be better in January and February
when the non-vaccinated folks in my office get the full on, kick ass flu.
In terms of vaccines for kids.
I had them as a child and my son is currently getting them.
My only concern is how many vaccines they pack into one session. He might get an MMR, DTaP and Varicella and one other
in one visit.
My wife and I decided to breakdown the vaccinations into smaller chunks. He'll get all his shots before Kindergarden,
but not enough to overwhelm his immune system before he gets there. In my area, high fever is not an uncommon event
and is actually expected as part of the process. Although we get spooked when kids go to 105 deg fever.
It's still not going to stop me taking my son for his vaccinations considering that if he gets a 105 deg fever
on the vaccination, the real thing would probably kill him.
You still don't get it, do you?
He'll find them. That's what he does. That's all he does!
You can't stop him! He absolutely WILL NOT STOP UNTIL EVERY CHAIR IS THROWN!
- scene from the Throwinator
More like the BSG Fan equivalent of Highlander 2: the Sickening.
We affectionately refer to it as Highslander2: the Sickening.
Worse than the Star Wars Christmas Special?
No. Not worse than the Christmas special. Nothing is worse than the Christmas special.
Nothing.
Unless Jar Jar does a Christmas special with Ewoks circa 1982.
Caprica needs to be shot down. Recover the money and maybe start something
worthwhile.
Once we go down the spinoff path, forever will it dominate your programming
like it did Roddenberry's apprentice.
Doh! Replying to my previous post. This has already been covered ad infinitum in subsequent posts.
What I get for not reading further.
From QuantumG
WTF? She pretended to be an "internet boyfriend" and then told the girl she didn't want to talk to her anymore. She didn't put rat poison in her coffee. No-one is responsible for the death of a person who commits suicide, except the person who commits suicide. Oh, no, life is too hard. A boy I've never met (and didn't even really exist) doesn't like me anymore, where's the sleeping pills?
I think the prosecution would paint a picture like this.
It's the equivalent of handing a recovering pyromaniac a book of matches and a gas can then putting them under extreme stress. After some time they are going to break and start a fire. It's manipulating someone in an unstable mental state.
BUT! It is a crime to press someone who is mentally unstable and "cause" them to lose control? It's like winding up the office crank with conspiracy theories and setting him loose in the office. IANAL enough to know.
Regardless of the outcome. I'd seriously like to find out if this soldier gets his problem resolved.
eleventypie, if you actually have the chance to post a follow-up to all this advice that would be great.
Because if it doesn't get resolved, I'd like to be one of the first in line to pound on Dell
for your behalf.
You and other soldiers are out there serving your country in serious danger. The least we could do
is sacrifice a little time to help out and get a laptop through.
There has never been a better time to live on this planet than the present. We're living in the golden age of humanity; why do you insist on being so miserable?
Because this good life has a price tag. And it's our generation that has to pay for our share and the previous
generations share. Upset yet? You should be.
There are very few inventors who have had the incredible mass market exposure that Kamen has enjoyed over the last ten years.
If his inventions during this interval have met with less than stellar success, it is certainly NOT because they were sheltered away.
They are super cool, but they just miss the market.
In my very humble opinion, this is one of Kamen's fatal flaws.
I've met the man personally and saw him speak at the local university where I work. Actually one of his earlier medical inventions
helped my son through his premie time in a hospital NICU.
In the informal talk/Q&A he gave this is what I get. Of course he is a hardcore do-it-yourself uber geek. You got a problem? He will solve it. He has more motivation, energy and brainpower in his pinky that I will ever have in my entire being.
That being said he has the uncanny ability and charisma to surround himself with extremely intelligent people. He values education very highly regardless of how you obtain it. He doesn't feel that governments or organizations can solve problems. Just go out and do it. Like all geniuses, he has a problem dealing with or considering people who are not smart. If you are not smart I don't think he wants to deal with you aside from solving your problem. He's moving and shaking so much in the limelight I don't think he can see and apply things for the average person. In some aspect this is good otherwise he would not have the foresight to invent these devices. He started inventing medical devices. Health insured people can benefit from these devices, since the insurance foots the bill. Other inventions sometimes result in high costs that can't reach the average person to make their life better.
In the Q&A the topic of invention cost didn't really come up. On slashdot we decry business managers and PHBs, but they sometimes do help in lowering a product's cost that people can actually buy.
Now the Kamen groupies can proceed in verbally lynching me or burning me in effigy.
Remember the spider that lived inside that experiment habitat? Orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer, then one day there's a big egg in it. The egg hatched...
Hello AC. I am Agent Smith. This is Agent Holden.
Were are going to ask you a few questions.
Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention.
Answer quickly as you can.
You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden
you look down and see a...
Oh for crap's sake! Slashdot trots out this theme every so often. The white males are guilty and
the women tell stories about being harassed.
This needs to stop. There is no mass male conspiracy going on to prevent women from
entering Computer Science, Engineering or any of the other so called "hard sciences".
Stop with the special treatment. In merit based disciplines it hurts worse than it helps.
Nothing wrong with scholarships, but the special quotas and support to help women aginst
those nasty men who hold us back and look at us . . with their eyes.
As a man I have no intention of holding anyone back. If you have the interest and ability
to go into the Computer field. Go for it! Having a mental diversity improves that discipline.
Even if you want to try it out. Go for it! Hell, it doesn't even require my say so.
I curious to see or hear from women who actually are in the field and WHY they are in the field.
Probably the same or similar to the guys.
Y'know I agree with Chris Rock very rarely, but he said one thing about parenthood.
Especially about being a father who has a daughter.
Your main job in life is to keep her OFF THAT POLE!
An Anon Coward said
Obama - not my president.
If you live in America, he's your president. Live with it.
You don't like it, move someplace else.
How do you like that?
I've spent 8 years with that dead raccoon corpse of a president, George W. Bush,
stapled to me every time I talked to someone who lived outside of the US.
Feel embarrassed if you like, but don't ever pretend you're a US citizen and
deny that you have a president.
Ooh, ooh! "I'm so fancy and what not!" Why don't you just say "my head asplode" like the rest of us?
So Moe, what do you call a garage?
I don't think Pennsylvanians believe we have never lost a war. We have many who fought in Vietnam and many who lost their lives and/or still missing over there.
Hell, there was even a Vietnam movie set in Western PA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deer_Hunter
The problem is all the people we call Pennsyltuckians. They all live in the spots between Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.
It's also really prevalent in Western PA. These are the good ol' boys who grew up in the failed steel towns and industrial towns that dried up. Then they were drafted into Vietnam. These people are also still in these failed towns as they begin dying when the rest of the jobs move away or are shipped overseas. These are the same people who see all their children move away because there is nothing left. Or don't see their children move away because education is so terrible or they are THAT poor.
But these are also the same people who chant USA! USA! to any rube in a suit who talks well about the military. And they also blindly say "I'm not voting fer no nigger!" Even though the man they plan to vote for is going to do it to them again. I don't like to live in fear anymore, but I really hope whoever does get elected doesn't shaft these people regardless of how pig ignorant they are.
It must be really taxing to live in a world of constant fear everyday.
Play Uboat! uuuuuuuuuuuboat!
Ah ha! Another Penn Stater.
What class were you?
I'll do you one better. I was at Penn State when we didn't have the internet.
You grabbed things from a 2400 baud modem or used R/NET to the University's CISC processor mainframe.
Whoa baby!
And I had to walk down High St. Along Beaver Ave. along College Dr. and up Shortlidge road to get to class.
We liked it! We loved it!
Even though it was 30 below zero with the windchill in 2ft of snow. 28 kbit/line? Penn State snow removal? Luxury.
Yes, and we survived college even then, but it's a brave new world. Students actually do other things than study.
Sometimes people forget that. You do pay money to goto college, but it's also a life experience.
Not everyone learns and studies the exact same way.
I would have killed to have an internet connection in my dorm room. Living a Spartan existence does not require
others to also live it.
Before I left the Internet just started (should tell you close to when I was there) and we had guys running MatLab and
Maple on their home PC to run simulations. Took awhile to move all that data. Although some was local data, other large datasets
had to be acquired from the outside. This was also the same with the Geolabs some folks in the Ag department etc. etc. etc.
The Anonymous Troll said
Sand ni... people living in caves, devising a more secure method of communication? I don't think so. They probably forgot to pay the dial-up bill.
I hate feeding the trolls, but this one has a kernel of truth with respect to American perception of Afghanis.
Sure the Taliban and Al-Queda might be backwards religious extremists,but they are extremists with a great deal of cash from the opium trade, hidden Muslim investors, and possibly other funding. My guess would be that they are retooling their communications. These are guys that know how to fight. I think we remember how well they did against the Russians. Their country may be destroyed, but fighting is all they know.
For all we know right now Al-Queda is bunkering down right along the Pakistan border, flush with cash and thinking new strategies to use against Coalition forces during the winter. It would be a good tactic to shut down your known communication lines and let your enemy guess what the hell is going on. Hell, they could be communicating locally by braiding the hair of their herded goats in cryptographic fashion. How's that for tinfoil hat wearing conspiracies! The point is we don't know when the lights go out. We're smart people. If you have to be out in the mountains for an extended period of time, what do you use to electronically communicate with the outside world? Cel phones? Satellite phones? Satellite broadband links? FTP riddles from the Qu'ran to your best buddy's blog?
As for V.P.s Sarah Palin, Joe Biden. Who would you pick as president? Chances are they are going to be president one way or another.
Wow....almost 8am central time (USA) and no comments? Is trek that dead?
Mebbe not, but it should be.
I know. I know. Before you flamebait mod me into oblivion hear me out.
It's too soon. We've collectively barely had the time to get the bad smell
of Enterprise out of the air before Paramount starts lighting another Trek stogie.
Also, it is time for something else to come along. Star Trek had its time.
It's been real fun riding around the galaxy in the Federation Universe, but
new ideas need to happen for inspiring the next generations to go into space.
Isn't anyone tired of the rehash, retread and remakes Hollywood and TV have been
making for the past couple decades? Enough with the homages.
Are there no new ideas?!
"Cyberdyne, a new company in Tsukuba outside Tokyo, will mass-produce HAL. Two people demonstrated the suits at the company's headquarters on Tuesday."
Cyberdyne producing HAL!?
Good god, are they TRYING to tempt fate? Expect to see exhausted pensioners in Japan running around the street while their robotic suits are running rampant.
You beat me to it.
Humanity! We're just begging for it!
Might as well have a company called the Seventh Seal run by a guy called Morningstar.
When on the company's opening day he opens the large front doors that happened to be shaped
like a large scroll with a wax seal. The company starts a large Web 2.0 AI network to control the entire
defense system of the free world.
You've been warned people! Warned I tells ya!
No one will see this post, but here goes.
I think we fail to see large enough.
It depends on how far and how connected an IT workers union is made.
This should be a union not only of the programmers and help desk people, but
hardware/system analysts, network designers, and telcom people.
Try outsourcing to India or China when the entire nation strikes and cuts off communications to the entire business world.
Or if all the DNS servers in the US fail to find web addresses. Many other crucial systems are the lever for hard negotiation when taken on a nationwide scale.
The might of such an organization would rival the power of something like say . . . the Spacing Guild in Dune. A problem business doesn't travel on the internet without us.
You could have two tracks to get into the union. Formal education or grandfathered in through work experience.
That brings in the folks who needed to work from the ground up when the industry began and covers the current workers who put in time through formal education.
Have rotating spokesmen the for "Guild" or Union whatever you want to call it.
We know who has ability and who doesn't. Set some minimal standards and help people become members who really want to learn and belong.
Only have fees when necessary for representation legal or otherwise.
All the pitfalls of Unions needs not apply: Greedy entrenched Union bosses, nepotism, freeloaders, squeezing small businesses.
What are the big beefs of IT? [Listed in no particular order]
No budget.
No time or training for new untested software.
Treated like glorified janitors instead of being included as part of the business.
Long hours, short on pay and high on stress and blame.
Lack of even minimal staffing.
The big problem is trying to group IT workers into a cohesive group.
Like herding cats on meth who hear an automatic can opener.
This Union can't be all things to all people, and that is why it hasn't formed earlier.
The lone hired guns won't give up competitive advantages compared to a union.
Really sharp programmer/consultants are still making money while helpdesk
and programming plebs get the outsourcing shaft.
Might want to stay away from government connections.