With all the money sloshing around the system right now looking for a relatively safe investment, I would think Google's financing options are as close to unlimited as any company in the world. Loans, bonds, silent hedge fund partners, keeping a majority in a spin-off company. All seem doable for a premier tech company with smart people and a solid business plan.
I wish you did say something against a comment I sympathize with but you didn't. You were just trying to appear clever and ended up looking petty, like the kid who learns something about proofs in math class and tries to apply it in the next period English class. The observation may be technically true but it doesn't make it appropriate, insightful, or any less a waste of anyone's time given the context and the fact that it ignores the larger point under discussion.
Allow us to simplify it for you. Regardless of what "news" you read or what the various levels of government tell you, if you don't assume you are being watched and tracked to one degree or another all the time, then you are an idiot.
The demographic argument, while interesting, is just wrong.
Regardless of their conceits, there was nothing unique about the Boomers. Like every youthful generation they reacted to their circumstances, which were ripe for bringing about big changes. Incredible post World War II prosperity, the stultifying corporate and political environs of the 50s, segregation, sexism on a scale most people today cannot fathom, the advent of things like the birth control pill and wide availability of drugs. And the main reason, the Vietnam war.
The difference you attribute to demographics has nothing to with the number of people in respective generations, it has everything to do with the difference between the Vietnam and Iraq wars - THE DRAFT.
The "values" we assign to Boomer youthfulness may or may not have been real. If they were, they were limited to a small slice of upper middle class kids in University who had the fear of being shipped off to an insane and pointless war held over their heads. I assure you that working class kids, the entire South, and good portion of the rest of the country's youth did not share in those values at the time and relished watching the "hippies" and protesters getting their asses kicked by the police on television.
You think the young people today do nothing because they have some defeatist notion that they will be outvoted by older people? I call bullshit on that. They do nothing because they have no skin in the game. Their military commitments have been outsourced to "volunteers" (read: poorer kids). Reinstall the draft and I bet you will see youthful political activism on a scale you can currently only dream about.
Every older American citizen could die tomorrow and you would not see any appreciable change along the lines you outline. In fact in might be worse. Due to no fault of their own, the last couple of generations have become accustomed to being surveilled, controlled, dumbed down, and distracted. You might be wishing for the elimination of the last generations of Americans that have any appreciation for, or memory of, what freedom was like.
Excellent point. But this issue cuts through even more political dimensions than illegal wiretapping and is even less likely to be attributable to simple party affiliation. Many shades of conservatives, libertarians, and liberals that don't see eye to eye on much of anything are against the real id act.
What depresses me is that the states are generally not against this on grounds of liberty or constitutionality but rather fiscal burdens. If the feds come up with money to pay for this travesty many of the hold out states would probably be only to happy to go along with it.
You seem to be missing that this is not based on any necessity for IDs at a campground. It is based on the feds busting the balls of citizens of non-complaint states in hopes that they will return home and agitate that their states become compliant.
It is the petty behavior the feds have used in all manner of things to bully states in the past. E.G. If you don't pass and enforce a seat belt law in your state we will not remit to you any of the millions in federal highway funds that your state citizens have paid us.
The problem with this is that every once and awhile people grow a backbone and the strategy has exactly the opposite effect that the feds hoped for.
But there is still no formal education on how to stay safe, secure and ethical online...the internet...has threats and dangers...These include communications from identity thieves, online predators and cyber-bullies."
How about media domination in a few corporate hands to shape and control discussion, political Newspeak from "elected" representatives, government compiled files of their publicly written opinions and private emails, corporate data mining to include them in targeted consumerism and potentially exclude them from future employment, etc?
Just guessing but I suspect lessons on these matters would not make it into the textbook.
For a person to take risks and be small business, which employs the majority of US citizens, they need to have some personal protection from liability.
Most small business are not corporations but rather sole proprietors or some kind of partnership. It usually doesn't make sense for a small biz to incorporate because of the tax implications. Since the business is the family's primary means of income they would have that income taxed at the corporate level and then taxed again at the income tax level when they paid themselves. Until a company grows to a certain size incorporation doesn't really make financial sense. Of course there are variations on this like S-corps and the like so nothing is cut and dried.
There is no chance of anyone getting more than a slap on the wrist over this
When it comes to the Bush Administration nothing is a coincidence.
This is a group that manages one thing well - news. How convenient that this comes out when the congress, in particular Senators Leahy and Spector and the Judicial Committee, are actively looking into amending the Patriot Act, etc. This will be an Abu Ghraib type operation where a few nobodies get their asses kicked and the higher ups will pretend to be SHOCKED that civil abuses were committed. "But don't worry, we're on top of it now and no need for any changes or further oversight. We are self-policing. Really."
gives explicit federal sanction to trade secrets in vote counting
WTF? What's wrong with the open-sourced way we have been counting since humans first figured out they have 10 fingers?
Seriously, what are we really talking about here that is so damn revolutionary that the system requires trade secrecy? Touch screens and scanners? Printer drivers? Encryption? Some minor networking?
It's the government. Companies build things to spec all the time. If Diebold and the rest think this kind of stuff is so proprietary then don't bid. I am sure there are hundreds of small outfits that can do this work and would love to write to a spec, release the code, collect the bounty and live prosperously ever after.
What do your ISP taxes, etc., have to do with paying sales tax on your new internet ordered gizmo?
I pay property taxes, car insurance, car registration, drivers license, etc., also. It doesn't disqualify me from having to pay sales tax when I drive and buy something at the local Best Buy.
As best I can reconstruct this, we basically agree but for some reason you insist on diving down this arcane hole.
>> So, if all I'm doing is transferring data with an operational request, isn't that the pure definition of messaging?
Well, no. There is no "pure" definition. As a hypothetical, you can slice and dice the meaning of message in several different ways and MOM and RPC have done exactly that. Arguably neither is the right one. So in the absence of a "correct" definition we have to default to the traditional ones, right or wrong.
You know as well as I that in MOM the endpoint is the middleware whereas with rpc the two endpoints communicate directly (albeit via proxies). You can try to equate the two by saying they are hiding their details in different places but the two models do have consequences, good and bad. MOM is the obvious choice for a pub-sub system but not so good for braking/steering system communication.
>>CORBA in essence is messaging, nothing more or less.
That is simply not true. Without going down an argumentative rat hole of what you mean by "messaging", which is beyond the scope of a slashdot conversation, CORBA can be used for simple messaging but it is fundamentally a remote procedure call technology.
Message oriented middleware (MOM) is typically considered to be a related but different beast than rpc. Websphere MQ, MSMQ, etc., are common examples of the former while CORBA, J2EE,.net remoting, even SOAP are examples of the latter.
>>There are less complicated solutions out there that are significantly easier to use than CORBA
I agree with you. I was trying to make two points. One, rpc has been reinvented numerous times over the last 30 years and there is no reason to think today's solutions won't yield to some newly hyped variation yet again. Two, the distributed space is too big and has to many variables for any one (or even all of the currently existing) technologies to satisfy, which is why people continue to create new ones.
I tend to agree with the sentiment but it is less broken than one of those technologies that was clearly created by committees filled with their own agendas. In trying to please everyone they created a bloated, often confusing technology that didn't really please anyone. CORBA's biggest usage is in a space most people would have never predicted - embedded. But it is usually a much tighter subset of the CORBA spec.
I looked at ICE a couple of years ago and it does address many of the pitfalls of CORBA. The problem is one of adoption. A few competent engineering organizations are willing to take a chance on it but it would never hit the radar of most standard corporate IT departments. Very few technologies not being pushed by one or more of the software giants do.
>>It's last century's technology for a problem that has since been elegantly solved several times over with many fewer pain points.
Maybe. My sense is that it is a problem with too many variables for a one-size-fits-all solution which is why so many people continue to fashion custom solutions.
Never gonna happen. Part of the deal is for Microsoft to make no patent violation claims over Mono as it stands now.
So perhaps you are looking at it upside down? The point is not for MS to attempt to move.NET to linux, it is to pave the road for Novell to do it for them.
Dotnet is part open and part proprietary. Novell, who is by far the biggest force behind Mono, has taken great pains not to stray into the proprietary areas. But now it is free of any MS patent constraints so it can just move on and create a complete.Net clone for linux without limitations. So SUSE can run (proprietary inclusive) Mono-Dotnet but no other flavor of linux can.
There are already a number of cool mono apps, Beagle perhaps being best known, so the argument that an MS spawned technology won't fly on Linux is already a bit ragged around the edges. A fuller, richer, Mono-Dotnet only opens more opportunities for writing apps.
So Novell gets a leg up in the linux market (albeit at a somewhat sleazy cost) and Microsoft has a ready-made platform on which to sell its business applications. Yes, MS makes a lot of money off of Windows licenses. But it also make a boat load of money from Office and other apps. They have already rewritten large parts of them to run on Dotnet. Now they will run on SUSE-Mono-Dotnet. A whole new revenue stream, particulary if Linux ever really becomes a viable mainstream business desktop.
(Have any of these people ever watched a non-op-ed, i.e., NOT Bill O'Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, etc., hard news show on FOX News, which consumes the majority of the news day from 8am until 7pm?)
You have to be kidding. From someone who once thought Fox was somewhat refreshing - before they went over the deep end at the start of the Iraq War:
Take the morning show Fox and Friends with the two male dorks and the obligatory blonde. Hard to believe but they are more revolting than O'Reilly. I don't know why they just don't make it official and wear Team Bush cheerleading outfits and do choreographed dance routines with their choreographed commentary.
Take John Gibson and his "the world's favorite sport is hating America" book. Is this the balance to Hannity?
Or Cavuto, who practically got on his knees during his Bush interview.
Or any of the so-called business shows on Saturday morning which follows the typical Fox script of one somewhat liberal person always being shouted down by 4 or 5 conservatives.
so the value of a particular property in New York will likely not fluctuate all that wildly - it does have a certain intrinsic value based on physical properties of the location that will never be altered.
What's the value of that location after a WMD or natural disaster occurs?
Airline pilots are some of the highest paid people in the world.
Right, and all they have is a couple thousand people's lives in their hands every week. It's not like they are deciding on the new slogan for Charmin, which is clearly worth 2 or 3 times as much given the stress and level of learning involved.
Slashdot Mirror
diff "Get The Facts" Compare >/dev/null
With all the money sloshing around the system right now looking for a relatively safe investment, I would think Google's financing options are as close to unlimited as any company in the world. Loans, bonds, silent hedge fund partners, keeping a majority in a spin-off company. All seem doable for a premier tech company with smart people and a solid business plan.
Feel better now?
I wish you did say something against a comment I sympathize with but you didn't. You were just trying to appear clever and ended up looking petty, like the kid who learns something about proofs in math class and tries to apply it in the next period English class. The observation may be technically true but it doesn't make it appropriate, insightful, or any less a waste of anyone's time given the context and the fact that it ignores the larger point under discussion.
Allow us to simplify it for you. Regardless of what "news" you read or what the various levels of government tell you, if you don't assume you are being watched and tracked to one degree or another all the time, then you are an idiot.
Where was Dick Cheney at the time in question?
Yawn though you may Neo...will it be the red shift or the blue shift?
The demographic argument, while interesting, is just wrong.
Regardless of their conceits, there was nothing unique about the Boomers. Like every youthful generation they reacted to their circumstances, which were ripe for bringing about big changes. Incredible post World War II prosperity, the stultifying corporate and political environs of the 50s, segregation, sexism on a scale most people today cannot fathom, the advent of things like the birth control pill and wide availability of drugs. And the main reason, the Vietnam war.
The difference you attribute to demographics has nothing to with the number of people in respective generations, it has everything to do with the difference between the Vietnam and Iraq wars - THE DRAFT.
The "values" we assign to Boomer youthfulness may or may not have been real. If they were, they were limited to a small slice of upper middle class kids in University who had the fear of being shipped off to an insane and pointless war held over their heads. I assure you that working class kids, the entire South, and good portion of the rest of the country's youth did not share in those values at the time and relished watching the "hippies" and protesters getting their asses kicked by the police on television.
You think the young people today do nothing because they have some defeatist notion that they will be outvoted by older people? I call bullshit on that. They do nothing because they have no skin in the game. Their military commitments have been outsourced to "volunteers" (read: poorer kids). Reinstall the draft and I bet you will see youthful political activism on a scale you can currently only dream about.
Every older American citizen could die tomorrow and you would not see any appreciable change along the lines you outline. In fact in might be worse. Due to no fault of their own, the last couple of generations have become accustomed to being surveilled, controlled, dumbed down, and distracted. You might be wishing for the elimination of the last generations of Americans that have any appreciation for, or memory of, what freedom was like.
Excellent point. But this issue cuts through even more political dimensions than illegal wiretapping and is even less likely to be attributable to simple party affiliation. Many shades of conservatives, libertarians, and liberals that don't see eye to eye on much of anything are against the real id act.
What depresses me is that the states are generally not against this on grounds of liberty or constitutionality but rather fiscal burdens. If the feds come up with money to pay for this travesty many of the hold out states would probably be only to happy to go along with it.
You seem to be missing that this is not based on any necessity for IDs at a campground. It is based on the feds busting the balls of citizens of non-complaint states in hopes that they will return home and agitate that their states become compliant.
It is the petty behavior the feds have used in all manner of things to bully states in the past. E.G. If you don't pass and enforce a seat belt law in your state we will not remit to you any of the millions in federal highway funds that your state citizens have paid us.
The problem with this is that every once and awhile people grow a backbone and the strategy has exactly the opposite effect that the feds hoped for.
But there is still no formal education on how to stay safe, secure and ethical online...the internet...has threats and dangers...These include communications from identity thieves, online predators and cyber-bullies."
How about media domination in a few corporate hands to shape and control discussion, political Newspeak from "elected" representatives, government compiled files of their publicly written opinions and private emails, corporate data mining to include them in targeted consumerism and potentially exclude them from future employment, etc?
Just guessing but I suspect lessons on these matters would not make it into the textbook.
For a person to take risks and be small business, which employs the majority of US citizens, they need to have some personal protection from liability.
Most small business are not corporations but rather sole proprietors or some kind of partnership. It usually doesn't make sense for a small biz to incorporate because of the tax implications. Since the business is the family's primary means of income they would have that income taxed at the corporate level and then taxed again at the income tax level when they paid themselves. Until a company grows to a certain size incorporation doesn't really make financial sense. Of course there are variations on this like S-corps and the like so nothing is cut and dried.
Every cable system gets a free Phishing Network channel.
This is organic astroturf.
There is no chance of anyone getting more than a slap on the wrist over this
When it comes to the Bush Administration nothing is a coincidence.
This is a group that manages one thing well - news. How convenient that this comes out when the congress, in particular Senators Leahy and Spector and the Judicial Committee, are actively looking into amending the Patriot Act, etc. This will be an Abu Ghraib type operation where a few nobodies get their asses kicked and the higher ups will pretend to be SHOCKED that civil abuses were committed. "But don't worry, we're on top of it now and no need for any changes or further oversight. We are self-policing. Really."
gives explicit federal sanction to trade secrets in vote counting
WTF? What's wrong with the open-sourced way we have been counting since humans first figured out they have 10 fingers?
Seriously, what are we really talking about here that is so damn revolutionary that the system requires trade secrecy? Touch screens and scanners? Printer drivers? Encryption? Some minor networking?
It's the government. Companies build things to spec all the time. If Diebold and the rest think this kind of stuff is so proprietary then don't bid. I am sure there are hundreds of small outfits that can do this work and would love to write to a spec, release the code, collect the bounty and live prosperously ever after.
What do your ISP taxes, etc., have to do with paying sales tax on your new internet ordered gizmo?
I pay property taxes, car insurance, car registration, drivers license, etc., also. It doesn't disqualify me from having to pay sales tax when I drive and buy something at the local Best Buy.
"people in general" != "everyone"
just as
"common good" != "always good for me"
As best I can reconstruct this, we basically agree but for some reason you insist on diving down this arcane hole.
>> So, if all I'm doing is transferring data with an operational request, isn't that the pure definition of messaging?
Well, no. There is no "pure" definition. As a hypothetical, you can slice and dice the meaning of message in several different ways and MOM and RPC have done exactly that. Arguably neither is the right one. So in the absence of a "correct" definition we have to default to the traditional ones, right or wrong.
You know as well as I that in MOM the endpoint is the middleware whereas with rpc the two endpoints communicate directly (albeit via proxies). You can try to equate the two by saying they are hiding their details in different places but the two models do have consequences, good and bad. MOM is the obvious choice for a pub-sub system but not so good for braking/steering system communication.
>>CORBA in essence is messaging, nothing more or less.
That is simply not true. Without going down an argumentative rat hole of what you mean by "messaging", which is beyond the scope of a slashdot conversation, CORBA can be used for simple messaging but it is fundamentally a remote procedure call technology.
Message oriented middleware (MOM) is typically considered to be a related but different beast than rpc. Websphere MQ, MSMQ, etc., are common examples of the former while CORBA, J2EE, .net remoting, even SOAP are examples of the latter.
>>There are less complicated solutions out there that are significantly easier to use than CORBA
I agree with you. I was trying to make two points. One, rpc has been reinvented numerous times over the last 30 years and there is no reason to think today's solutions won't yield to some newly hyped variation yet again. Two, the distributed space is too big and has to many variables for any one (or even all of the currently existing) technologies to satisfy, which is why people continue to create new ones.
>>CORBA is hopelessly broken.
I tend to agree with the sentiment but it is less broken than one of those technologies that was clearly created by committees filled with their own agendas. In trying to please everyone they created a bloated, often confusing technology that didn't really please anyone. CORBA's biggest usage is in a space most people would have never predicted - embedded. But it is usually a much tighter subset of the CORBA spec.
I looked at ICE a couple of years ago and it does address many of the pitfalls of CORBA. The problem is one of adoption. A few competent engineering organizations are willing to take a chance on it but it would never hit the radar of most standard corporate IT departments. Very few technologies not being pushed by one or more of the software giants do.
>>It's last century's technology for a problem that has since been elegantly solved several times over with many fewer pain points.
Maybe. My sense is that it is a problem with too many variables for a one-size-fits-all solution which is why so many people continue to fashion custom solutions.
Never gonna happen. Part of the deal is for Microsoft to make no patent violation claims over Mono as it stands now.
So perhaps you are looking at it upside down? The point is not for MS to attempt to move .NET to linux, it is to pave the road for Novell to do it for them.
Dotnet is part open and part proprietary. Novell, who is by far the biggest force behind Mono, has taken great pains not to stray into the proprietary areas. But now it is free of any MS patent constraints so it can just move on and create a complete .Net clone for linux without limitations. So SUSE can run (proprietary inclusive) Mono-Dotnet but no other flavor of linux can.
There are already a number of cool mono apps, Beagle perhaps being best known, so the argument that an MS spawned technology won't fly on Linux is already a bit ragged around the edges. A fuller, richer, Mono-Dotnet only opens more opportunities for writing apps.
So Novell gets a leg up in the linux market (albeit at a somewhat sleazy cost) and Microsoft has a ready-made platform on which to sell its business applications. Yes, MS makes a lot of money off of Windows licenses. But it also make a boat load of money from Office and other apps. They have already rewritten large parts of them to run on Dotnet. Now they will run on SUSE-Mono-Dotnet. A whole new revenue stream, particulary if Linux ever really becomes a viable mainstream business desktop.
Why assume I am far left just because I criticize Fox News? Sounds like something directly out of their playbook.
(Have any of these people ever watched a non-op-ed, i.e., NOT Bill O'Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, etc., hard news show on FOX News, which consumes the majority of the news day from 8am until 7pm?)
You have to be kidding. From someone who once thought Fox was somewhat refreshing - before they went over the deep end at the start of the Iraq War:
Take the morning show Fox and Friends with the two male dorks and the obligatory blonde. Hard to believe but they are more revolting than O'Reilly. I don't know why they just don't make it official and wear Team Bush cheerleading outfits and do choreographed dance routines with their choreographed commentary.
Take John Gibson and his "the world's favorite sport is hating America" book. Is this the balance to Hannity?
Or Cavuto, who practically got on his knees during his Bush interview.
Or any of the so-called business shows on Saturday morning which follows the typical Fox script of one somewhat liberal person always being shouted down by 4 or 5 conservatives.
Open your eyes.
so the value of a particular property in New York will likely not fluctuate all that wildly - it does have a certain intrinsic value based on physical properties of the location that will never be altered.
What's the value of that location after a WMD or natural disaster occurs?
Airline pilots are some of the highest paid people in the world.
Right, and all they have is a couple thousand people's lives in their hands every week. It's not like they are deciding on the new slogan for Charmin, which is clearly worth 2 or 3 times as much given the stress and level of learning involved.