H2O is simply a molecule that is incredibly important to the process called life. Whether it is alive or not is not something I have ever heard debated. It may be a component in something that is alive, just as a neutrino might be. But water on its own is not capable of anything that even remotely resembles what is classically called life.
Put simply, being a part, even an important part, of something that is alive does not confer life on the sub-component. Like a tire is part of a car, but is not, nor ever will be a car.
All enterprise, employment, volunteerism, etc. is, at their base, exploitation of people's skills and the people themselves. The rewards for doing it vary but somehow each who does is motivated in their own way. Even Open source *exploits* the talents of the developers. Every user is an exploiter.
So, yeah, Red Hat is exploiting. Steam is exploiting. We are all exploiting something and someone every day. (ok, maybe not you isolated desert island dwellers, but you can't see this, as there is no service to exploit.) If you do not believe this, please look the word up. Get a feel for what it means and then try to understand that the use of money to purchase something is inherently exploiting someone somewhere. It is how the world goes around. The only way to not be part of it is to not live.
And about symmetry. It is not realistically possible. People have different valuations of the same things. Even if you could arrive at an agreement for each transaction of what symmetry for that transaction was, that valuation would still change going forward as people's perceptions of valuation change and the balance that symmetry is trying to preserver would still be lost. That being said, more balanced transactions could be arrived at, but profiteers would not be happy with that.
But that does not necessarily maximize profit for the selling venue, and for business, maximizing profit is an important consideration. In fact, it has been proven that selling all seats is a pretty strong indicator that the tickets were under priced. So, the question then becomes fair for who?
Many countries have special units designed to deal with these *issues*. Osama was dealt with by one from the US. If the problems draw the attention of certain parties from certain countries. The problem will be made to go away.
On the flip side of the issue, it is also possible for the community at large to end most of the current methods for doing what is done, but the will is not there to do the upgrades, modifications and administration to end it (systemically). So, as long as the general users and administrators allow the situation to remain the way it is, so will the crime continue.
think about Mexican drug cartels.
And they still only exist because a large enough part of the population pays them for what they sell (not protection, but drugs and such). So, it is still the caused by the population in general. The American failure in the war on drugs is one more great example of this. As is the success of online spammers and other such obnoxious criminals.
The method by which they justify a thing is not necessarily the course of action they take. In fact in politics it rarely is. My point is no matter the reasoning (excuse), they perform the same actions.
Wouldn't it be better to contact the site owners to point out the issue and have them deal with fixing the bad passwords by changing them and/or alerting the users that there is a potential problem? If they at least did that and allowed a reasonable time to fix
I would have agreed if the predominant position of companies had not been have them arrested. At that point, I don't think anyone with any smarts is going to contact a company to let them know that the person(s) discovered a security hole and here is the proof. Companies in general have shot themselves in the foot there. Then again, as a company (most of which have no clue as to what security in any form is), do you act tough and *proactive* by taking the *evil doers* down or work with them? Are you opening yourself to extortion over time, or are these hackers truly not crackers in disguise? How does one ignorant of the internet and its ways truly gauge that? They do not. They fall back on what they know. Legal prosecution and woe is me.
Think of it this way. You come home and a stranger is sitting in your house with some of your most valuable stuff. They tell you your security is inadequate (you paid for the best you know about). But, they can show you how to fix it (or not). Do you trust this person? Do you bargain with or listen to them? No way in hell. That is how most business feels about that kind of hacking. They see a stranger in their house. They will probably seek out and consult some *expert* who is nowhere near close but talks a good talk. In the end, little to nothing will change and they will never know unless they can afford to hire a real expert who can stay with them every week to every day. Most can not afford that.
The reality is both parties overspend. One justifies it as defending the countries economic well being by fighting wars abroad and subsidizing business at home at the expense of the general populace. The other justifies it by defending the general *impoverished* populace and subsidizing business at home at the expense of the general populace.
Which party are you saying is at fault?
The bottom line is the republicans are just as bad as the democrats. They just market the same product in different ways. In one line of business, we see this as McDonalds, Burger King, Hardies, and others. Same basic unhealthy product that the consumer buys in droves due to the supposed convenience and slick marketing campaigns. And still, a bad decision by the general American public.
So, as much as I have no respect for a majority of the political parties accomplishments and actions, I do respect the fact that the only people who elect them are the ones who vote for them. I also respect the fact that in America being an electable politician has far less to do with possessing the skills to do a good job in office than it has to do with how well you come across with 30 second sound bites and public appearances. We (the people) do not elect people for the job they do. We elect them for how they make us feel.
As always, the problem is management and management not knowing enough about what they are managing,
Most management has two issues they contend with when it comes to IT. One is they can not see how IT contributes to profit, and therefore see it as nothing more than cost. Another is they do not see how IT can help enhance and manage work flow.
For an IT person to be successful, they need to learn how their management hears things, and learn to talk to them in a way they will hear. Which means to get where you need to be and to get what you need you have to sell it by talking to them at their level. That may not be easy. Sometimes it involves golf games, sometimes fishing, whatever it takes to get to know management to understand what it is they see and hear (we all have filters). Once you learn how to communicate with them, then you have to start to educate them. Once they learn how IT truly can work, they will start to let you have projects that they would not have let you have before. Choose these projects carefully. The ones they can see and feel the success of get you *karma* points. These points become spendable for projects you need that they will not understand the benefit of. Do enough stuff they can see the benefit of, and eventually, they will see the justification of having another person.
Should it be this way? Probably not, but it is, so we in IT have to learn to deal with it. Remember that most management is ignorant about IT. And they want to stay that way. Management typically thinks it has too much on its own plate as it is. They manage things like IT by looking elsewhere and saying, hey see what they are bragging about, why are we not like that? Kind of like all those *investment* bankers who collapsed the economy on bad loans and derivatives. Many said, "Not smart", but their bosses ignored them, saying, "Look others are doing it and profiting , we need that profit as well."
We know that is not real management. But management does not care. If it does not bite them today, it is a good thing today.
That is why it is our job in IT to stealth educate our management. It is our job to know these things. It is also our job to communicate those needs effectively. That is where most in IT fall down. It is very hard to communicate IT effectively. It is even harder to do so when you do not have a grasp on the whole of the company's operations. To be able to explain IT in terms the rest of the company will understand, you have to know their jobs and how IT is used to help them. So, one of the reasons IT management is so extraordinarily tough is that you have to know everything about how the company works to be able to do the job effectively. That means not just running the IT department. It means knowing in full detail how the IT department impacts the company as a whole in every nook and corner. It actually means you wind up knowing more than anyone else in the company about how the company works. IT management is the hardest job in any company.
And that is a natural things when you think about what IT truly is in a company. It is everywhere in a company. The phone system, the desktops, the printers, the servers, the network, the data, the data sharing, the personnel,... Companies work or don't work because of their Information flow. Information flows because of IT. IT becomes the lifeblood of the company. Wrong numbers in inventory, parts are not made. Wrong field size for an import, data lost. Wrong version of software, job might not get done. Nothing in a company is as pervasive as IT.
We could all go back to pen and paper to track things. We could remove all the digital IT in every company. The job could and would get done (well, most would). But, as what cost? This is probably the thing that an IT person has to understand the most to manage the company (not just IT). This cost reduction from using data systems is where management will understand you. But you have to understand it first. Only then can you demonstrate why hiring another person in IT is profitable.
writing a second version of their customer's code for SQL Server, cleaning up the original version for Oracle, and having both be 100x faster
That is correct way to implement. I keep my display logic, my business logic and my data logic separate. None of the code that needs the data has any clue where the data is coming from or how it was retrieved. All of that logic stays in a segregated block of code for data management for each method needed. If I need to tweak or modify one, I only have to bugger with that one. Rarely, I have to bugger with more than one when a major change in data comes up. That is more time consuming this way, but very rare, but for day to day (overall time), it is far cheaper to keep them separate. When I need to add a data source, it is as simple as making the new data source interface and providing it as an option. All of the data scrubbing is already there (except some that need special data encapsulation - like CSV), all I need is to create new code for retrieving and storing. If I need to move an app from a MSSQL to MySQL or Oracle or something else, All I have to do is go through the data logic. Once that is done, the process is done.
The problem I see more often than not (esp working with manufacturing) is the fragmentation of different data sources (true in education, research and general business as well). I have to deal with everything from Excel, Access, MSSql, text, DIF, specialized data feeds,... you name it. Some of the apps I have had the *pleasure* of working with are pulling from more than 3 sources. No choices, no consolidation allowed. Different customers/suppliers have made different decisions as to how they are going to store and share their data. So, the application I am working on has to be fluent in whatever it needs to be in.
This ends up looking like this:
Program needs data A from clients 1,3 and 8.
Client 1 uses a pseudo api that I have to call.
Client 3 has a live person to request from via email who will reply with a spreadsheet that has to then be parsed.
Client 8 has a website we can query directlly against.
The application at large needs to remain completely isolated from that kludge. I simply have an object (module) for each data source, then each client has a module for how to retrieve the data from its own data source. The scary part is that I see 300 to 600 thousand line spreadsheets broken into multiple sheets that need to be treated as a single table. lmao! Excel is the normal database for most people in small to medium size companies, not anything else.
and last time I checked that doesn't get uploaded to Ma Bell for guys in white lab coats to analyze
When was the last time you checked? Not too long ago there was this seeming ruckus about them doing just such a thing. All in the name of national security. Given, they were probably convinced to do this, but none the less, they still did. They got busted, and were given immunity. Now, I can not tell you to who, for what or how often they did this, however I can tell you it happened. It was in the news, people were named, excuses were given and the government gave them a get off free pass.
I trust AT&T far more than Microsoft, and that is saying a lot, because I really despise AT&T (Ameritech) legal and business practices. Will Microsoft do anything illegal or *wrong* with this technology. Well, I can not tell you, but I can draw parallels. Ever wonder why investments are based on past performance, or criminal records are all about past performance? Well, past actions are a pretty good indicator of future actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Point the telescope away from Hollywood.
If the aliens are intelligent, they will avoid us for now anyway.
H2O is simply a molecule that is incredibly important to the process called life. Whether it is alive or not is not something I have ever heard debated. It may be a component in something that is alive, just as a neutrino might be. But water on its own is not capable of anything that even remotely resembles what is classically called life.
Put simply, being a part, even an important part, of something that is alive does not confer life on the sub-component. Like a tire is part of a car, but is not, nor ever will be a car.
So, water is a living tissue?
Not directed at parent
All enterprise, employment, volunteerism, etc. is, at their base, exploitation of people's skills and the people themselves. The rewards for doing it vary but somehow each who does is motivated in their own way. Even Open source *exploits* the talents of the developers. Every user is an exploiter.
So, yeah, Red Hat is exploiting. Steam is exploiting. We are all exploiting something and someone every day. (ok, maybe not you isolated desert island dwellers, but you can't see this, as there is no service to exploit.) If you do not believe this, please look the word up. Get a feel for what it means and then try to understand that the use of money to purchase something is inherently exploiting someone somewhere. It is how the world goes around. The only way to not be part of it is to not live.
And about symmetry. It is not realistically possible. People have different valuations of the same things. Even if you could arrive at an agreement for each transaction of what symmetry for that transaction was, that valuation would still change going forward as people's perceptions of valuation change and the balance that symmetry is trying to preserver would still be lost. That being said, more balanced transactions could be arrived at, but profiteers would not be happy with that.
lol! So is pulling your hand back when a snake strikes.
Braille pad.
But that does not necessarily maximize profit for the selling venue, and for business, maximizing profit is an important consideration. In fact, it has been proven that selling all seats is a pretty strong indicator that the tickets were under priced. So, the question then becomes fair for who?
Many countries have special units designed to deal with these *issues*. Osama was dealt with by one from the US. If the problems draw the attention of certain parties from certain countries. The problem will be made to go away.
On the flip side of the issue, it is also possible for the community at large to end most of the current methods for doing what is done, but the will is not there to do the upgrades, modifications and administration to end it (systemically). So, as long as the general users and administrators allow the situation to remain the way it is, so will the crime continue.
think about Mexican drug cartels.
And they still only exist because a large enough part of the population pays them for what they sell (not protection, but drugs and such). So, it is still the caused by the population in general. The American failure in the war on drugs is one more great example of this. As is the success of online spammers and other such obnoxious criminals.
It is a quantum community?
Just keep the ambient temperature below absolute zero and you'll have no problems.
Would this be i-energy?
Oooh. I can finally get a Stimm Pack.
In other words, there is no such thing as absolute truth, there is just observations and opinions
Actually, no, there is absolute truth. The problem is we absolutely do not have the ability to know it. Even when we do.
The method by which they justify a thing is not necessarily the course of action they take. In fact in politics it rarely is. My point is no matter the reasoning (excuse), they perform the same actions.
That would be called marketing, governing and law.
Political parties have brains?
I would have agreed if the predominant position of companies had not been have them arrested. At that point, I don't think anyone with any smarts is going to contact a company to let them know that the person(s) discovered a security hole and here is the proof. Companies in general have shot themselves in the foot there. Then again, as a company (most of which have no clue as to what security in any form is), do you act tough and *proactive* by taking the *evil doers* down or work with them? Are you opening yourself to extortion over time, or are these hackers truly not crackers in disguise? How does one ignorant of the internet and its ways truly gauge that? They do not. They fall back on what they know. Legal prosecution and woe is me.
Think of it this way. You come home and a stranger is sitting in your house with some of your most valuable stuff. They tell you your security is inadequate (you paid for the best you know about). But, they can show you how to fix it (or not). Do you trust this person? Do you bargain with or listen to them? No way in hell. That is how most business feels about that kind of hacking. They see a stranger in their house. They will probably seek out and consult some *expert* who is nowhere near close but talks a good talk. In the end, little to nothing will change and they will never know unless they can afford to hire a real expert who can stay with them every week to every day. Most can not afford that.
The reality is both parties overspend. One justifies it as defending the countries economic well being by fighting wars abroad and subsidizing business at home at the expense of the general populace. The other justifies it by defending the general *impoverished* populace and subsidizing business at home at the expense of the general populace.
Which party are you saying is at fault?
The bottom line is the republicans are just as bad as the democrats. They just market the same product in different ways. In one line of business, we see this as McDonalds, Burger King, Hardies, and others. Same basic unhealthy product that the consumer buys in droves due to the supposed convenience and slick marketing campaigns. And still, a bad decision by the general American public.
So, as much as I have no respect for a majority of the political parties accomplishments and actions, I do respect the fact that the only people who elect them are the ones who vote for them. I also respect the fact that in America being an electable politician has far less to do with possessing the skills to do a good job in office than it has to do with how well you come across with 30 second sound bites and public appearances. We (the people) do not elect people for the job they do. We elect them for how they make us feel.
As always, the problem is management and management not knowing enough about what they are managing,
Most management has two issues they contend with when it comes to IT. One is they can not see how IT contributes to profit, and therefore see it as nothing more than cost. Another is they do not see how IT can help enhance and manage work flow.
For an IT person to be successful, they need to learn how their management hears things, and learn to talk to them in a way they will hear. Which means to get where you need to be and to get what you need you have to sell it by talking to them at their level. That may not be easy. Sometimes it involves golf games, sometimes fishing, whatever it takes to get to know management to understand what it is they see and hear (we all have filters). Once you learn how to communicate with them, then you have to start to educate them. Once they learn how IT truly can work, they will start to let you have projects that they would not have let you have before. Choose these projects carefully. The ones they can see and feel the success of get you *karma* points. These points become spendable for projects you need that they will not understand the benefit of. Do enough stuff they can see the benefit of, and eventually, they will see the justification of having another person.
Should it be this way? Probably not, but it is, so we in IT have to learn to deal with it. Remember that most management is ignorant about IT. And they want to stay that way . Management typically thinks it has too much on its own plate as it is. They manage things like IT by looking elsewhere and saying, hey see what they are bragging about, why are we not like that? Kind of like all those *investment* bankers who collapsed the economy on bad loans and derivatives. Many said, "Not smart", but their bosses ignored them, saying, "Look others are doing it and profiting , we need that profit as well."
We know that is not real management. But management does not care. If it does not bite them today, it is a good thing today.
That is why it is our job in IT to stealth educate our management. It is our job to know these things. It is also our job to communicate those needs effectively. That is where most in IT fall down. It is very hard to communicate IT effectively. It is even harder to do so when you do not have a grasp on the whole of the company's operations. To be able to explain IT in terms the rest of the company will understand, you have to know their jobs and how IT is used to help them. So, one of the reasons IT management is so extraordinarily tough is that you have to know everything about how the company works to be able to do the job effectively. That means not just running the IT department. It means knowing in full detail how the IT department impacts the company as a whole in every nook and corner. It actually means you wind up knowing more than anyone else in the company about how the company works. IT management is the hardest job in any company.
And that is a natural things when you think about what IT truly is in a company. It is everywhere in a company. The phone system, the desktops, the printers, the servers, the network, the data, the data sharing, the personnel, ... Companies work or don't work because of their Information flow. Information flows because of IT. IT becomes the lifeblood of the company. Wrong numbers in inventory, parts are not made. Wrong field size for an import, data lost. Wrong version of software, job might not get done. Nothing in a company is as pervasive as IT.
We could all go back to pen and paper to track things. We could remove all the digital IT in every company. The job could and would get done (well, most would). But, as what cost? This is probably the thing that an IT person has to understand the most to manage the company (not just IT). This cost reduction from using data systems is where management will understand you. But you have to understand it first. Only then can you demonstrate why hiring another person in IT is profitable.
writing a second version of their customer's code for SQL Server, cleaning up the original version for Oracle, and having both be 100x faster
That is correct way to implement. I keep my display logic, my business logic and my data logic separate. None of the code that needs the data has any clue where the data is coming from or how it was retrieved. All of that logic stays in a segregated block of code for data management for each method needed. If I need to tweak or modify one, I only have to bugger with that one. Rarely, I have to bugger with more than one when a major change in data comes up. That is more time consuming this way, but very rare, but for day to day (overall time), it is far cheaper to keep them separate. When I need to add a data source, it is as simple as making the new data source interface and providing it as an option. All of the data scrubbing is already there (except some that need special data encapsulation - like CSV), all I need is to create new code for retrieving and storing. If I need to move an app from a MSSQL to MySQL or Oracle or something else, All I have to do is go through the data logic. Once that is done, the process is done.
The problem I see more often than not (esp working with manufacturing) is the fragmentation of different data sources (true in education, research and general business as well). I have to deal with everything from Excel, Access, MSSql, text, DIF, specialized data feeds, ... you name it. Some of the apps I have had the *pleasure* of working with are pulling from more than 3 sources. No choices, no consolidation allowed. Different customers/suppliers have made different decisions as to how they are going to store and share their data. So, the application I am working on has to be fluent in whatever it needs to be in.
This ends up looking like this:
Program needs data A from clients 1,3 and 8.
Client 1 uses a pseudo api that I have to call.
Client 3 has a live person to request from via email who will reply with a spreadsheet that has to then be parsed.
Client 8 has a website we can query directlly against.
The application at large needs to remain completely isolated from that kludge. I simply have an object (module) for each data source, then each client has a module for how to retrieve the data from its own data source. The scary part is that I see 300 to 600 thousand line spreadsheets broken into multiple sheets that need to be treated as a single table. lmao! Excel is the normal database for most people in small to medium size companies, not anything else.
and last time I checked that doesn't get uploaded to Ma Bell for guys in white lab coats to analyze
When was the last time you checked? Not too long ago there was this seeming ruckus about them doing just such a thing. All in the name of national security. Given, they were probably convinced to do this, but none the less, they still did. They got busted, and were given immunity. Now, I can not tell you to who, for what or how often they did this, however I can tell you it happened. It was in the news, people were named, excuses were given and the government gave them a get off free pass.
I trust AT&T far more than Microsoft, and that is saying a lot, because I really despise AT&T (Ameritech) legal and business practices. Will Microsoft do anything illegal or *wrong* with this technology. Well, I can not tell you, but I can draw parallels. Ever wonder why investments are based on past performance, or criminal records are all about past performance? Well, past actions are a pretty good indicator of future actions.
NASA has only done what it has been allowed to. The military (via NASA) put us on the moon.
I may be wrong, but ELE (Extinction Level Event) might fit.
lmao! Absolutely agreed.
No, I just don't know any quotes from Carter on this topic. Not saying there are not any.