The translation given on the page is quite precise. I was going to post a translation on Slashdot but then saw that they did a great job themselves.
Say what? Are you talking about the Russian text from the web page? You mean it really consists of nearly unreadable, ungrammatical babble? I thought the Websense site was using Babelfish.
Not really. When you move to a new neighborhood you have to register with the local police station. And the Catholic church by default gets money out of your paycheck. You have to request otherwise.
With regard to the first point, is that really so different from having to report your new address to the Department of Motor Vehicles when you move (in the U.S.)? Regardless, the State wants to know where you live.
The second point is indeed a fundamental difference between Europe and the US. However, it's not just the Catholic church--it's either the Catholic or German Protestant (Evangelische) Church that gets the money. This goes back to a system of government where Church and State were intertwined. Today, at least you have a choice--you can say you're an atheist...or a Muslim. Then you don't have to pay church tax.
They don't like kids in Germany. Now if he'd brought along a dog, that would have been a different story. It's really disconcerting to eat in a German restaurant and have a dog snuffling around your feet. But hey, at least they don't cry.
how long till whackjob's start making weapons in them?
Hmmm. I didn't have the patience to watch the video, but they have a machine here at work that makes objects out of plastic goo, working from a CAD design. Is that the kind of thing we're talking about? I asked the geek who runs it if he can make me a Glock. Now they've moved me to a new unheated cubicle with concrete walls in the basement, taken away my red stapler, and my manager never seems to be in when I want to discuss my working conditions.
I don't see it valuable even in those situations. How is "beaming" your voice into a hostage takers head a positive ability?
In their eyes, It's positive. Remember, these are the people who thought that ceaselessly broadcasting the amplified screams of dying bunnies would produce a "satisfactory" resolution at Waco. To them, "negotiations" are something like, "Hi, I am a talking laser pointed at your head. Meet my friend, the targeting laser." If the hostage takers then go nuts and kill everyone...well, that just shows they were bad people.
I don't really expect better of the government, but there really ought to be some moral outrage directed at the engineers who prostitute themselves by working on this kind of trash.
Know what I hate? It was so patently obvious Iraq had no WMDs, and no capability of developing anything more dangerous than mixing bleach with ammonia.
Well...not really. Iraq employed war gas ("mustard" gas and maybe VX, if I recall correctly) extensively during the Iran-Iraq war. (Iran reciprocated.) You may recall that Saddam put some of his left-over stock to use against the Kurds, also. So it was quite reasonable to think—at the time—that Saddam had an inventory of chemical weapons before Gulf War II. The big mystery is why anyone would think it mattered.
Today, just about any government can acquire (or even make) war gases, and other very nasty chemical things. These substances have been used as weapons for a hundred years, and are no more complex to produce than antibiotics or insecticide. Using them confers no advantage to a belligerent, because counter-measures are well-known, and the other side will reply in kind. Any state that uses such weapons to attack a much more powerful state is no less foolish than if it had attacked the superior power with "conventional" weapons. In other words, an Iraq with chemical weapons was no more of a threat than an Iraq without them.
This is so obvious that the phrase "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was spun into currency to obfuscate the issue. War gas is just gas...but WMDs could be anything. If you say, "Iraq is a danger to us because they have mustard gas", you sound dumb. Fewer people will realize you are saying something dumb if you say "Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction". Also, it helps if you hint that these WMDs might be nuclear weapons. There wasn't any proof that Iraq had nukes...but the fog of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" suggested that they might.
Of course, if Washington had really thought that Saddam had nukes, there would have been no war. Why? Because, unlike war gas, nukes are truly a different order of weapon. They're much harder to make than insecticide, and having one elevates a state into a special club: Those Who Cannot Be Attacked. Any government that attacks another state which possesses nuclear weapons is acting suicidally--the risk that the victim will succeed in retaliating with even one bomb is unacceptable. That is why war today is of two kinds: big states attacking small states that have no nukes, and non-states attacking whomever they please, because those who have no fixed address cannot be nuked.
I highly recommend Martin Van Creveld's The Transformation of War on this subject.
OK, so you did a successful restore after wiping your disk, as I understand it, anyway. (I haven't been near a Mac since 1996, when I started building my own PCs, so pardon me if I am misunderstanding...but "formatted the laptop drive" probably means the same thing to a MacGuy as it does to me.) However, your test doesn't show what you think it does. It only shows that if you want to recover to a previous back-up after wiping your disk, you can do it. It certainly doesn't enlighten us about the bug alleged by Mr. Limbaugh.
Granted, I'd probably want to ask Limbaugh for some more details, but I think you ought to try something like this: Simulate a test bed having a really huge number of emails in its database. Write a test script that simulates receiving large volumes (hundreds) of emails per day, and deletes a random number of them at random times. I see no way to avoid running this script over at least a couple of weeks of real time (unless you want to get fancy and mess with the datestamps and the system clock...which intruduces variables you really don't want). Now try (or have the script try) to
Restore specific deleted emails, based on criteria such as sender or date received.
Restore the state of the entire email database as it was at a specified time and date
Repeat 1 and 2 at least a couple dozen times over several days, while continuing normal email operations.
If those tests don't turn up a problem, then I think you can say something authoritative about the reliability of this backup utility (disclaimer: I don't know what "Time Machine" thing claims it can do...I'm assuming what I would expect to be reasonable functionality from such a system "for the rest of us").
Just how do you go about sacking an Eurocrat? They're not elected, they're appointed. I'm not sure who appoints them...the EU Parliament, I suppose. Is the EU Parliament elected? I seem to remember that its members are appointed by the constituent countries of the European Union. (Genuine question here...if you know, tell me.)
I can't decide if the European Union is a bureaucratic tyranny in the making, or if it's just a phantom "government" along the lines of the late Holy Roman Empire.
Since I'm someone who makes a living off his "intellectual property", I've thought about this a lot. I just can't see any benefit (as far as the original purpose of copyright is concerned) for any rights to a work of art to be transferable in any manner. I might go so far as to say an artist should be able to "license" his idea to someone else who wants to extend the work somehow, but there's no reason his grandchildren should be able to reap direct benefits from it.
I agree completely with your sentiment. It's as though "copyright" has mutated into sort of a zombie that can lock up the rights to artistic works for all eternity. I certainly don't think the Tolkien Foundation have any moral right to assert ownership over Tokien's works; they belong to all of us now. Remember, though, that when The Lord of the Rings first made it big, in the mid 60s, Tokien's copyright had already expired under the then-current laws. Tolkien had to appeal to the public's "sense of fairness" to get them to buy from the authorized publisher (i.e., the one that was paying him royalties). So the new laws could be characterized as an overreaction to past injustices.
I'm probably a bit older than you, and I wouldn't mind if my grandkids got some money from my (hypothetical) best-seller. I'd say that fair copyright laws should probably provide for the rights to be held by the author or his heirs for the duration of the author's life time, plus 20 years.
The big, gaping hole in the amendment is the inclusion of the word "unreasonable." It's quite easy to convince the more timid that all monitoring is reasonable if it can protect us from terrorists or protect our children from pedophiles.
I have to disagree. The "reasonable man" test is fundamental to very existence of law. Law is always subject to interpretation, mainly because laws simply cannot be formulated to cover every possible contingency. The government must have the power of search and seizure, otherwise it could not prosecute criminal cases—something I, at least, regard as a legitimate function of government. On the other hand, that power must be limited, otherwise the government could arbitrarily search and seize whatever private property it wishes. However, this limit cannot be precisely described because no one can anticipate all possible circumstances that might arise.
Hence the "reasonable man" test: it consists of asking yourself, "how would a reasonable man, having read the law, apply it to this particular case?" If the government raids your home, you may go before a judge and contest the legality of that search. The judge has to decide whether the police acted "reasonably" within the parameters of the law. (The judge will also take precedent into account to guide his thinking, of course.)
Does this always work? Of course not; but it's the best we've got. Sometimes, judges can be very unreasonable. Even reasonable people can disagree with each other. That's why we have an appeals system. Such failures or disagreements don't invalidate the principle: as long as there is at least a general consensus in our society of what is reasonable, the "reasonable man" test works well enough. If that consensus fails, or if we come to a point where the state deliberately chooses to act unreasonably, and the courts consistently uphold such unreasonable behavior, then we will have reached the end of the rule of law.
Back when I played a bunch of games that had the "CD in the drive" requirement, I got a product called Virtual CD. It allows you to create a set of virtual CD drives on your system, and mount images of the CDs you need on those drives. (You have to create the images by copying the CDs or DVDs first, of course, and store them on your hard drive.) This meant I could take my laptop anywhere without lugging around a bunch of discs and fiddling with them every time I wanted to run one of these programs that insisted on seeing its installation CD before it started. It was a bit of a hassle to configure Virtual CD so that it would automatically mount the appropriate CD when you double clicked on an application, but once I set it up, it worked flawlessly.
These days, I don't run much software that has this requirement, so I haven't used Virtual CD (http://www.virtualcd-online.com/) for a couple of years. But I'd highly recommend it if you do have this need.
Now, if you didn't like it, that's fine. But I don't see why you need to badmouth it though, especially with claims that are demonstrably untrue.
Then why don't you demonstrate that his claims are untrue? He argued that Eve is "is extremely simple from a client/server perspective". And in the sense in which he intended this assertion, he's right. Eve's graphics consist of a background of stars (little tiny points of light), with an improbable amount of multicolored gases percolating about to differentiate one solar system from another. There are no animated avatars in eve—the closest thing you get to an avator is the little portrait that pops up when you click on someone's space ship), nothing much of anything that moves or changes except more little points that represent other player's spaceships (unless you're up close—then you do actually see the spaceship, but it looks just like all the other ships of its type)...and huge, spectacular explosions when you blow up some poor sucker who was trying to haul home the minerals he'd just spent hours mining. OK, the explosions are cool. Except, of course, if you're the poor sod getting blown up.
You've got to admit that 50K people logged into a text-based MMO wouldn't be as impressive as even 10K people logged into something like EQ or WoW, so numbers alone don't tell the story. Now, Eve is in some ways a very complex game. It has an admirably sophisticated economy, and a large number or craftable and tradeable items. Tracking those items and keeping up with the transactions may very well be as difficult—or, for all I know more difficult—than running a "traditional" MMO fantasy game with avatars that run around in a three-dimensional landscape, interacting and engaging each other and various MOBs in battle. However, I'd like to see some argument for this, some facts even.
Let me emphasize that I'm not saying that EVE doesn't deserve plaudits for its achievements, but if I'm supposed to believe that running this game with 45K users is per se a triumph of technical wizardry, then I'd like to know why.
And, unless things have changed radically in the 3 months since I quit playing it, there's lots of lag in Eve. Buying or selling stuff is a real chore, as you have to click on each item, then wait for the transaction to be executed...and that wait can be awfully long (10-15 seconds), even if you're not in Jita. And don't even get me started on the GUI. Like, I'm not going to whine about the fact that a game in which financial transactions are crucial forces you to use a tiny font (at 1600 x 1200) in which the characters for zero, eight, and B are indistinguishable...
Aside from merely technical issue, I have a lot of respect for the designers of Eve. It is a conceptually sophisticated game, and I would have continued to play it despite all its defects, were it not for the fact that Eve is inescapably a PvP game, and I just don't like PvP. That I played the game for two years, getting ganked by griefers at least once a week, is a testimonial to just how good the game is. If you like PvP, you'll probably like Eve.
Our education system is a mess, but I'm not sure it's the DE's fault. Partly it's the fault of parents who don't take an interest or actively participate in their own child's education. Partly it's a funding system that penalizes poor neighborhoods. Partly it's the politicization of education, and not just by the DE.
Mostly our educational system is a mess because it is a system. More specifically, our schools are a mess because they are state schools, and the state runs them as well as it runs most everything these days. State schools were a valuable innovation back in the mid nineteenth century, insofar as they were preferable to no schools, which was the case in much of Europe at the time for the lower classes. This was not true in the United States, which always had a strong tradition of locally funded and operated schools. However, over the next 150 years, even schools in the U.S. have become so heavily dependent on Federal and State funds that they have become de facto state schools, and the bureaucracies of the individual states that also have a hand in running them are little better at it than the Federal Government. (It's a bit confusing in the U.S. to write about "the state"...in general, "the state" is a reference to the abstract, corporate entity that has as its most obvious component the Federal Government—it is not a reference to the individual States that compose the Union.)
This is probably a Ron Paul position (I don't know, I'm not really a fan), but the answer is to privatize the schools. I resent paying huge taxes to subsidize schools that are so terrible that I haven't been able to send my own kids to them. (Private schools and home schooling have been the solution for me.) It's not the money per se, it's the waste of money. I'd gladly pay to send other people's kids to the private school of their parent's choice—I'm all for a "voucher" system.
The problem is that the state doesn't want to let go of the schools. It sees them as a way to mold the minds of future generations so that they will become better "citizens"—that is, more obedient to the state, and willing to accept uncritically everything they are told. In the U.S., we can at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the state is doing as badly in accomplishing this goal as in most everything else; in Europe, there is a much longer tradition of efficiently controlled school systems, and few parents even question sending their kids to those schools.
I don't know what you mean by "accountable". Do you mean in the legal sense? Are you saying there's going to be more lawsuits if a major bridge collapses than if Vista has a bug in it? Well yeah...nobody has gotten killed by a Vista bug yet, but that's just a special case. As I've written before, there are cases where software can kill people, either by accident or by design. But that isn't really the issue, is it? You say the issue is "accountability", but I'm not sure what you mean.
It's true that Engineers enjoy a special legal status, which is enshrined by law in many countries. That status is much more formal in Europe (and probably Canada) than it is in the United States. I have a feeling that many of the posters who are coming down on the side of "engineers are accountable" are posting from outside the U.S. Perhaps that is true in your case? In any case, it remains for you to argue that programmers can't be "accountable" in the same sense as engineers; in other words, if you think programmers aren't engineers, why is this not simply a legal matter than can be changed by your legislature?
Personally, I wouldn't advocate legal standards for programmers; in my opinion, such regulation would only bog down the industry. One of the advantages the U.S. enjoys over Europe is that it is much less bound by credentialism. Back when writing software was just dawning on the horizon as a profession (I speak of the ancient 1980s here), it was fairly easy to talk your way into a programming job, even though you'd never studied computer science in school (I had a degree in Philosophy) and had no real experience. In Europe, this might have been possible, but it was damned unlikely. The notion of hiring someone for a "technical" job who does not have the appropriate academic credentials gives most Europeans apoplexy. That's one of the causes of the great surge in innovation in the U.S. computer industry in the latter couple of decades of the twentieth century. While the Europeans were waiting for the universities to turn out "qualified professionals" to do things properly, smart and motivated people in the U.S. were innovating.
By the way, if an engineer in the U.S. who works for a construction firm that is contracted to build a bridge makes a mistake, I think he probably isn't going to be legally liable. The firm will be liable—at least in the legal sense. I don't know what would happen in Germany or France.
And here's a question: suppose there's a bug in a CAD program used by the engineer that causes the design of the bridge to be screwed up. Who's to blame? Does the craftsman get to blame his tools? And where would you engineers be without us software people to create the new wonderful tools you rely on, eh?
I remember that one. There were news reports that the CIA had tried to raise a Russian sub, but that the sub had broken in half during the attempt, and that the salvage attempt ended in failure. I could never figure out whether the whole thing was made up, or whether it truly was tried and they failed, or whether the story of the failure was disinformation circulated by the CIA to cover up their success...
Ask people what professions they think require high responsibility, and they might say something like "doctor." Well, doctors really don't have all that much: unlike Engineers, they can only kill their patients one at a time. Engineers kill people in big groups.
Hmm. I thought you said you are studying civil engineering, but it sounds as though your career objective is combat engineer. Surely you know the distinction: "civil engineers build targets, combat engineers destroy them". But I think I get the idea: you're saying that engineering differs from computer programming in that engineering is an activity that has real-world consequences, while programming does not. So if you're a programmer working on, say, the targeting and guidance software for a cruise missile, then you're completely harmless. I work for the software group of a company that makes lab instruments that analyze yucky bodily fluids to see what's wrong with people. Those instruments are controlled by...software. (It runs on Windows, don't tell.) If I screw up, and a few hundred cases of Hepatitis C go undiagnosed before someone notices, well...I probably won't have killed too many people. After all, I'm just a harmless programmer...
I actually agree with you—the title "Software Engineer" is pretentious.
I disagree with your apparent belief that programming differs from engineering in that only engineering can have serious—even fatal—consequences. As I tried to show with my examples, the way in which computer programs function—or fail to function—can have serious consequences as well. So what is the difference between engineering and programming?
You might invert the question: why would anyone think they're the same? I think it's correct to say that, in the most general terms, engineers determine how to construct or arrange materials to fulfill a specified purpose. In doing so, they manipulate quantifiable entities—such as the strengths of materials, the distribution of stresses, the known limits and characteristics of varying methods of construction as determined by empirical study, and so on. Programmers don't do anything like that. Programmers write code, and code is an application of logic. You might say that programmers are like engineers who build logical machines, but that's mere metaphor. Computer programs don't break because the wrong type of steel was specified for one of the gears.
So where did the notion of "software engineering" come from? Maybe it's symptomatic of an unspoken insecurity, a fear that programming isn't a serious profession. Perhaps one source of this insecurity is that programming is still a very new item in the human tool-box, and we haven't quite decided which compartment to put it in. Moreover, programming isn't like any other tool we've had before. It resembles engineering in that the programmer does build something, though no materials are used in the building. It resembles mathematics in that it's logical, but it isn't bound by mathematical rigor. You can't "prove" a program—except perhaps in a—completely impractical—theoretical sense. (Of course you can test programs, and rest assured that where I work, we have very thorough software design and testing protocols.)
And now the next contentious question: are computer scientists really scientists?
To take down all 3 at the same time for several days would be idiotic. I think Occam's Razor wins here for me.
<paranoia level="high">Ah, but what if a certain American "superpower" suddenly felt an urgent need to tap the cables that go into, say, Iran? Maybe because it wants to start a war in a week or so, and needs that extra big hit of intelligence before it launches the bombers?</paranoia>
No, I don't think there's anything to it. But the paranoid version sends shivers up and down my spine, while the sensible one doesn't.
I think the idea of using a light-weight, collaborative tool to gather "process" information is a basically sound, but merely establishing a collaborative environment usually is not enough to accomplish what you want. You can't just say, "here's your new documentation tool! Write down what you do!" I've seen many such pitiful attempts at "Knowledge Management" die whimpering; their naive sponsors never seem to understand that "knowledge" doesn't just happen. Here's what I'd do if I were you:
Hire an experienced technical writer, preferably one who has worked in your industry. If you're serious, this is too much work for you to do alone. You need a dedicated professional, at least to set it up. You might be able to fill this position with a contractor, but I don't recommend it. To do this job right, the writer has to care; he has to commit himself to learning about your company, getting to know the people, and have a sincere desire to create order out of chaos. Contractors aren't paid to care...or at least most of them don't think so.
In consultation with the person you've hired, pick a light-weight collaborative authoring tool that is easy to use, but allows control of components based on user privileges that you set up. It is imperative that you do not fall for the "KMS" (Knowledge Management System) claptrap. There is no such thing. If anyone offers to sell you a KMS, defenestrate him forthwith. I don't know enough about Wiki-foo to recommend it, but it sounds like it might do the job. Whatever you get should be either free or pretty cheap. (Back about 6 years ago, I used something called DocuShare, by Xerox. I dunno if it's still around, or if it's morphed into some monstrous form, but worked pretty well for me back then, and didn't cost much.)
Now is where your writer should take over. If I were him, I'd probably start by creating a "page" (or whatever your system uses to identify user space), and give the manager of each department read/write permissions to that page. I'd also give each member of the department read privileges.
Now, ask the managers to list the things their department does. Any smart manager will know that he'd better not leave that list empty, lest his boss think the group doesn't do anything. You could create a separate page that's writeable by the whole department for people to add comments, but these would be "off the record"—at this point you should leave each group to talk among themselves. The final product is the list of tasks that are done, and a list of people that know about each task.
Here is where the writer has to start asking questions. He has to ask the managers to clarify any items that seem muddled or incomplete, and see if he can dig out more information. Then he has to ask the people who were identified as being responsible for specific tasks if they really do what their boss says they do. If not, who does do it? If the answer is "nobody", this will not only be a test of your writer's skills in diplomacy and tact, but also of his integrity. Documentation must tell the truth. If what is written is not true, the writer must be strong enough to fix it.
I think you can see where I'm going with this. You now give each expert (or maybe small groups of experts) their own pages. You ask them to write down how they do each of the things you've established they do. Then you (the writer) ask more questions. Based on the information you get, you edit the expert's pages for clarity and completeness. (Again, a test of diplomatic skills, integrity, and intestinal fortitude.) The original authors can change what you've done...one can only hope they will have enough sense to leave well enough alone. (This is not as hopeless as it might appear—the reason so little good process documentation gets done is that the experts don't have time to do it. You can simply wear them down.)
Now it's time to loosen up. Create permissions under each
It would take an unusually bold person to organize such an...er...extralegal form of negative reinforcement of the meme, but if I saw one, I'd hit his PayPal button.
I'm doing my PhD, and pretty much everything that I need for my research is a google search away. In particular google scholar rocks.
You're doing your doctoral research via...Google. *Deep breath* Please tell me that you are using Google to access verifiable primary sources, with page numbers that can be cited, and not random postings on, say, Slashdot. I'd find that acceptable. What I do not find acceptable is the notion that surfing the web is somehow a substitute for scholarship, because it isn't. Not only is there all kinds of crap on the web, but there is no way to cite said crap. A URL is not citation, because it is ephemeral. If I read your dissertation 20 years from now, I'm not likely to find the web page you cited, even if what you cited wasn't complete drivel to start with.
Your reference to Google Scholar hints that you are indeed doing the right thing, but the notion that web surfing is equivalent to scholarship is so widespread and so pernicious that you ought to clarify. What field, by the way?
The protest against the visit was spearheaded by physicist Marcello Cini, a professor emeritus of La Sapienza, who wrote to rector Renato Guarini complaining of an "incredible violation" of the university's autonomy.
Sixty-seven professors and researchers of the sprawling university's physics department, as well as radical students, joined in the call for the pope to stay away on Thursday, the start of the university's academic year.
It sounds to me like there were a large group of people making a great deal of fuss that generated the impression that the Pope was not welcome. What does "stay away" mean to you? I don't know about you, but I don't generally go where I'm not welcome.
Does this university's faculty consist entirely of physicists and Marxists? If so, I'd say that the Vatican goofed booking this gig. On the other hand, if it's a real University, and includes other disciplines (like Philosophy or Theology), then the Pope was well-qualified to speak there, for his credentials in those fields are considerable. Having heard him speak at Regensburg, I was deeply impressed with the man's erudition, and would love to have another oppurtunity to hear him. And no, I'm not even Catholic.
Sorry, we have no products that match your search roadmap. Did you mean road?
Hmm...reflective vests that make me safer if I want to walk a road at night. I must be benighted.
Perhaps you're confused by the use of the word "roadmap", which is a powerpointism that means something like, "plan to make magic happen, and create order out of chaos". Remember, a roadmap is really a type of map, a graphic depiction of a certain territory, showing items of interest. In the case of roadmaps, that would be...um...roads. I forget where I was going with this. Where were you going? Do you have a map?
Slashdot Mirror
Say what? Are you talking about the Russian text from the web page? You mean it really consists of nearly unreadable, ungrammatical babble? I thought the Websense site was using Babelfish.
With regard to the first point, is that really so different from having to report your new address to the Department of Motor Vehicles when you move (in the U.S.)? Regardless, the State wants to know where you live.
The second point is indeed a fundamental difference between Europe and the US. However, it's not just the Catholic church--it's either the Catholic or German Protestant (Evangelische) Church that gets the money. This goes back to a system of government where Church and State were intertwined. Today, at least you have a choice--you can say you're an atheist...or a Muslim. Then you don't have to pay church tax.They don't like kids in Germany. Now if he'd brought along a dog, that would have been a different story. It's really disconcerting to eat in a German restaurant and have a dog snuffling around your feet. But hey, at least they don't cry.
Hmmm. I didn't have the patience to watch the video, but they have a machine here at work that makes objects out of plastic goo, working from a CAD design. Is that the kind of thing we're talking about? I asked the geek who runs it if he can make me a Glock. Now they've moved me to a new unheated cubicle with concrete walls in the basement, taken away my red stapler, and my manager never seems to be in when I want to discuss my working conditions.
In their eyes, It's positive. Remember, these are the people who thought that ceaselessly broadcasting the amplified screams of dying bunnies would produce a "satisfactory" resolution at Waco. To them, "negotiations" are something like, "Hi, I am a talking laser pointed at your head. Meet my friend, the targeting laser." If the hostage takers then go nuts and kill everyone...well, that just shows they were bad people.
I don't really expect better of the government, but there really ought to be some moral outrage directed at the engineers who prostitute themselves by working on this kind of trash.
Sometimes, the only response to something this disgusting is gallows humor.
Well...not really. Iraq employed war gas ("mustard" gas and maybe VX, if I recall correctly) extensively during the Iran-Iraq war. (Iran reciprocated.) You may recall that Saddam put some of his left-over stock to use against the Kurds, also. So it was quite reasonable to think—at the time—that Saddam had an inventory of chemical weapons before Gulf War II. The big mystery is why anyone would think it mattered.
Today, just about any government can acquire (or even make) war gases, and other very nasty chemical things. These substances have been used as weapons for a hundred years, and are no more complex to produce than antibiotics or insecticide. Using them confers no advantage to a belligerent, because counter-measures are well-known, and the other side will reply in kind. Any state that uses such weapons to attack a much more powerful state is no less foolish than if it had attacked the superior power with "conventional" weapons. In other words, an Iraq with chemical weapons was no more of a threat than an Iraq without them.
This is so obvious that the phrase "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was spun into currency to obfuscate the issue. War gas is just gas...but WMDs could be anything. If you say, "Iraq is a danger to us because they have mustard gas", you sound dumb. Fewer people will realize you are saying something dumb if you say "Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction". Also, it helps if you hint that these WMDs might be nuclear weapons. There wasn't any proof that Iraq had nukes...but the fog of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" suggested that they might.
Of course, if Washington had really thought that Saddam had nukes, there would have been no war. Why? Because, unlike war gas, nukes are truly a different order of weapon. They're much harder to make than insecticide, and having one elevates a state into a special club: Those Who Cannot Be Attacked. Any government that attacks another state which possesses nuclear weapons is acting suicidally--the risk that the victim will succeed in retaliating with even one bomb is unacceptable. That is why war today is of two kinds: big states attacking small states that have no nukes, and non-states attacking whomever they please, because those who have no fixed address cannot be nuked.
I highly recommend Martin Van Creveld's The Transformation of War on this subject.
OK, so you did a successful restore after wiping your disk, as I understand it, anyway. (I haven't been near a Mac since 1996, when I started building my own PCs, so pardon me if I am misunderstanding...but "formatted the laptop drive" probably means the same thing to a MacGuy as it does to me.) However, your test doesn't show what you think it does. It only shows that if you want to recover to a previous back-up after wiping your disk, you can do it. It certainly doesn't enlighten us about the bug alleged by Mr. Limbaugh.
Granted, I'd probably want to ask Limbaugh for some more details, but I think you ought to try something like this: Simulate a test bed having a really huge number of emails in its database. Write a test script that simulates receiving large volumes (hundreds) of emails per day, and deletes a random number of them at random times. I see no way to avoid running this script over at least a couple of weeks of real time (unless you want to get fancy and mess with the datestamps and the system clock...which intruduces variables you really don't want). Now try (or have the script try) to
If those tests don't turn up a problem, then I think you can say something authoritative about the reliability of this backup utility (disclaimer: I don't know what "Time Machine" thing claims it can do...I'm assuming what I would expect to be reasonable functionality from such a system "for the rest of us").
Just how do you go about sacking an Eurocrat? They're not elected, they're appointed. I'm not sure who appoints them...the EU Parliament, I suppose. Is the EU Parliament elected? I seem to remember that its members are appointed by the constituent countries of the European Union. (Genuine question here...if you know, tell me.)
I can't decide if the European Union is a bureaucratic tyranny in the making, or if it's just a phantom "government" along the lines of the late Holy Roman Empire.
I agree completely with your sentiment. It's as though "copyright" has mutated into sort of a zombie that can lock up the rights to artistic works for all eternity. I certainly don't think the Tolkien Foundation have any moral right to assert ownership over Tokien's works; they belong to all of us now. Remember, though, that when The Lord of the Rings first made it big, in the mid 60s, Tokien's copyright had already expired under the then-current laws. Tolkien had to appeal to the public's "sense of fairness" to get them to buy from the authorized publisher (i.e., the one that was paying him royalties). So the new laws could be characterized as an overreaction to past injustices.
I'm probably a bit older than you, and I wouldn't mind if my grandkids got some money from my (hypothetical) best-seller. I'd say that fair copyright laws should probably provide for the rights to be held by the author or his heirs for the duration of the author's life time, plus 20 years.
I have to disagree. The "reasonable man" test is fundamental to very existence of law. Law is always subject to interpretation, mainly because laws simply cannot be formulated to cover every possible contingency. The government must have the power of search and seizure, otherwise it could not prosecute criminal cases—something I, at least, regard as a legitimate function of government. On the other hand, that power must be limited, otherwise the government could arbitrarily search and seize whatever private property it wishes. However, this limit cannot be precisely described because no one can anticipate all possible circumstances that might arise.
Hence the "reasonable man" test: it consists of asking yourself, "how would a reasonable man, having read the law, apply it to this particular case?" If the government raids your home, you may go before a judge and contest the legality of that search. The judge has to decide whether the police acted "reasonably" within the parameters of the law. (The judge will also take precedent into account to guide his thinking, of course.)
Does this always work? Of course not; but it's the best we've got. Sometimes, judges can be very unreasonable. Even reasonable people can disagree with each other. That's why we have an appeals system. Such failures or disagreements don't invalidate the principle: as long as there is at least a general consensus in our society of what is reasonable, the "reasonable man" test works well enough. If that consensus fails, or if we come to a point where the state deliberately chooses to act unreasonably, and the courts consistently uphold such unreasonable behavior, then we will have reached the end of the rule of law.
Back when I played a bunch of games that had the "CD in the drive" requirement, I got a product called Virtual CD. It allows you to create a set of virtual CD drives on your system, and mount images of the CDs you need on those drives. (You have to create the images by copying the CDs or DVDs first, of course, and store them on your hard drive.) This meant I could take my laptop anywhere without lugging around a bunch of discs and fiddling with them every time I wanted to run one of these programs that insisted on seeing its installation CD before it started. It was a bit of a hassle to configure Virtual CD so that it would automatically mount the appropriate CD when you double clicked on an application, but once I set it up, it worked flawlessly.
These days, I don't run much software that has this requirement, so I haven't used Virtual CD (http://www.virtualcd-online.com/) for a couple of years. But I'd highly recommend it if you do have this need.
Then why don't you demonstrate that his claims are untrue? He argued that Eve is "is extremely simple from a client/server perspective". And in the sense in which he intended this assertion, he's right. Eve's graphics consist of a background of stars (little tiny points of light), with an improbable amount of multicolored gases percolating about to differentiate one solar system from another. There are no animated avatars in eve—the closest thing you get to an avator is the little portrait that pops up when you click on someone's space ship), nothing much of anything that moves or changes except more little points that represent other player's spaceships (unless you're up close—then you do actually see the spaceship, but it looks just like all the other ships of its type)...and huge, spectacular explosions when you blow up some poor sucker who was trying to haul home the minerals he'd just spent hours mining. OK, the explosions are cool. Except, of course, if you're the poor sod getting blown up.
You've got to admit that 50K people logged into a text-based MMO wouldn't be as impressive as even 10K people logged into something like EQ or WoW, so numbers alone don't tell the story. Now, Eve is in some ways a very complex game. It has an admirably sophisticated economy, and a large number or craftable and tradeable items. Tracking those items and keeping up with the transactions may very well be as difficult—or, for all I know more difficult—than running a "traditional" MMO fantasy game with avatars that run around in a three-dimensional landscape, interacting and engaging each other and various MOBs in battle. However, I'd like to see some argument for this, some facts even.
Let me emphasize that I'm not saying that EVE doesn't deserve plaudits for its achievements, but if I'm supposed to believe that running this game with 45K users is per se a triumph of technical wizardry, then I'd like to know why.
And, unless things have changed radically in the 3 months since I quit playing it, there's lots of lag in Eve. Buying or selling stuff is a real chore, as you have to click on each item, then wait for the transaction to be executed...and that wait can be awfully long (10-15 seconds), even if you're not in Jita. And don't even get me started on the GUI. Like, I'm not going to whine about the fact that a game in which financial transactions are crucial forces you to use a tiny font (at 1600 x 1200) in which the characters for zero, eight, and B are indistinguishable...
Aside from merely technical issue, I have a lot of respect for the designers of Eve. It is a conceptually sophisticated game, and I would have continued to play it despite all its defects, were it not for the fact that Eve is inescapably a PvP game, and I just don't like PvP. That I played the game for two years, getting ganked by griefers at least once a week, is a testimonial to just how good the game is. If you like PvP, you'll probably like Eve.
Mostly our educational system is a mess because it is a system. More specifically, our schools are a mess because they are state schools, and the state runs them as well as it runs most everything these days. State schools were a valuable innovation back in the mid nineteenth century, insofar as they were preferable to no schools, which was the case in much of Europe at the time for the lower classes. This was not true in the United States, which always had a strong tradition of locally funded and operated schools. However, over the next 150 years, even schools in the U.S. have become so heavily dependent on Federal and State funds that they have become de facto state schools, and the bureaucracies of the individual states that also have a hand in running them are little better at it than the Federal Government. (It's a bit confusing in the U.S. to write about "the state"...in general, "the state" is a reference to the abstract, corporate entity that has as its most obvious component the Federal Government—it is not a reference to the individual States that compose the Union.)
This is probably a Ron Paul position (I don't know, I'm not really a fan), but the answer is to privatize the schools. I resent paying huge taxes to subsidize schools that are so terrible that I haven't been able to send my own kids to them. (Private schools and home schooling have been the solution for me.) It's not the money per se, it's the waste of money. I'd gladly pay to send other people's kids to the private school of their parent's choice—I'm all for a "voucher" system.
The problem is that the state doesn't want to let go of the schools. It sees them as a way to mold the minds of future generations so that they will become better "citizens"—that is, more obedient to the state, and willing to accept uncritically everything they are told. In the U.S., we can at least comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the state is doing as badly in accomplishing this goal as in most everything else; in Europe, there is a much longer tradition of efficiently controlled school systems, and few parents even question sending their kids to those schools.
What, nobody asked about his position on pr0n?
I don't know what you mean by "accountable". Do you mean in the legal sense? Are you saying there's going to be more lawsuits if a major bridge collapses than if Vista has a bug in it? Well yeah...nobody has gotten killed by a Vista bug yet, but that's just a special case. As I've written before, there are cases where software can kill people, either by accident or by design. But that isn't really the issue, is it? You say the issue is "accountability", but I'm not sure what you mean.
It's true that Engineers enjoy a special legal status, which is enshrined by law in many countries. That status is much more formal in Europe (and probably Canada) than it is in the United States. I have a feeling that many of the posters who are coming down on the side of "engineers are accountable" are posting from outside the U.S. Perhaps that is true in your case? In any case, it remains for you to argue that programmers can't be "accountable" in the same sense as engineers; in other words, if you think programmers aren't engineers, why is this not simply a legal matter than can be changed by your legislature?
Personally, I wouldn't advocate legal standards for programmers; in my opinion, such regulation would only bog down the industry. One of the advantages the U.S. enjoys over Europe is that it is much less bound by credentialism. Back when writing software was just dawning on the horizon as a profession (I speak of the ancient 1980s here), it was fairly easy to talk your way into a programming job, even though you'd never studied computer science in school (I had a degree in Philosophy) and had no real experience. In Europe, this might have been possible, but it was damned unlikely. The notion of hiring someone for a "technical" job who does not have the appropriate academic credentials gives most Europeans apoplexy. That's one of the causes of the great surge in innovation in the U.S. computer industry in the latter couple of decades of the twentieth century. While the Europeans were waiting for the universities to turn out "qualified professionals" to do things properly, smart and motivated people in the U.S. were innovating.
By the way, if an engineer in the U.S. who works for a construction firm that is contracted to build a bridge makes a mistake, I think he probably isn't going to be legally liable. The firm will be liable—at least in the legal sense. I don't know what would happen in Germany or France.
And here's a question: suppose there's a bug in a CAD program used by the engineer that causes the design of the bridge to be screwed up. Who's to blame? Does the craftsman get to blame his tools? And where would you engineers be without us software people to create the new wonderful tools you rely on, eh?
See, ain't this fun?
Hmm. I thought you said you are studying civil engineering, but it sounds as though your career objective is combat engineer. Surely you know the distinction: "civil engineers build targets, combat engineers destroy them". But I think I get the idea: you're saying that engineering differs from computer programming in that engineering is an activity that has real-world consequences, while programming does not. So if you're a programmer working on, say, the targeting and guidance software for a cruise missile, then you're completely harmless. I work for the software group of a company that makes lab instruments that analyze yucky bodily fluids to see what's wrong with people. Those instruments are controlled by...software. (It runs on Windows, don't tell.) If I screw up, and a few hundred cases of Hepatitis C go undiagnosed before someone notices, well...I probably won't have killed too many people. After all, I'm just a harmless programmer...
I actually agree with you—the title "Software Engineer" is pretentious. I disagree with your apparent belief that programming differs from engineering in that only engineering can have serious—even fatal—consequences. As I tried to show with my examples, the way in which computer programs function—or fail to function—can have serious consequences as well. So what is the difference between engineering and programming?
You might invert the question: why would anyone think they're the same? I think it's correct to say that, in the most general terms, engineers determine how to construct or arrange materials to fulfill a specified purpose. In doing so, they manipulate quantifiable entities—such as the strengths of materials, the distribution of stresses, the known limits and characteristics of varying methods of construction as determined by empirical study, and so on. Programmers don't do anything like that. Programmers write code, and code is an application of logic. You might say that programmers are like engineers who build logical machines, but that's mere metaphor. Computer programs don't break because the wrong type of steel was specified for one of the gears.
So where did the notion of "software engineering" come from? Maybe it's symptomatic of an unspoken insecurity, a fear that programming isn't a serious profession. Perhaps one source of this insecurity is that programming is still a very new item in the human tool-box, and we haven't quite decided which compartment to put it in. Moreover, programming isn't like any other tool we've had before. It resembles engineering in that the programmer does build something, though no materials are used in the building. It resembles mathematics in that it's logical, but it isn't bound by mathematical rigor. You can't "prove" a program—except perhaps in a—completely impractical—theoretical sense. (Of course you can test programs, and rest assured that where I work, we have very thorough software design and testing protocols.)
And now the next contentious question: are computer scientists really scientists?
<paranoia level="high">Ah, but what if a certain American "superpower" suddenly felt an urgent need to tap the cables that go into, say, Iran? Maybe because it wants to start a war in a week or so, and needs that extra big hit of intelligence before it launches the bombers?</paranoia>
No, I don't think there's anything to it. But the paranoid version sends shivers up and down my spine, while the sensible one doesn't.
I think the idea of using a light-weight, collaborative tool to gather "process" information is a basically sound, but merely establishing a collaborative environment usually is not enough to accomplish what you want. You can't just say, "here's your new documentation tool! Write down what you do!" I've seen many such pitiful attempts at "Knowledge Management" die whimpering; their naive sponsors never seem to understand that "knowledge" doesn't just happen. Here's what I'd do if I were you:
Really? Have a taste for polonium, do you?
Jeez, mass constipation on Wall Street! I guess the real investment lesson here is to buy stock in whoever makes Metamucil.
Sorry, but the abuse of that word has got to stop.
You're doing your doctoral research via...Google. *Deep breath* Please tell me that you are using Google to access verifiable primary sources, with page numbers that can be cited, and not random postings on, say, Slashdot. I'd find that acceptable. What I do not find acceptable is the notion that surfing the web is somehow a substitute for scholarship, because it isn't. Not only is there all kinds of crap on the web, but there is no way to cite said crap. A URL is not citation, because it is ephemeral. If I read your dissertation 20 years from now, I'm not likely to find the web page you cited, even if what you cited wasn't complete drivel to start with.
Your reference to Google Scholar hints that you are indeed doing the right thing, but the notion that web surfing is equivalent to scholarship is so widespread and so pernicious that you ought to clarify. What field, by the way?
From the article:
It sounds to me like there were a large group of people making a great deal of fuss that generated the impression that the Pope was not welcome. What does "stay away" mean to you? I don't know about you, but I don't generally go where I'm not welcome.
Does this university's faculty consist entirely of physicists and Marxists? If so, I'd say that the Vatican goofed booking this gig. On the other hand, if it's a real University, and includes other disciplines (like Philosophy or Theology), then the Pope was well-qualified to speak there, for his credentials in those fields are considerable. Having heard him speak at Regensburg, I was deeply impressed with the man's erudition, and would love to have another oppurtunity to hear him. And no, I'm not even Catholic.
I don't get it. They're an office supply house.
Hmm...reflective vests that make me safer if I want to walk a road at night. I must be benighted.
Perhaps you're confused by the use of the word "roadmap", which is a powerpointism that means something like, "plan to make magic happen, and create order out of chaos". Remember, a roadmap is really a type of map, a graphic depiction of a certain territory, showing items of interest. In the case of roadmaps, that would be...um...roads. I forget where I was going with this. Where were you going? Do you have a map?