...at least, that's what I'm guessing from the "hipcool" language used in their fora (a/k/a "forums"). Nearly every topic is seeded by an "rlunetta" who writes as though she were a 13-yo MySpaceFlickrFrapprButchrBakrCandlestickMakr type. Either Adesso has hired a prepubescent to serve as their public face or they're slickly targeting this at the demographic that has conflated a computer with a keyboard-loaded tellybision.
The fact that we're even having this discussion -- meaning that there are large numbers of people who are cool with the cameras -- means that we, who believe it's better that a hundred guilty men go free than that one innocent man go to jail, who believe it's better that a hundred guilty men go uncaught than that one innocent man be filmed every moment he's out of his home -- have lost. Yes, we have lost. You can rage, and fume, and post to Slashdot, and quote "V for Vendetta" until you're blue in the face and all the while the other side will be putting up cameras. It's over. Liberty was a cool idea but it just didn't work out. As Sallust said, most men haven't the stomach for it; they wish only for a just master.
And this is why LANL will never unionize. Unions were formed because you had children getting their feet chopped off in the 63rd hour of their workweek as they were earning pennies: in other words, because management treated its employees -- even the good ones -- like disposable crap. An individual employee is relatively powerless against an organization like that. A union means you treat your employees -- even the poor ones -- like valued employees, or you lose them all. That's a tremendous club. Attitudes like yours reflect the fact that in many cases, the pendulum between employer and employee went too far. Your solution is not to balance the pendulum, but to cut it off and burn the clock.
The investigation is still underway but based on what's been released to the press thus far it appears as though the person who committed the security breach and the person who had all the drug paraphernalia were living separate lives in the same residence. Call it spin if you want.
Quite simply, LANL employees' biggest problem is that we aren't unionized. We stand idly by and watch management (LANS/NNSA/DOE) hammer us again and again and again with policies that decrease the quality of workplace life (without adding jack to the real safety and security of the institution). The "substantially equivalent" requirement for benefits between the last contractor and the current contractor has been revealed to be a stinking pile of bullshit. With a strong collective bargaining agreement, there'd be some pushback against this unrelenting spiral into hell. There is none, however, because nearly everyone in Los Alamos County believes that unions are dues-sucking liberal plots that exist solely to protect the slackers and lackwits. Efforts to unionize have been and will continue to be fruitless. And so, things will get worse.
To specifically address the current outrage, Director Mike Anastasio's plan to expand random drug testing, one can say that it's true that LANL has had far, far too many security and safety incidents over the past decade. But I can't think of a single one in which the cause was traced back to drug use or alcohol overconsumption. This means we'll be spending money that the contractor doesn't have (they're facing a $150M + shortfall this year) to solve a problem that the lab doesn't have, and raping the Fourth Amendment in the process. (Yes, I know the workplace drug laws have been routinely upheld, but when the courts write that some things are too important for Constitutional protections to apply, what're you to think?) THIS is the kind of visionary thinking that made LANS the winning contractor?
Just look at the steaming pile of crap that is the ISS and there's your Moon Base Alpha right there. Grandiose dreams and visions reduced to a paltry 3-man crew that spends most of its time trying to stay alive. Rah farkin' rah.
Put down your Heinleins and spend a little time trying to make the planet we will all live and die on a better place.
I don't play video games but I'd say a convincing argument can be made that playing violent games doesn't turn people into violent offenders. Namely, that none of these people has mowed down ol' Jack with a bazooka or GTO.
Thing is, I'm not interested in returning America to its God-mandated place as The World's Greatest And Awesomest Place. I'm not interested in dedicating my life to busting my ass to the goal of trying to make the place not suck as much forty years from now as it does now. I've got one time around the carousel we call life and it's damn near half over. I just want to live the remaining half in a place that has different priorities from what my countrymen have decided they want. You can call that "giving up" if you like. I consider it "living life on my terms, not someone else's" -- a quintessentially American notion.
And for the record, as soon as I retrain so that I'm more desirable to the NZ immigration folks, I'm outta here.
I couldn't decide whether one big or two smaller would make me a better employee, so I split the difference and got two 30" screens. It kicks much butt. On the primary screen I have half a dozen 100-row xterms open for the programming aspect of my job. On the secondary, I keep email, open browser, stickies, and little utility-things for instant convenience. It's made me do my job not just faster, but better. That's an easy win for my employer.
For those of you muttering about command-lines and how real productivity gains are to be made there versus using larger screens to drive a GUI better, it's important to remember that "typing" is something most people do only in an email or word-processing program. The computer itself is to be interacted with by dragging, dropping, and drooling. Oh, and clicking like a maniac whenever something unexpected happens. Given the way people work, more screen area generally lets them work faster, whatever they're working on. Teaching them a different way of working is orthogonal to this issue.
You're exactly right. My guess is the author was grasping for "skunk works" in a desperate attempt to look "cool" and "with it" to the new "online generation."
"As for your example of Microsoft, notice that the Government couldn't fix that problem. And no it wasn't Bush's fault. The case had pretty much collapsed by election day 2000. David Bois (of SCO fame) had already managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory months before Bush & Ashcroft were in office. "
I'm not sure whether you're engaging in revisionist history or whether you just have no idea what you're talking about. Boies and the other attorneys beat Microsoft like a drum, up one side and down the other. Two factors combined to kill any chance at a governmental remedy (this time):
1) Judge Jackson couldn't keep his damn mouth shut during the trial, so the Appellate Court threw out his order to break up the company. In their ruling they stated that there was absolutely no evidence he'd been anything but impartial, but someone might complain so out went the order and the case was sent (with the finding of Sherman violations intact) to a new judge for a new disposition order. Unfortunately, that turned out to be Judge Kollar-Kotelly, who has less antitrust experience in her whole body than Judge Jackson had in his lovesack. Her over-the-head-ness led to a desperate, frantic plea for a settlement. Here's Factor 2.
2) While Factor 1 was going down, we had a change of Administration and the DOJ's antitrust bunch were replaced by Republican douches whose entire antitrust experience was based on the assertion that antitrust was nonsense and probably an affront to God Almighty. When presented with Judge K-K's desperate, frantic plea for a settlement, they all sprouted wood and absolutely, utterly, shamefully threw in the towel and offered up a settlement that wasn't so much a slap on the wrist as it was a long, slow, deep, wet tongue-kiss.
On behalf of the handful of remaining literate users of the Web, I would like to thank you for your correct usage of the word "loosing." It's people like you who give me hope that we as a species aren't completely regressing to the days of communication through grunts and the throwing of feces.
"I used to work at LANL... I can almost see the folks at LANL partying over this."
Well, I still work at LANL and believe me, there's no partying going on here. The feeling is one of shock and disbelief that an organization which so badly mismanaged the institution that it lost its 63-year no-bid, no-compete contract is rewarded by being given (a share of) the management of the institution. Once the revised RFP came out last year which drummed up additional bidders by guaranteeing our pensions would be destroyed, thereby saving the winning bidder a pile of money, the only reason to support a UC bid went out the window. For the last 24 hours, I'd wager the number one employee activity here has been rèsumè-updating. Which, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to.
Herein lies the problem...in the US, "the Internet" is viewed as a profit center to be monetized rather than as a public good to be encouraged and expanded. "If it isn't profitable," they proclaim, "who will roll out the network of the future?" The federal government, baby. This is nothing more than the Interstate Highway System of the future and rolling out basic infrastructure for the improvement of the lives of every citizen, resident alien, and undocumented worker is a legitimate function of the government. There's no profit in it? Who farkin' cares? If Verizon won't pull fiber into my house, let my tax dollar do it.
They won't take it from you. There's something about a nuclear weapons thread that brings out staggering levels of bullshit from folks who read a novel and saw a movie. Remember, those who know don't talk. Those who talk don't know.
Only if by "almost all possessives" you mean "possessive nouns". It's always been a mystery to me why so many people use it's as a possessive but not hi's, her's, or min'e. Come to think of it, there's a lot of pronoun-bungling going on, as I see a lot of your's, our's, and their's.
Well, no, I didn't think that. I thought (and think) "How very odd that one branch of the government thinks I can be trusted with Very Sensitive Information and another thinks I might try to hijack a plane and crash it into something of national importance."
Unless you mean TSA's stopping just short of chectum my rectum as some sort of way of keeping me safe from those who would harm one of DOE's most favored sons. Seems unlikely to me...
"I know people on the "No Fly List" merely because they speak out on the net against government intrusion."
I discovered about a month ago that I'm on the TSA watch list. Sure, they'll let me get on a plane but only after special screening. As for printing a boarding pass from the Web, forget it. I don't know if it's really me, or just the name (firstname lastname...that ought to be enough to identify terriss uniquely!) but I do know that I've been very outspoken on- and offline. My first letter to my Congressional delegation went out on 9/14/01, begging them not to over-react with liberty-gutting legislation. I guess I should have included a sack of cash with that.
The delightful thing is that all the administrative shuffling by the government after 9/11 has led to a state of affairs in which one hand still doesn't know what the other is doing. One branch of the government says I'm a threat to civil aviation and another gives me a TS clearance to work with special weapons. Sheesh.
Only in the abstract. There's a tremendous difference between education and training. I consider a kid "prepared for a job" if he knows history, mathematics, science, critical thinking, fine art, applied art, music, geography, basic computer skills, language, and on and on and on. Give me someone like that and I can teach him anything I need him to do on the job. Give me a product of a drag, drop, and drool school and he'll likely be useless.
Now, if the student is in a vocational curriculum then I would argue that Office skills are essential -- but they can and should be supplemented by, for examples, Office X, that free software product idiotically named for its website, and anything else that the student might reasonably be exposed to professionally.
Underlying all this is a false belief: that people are so inherently got-damn stoopit that they cannot learn quickly how to use a software package effectively. This fear of retraining leads to the notion that we must have One Product and only One Product taught from the moment kids enter school until they enter the workforce. I reject that.
No, it is not a viable theory. Viable theories have supporting evidence not in contradiction to direct observation. Viable theories require more than merely observing an "irreducible complexity" and saying "Well, hyuck, I can't figure it out so there must be a really smart intelligent designer out there."
Here's my viable theory supported by direct observation and non-contradictory evidence: Every single proponent of intelligent design is either a devout Christian, an undereducated yokel, or more typically, both. That you profess to be a Christian is neither here nor there to me. I would prefer you walk on your own legs rather than preach the worth of crutches, but to each his own.
The utter absence of evidence for an intelligent designer keeps ID from being a theory, much less a viable one.
Slashdot Mirror
...at least, that's what I'm guessing from the "hipcool" language used in their fora (a/k/a "forums"). Nearly every topic is seeded by an "rlunetta" who writes as though she were a 13-yo MySpaceFlickrFrapprButchrBakrCandlestickMakr type. Either Adesso has hired a prepubescent to serve as their public face or they're slickly targeting this at the demographic that has conflated a computer with a keyboard-loaded tellybision.
The fact that we're even having this discussion -- meaning that there are large numbers of people who are cool with the cameras -- means that we, who believe it's better that a hundred guilty men go free than that one innocent man go to jail, who believe it's better that a hundred guilty men go uncaught than that one innocent man be filmed every moment he's out of his home -- have lost. Yes, we have lost. You can rage, and fume, and post to Slashdot, and quote "V for Vendetta" until you're blue in the face and all the while the other side will be putting up cameras. It's over. Liberty was a cool idea but it just didn't work out. As Sallust said, most men haven't the stomach for it; they wish only for a just master.
Depressed in the wee hours...
And this is why LANL will never unionize. Unions were formed because you had children getting their feet chopped off in the 63rd hour of their workweek as they were earning pennies: in other words, because management treated its employees -- even the good ones -- like disposable crap. An individual employee is relatively powerless against an organization like that. A union means you treat your employees -- even the poor ones -- like valued employees, or you lose them all. That's a tremendous club. Attitudes like yours reflect the fact that in many cases, the pendulum between employer and employee went too far. Your solution is not to balance the pendulum, but to cut it off and burn the clock.
The investigation is still underway but based on what's been released to the press thus far it appears as though the person who committed the security breach and the person who had all the drug paraphernalia were living separate lives in the same residence. Call it spin if you want.
Quite simply, LANL employees' biggest problem is that we aren't unionized. We stand idly by and watch management (LANS/NNSA/DOE) hammer us again and again and again with policies that decrease the quality of workplace life (without adding jack to the real safety and security of the institution). The "substantially equivalent" requirement for benefits between the last contractor and the current contractor has been revealed to be a stinking pile of bullshit. With a strong collective bargaining agreement, there'd be some pushback against this unrelenting spiral into hell. There is none, however, because nearly everyone in Los Alamos County believes that unions are dues-sucking liberal plots that exist solely to protect the slackers and lackwits. Efforts to unionize have been and will continue to be fruitless. And so, things will get worse.
To specifically address the current outrage, Director Mike Anastasio's plan to expand random drug testing, one can say that it's true that LANL has had far, far too many security and safety incidents over the past decade. But I can't think of a single one in which the cause was traced back to drug use or alcohol overconsumption. This means we'll be spending money that the contractor doesn't have (they're facing a $150M + shortfall this year) to solve a problem that the lab doesn't have, and raping the Fourth Amendment in the process. (Yes, I know the workplace drug laws have been routinely upheld, but when the courts write that some things are too important for Constitutional protections to apply, what're you to think?) THIS is the kind of visionary thinking that made LANS the winning contractor?
/Pee in cups for LANL
//Take polygraphs for LANL
///Hates self for it
Just look at the steaming pile of crap that is the ISS and there's your Moon Base Alpha right there. Grandiose dreams and visions reduced to a paltry 3-man crew that spends most of its time trying to stay alive. Rah farkin' rah.
Put down your Heinleins and spend a little time trying to make the planet we will all live and die on a better place.
I don't play video games but I'd say a convincing argument can be made that playing violent games doesn't turn people into violent offenders. Namely, that none of these people has mowed down ol' Jack with a bazooka or GTO.
Thing is, I'm not interested in returning America to its God-mandated place as The World's Greatest And Awesomest Place. I'm not interested in dedicating my life to busting my ass to the goal of trying to make the place not suck as much forty years from now as it does now. I've got one time around the carousel we call life and it's damn near half over. I just want to live the remaining half in a place that has different priorities from what my countrymen have decided they want. You can call that "giving up" if you like. I consider it "living life on my terms, not someone else's" -- a quintessentially American notion.
And for the record, as soon as I retrain so that I'm more desirable to the NZ immigration folks, I'm outta here.
I couldn't decide whether one big or two smaller would make me a better employee, so I split the difference and got two 30" screens. It kicks much butt. On the primary screen I have half a dozen 100-row xterms open for the programming aspect of my job. On the secondary, I keep email, open browser, stickies, and little utility-things for instant convenience. It's made me do my job not just faster, but better. That's an easy win for my employer.
For those of you muttering about command-lines and how real productivity gains are to be made there versus using larger screens to drive a GUI better, it's important to remember that "typing" is something most people do only in an email or word-processing program. The computer itself is to be interacted with by dragging, dropping, and drooling. Oh, and clicking like a maniac whenever something unexpected happens. Given the way people work, more screen area generally lets them work faster, whatever they're working on. Teaching them a different way of working is orthogonal to this issue.
You're exactly right. My guess is the author was grasping for "skunk works" in a desperate attempt to look "cool" and "with it" to the new "online generation."
"My wife, on the other hand, was blind as a bat without her glasses..."
ObCliffClavin:
It's a little-known fact that bats actually have very good eyesight. The echolocation isn't compensatory.
"As for your example of Microsoft, notice that the Government couldn't fix that problem. And no it wasn't Bush's fault. The case had pretty much collapsed by election day 2000. David Bois (of SCO fame) had already managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory months before Bush & Ashcroft were in office. "
I'm not sure whether you're engaging in revisionist history or whether you just have no idea what you're talking about. Boies and the other attorneys beat Microsoft like a drum, up one side and down the other. Two factors combined to kill any chance at a governmental remedy (this time):
1) Judge Jackson couldn't keep his damn mouth shut during the trial, so the Appellate Court threw out his order to break up the company. In their ruling they stated that there was absolutely no evidence he'd been anything but impartial, but someone might complain so out went the order and the case was sent (with the finding of Sherman violations intact) to a new judge for a new disposition order. Unfortunately, that turned out to be Judge Kollar-Kotelly, who has less antitrust experience in her whole body than Judge Jackson had in his lovesack. Her over-the-head-ness led to a desperate, frantic plea for a settlement. Here's Factor 2.
2) While Factor 1 was going down, we had a change of Administration and the DOJ's antitrust bunch were replaced by Republican douches whose entire antitrust experience was based on the assertion that antitrust was nonsense and probably an affront to God Almighty. When presented with Judge K-K's desperate, frantic plea for a settlement, they all sprouted wood and absolutely, utterly, shamefully threw in the towel and offered up a settlement that wasn't so much a slap on the wrist as it was a long, slow, deep, wet tongue-kiss.
History isn't always written by the victors.
Doofus:
On behalf of the handful of remaining literate users of the Web, I would like to thank you for your correct usage of the word "loosing." It's people like you who give me hope that we as a species aren't completely regressing to the days of communication through grunts and the throwing of feces.
Really? Where's the cameo?
"I used to work at LANL ... I can almost see the folks at LANL partying over this."
Well, I still work at LANL and believe me, there's no partying going on here. The feeling is one of shock and disbelief that an organization which so badly mismanaged the institution that it lost its 63-year no-bid, no-compete contract is rewarded by being given (a share of) the management of the institution. Once the revised RFP came out last year which drummed up additional bidders by guaranteeing our pensions would be destroyed, thereby saving the winning bidder a pile of money, the only reason to support a UC bid went out the window. For the last 24 hours, I'd wager the number one employee activity here has been rèsumè-updating. Which, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to.
Herein lies the problem...in the US, "the Internet" is viewed as a profit center to be monetized rather than as a public good to be encouraged and expanded. "If it isn't profitable," they proclaim, "who will roll out the network of the future?" The federal government, baby. This is nothing more than the Interstate Highway System of the future and rolling out basic infrastructure for the improvement of the lives of every citizen, resident alien, and undocumented worker is a legitimate function of the government. There's no profit in it? Who farkin' cares? If Verizon won't pull fiber into my house, let my tax dollar do it.
Her ship crashes on a prison planet and she has to lead the convicts to victory over a nigh-indestructible alien?
Great idea, but s/marketplace/enterprise .
"...almost all possessives have 's".
Only if by "almost all possessives" you mean "possessive nouns". It's always been a mystery to me why so many people use it's as a possessive but not hi's, her's, or min'e. Come to think of it, there's a lot of pronoun-bungling going on, as I see a lot of your's, our's, and their's.
Well, no, I didn't think that. I thought (and think) "How very odd that one branch of the government thinks I can be trusted with Very Sensitive Information and another thinks I might try to hijack a plane and crash it into something of national importance."
Unless you mean TSA's stopping just short of chectum my rectum as some sort of way of keeping me safe from those who would harm one of DOE's most favored sons. Seems unlikely to me...
"I know people on the "No Fly List" merely because they speak out on the net against government intrusion."
I discovered about a month ago that I'm on the TSA watch list. Sure, they'll let me get on a plane but only after special screening. As for printing a boarding pass from the Web, forget it. I don't know if it's really me, or just the name (firstname lastname...that ought to be enough to identify terriss uniquely!) but I do know that I've been very outspoken on- and offline. My first letter to my Congressional delegation went out on 9/14/01, begging them not to over-react with liberty-gutting legislation. I guess I should have included a sack of cash with that.
The delightful thing is that all the administrative shuffling by the government after 9/11 has led to a state of affairs in which one hand still doesn't know what the other is doing. One branch of the government says I'm a threat to civil aviation and another gives me a TS clearance to work with special weapons. Sheesh.
Color me confused by this post and its followups...
"Shouldn't a school prepare a kid for a job."
Only in the abstract. There's a tremendous difference between education and training. I consider a kid "prepared for a job" if he knows history, mathematics, science, critical thinking, fine art, applied art, music, geography, basic computer skills, language, and on and on and on. Give me someone like that and I can teach him anything I need him to do on the job. Give me a product of a drag, drop, and drool school and he'll likely be useless.
Now, if the student is in a vocational curriculum then I would argue that Office skills are essential -- but they can and should be supplemented by, for examples, Office X, that free software product idiotically named for its website, and anything else that the student might reasonably be exposed to professionally.
Underlying all this is a false belief: that people are so inherently got-damn stoopit that they cannot learn quickly how to use a software package effectively. This fear of retraining leads to the notion that we must have One Product and only One Product taught from the moment kids enter school until they enter the workforce. I reject that.
No, it is not a viable theory. Viable theories have supporting evidence not in contradiction to direct observation. Viable theories require more than merely observing an "irreducible complexity" and saying "Well, hyuck, I can't figure it out so there must be a really smart intelligent designer out there."
Here's my viable theory supported by direct observation and non-contradictory evidence: Every single proponent of intelligent design is either a devout Christian, an undereducated yokel, or more typically, both. That you profess to be a Christian is neither here nor there to me. I would prefer you walk on your own legs rather than preach the worth of crutches, but to each his own.
The utter absence of evidence for an intelligent designer keeps ID from being a theory, much less a viable one.