It is clear to me that the office of Homeland Security is, to date, a failure. Granted, some improvements have been made in terms of shared information within law enforcement, but there is a long way to go even on this front.
The major thing that this department is meant to handle, response to information indicating a threat to the U.S., has been implemented willy-nilly. Terror alert levels are raised and lowered without reason or a set of expected responses, causing panic and nothing at all productive.
In terms of incidence response to computer security threats, how would they be any different? All that we'll see from this is another set of useless buzzwords, millions of dollars spent on who-knows-what, and a still-flailing and under/mis-funded department of Homeland Security.
As much as I hate to say it, I would rather see M$ in charge of computer security than our government.
Open source is not just about $free$ software--this point is made quite frequently on/. It is more about access to information, the dissemination of that information, and keeping that information open and transparent.
Back in the day, when software design was handled by a few engineers high up on the food chain (Bell labs, etc.), people freely shared information between institutions. The development of software was an innovative activity and ideas were not so often held hostage to the corporate bottom-line. You could talk to other people about what you were doing without violating all the NDAs you'd signed. And even if you were in violation, I don't think anyone cared.
It was this attitude, IMO, that allowed computer technology to grow so quickly. This paved the way for the PC, for Arpanet/Internet, etc. The more proprietary stuff gets, the less we're going to progress as a society/culture.
What does this have to do with outsourcing, really?
This post is old now, so I doubt anyone will read my reply, but:
1) This is different from uncertainty
2) I always thought the infinitesimal approach to time/distance increments was sketchy at best. Yes, it gets the job done mathematically, which is his point in the paper--that's about all it does.
3) It seems intuitive to me that time is a function of motion + consciousness. Motion does not depend on time. Time is simply the measure of change in the physical universe. Shit moves, we measure and observe its motion, and voila--Time! How quickly we can observe determines the smallest possible interval of time, and since infinitesimals aren't real numbers, you can never stage an infinitesimal observation.
I live in Colorado, which ranked 3 this year and 2 last year. The kicker is, Colorado also placed 1st in job dissatisfaction last year (sorry, don't have a source, it was from one of my gf's classes at CU).
I wonder if the other tech-savvy states are the same way, or if it's just coincidence?
Point taken, but I dunno...it seems like it should have more value in and of itself. A CS degree is a challenging degree to acquire (well, at a decent school I would assume it still is), and a BS/CS borders on overqualified for many positions. I mean, who wants to take all that calc and spend the next 5-10 years writing patches for some legacy system in an anonymous corporate environment? Granted it will pay the bills, but I don't think it warrants the degree.
Possibly the parent and several others are right though, and hangers on will fall off and the curriculum's intrinsic value will be more obvious? One can only hope.
Do you need a CS degree to write a new module for an accounting application, to write a chat program in VB, etc.? Probably not.
Should you need one to get a job doing this type of thing? Definitely not.
Should you need a CS degree to design automobile software, space shuttle software, large distributed programs, the next generation networking protocols, etc.? Yes, but you should probably have a masters/phd or a lot of proven experience in addition.
The purpose of a CS degree has been lost on me personally, I don't think most major institutions are providing what anyone really wants or needs.
This is relative--in a sense, they are treating you poorly, but not necessarily for just your sake.
A company striving to be excellent would take the stance of, "this guy works like crazy and gets more done than anyone else around here, and he's wearing shorts and sandals--better not mess with something that's working so well." This, despite whether you are considered a commodity or a person. If you start slacking or driving away business, they may then ask you to change your clothing, but not without reason.
The average modern company, however, strives for a uniform level of mediocrity. They don't really want anyone to do well, or anyone to stand out, because people who do so are a liability and risk causing some sort of controversy. "Throw production out the window, we have to be normal..."
Actually there is no historical basis for "whom" over "who" in any context. "Whom" was a contrived word from the early part of the last century and has now been brought into common usage. "Who" is technically correct in all instances in question.
I don't think that's the same usage...rather, it's an oblique reference to the incarnation of a god in human form. The game prophecies that the avatar would continually return to rescue the world from peril.
...after all, I just upgraded with this service and my system will now support HDD sizes up to a whopping 800MB and modems that run at speeds of up to 14.4Kbps. What's there to complain about?
1. There is a lot of supposition throughout the article, and several other theories are proposed but inconclusive.
2. The images obtained to date are not adequate for a definitive answer.
It's very possible that there was water. We are, however, extrapolating that from our experiences on Earth, and from a very limited set of data returned by the rovers. I would love for nothing more than evidence of liquid water be found, but this is an alien landscape and may not adhere to the same rules as our own.
It is official; Science News confirms: Coin Tossing is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Coin Tossing community when Science News confirmed that Coin Tossing reliability has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent reliability out of all random number generations. Coming on the heels of over 100,000 coin tossings which plainly state that Coin Tossing has lost reliability, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Coin Tossing is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent random number generation competition and pole vault.
You need to be a mathemetician to predict Coin Tossing's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Coin Tossing faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Coin Tossing because Coin Tossing is dying. Things are looking very bad for Coin Tossing. As many of us are already aware, Coin Tossing continues to lose reliability. Spare change flows like a river of blood.
Football Coin Tossing is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core supporters, including the Miami Dolphins and the Greenbay Packers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time coin tossers only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Football Coin Tossing is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Coin Tossing proponent Bob states that there are 70000000 users of Coin Tossing, and that 35000001 come out heads the majority of the time. How many users of/dev/rand are there? Let's see. The number of Coin Tossing versus/dev/rand posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 2000 to 1. Therefore there are about 70000000/2000 = 35000/dev/rand users. Coin Tossing posts on Usenet are about a millionth of the volume of computer-related random number generation posts. Still, there are about 70000000 users of Coin Tossing. A recent article put quarters at about 80 percent of the Coin Tossing market. Therefore there are 60000000 quarter users. This is inconsistent with the number of quarter tossing Usenet posts, so we assume that coin tossing is way overexaggerated. Studies also show that an astounding 35% of all coin tosses come out undecided, usually from dropping the coin. 2% of all coins tossed are lost and never found again.
Due to the troubles of spare change, abysmal toss-failures and so on, quarter tossing went out of business and was taken over by nickel tossing, which sells another troubled method of random number generation. Now nickel tossing is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Coin Tossing has steadily declined in reliability. Coin Tossing is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Coin Tossing is to survive at all it will be among Coin Tossing dilettante dabblers. Coin Tossing continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Coin Tossing is dead.
You may just be trolling, but I'd agree. We can bitch and moan and make block lists and pass legislation ad nauseum, and it _will_ reduce the amount of spam in many people's inboxes. The inevitable conclusion however is "legitimate" spam that advertisers pay more for that is still opt-out but gets around spam legislation and technology. Who are the new spammers? Those who are willing to pay for advertisements to ISPs, etc. It will be like TV. Just too cheap/convenient a medium to pass up.
I could not agree more. I would elaborate on this point; only some people cause stress.
Over time, people have become more stressed. Stress wasn't even a common word back in the 50s and 60s, even though people still experienced it.
So, why would we become more stressed? Why would it help anyone to be stressed out?
Oops, wait a minute, I better go pay a shrink $100s/hr to deal with this issue, and then pay a pharmaceutical company even more to get the drugs the shrink says I need. Then find out that my kids, normal abnoxious brats that they may be, really aren't normal but have ADD. They need shrinks too, who will also give them drugs.
But you can't have people thinking that the cognitive scientists^H^H^H^H^Hshrinks cause stress, so they have to point to, say, technology as the cause. Yes, that's it, computers!
You clearly don't understand how open source works. The russians would have exploited the code, the chinese would have patched it, and Microsoft would have issued a press release stating that their comanche code was more secure, based on an independent study.
On the off chance that aliens drop by for a visit, could we use the drones to try breaking their ships into little pieces too? After reading Mission Earth years ago I always thought we needed some sort of space-pointing defence system, just in case;)
I was never clear on this...Kilgore Trout was originally a character in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s novels. And yet I know that *someone* published books under the pseudonym. Was it actually Vonnegut or someone else?
Wow, they sound formidable. Undoubtedly, they will be able to sway the administration, who only has a few trillion dollars of industry capital supporting the status quo. Good thing they are concerned, not just mildly interested;)
You know, I remember seeing on two of the local news stations, about 4 years ago, that unmistakable signs of life had been discovered on Mars. Ruined buildings, no less, a series of low-lying structures that could not have occurred by natural means.
Never heard anything about it before or since that one night. I've seen plenty of photos that indicate that life existed that have been debunked; this was supposedly something new. I would agree with Arthur that the pentagon is probably not holding little green men in an underground bunker, but I've always been a bit suspicious that more is going on than we are allowed to see.
Slashdot Mirror
The major thing that this department is meant to handle, response to information indicating a threat to the U.S., has been implemented willy-nilly. Terror alert levels are raised and lowered without reason or a set of expected responses, causing panic and nothing at all productive.
In terms of incidence response to computer security threats, how would they be any different? All that we'll see from this is another set of useless buzzwords, millions of dollars spent on who-knows-what, and a still-flailing and under/mis-funded department of Homeland Security.
As much as I hate to say it, I would rather see M$ in charge of computer security than our government.
Back in the day, when software design was handled by a few engineers high up on the food chain (Bell labs, etc.), people freely shared information between institutions. The development of software was an innovative activity and ideas were not so often held hostage to the corporate bottom-line. You could talk to other people about what you were doing without violating all the NDAs you'd signed. And even if you were in violation, I don't think anyone cared.
It was this attitude, IMO, that allowed computer technology to grow so quickly. This paved the way for the PC, for Arpanet/Internet, etc. The more proprietary stuff gets, the less we're going to progress as a society/culture.
What does this have to do with outsourcing, really?
1) This is different from uncertainty
2) I always thought the infinitesimal approach to time/distance increments was sketchy at best. Yes, it gets the job done mathematically, which is his point in the paper--that's about all it does.
3) It seems intuitive to me that time is a function of motion + consciousness. Motion does not depend on time. Time is simply the measure of change in the physical universe. Shit moves, we measure and observe its motion, and voila--Time! How quickly we can observe determines the smallest possible interval of time, and since infinitesimals aren't real numbers, you can never stage an infinitesimal observation.
I wonder if the other tech-savvy states are the same way, or if it's just coincidence?
Possibly the parent and several others are right though, and hangers on will fall off and the curriculum's intrinsic value will be more obvious? One can only hope.
Should you need one to get a job doing this type of thing? Definitely not.
Should you need a CS degree to design automobile software, space shuttle software, large distributed programs, the next generation networking protocols, etc.? Yes, but you should probably have a masters/phd or a lot of proven experience in addition.
The purpose of a CS degree has been lost on me personally, I don't think most major institutions are providing what anyone really wants or needs.
You see, you have this mat, with different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO!
A company striving to be excellent would take the stance of, "this guy works like crazy and gets more done than anyone else around here, and he's wearing shorts and sandals--better not mess with something that's working so well." This, despite whether you are considered a commodity or a person. If you start slacking or driving away business, they may then ask you to change your clothing, but not without reason.
The average modern company, however, strives for a uniform level of mediocrity. They don't really want anyone to do well, or anyone to stand out, because people who do so are a liability and risk causing some sort of controversy. "Throw production out the window, we have to be normal..."
...giving the RIAA another 1 to 2 million people to sue for--something...it is P2P after all;)
Actually there is no historical basis for "whom" over "who" in any context. "Whom" was a contrived word from the early part of the last century and has now been brought into common usage. "Who" is technically correct in all instances in question.
I don't think that's the same usage...rather, it's an oblique reference to the incarnation of a god in human form. The game prophecies that the avatar would continually return to rescue the world from peril.
Yeah it's called Longhorn. The box reads "Caveat Emptor" though...
...after all, I just upgraded with this service and my system will now support HDD sizes up to a whopping 800MB and modems that run at speeds of up to 14.4Kbps. What's there to complain about?
2. The images obtained to date are not adequate for a definitive answer.
It's very possible that there was water. We are, however, extrapolating that from our experiences on Earth, and from a very limited set of data returned by the rovers. I would love for nothing more than evidence of liquid water be found, but this is an alien landscape and may not adhere to the same rules as our own.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Coin Tossing community when Science News confirmed that Coin Tossing reliability has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent reliability out of all random number generations. Coming on the heels of over 100,000 coin tossings which plainly state that Coin Tossing has lost reliability, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Coin Tossing is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent random number generation competition and pole vault.
You need to be a mathemetician to predict Coin Tossing's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Coin Tossing faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Coin Tossing because Coin Tossing is dying. Things are looking very bad for Coin Tossing. As many of us are already aware, Coin Tossing continues to lose reliability. Spare change flows like a river of blood.
Football Coin Tossing is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core supporters, including the Miami Dolphins and the Greenbay Packers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time coin tossers only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Football Coin Tossing is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Coin Tossing proponent Bob states that there are 70000000 users of Coin Tossing, and that 35000001 come out heads the majority of the time. How many users of /dev/rand are there? Let's see. The number of Coin Tossing versus /dev/rand posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 2000 to 1. Therefore there are about 70000000/2000 = 35000 /dev/rand users. Coin Tossing posts on Usenet are about a millionth of the volume of computer-related random number generation posts. Still, there are about 70000000 users of Coin Tossing. A recent article put quarters at about 80 percent of the Coin Tossing market. Therefore there are 60000000 quarter users. This is inconsistent with the number of quarter tossing Usenet posts, so we assume that coin tossing is way overexaggerated. Studies also show that an astounding 35% of all coin tosses come out undecided, usually from dropping the coin. 2% of all coins tossed are lost and never found again.
Due to the troubles of spare change, abysmal toss-failures and so on, quarter tossing went out of business and was taken over by nickel tossing, which sells another troubled method of random number generation. Now nickel tossing is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Coin Tossing has steadily declined in reliability. Coin Tossing is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Coin Tossing is to survive at all it will be among Coin Tossing dilettante dabblers. Coin Tossing continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Coin Tossing is dead.
Fact: Coin Tossing is dying
In related news, Darl finally pulled off his human-like face mask to reveal his pasty green skin and large eyes.
You may just be trolling, but I'd agree. We can bitch and moan and make block lists and pass legislation ad nauseum, and it _will_ reduce the amount of spam in many people's inboxes. The inevitable conclusion however is "legitimate" spam that advertisers pay more for that is still opt-out but gets around spam legislation and technology. Who are the new spammers? Those who are willing to pay for advertisements to ISPs, etc. It will be like TV. Just too cheap/convenient a medium to pass up.
Over time, people have become more stressed. Stress wasn't even a common word back in the 50s and 60s, even though people still experienced it.
So, why would we become more stressed? Why would it help anyone to be stressed out?
Oops, wait a minute, I better go pay a shrink $100s/hr to deal with this issue, and then pay a pharmaceutical company even more to get the drugs the shrink says I need. Then find out that my kids, normal abnoxious brats that they may be, really aren't normal but have ADD. They need shrinks too, who will also give them drugs.
But you can't have people thinking that the cognitive scientists^H^H^H^H^Hshrinks cause stress, so they have to point to, say, technology as the cause. Yes, that's it, computers!
Sheesh!
On the off chance that aliens drop by for a visit, could we use the drones to try breaking their ships into little pieces too? After reading Mission Earth years ago I always thought we needed some sort of space-pointing defence system, just in case;)
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, space will start wars from earth!!
I was never clear on this...Kilgore Trout was originally a character in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s novels. And yet I know that *someone* published books under the pseudonym. Was it actually Vonnegut or someone else?
Wow, they sound formidable. Undoubtedly, they will be able to sway the administration, who only has a few trillion dollars of industry capital supporting the status quo. Good thing they are concerned, not just mildly interested;)
Never heard anything about it before or since that one night. I've seen plenty of photos that indicate that life existed that have been debunked; this was supposedly something new. I would agree with Arthur that the pentagon is probably not holding little green men in an underground bunker, but I've always been a bit suspicious that more is going on than we are allowed to see.
Hopefully they'll develop one that can go on my arm right next to the nicotine patch, for when I'm on vacation and away from my computers.