However the current government has decided that the only way they'll know what a fantastic job they're doing is to measure everything they can think of. They're so enthusiastic about doing this that most public sector organisations are diverting resources from stuff which isn't easy to measure ("How many muggings have we prevented this month?") to stuff which is.
Further, a lot of people won't bother reporting something like that to the police these days unless they have to - say, for an insurance company - and if the crime isn't reported, as far as the numbers are concerned, it didn't happen.
It's a bit like the health service. Anyone can see a doctor free of charge, though until recently you often had to wait several days for an appointment to become available. Then the order came down : "No-one shall wait more than 48 hours for an appointment". Result: "I'm sorry, we will only book appointments for today." If they won't write it in the appointment book for next week, you don't wait until next week for an appointment.
Assuming what you say is correct, I can only figure out two sensible explanations.
1. SCOs lawyers are breathtakingly stupid to continually get such procedural stuff wrong. 2. SCOs lawyers are breathtakingly clever at delaying matters by making procedural errors.
I don't think the first is true because they seem to be very good at getting the core procedural stuff which is crucial to continuing the various cases close enough to correct that it's not been thrown out yet.
1. Are you legally obliged to make it easy for someone to subpoena you? eg. by replying to an email asking for that information. 2. Is it a particularly good idea to email an address on a website which may or may not go to the correct person asking "Hey, where do you live, we want to serve legal documents on you"?
On the upside, there's hardly any cops on the streets or roads. I think I can count on one hand the number of patrol cars I've seen in the 8 months I've been living here...
I'm not sure that's an upside.
Every police force in the UK publishes its crime detection statistics. Even allowing for Mark Twain's aphorism about lies and damned lies, they're disturbing reading.
IIRC, even the best police force in the country had a detection rate of around 25% for most relatively minor crimes. Most are in the region of 15%. In other words, there's an 80% chance that your average thug won't suffer any repercussions for their actions. Even if they do get caught it takes months to work its way through the court system and they get given a slap on the wrist.
At least with a reasonable number of police on the street, if something happens to you there's a strong chance you can run up to the nearest police officer and explain what's happened. CCTV simply isn't as quick to respond.
And the solution is to install more, and more expensive, cameras? It's working well, isn't it?
Not really. But the official government stance is "You got any better ideas?" (Seriously, it is. I've written to people in government and received almost that exact reply).
For my shame, I worked for such a consultancy
on
The Top 21 Tech Flops
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I worked for a consultancy firm which had (apparently) been in IT consultancy for years. Though at the time, 99% of its business was Y2K consultancy - basically, going to clients' offices and auditing their PCs for Year 2000 compliance.
Understand that at the time I wasn't long out of school and had zero real-world IT experience.
This consultancy had bought a proprietary software package which went on a floppy and could be operated by a monkey. The idea was you booted the PC from the floppy, the software checked the clock on the PC would happily support the year 2000 and we put a sticker on the front to confirm this.
In order to earn our money, we also installed a Windows '95 patch for y2k and ran a piece of software which audited what software was installed and wrote the results to another floppy. We'd then return these floppies to the office where some other piece of software would turn them into a report to go to the client.
In a team of 3 of us, we could probably do about 80-90 PCs each per day, assuming they were all easy to get to. In about a month or so of doing this, I think I saw about a dozen PCs which "apparently" had problems. I later found that IBM's original specifications for the PC accounted for the Y2K problem, so the chances of finding something with a hardware issue were pretty slim.
The more alert amongst you will have noticed that I haven't said anything about the real business-critical stuff. The software which runs on, say, a mainframe or midrange Unix system, is accessed via telnet (or, if you're lucky these days, SSH) and you won't learn a damn thing about by auditing client PCs. Remember this is late 1998, Windows was still just finding its feet in the server room and such applications were pretty common. There's a reason for I haven't mentioned it. We were under strict intstructions not to go near servers - apparently someone more qualified "would do them later", but I never saw any evidence of that. And seeing as we were charging by the day, you'd think they'd dedicate some time to that.
When there's an oligopoly of video card manufacturers, what incentive to they have to be anything more than "not quite as appalling" as the competition?
If you do everything which is non-expensive, pushing the expensive stuff to one side until such time as you can dedicate the time and effort to it, you wind up with the expensive stuff sat around waiting (and getting more expensive every day) indefinitely as there will always be something cheaper to do.
For examples of this, look at the US healthcare system or almost anything government-run in the UK.
just like whether a cow should have more rights than a cockroach.
That's been solved long ago. The cow has fewer rights. How many people you know intentionally keep hundreds of cockroaches purely with a view to shooting them and selling them on for food and designer leather goods?
Actually, I can't think of a single example in the past half century that a people got fed up with a dictator, threw him out of power (with or without outside assistance) and then were still a democracy 10 years later.
Russia? (Generally considered fairly corrupt, so I don't know if that counts. Mind you, I daresay they're just not as good at hiding the corruption as most of the West as they've not had the practise.)
But maybe you could do something like spend 15 minutes with everyone (this would take a while, I know) and ask them questions about what they wrote, or have them give a presentation on the topic. That way even if they cheated on the paper itself, at least you know it wasn't a case of just downloading it and handing it in, and that they actually know the material.
What a good idea. We've been using it in the UK for years, it's called a viva though it's generally reserved for your final, major project in University.
It's not intimidating at all if you've done the work - just a 15 minute or so face to face chat about your work with a lecturer. I imagine cheating would probably be fairly obvious within the first 2 minutes to any lecturer who's even vaguely awake.
I think we can go either way -- either have the government pick up the tab for maintaining the nation's rail network, and make it available to anyone who wants to use it, in the same way that the Interstate highway system and the Air Traffic Control network is, or make users of the ATC network and the Interstate highways pay for their entire budgets so that they're self-funding without any support (and have them pay back over time the cost already contributed) -- but we're only hurting ourselves with the current arrangement. Anything that encourages an inefficiency to continue is inherently bad, and we suffer as a result of it due to higher gas prices, and geopolitical conflicts that arise due to petroleum supplies.
So you either nationalise the rails or privatise the roads and the air traffic control network.
The "privatise the roads" idea sucks if you want to use a road which isn't very popular. (Or, more accurately, it sucks in 20 years time when the road hasn't been resurfaced in that long). It's also going to be worryingly unsafe in air traffic unless the industry is regulated so tightly it may as well be government-run.
This leaves nationalising the rails. But there's only so much money in any country's budget to go around, and while I'm not from the US, I'm given to understand that announcing "We're going to increase everyone's taxes to build a new rail network" is the political equivalent of attempting to commit an armed raid in a gun store.
I seem to recall "futurists" like Arthur Clarke claiming that the train of the future would use lots of small motors connected to each wheel instead of one big one in a locomotive. Not practical?
I can't speak for the rest of Europe, but here in the UK a number of newer trains are being built to a French/Italian design (based originally around a British design) with something very similar to what you describe:
The problem with passenger rail transport is it's very difficult to run it at a profit - especially if the infrastructure isn't there to begin with. Getting people out of cars and onto trains is much harder than the other way around. So it's not particularly attractive to private companies.
This is a problem in any country which has historically shied away from having the government run services.
More or less by definition, you can't declare war in any conventional sense on a ragtag bunch of terrorists. Or even on a well-organised bunch of terrorists. As often as not, they don't have any specific land, sea or airspace to defend - just ideas and/or the desire for land/sea/airspace.
The closest you can come is declaring war on any country you think may be harbouring them, which is an extremely dubious route to go down. Before you know it you'll have any other country in that area starting to get jumpy, and looking for some way to strengthen their hand.
Here we can look at that and say, "Psssh, effing New Jersey" but in a lot of places in Europe they absolutely believe that we would fry this joker for a non-violent crime. The BBC is a fairly well respected news source and when they publish things like:
Speaking later, solicitor Jeffrey Anderson said alleged threats by US authorities, including one from New Jersey prosecutors that Mr McKinnon "would fry", would be among issues raised.
....I think you can see where that opinion of the USA comes from.
Same as always, the majority, whatever it may be, after all it is not about blocking it, it is all about society as a whole not providing an opportunity for questionable product to profit at societies expense.
The one copy that goes to a nation's library hardly constitutes a great profit at societies expense.
And the whole point of my post was that society changes. What may be considered perfectly acceptable today may not have been 100 years ago. Pre-marital sex immediately springs to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Or, taking another angle, what about Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita"? It's considered a modern literary classic, but the subject matter could hardly be described as morally "acceptable". Does that mean that it should never be archived? (By the way, if you don't know about the novel "Lolita", look in Wikipedia. Don't punch it into Google, especially if you're at work. I'm not sure what Google will return but I've got a pretty good idea).
Chernobyl would probably still be running and providing power if they had not shut off all kinds of safety mechanisms at the same time like a bunch of fucking idiots.
If they tried to turn off all the safety mechanisms at the same time like a bunch of fucking idiots in a modern nuclear power station, it would shut down.
The whole thing is designed so that rather than having a bunch of things oversee a reaction which must be kept under control or Bad Things Happen, instead a bunch of things oversee that the reaction continues to take place or Nothing At All Happens.
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I just don't know if I could take it.
Calmly take the cellphone, push it down your underpants and give it a good rub around there. Hand it back, smiling silently.
I guarantee that you won't have to worry about that person putting the cellphone anywhere near their face for the remainder of the flight.
You're absolutely right.
However the current government has decided that the only way they'll know what a fantastic job they're doing is to measure everything they can think of. They're so enthusiastic about doing this that most public sector organisations are diverting resources from stuff which isn't easy to measure ("How many muggings have we prevented this month?") to stuff which is.
Further, a lot of people won't bother reporting something like that to the police these days unless they have to - say, for an insurance company - and if the crime isn't reported, as far as the numbers are concerned, it didn't happen.
It's a bit like the health service. Anyone can see a doctor free of charge, though until recently you often had to wait several days for an appointment to become available. Then the order came down : "No-one shall wait more than 48 hours for an appointment". Result: "I'm sorry, we will only book appointments for today." If they won't write it in the appointment book for next week, you don't wait until next week for an appointment.
Assuming what you say is correct, I can only figure out two sensible explanations.
1. SCOs lawyers are breathtakingly stupid to continually get such procedural stuff wrong.
2. SCOs lawyers are breathtakingly clever at delaying matters by making procedural errors.
I don't think the first is true because they seem to be very good at getting the core procedural stuff which is crucial to continuing the various cases close enough to correct that it's not been thrown out yet.
1. Are you legally obliged to make it easy for someone to subpoena you? eg. by replying to an email asking for that information.
2. Is it a particularly good idea to email an address on a website which may or may not go to the correct person asking "Hey, where do you live, we want to serve legal documents on you"?
On the upside, there's hardly any cops on the streets or roads. I think I can count on one hand the number of patrol cars I've seen in the 8 months I've been living here...
I'm not sure that's an upside.
Every police force in the UK publishes its crime detection statistics. Even allowing for Mark Twain's aphorism about lies and damned lies, they're disturbing reading.
IIRC, even the best police force in the country had a detection rate of around 25% for most relatively minor crimes. Most are in the region of 15%. In other words, there's an 80% chance that your average thug won't suffer any repercussions for their actions. Even if they do get caught it takes months to work its way through the court system and they get given a slap on the wrist.
At least with a reasonable number of police on the street, if something happens to you there's a strong chance you can run up to the nearest police officer and explain what's happened. CCTV simply isn't as quick to respond.
And the solution is to install more, and more expensive, cameras? It's working well, isn't it?
Not really. But the official government stance is "You got any better ideas?" (Seriously, it is. I've written to people in government and received almost that exact reply).
I worked for a consultancy firm which had (apparently) been in IT consultancy for years. Though at the time, 99% of its business was Y2K consultancy - basically, going to clients' offices and auditing their PCs for Year 2000 compliance.
Understand that at the time I wasn't long out of school and had zero real-world IT experience.
This consultancy had bought a proprietary software package which went on a floppy and could be operated by a monkey. The idea was you booted the PC from the floppy, the software checked the clock on the PC would happily support the year 2000 and we put a sticker on the front to confirm this.
In order to earn our money, we also installed a Windows '95 patch for y2k and ran a piece of software which audited what software was installed and wrote the results to another floppy. We'd then return these floppies to the office where some other piece of software would turn them into a report to go to the client.
In a team of 3 of us, we could probably do about 80-90 PCs each per day, assuming they were all easy to get to. In about a month or so of doing this, I think I saw about a dozen PCs which "apparently" had problems. I later found that IBM's original specifications for the PC accounted for the Y2K problem, so the chances of finding something with a hardware issue were pretty slim.
The more alert amongst you will have noticed that I haven't said anything about the real business-critical stuff. The software which runs on, say, a mainframe or midrange Unix system, is accessed via telnet (or, if you're lucky these days, SSH) and you won't learn a damn thing about by auditing client PCs. Remember this is late 1998, Windows was still just finding its feet in the server room and such applications were pretty common. There's a reason for I haven't mentioned it. We were under strict intstructions not to go near servers - apparently someone more qualified "would do them later", but I never saw any evidence of that. And seeing as we were charging by the day, you'd think they'd dedicate some time to that.
When there's an oligopoly of video card manufacturers, what incentive to they have to be anything more than "not quite as appalling" as the competition?
If you do everything which is non-expensive, pushing the expensive stuff to one side until such time as you can dedicate the time and effort to it, you wind up with the expensive stuff sat around waiting (and getting more expensive every day) indefinitely as there will always be something cheaper to do.
For examples of this, look at the US healthcare system or almost anything government-run in the UK.
just like whether a cow should have more rights than a cockroach.
That's been solved long ago. The cow has fewer rights. How many people you know intentionally keep hundreds of cockroaches purely with a view to shooting them and selling them on for food and designer leather goods?
Obviously they're not but there are only so many hours in the day. But in this discussion, there are two things at issue:
1. That all citizens of their country are guaranteed basic rights.
2. That all chimpanzees of their country are guaranteed basic rights.
What order do you want your politicians and leaders to do things in?
Actually, I can't think of a single example in the past half century that a people got fed up with a dictator, threw him out of power (with or without outside assistance) and then were still a democracy 10 years later.
Russia? (Generally considered fairly corrupt, so I don't know if that counts. Mind you, I daresay they're just not as good at hiding the corruption as most of the West as they've not had the practise.)
Serbia? (though Serbia hasn't had 10 years yet)
PRESIDENT actually REALLY thinks that Jesus Christ is going to "come again" (whatever that means)
Whatever it means, I hope he's got some tissues handy.
(I'm going straight to Hell for that one, aren't I?)
Education shouldn't be some stupid game where students quite legitimately ask, 'Is this going to be on the exam?'
Purely out of morbid curiosity, what kind of lecturer gives any answer other than "It might be."?
But maybe you could do something like spend 15 minutes with everyone (this would take a while, I know) and ask them questions about what they wrote, or have them give a presentation on the topic. That way even if they cheated on the paper itself, at least you know it wasn't a case of just downloading it and handing it in, and that they actually know the material.
What a good idea. We've been using it in the UK for years, it's called a viva though it's generally reserved for your final, major project in University.
It's not intimidating at all if you've done the work - just a 15 minute or so face to face chat about your work with a lecturer. I imagine cheating would probably be fairly obvious within the first 2 minutes to any lecturer who's even vaguely awake.
Then again, universities are currently set up to pass as many students as possible, rather than work them hard so that their future employers benefit.
Students who drop out don't tend to contribute much to the university's coffers.
I think we can go either way -- either have the government pick up the tab for maintaining the nation's rail network, and make it available to anyone who wants to use it, in the same way that the Interstate highway system and the Air Traffic Control network is, or make users of the ATC network and the Interstate highways pay for their entire budgets so that they're self-funding without any support (and have them pay back over time the cost already contributed) -- but we're only hurting ourselves with the current arrangement. Anything that encourages an inefficiency to continue is inherently bad, and we suffer as a result of it due to higher gas prices, and geopolitical conflicts that arise due to petroleum supplies.
So you either nationalise the rails or privatise the roads and the air traffic control network.
The "privatise the roads" idea sucks if you want to use a road which isn't very popular. (Or, more accurately, it sucks in 20 years time when the road hasn't been resurfaced in that long). It's also going to be worryingly unsafe in air traffic unless the industry is regulated so tightly it may as well be government-run.
This leaves nationalising the rails. But there's only so much money in any country's budget to go around, and while I'm not from the US, I'm given to understand that announcing "We're going to increase everyone's taxes to build a new rail network" is the political equivalent of attempting to commit an armed raid in a gun store.
I seem to recall "futurists" like Arthur Clarke claiming that the train of the future would use lots of small motors connected to each wheel instead of one big one in a locomotive. Not practical?
9 0
I can't speak for the rest of Europe, but here in the UK a number of newer trains are being built to a French/Italian design (based originally around a British design) with something very similar to what you describe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_3
Unfortunately, the net result used Italian and French engineering with British styling and comfort rather than the other way around.
Lovely.
The problem with passenger rail transport is it's very difficult to run it at a profit - especially if the infrastructure isn't there to begin with. Getting people out of cars and onto trains is much harder than the other way around. So it's not particularly attractive to private companies.
This is a problem in any country which has historically shied away from having the government run services.
I really don't fancy being on there if something goes wrong with the routing and you wind up stuck in a circular route.
And what happens with dropped packets?
More or less by definition, you can't declare war in any conventional sense on a ragtag bunch of terrorists. Or even on a well-organised bunch of terrorists. As often as not, they don't have any specific land, sea or airspace to defend - just ideas and/or the desire for land/sea/airspace.
The closest you can come is declaring war on any country you think may be harbouring them, which is an extremely dubious route to go down. Before you know it you'll have any other country in that area starting to get jumpy, and looking for some way to strengthen their hand.
Oh look....
Speaking later, solicitor Jeffrey Anderson said alleged threats by US authorities, including one from New Jersey prosecutors that Mr McKinnon "would fry", would be among issues raised.
Same as always, the majority, whatever it may be, after all it is not about blocking it, it is all about society as a whole not providing an opportunity for questionable product to profit at societies expense.
The one copy that goes to a nation's library hardly constitutes a great profit at societies expense.
And the whole point of my post was that society changes. What may be considered perfectly acceptable today may not have been 100 years ago. Pre-marital sex immediately springs to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Or, taking another angle, what about Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita"? It's considered a modern literary classic, but the subject matter could hardly be described as morally "acceptable". Does that mean that it should never be archived? (By the way, if you don't know about the novel "Lolita", look in Wikipedia. Don't punch it into Google, especially if you're at work. I'm not sure what Google will return but I've got a pretty good idea).
Chernobyl would probably still be running and providing power if they had not shut off all kinds of safety mechanisms at the same time like a bunch of fucking idiots.
If they tried to turn off all the safety mechanisms at the same time like a bunch of fucking idiots in a modern nuclear power station, it would shut down.
The whole thing is designed so that rather than having a bunch of things oversee a reaction which must be kept under control or Bad Things Happen, instead a bunch of things oversee that the reaction continues to take place or Nothing At All Happens.