> But pretending to be a student seems to pretty much rule out sexual harassment.
It would suggest sexual harassment, not rule it out. He had access to privileged information and control over the student's carrers as a professor that provided quite unreasonable opportunities to abuse the students.
I'd not thought about winder freezing pipes. I've actually had it happen when an upstairs tenant in an office building turned down the heat for the weekend, and pipes in the hot water heating system broke.
Thank you very much for the correction. I confused "Minix" with "Multics", which is a UNIX ancestor and which I used a very long time ago in my career.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
That's from Andrew Tannenbaum, one of the main authors of Minix, the direct ancestor of UNIX, in his book on computer networks. It was a _very_ good book, and I recommend its latest edition to my younger colleagues today. It was first printed in 1981, and I certainly remember occassionally using that kind of solution in the 1980's myself. And physical media transport is still a useful solution today: the external disk or box of disks can be taken offsite and archived for recovery, and to prevent accidental deletion by poorly configured backup systems. Keeping your archival storage away from the possible fat fingers of your current storage maintainers is priceless protection, as is having a secondary backup system not vulnerable to the software or identical hardware failures of your primary backup system.
The presence of backdoor keys for NSA warrant free decryption seems a given. But that would seem to be a given for all major cloud storage services, so it may not even be needed for the Snowball device itself. And there are quite a few situations where local bandwidth costs or data center replication would justify transferring this material to Amazon: their AWS S3 storage has proven far more reliable, and scalable, than many local storage solutions.
> Getting into university by cheating isn't a particularly worthwhile endeavour
Not if you keep paying the team or another team to do your work for you. This can go on for _years_, even decades if you've got the money or the athletic career to help the school ignore the behavior.
In my decades, I've seen women openly and subtly refused roles or downgraded in evaluations because "they might get pregnant, or married, or follow their husband's career, or they'd be distracting to the workplace, or reduce the camarederie, etc., etc., etc.". And I've certainly seen considerable sexual harassment in the workplace.
I've also seen a less capable female colleague hired. Then everyone refused to train them, and gave them the work no one else could be bothered to do, and the results were predictably poor for all of us. _I_ trained them in the parts that interacted with my work, but wasn't in a position to take my colleagues to task for refusal to train. So their continuing poor performance was a failure, but very little of the failure was theirs.
Except when they do close, I'm afraid. Hospitals don't like to publicize it, and often don't "close" the emergency but stop accepting new patients in crisis situations. The result is the same for people needing emergency treatment, or those desperate for chronic care they cannot get due to the strike.
There is some uncertainty about the extinction of North American megafauna. Human migrations to North America tended to occur during climate change, so which was the cause and with the effect of human migration and of extinction is a fascinating question.
The destruction of the Nazca native American civilization due to overfarming and damming of rivers for agricultural control, coupled with unexpected floods, is very convincing.
> I have a feeling that the annoyance felt by the existing generations when they view the generations below them stems from those younger generations being not part of the established mindset of those of the older generation
And I remember this in the 1960's. The 1970's. The 1980's. The 1990's. And from Shakespeare's writing, it certainly dates back to the European Middle Ages.
> Amazingly simple solution: the H1b they bring in has to meet the same qualifications they listed. If they are willing to accept a lesser candidate, they have to re-list and go through their US applicants first with the lowered requirements before they can hire the H1b.
You've apparently not been paying attention to just how the H1B's are hired. The wonderful presention in 2007 about how to hire a cheap H1B instead of an expensive American revealed a number of fascinating tricks, all still in use, used to avoid hiring expensive Americans.
> I really can't argue anything else in your post, but I can't help but wonder how Cuba was supposed to be an embarrassment vis a vis political systems.
There's a lot of sources of embarrassment, from the ineffectiveness of the US embargo in collapsing their economy, to the demonstrably stable Communist regime, in the USA's back yard, one that countered the claims that the only way for Latin American nations to survive was as as US puppets, to Castro's ongoing political friendships with other Latin American countries. The living counterexample to claims of Communist enforced starvation and economic despair.
Do understand that they're quite poor, but for most of them it's still much better than it was under Batista when stunning corruption, death gangs, and US organized crime controlled the island. The revolution there was inevitable: it's amazing that it worked so well, and that they have any economy left after 50 years of murderous anger from the nearest superpower.
> And I'm simply saying: what "the population in general" believes to be right or wrong is irrelevant to my moral judgments. In particular, as an American traveling to the UK, I may decide to respect UK law for practical reasons, but otherwise the majority beliefs of UK voters are completely irrelevant to me.
So, what the population believes moral is irrelevant to your moral judgment.
> The fact that the society I grew up in influenced my moral judgments doesn't change that. And, in fact, the way the society I grew up in influenced my moral views wasn't by having me adopt the majority opinion either, but by rejecting that majority opinion in many areas.
Except that it is completely relevant to your moral judgment.
Please, I have to ask: Doesn't it _hurt_ when your logic gets reversed that fast?
> The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is one profoundly limiting factor for all digital processing, but we're a few "Moore's law" generations away from that one.
>> Except that Moore's law has nothing to do with the size of transistors, but the number of transistors on a single chip.
Only if you ignore the last 50 years of computing history and _how_ more transistors have been placed on a single chip. It's like saying that computing has nothing to do with binary logic: there are other available logics, such as trinary, but they haven't proven very useful yet. So let's be aware for planning purposes that we're approaching that limitation. You do mention the problem, but it seems confusing to me that you first mention how much they aren't related, then go on to mention the history of workarounds for just that problem.
Another fascinating physics limitation is Landauer's Principle: that's a deduction of how much minimum _energy_ or power is involved in computation. As components shrink, the density of heat production is increased, which creates a whole second set of limitations involving circuit cooling. It's all fascinating material, and definitely worth keeping in mind when people simply extend their charts of Moore's law forever, or extend their charts of other exponential growth curves.
> They (the "supporting" communist countries) abandoned that shithole and let it rot for many years.
For decades, the Soviet Union in particular kept their economy afloat. They were an absolutely critical Atlantic Ocean seaport for the Soviet navy, a treasured vacation for Communist Party leadership, and and a critical source of sugar and tobacco luxury goods in an increasingly desperate Soviet economy. They were also an invaluable electronic listening post, an embarrassing counter-example to American and western democracy's political claims against communism, and a critical exporter of communist ideology to all of Latin America.
Then they Soviet Empire went bankrupt, and the economy tanked. But they've still managed to avoid the boom-bust and destructive mismanagement of Haiti, and the third class US protectorate status of Puerto Rico, and they've managed to survive the devastation to their most critical trade good, tobacco, as worldwide smoking habits shifted. They still have one of the highest literacy rates in the world and lowest lower infant mortality rates, both notably better than the USA or Canada. They're making do with an economy that is stretched very, very thin, but give credit where it's due. They've avoided the murderous puppet governments of other desperate Caribbean islands such as Haiti and Jamaica.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is one profoundly limiting factor for all digital processing, but we're a few "Moore's law" generations away from that one.
Re:Ah, the good old days of best person for the jo
on
30 Years a Sysadmin
·
· Score: 2
I hat to say this, but I was in the field that long ago. Women were pressured and harassed out of the field at every stage of education and employment. The ones who remained were _amazing_, and worth their weight in post-it notes of rootkeys, coffee beans, and pre-tested hard drives.
I won't say whether my first UNIX predates hers, but I've certainly been at it long enough to share early experiences with her. I no longer keep my original ancient hardware, it's too bulky and unusable by now. But oh, my, when an old lesson from the first jobs or the earliest days comes back to haunt you and need explanation to the youngsters, it's gratifying. And when the old lessons from your first mentors can be passed on and shown to still be critical, and still valid, and have not been taught to newer colleagues in their certifications and coursework, it's especially satisfying.
My most gratifying "old-timer" experience in the last month was when a colleague did their Google search on a problem, found the top references based their solution and meeting presentation on it, and I pointed them to the follow-up where I corrected the original answer. This doesn't happen that often, but it's gratifying to see my early work still pay off. It was even more gratifying that my correction was at the bottom of the page of their first reference, and the datestamp on my quoted email message was before my colleague was born. They really should have read the entire thread before quoting it.
> The axiomatic beliefs of morality are called "values"; that's what people differ on. Moral reasoning connects values with moral judgments in more complex situations, just like mathematical reasoning connects axioms with theorems.
Oh, my. I'm uncertain at this point whether I'm being trolled, or whether you're actually convinced that "moral reasoning" can actually generate a complete set of morals _without_ social involvement by other people.
The first of these is moral sensitivity, which is "the ability to see an ethical dilemma, including how our actions will affect others"
That's not defined by axiom in a social vacuum. That's rooted in the _opinions_ of others, and it's at the level of "axioms" in mathematical reasoning. So please, if you can think of a single moral axiom by which you mathematically derive a moral stance. let's explore it and see where moral reasoning has led to an outrageous or even contradictory stance.
> Hospital emergency rooms go offline during strikes?
During a nursing or doctor's strike, emergency rooms sometimes close due to inability to handle the flood of patients who aren't treated through more normal venues. The quality of care in the ER, even if it's open, can also degrade markedly.It's a very real concern for hospital staff and for the people who need medical help.
> But since the existing taxi companies and governments have zero interest in improving taxi services
Actually, they do have interests. Many of them would _love_ to switch to Uber or Lyft style phone apps. But it's a regulatory nightmare for them, and they have a great deal of sunk cost in their existing infrastructure. They also have to pay drivers who are idle, and take fares without smart phones.
Slashdot Mirror
Or blocked by budget or "we don't support that, don't touch it" policies from upgrading or maintaining old systems.
> But pretending to be a student seems to pretty much rule out sexual harassment.
It would suggest sexual harassment, not rule it out. He had access to privileged information and control over the student's carrers as a professor that provided quite unreasonable opportunities to abuse the students.
I'd not thought about winder freezing pipes. I've actually had it happen when an upstairs tenant in an office building turned down the heat for the weekend, and pipes in the hot water heating system broke.
Thank you very much for the correction. I confused "Minix" with "Multics", which is a UNIX ancestor and which I used a very long time ago in my career.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
That's from Andrew Tannenbaum, one of the main authors of Minix, the direct ancestor of UNIX, in his book on computer networks. It was a _very_ good book, and I recommend its latest edition to my younger colleagues today. It was first printed in 1981, and I certainly remember occassionally using that kind of solution in the 1980's myself. And physical media transport is still a useful solution today: the external disk or box of disks can be taken offsite and archived for recovery, and to prevent accidental deletion by poorly configured backup systems. Keeping your archival storage away from the possible fat fingers of your current storage maintainers is priceless protection, as is having a secondary backup system not vulnerable to the software or identical hardware failures of your primary backup system.
The presence of backdoor keys for NSA warrant free decryption seems a given. But that would seem to be a given for all major cloud storage services, so it may not even be needed for the Snowball device itself. And there are quite a few situations where local bandwidth costs or data center replication would justify transferring this material to Amazon: their AWS S3 storage has proven far more reliable, and scalable, than many local storage solutions.
> Getting into university by cheating isn't a particularly worthwhile endeavour
Not if you keep paying the team or another team to do your work for you. This can go on for _years_, even decades if you've got the money or the athletic career to help the school ignore the behavior.
In my decades, I've seen women openly and subtly refused roles or downgraded in evaluations because "they might get pregnant, or married, or follow their husband's career, or they'd be distracting to the workplace, or reduce the camarederie, etc., etc., etc.". And I've certainly seen considerable sexual harassment in the workplace.
I've also seen a less capable female colleague hired. Then everyone refused to train them, and gave them the work no one else could be bothered to do, and the results were predictably poor for all of us. _I_ trained them in the parts that interacted with my work, but wasn't in a position to take my colleagues to task for refusal to train. So their continuing poor performance was a failure, but very little of the failure was theirs.
Except when they do close, I'm afraid. Hospitals don't like to publicize it, and often don't "close" the emergency but stop accepting new patients in crisis situations. The result is the same for people needing emergency treatment, or those desperate for chronic care they cannot get due to the strike.
Or in Israel in the 21st century, where poor Ethiopian refugees were sterilized without their knowledge, believing they were being vaccinated.
http://www.theguardian.com/com...
It's a recurring practice in human history.
There is some uncertainty about the extinction of North American megafauna. Human migrations to North America tended to occur during climate change, so which was the cause and with the effect of human migration and of extinction is a fascinating question.
The destruction of the Nazca native American civilization due to overfarming and damming of rivers for agricultural control, coupled with unexpected floods, is very convincing.
> Hardly. People have been equating the words evil with anything they don't like for a good 3500+ years now.
Go back to the Code of Hammurabi for the earliest written examples.
> I have a feeling that the annoyance felt by the existing generations when they view the generations below them stems from those younger generations being not part of the established mindset of those of the older generation
And I remember this in the 1960's. The 1970's. The 1980's. The 1990's. And from Shakespeare's writing, it certainly dates back to the European Middle Ages.
Is there anything surprising about this?
Gods. Doctors Without Borders is one of the best charities on the planet, and gives hope that humans can actually be civilized.
> Amazingly simple solution: the H1b they bring in has to meet the same qualifications they listed. If they are willing to accept a lesser candidate, they have to re-list and go through their US applicants first with the lowered requirements before they can hire the H1b.
You've apparently not been paying attention to just how the H1B's are hired. The wonderful presention in 2007 about how to hire a cheap H1B instead of an expensive American revealed a number of fascinating tricks, all still in use, used to avoid hiring expensive Americans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
> I really can't argue anything else in your post, but I can't help but wonder how Cuba was supposed to be an embarrassment vis a vis political systems.
There's a lot of sources of embarrassment, from the ineffectiveness of the US embargo in collapsing their economy, to the demonstrably stable Communist regime, in the USA's back yard, one that countered the claims that the only way for Latin American nations to survive was as as US puppets, to Castro's ongoing political friendships with other Latin American countries. The living counterexample to claims of Communist enforced starvation and economic despair.
Do understand that they're quite poor, but for most of them it's still much better than it was under Batista when stunning corruption, death gangs, and US organized crime controlled the island. The revolution there was inevitable: it's amazing that it worked so well, and that they have any economy left after 50 years of murderous anger from the nearest superpower.
> And I'm simply saying: what "the population in general" believes to be right or wrong is irrelevant to my moral judgments. In particular, as an American traveling to the UK, I may decide to respect UK law for practical reasons, but otherwise the majority beliefs of UK voters are completely irrelevant to me.
So, what the population believes moral is irrelevant to your moral judgment.
> The fact that the society I grew up in influenced my moral judgments doesn't change that. And, in fact, the way the society I grew up in influenced my moral views wasn't by having me adopt the majority opinion either, but by rejecting that majority opinion in many areas.
Except that it is completely relevant to your moral judgment.
Please, I have to ask: Doesn't it _hurt_ when your logic gets reversed that fast?
> The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is one profoundly limiting factor for all digital processing, but we're a few "Moore's law" generations away from that one.
>> Except that Moore's law has nothing to do with the size of transistors, but the number of transistors on a single chip.
Only if you ignore the last 50 years of computing history and _how_ more transistors have been placed on a single chip. It's like saying that computing has nothing to do with binary logic: there are other available logics, such as trinary, but they haven't proven very useful yet. So let's be aware for planning purposes that we're approaching that limitation. You do mention the problem, but it seems confusing to me that you first mention how much they aren't related, then go on to mention the history of workarounds for just that problem.
Another fascinating physics limitation is Landauer's Principle: that's a deduction of how much minimum _energy_ or power is involved in computation. As components shrink, the density of heat production is increased, which creates a whole second set of limitations involving circuit cooling. It's all fascinating material, and definitely worth keeping in mind when people simply extend their charts of Moore's law forever, or extend their charts of other exponential growth curves.
> They (the "supporting" communist countries) abandoned that shithole and let it rot for many years.
For decades, the Soviet Union in particular kept their economy afloat. They were an absolutely critical Atlantic Ocean seaport for the Soviet navy, a treasured vacation for Communist Party leadership, and and a critical source of sugar and tobacco luxury goods in an increasingly desperate Soviet economy. They were also an invaluable electronic listening post, an embarrassing counter-example to American and western democracy's political claims against communism, and a critical exporter of communist ideology to all of Latin America.
Then they Soviet Empire went bankrupt, and the economy tanked. But they've still managed to avoid the boom-bust and destructive mismanagement of Haiti, and the third class US protectorate status of Puerto Rico, and they've managed to survive the devastation to their most critical trade good, tobacco, as worldwide smoking habits shifted. They still have one of the highest literacy rates in the world and lowest lower infant mortality rates, both notably better than the USA or Canada. They're making do with an economy that is stretched very, very thin, but give credit where it's due. They've avoided the murderous puppet governments of other desperate Caribbean islands such as Haiti and Jamaica.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is one profoundly limiting factor for all digital processing, but we're a few "Moore's law" generations away from that one.
I hat to say this, but I was in the field that long ago. Women were pressured and harassed out of the field at every stage of education and employment. The ones who remained were _amazing_, and worth their weight in post-it notes of rootkeys, coffee beans, and pre-tested hard drives.
I won't say whether my first UNIX predates hers, but I've certainly been at it long enough to share early experiences with her. I no longer keep my original ancient hardware, it's too bulky and unusable by now. But oh, my, when an old lesson from the first jobs or the earliest days comes back to haunt you and need explanation to the youngsters, it's gratifying. And when the old lessons from your first mentors can be passed on and shown to still be critical, and still valid, and have not been taught to newer colleagues in their certifications and coursework, it's especially satisfying.
My most gratifying "old-timer" experience in the last month was when a colleague did their Google search on a problem, found the top references based their solution and meeting presentation on it, and I pointed them to the follow-up where I corrected the original answer. This doesn't happen that often, but it's gratifying to see my early work still pay off. It was even more gratifying that my correction was at the bottom of the page of their first reference, and the datestamp on my quoted email message was before my colleague was born. They really should have read the entire thread before quoting it.
> The axiomatic beliefs of morality are called "values"; that's what people differ on. Moral reasoning connects values with moral judgments in more complex situations, just like mathematical reasoning connects axioms with theorems.
Oh, my. I'm uncertain at this point whether I'm being trolled, or whether you're actually convinced that "moral reasoning" can actually generate a complete set of morals _without_ social involvement by other people.
The first of these is moral sensitivity, which is "the ability to see an ethical dilemma, including how our actions will affect others"
That's not defined by axiom in a social vacuum. That's rooted in the _opinions_ of others, and it's at the level of "axioms" in mathematical reasoning. So please, if you can think of a single moral axiom by which you mathematically derive a moral stance. let's explore it and see where moral reasoning has led to an outrageous or even contradictory stance.
> Hospital emergency rooms go offline during strikes?
During a nursing or doctor's strike, emergency rooms sometimes close due to inability to handle the flood of patients who aren't treated through more normal venues. The quality of care in the ER, even if it's open, can also degrade markedly.It's a very real concern for hospital staff and for the people who need medical help.
> But since the existing taxi companies and governments have zero interest in improving taxi services
Actually, they do have interests. Many of them would _love_ to switch to Uber or Lyft style phone apps. But it's a regulatory nightmare for them, and they have a great deal of sunk cost in their existing infrastructure. They also have to pay drivers who are idle, and take fares without smart phones.