As someone who participates in said classic car auctions I can assure you that new models do carry a lot of appeal both for older and younger generations. The new Shelby GT 500s for instance are highly sought after. Saleen, Roush, and Foose all make great money tapping into that interest. They extend past just the humble Mustang too. People love their cars and people love the connection that the Internet gives them. In a society becoming increasingly fearful of just about everything the Internet provides a security blanket for those too scared to go outside. For those that are social and do get out, the Internet will continue to provide them with ways to do it more and so it's not going anywhere. While Facebook as a single website may disappear social networking won't go anywhere as it just taps into what people do naturally. It is quite natural for a bunch of people to sit at a bar after work and talk about BS much like they do on Facebook.
Prince is just trying to shock people into thinking he's relevant. The fact that people are still listening means that I guess he still is.
The reality is that you have come to your conclusion based on something other than reality. Further reality is that porn producers online were some of the first people to introduce social media and pioneered true network security. Geeks like their porn and have found thousands of ways to distribute it and secure it with many different business models driving it's success. The very first websites online that made profit were porn sites.
The meme didn't come out of nowhere, it is based in reality. While the porn industry doesn't have control over the development of technology they do act as a good guide for what technology will actually get deployed. Hollywood was having lots of problems going HD due to blemishes showing up that couldn't be easily airbrushed like in print media. It was the porn industry that solved the problem and propelled HD into a true platform. The industry was forced at first to adopt HD-DVD but now license restrictions from Sony have been lifted and BD production is in full swing.
I think you are hard pressed to paint the porn industry as anti-technology as that is simply completely utterly not the case. It's a bit like trying to argue that water isn't wet. They didn't hold off HD because they didn't like the platform, they embraced it fully actually and had to wait until they could solve the problems like anyone else that went HD had to do. Even in my industry which is auctions we ran into a lot of problems going HD that held us back for a few years. We're in no way shape or form anti-technology, we just believe that the technology we deploy should help us do our jobs better and reach more people. When the technology matured enough to become beneficial we went and adopted it.
You've been in Steve's reality distortion field too long. If I didn't know better I'd say this was fark. Are you really trying to say that Windows 2000,XP were clones of OS 8 and 9? Cause MacOS 8 and 9 were atrocious causing instabilities everywhere, they couldn't even handle running out of disk space. The iPad is already a clone of other tablets, specifically the Archos Internet tablet which has been on the market for over a year and ran Windows XP and now runs Windows 7.
You give Apple way too much credit, I'm not saying Microsoft deserves any but you portray a woefully inaccurate picture of the landscape. There is no one genuinely trading a Windows XP machine for an iPad. They target fundamentally different markets and have different strengths and weaknesses. The iPad has cost me many hours of lost time and has cost my users many lost hours of productivity as they encounter it's limitations. It's so heavy I can't imagine wanting to read an entire book on it. It's pretty well limited to consuming content which is precisely what it is marketed as. It makes no attempt at content creation which is why it doesn't even include a camera or SD card slot or USB.
When it comes to mobile phones the iPhone was again nothing of a first besides the multi-touch UI. Apple's strength has been in presentation and marketing which is precisely what Microsoft used to be good at. There's no arguing that the strategy leads to business success at the cost of consumer freedom. Those of us that learned our lesson have headed for Android because we are given back the full abilities of our increasingly useful mobile hardware. I also laugh at you considering the iPhone having a full desktop browser. While it is a good browser the lack of flash makes that statement laughable at best and completely disingenuous at worst. My Android phone in contrast has a more full desktop browser but lacks functionality like adblock that I enjoy in my actual desktop browsing. It also has flash and full java capability unlike the iPhone.
As for an open platform being a malware vector I again laugh at your distorted view of reality. As a Windows mobile user and administrator for the better part of the last decade I can assure you that malware on Windows Mobile is few and far between, so few that I've never encountered it although I've certainly read about duped users but Windows mobile since 5.0 has had centrally managed software and full multi-user controls, things the iPhone even with version 4 still lacks. The iPhone makes a half decent toy but even the camera on my Samsung Moment blows the iPhone out of the water and that was Samsung's first attempt at an Android phone. Android lacks the centrally managed functionality that Windows Mobile and Blackberry has so it still has some catching up to do but development is moving quickly as my phone came with Android 1.5 and now has 2.1 which was a significant jump. Exchange support is great now even supporting remote wipe with 2.1. Of course the locks also work unlike the iPhone as shown by the latest version of Ubuntu.
I find it humorous that you think the government has immunity from screw-ups. You might also note that I didn't like the idea but ultimately when corporations are colluding against the populous a new competitor needs to emerge with better ideals. When no competitor is available then what do you have left? A nationalized drilling of a precious resource backed by the government and accountable to the people.
You also completely missed my statement about the AC's argument methods. AC didn't contribute anything to the argument, that is why it was marked as troll.
I actually explained my stance and recognized that it wasn't the best option but one of the few options that would work.
Unlike your mind, mine is actually open as evidenced by my post. The large oil companies have repeatedly screwed consumers and the environment, why should we help them continue to do that on a wildlife preserve no less? This is why I left the door open for smaller oil companies that have a better track record although I honestly don't know any.
Finally, for a private corporation, of which there are very few oil companies that are private, assets are not routinely frozen. Most oil companies are publicly traded and not beholden to any particular country. BP for instance agreed to a 20 billion dollar escrow which sounds like a lot of money but is only half of their profit for one year. Given that lives in the golf have been destroyed and stand to take decades to recover this is hardly equitable.
Sorry, there are no heads rolling at BP, at least not yet, so I fail to see your argument. Private corporations are no more responsible than government organizations and in many cases even less so since they aren't elected.
It's people like you that lead to lakes dying or even catching on fire. Just because we need a commodity doesn't mean the provider gets to bend us over a barrel and rape our environment. If oil companies didn't show such blatant disregard for the environment I would actually support drilling for oil in ANWR as I think it would stabilize a lot of political pressure in the middle east.
I don't agree with the method AC used to reply I understand where that frustration comes from since no one seems to be doing anything to control the oil industry out of fear of reprisal. With corporate entities wielding such level of control something really does need to change like a nationalized drilling of ANWR. I don't really like that idea but it does seem better than giving the contract to BP who has twice shown what can be viewed as criminal negligence in four years or Shell who spills the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez oil spill every year. There aren't a lot of good options but I wouldn't rule out one of the much smaller oil companies that have a better track record.
While you're assessment of the process is accurate you leave out the fact that the bacteria digesting the oil removes oxygen from the water suffocating everything in the area.
It appears to me at least that dispersant were at best a terrible idea based on wildly inaccurate information. If they had known how much oil was actually spilling rather than hiding those facts then they would not have used dispersant.
It remains to be seen whether BP actually did know that the flow of oil was much greater than their initial reports. From what I've seen of other corporate disasters I wouldn't be surprised if one hand didn't know what the other was doing as I've seen companies with only 50 employees that can't affectively communicate especially sensitive issues.
From what I heard the Nigerian government doesn't even mention domestic spills in press briefings on a regular basis. If the local government doesn't seem to care about the spill then why should Americans care for them? It's their border and if they don't want their environment crushed they should regulate. America learned that lesson when lakes caught on fire but seems to have forgotten that lesson in the last decade.
We can't control the conditions inside a sovereign country's border although I definitely think more attention should be given to the problems in the Niger Delta. With Shell claiming that vandalism and sabotage are the main cause you'd think that would be enough for the U.N. to contribute bodies to protect economic as well as environmental concerns.
Wow... simply wow... Ixtoc 1 would beg to differ. That was in 160 feet of water and it took them 9 months to cap it. I know you wanna blame the liberal environmentalists but that is simply not the reason oil is being moved offshore. You ever wonder why the current rig we are dealing with is licensed in a foreign country? The Marshal Islands is home-base for the revenue which is conveniently not taxed.
Given that Ixtoc 1 happened 30 years ago and they are using the same exact techniques to deal with it I have zero faith that it would have been resolved by now if this spill were in 500 feet or less of water.
It's amazing the depths of rationalization going on in BPs favor. They have a history of bad behavior and somehow you come to the conclusion that it's the environmentalists forcing them to take risks? Just four years ago BP was shown to be negligent in many of the same ways. It appears little has changed from what should have been a dramatic wake-up call. Regulations for offshore drilling exist for a reason and it's not to make drilling near shore expensive.
Why? Are people forgetting that it's a computer? As someone who routinely takes notes in business meetings I can assure you that taking notes on a smaller surface is not a problem, most people don't even use full size notebooks, you won't find any in this office because they take up a lot of room when most meetings you're just writing down action items. Then of course there is the side effect that at least with my Windows 7 tablets that can be taught the user's handwriting, the notes you've taken can then fit on a single page of A4 or legal or whatever form factor you find works best in the hard copy world.
Sorry, at least currently, the 9" form factor is great for carrying around and actually using. The tablets in use around here are 12" and they are more than sufficient, the larger screen size only serves to make the devices more expensive. When you want higher res then it's time to hook up an external monitor, something we have in the office everywhere as we like docking stations and they make it so darned easy. There was a lot of excitement over the iPad here although not from me personally until people starting working with them. They just aren't nearly as useful albeit they are definitely simpler to use. Throwing Windows 7 into a kiosk mode isn't that hard though and since I'm starting to use XenApp and XenDesktop we even have our own app store that is available. I have no idea why people think that an interface needs to be 100% customized for touch when you can easily have both.
I won't be paying for the privilege to be locked into Apple anytime soon. Windows will be around a while but clients now have no problem running any flavor of Linux as the Citrix client makes connecting to their virtual desktop easy.
While your assessment of MS is wildly inaccurate for the better part of the last decade it seems like you fail to realize that a lot of issues with OS X don't even require exploits. SMB authentication uses plaintext by default instance despite the fact that it supports IPSec. Course with each release of OS X SMB support has gotten worse and worse. It still works, random disconnects and thumbnails placed all over my network but it still works.
Also, keep in mind that while Linux as a base can be secure it is often not deployed in a manner which is safe. Look at Apache, there is a high frequency of Apache breaches with website defacing due to poor passwords than there were IIS breaches albeit back in the days of IIS 4 things were pretty bad for Microsoft. With process isolation and a number of new security features IIS 7.5 is pretty rock solid however.
Back to OS X, the base OS is mostly secure but again, it's the applications that aren't. iTunes is a nightmare for security on both Windows and OS X. Sorry, Apple products aren't secure, look at the poor security implemented with the iPhone and the newest release of Ubuntu bypassing the pin. This doesn't happen with either my Android or Windows Mobile phones and I know it doesn't happen with Blackberry phones either.
The bottom line is that platforms are only as secure as management cares to make them. Security and productivity are often at odds in corporate America whereas consumer level products just outright don't care about security to make things "Just Work."
Google's approach makes a lot of sense, they'll have 20,000ish beta testers if they can get them all on ChromeOS. I'm not sure why they gave users the option of OS X given the hardcore lock-in that ensues. Seems like they are just making it harder on themselves. If they don't think ChromeOS is ready the go with a distro that will be similar so you can practice deployment skills and be ready when Chrome is. Instead they'll develop two different deployment strategies to handle both Apple and Linux. There are certainly products that do both but now you have two sets of patches to test and deploy.
Science didn't give us nukes or bioweapons, people did based on the knowledge they gained through the application of the scientific method. Science requires no faith. You can't argue that faith is the same as observation because observation in order to be accepted needs to be reproducible again and again. I haven't seen anything in any religion that is as reproducible as say the interaction of oxygen and hydrogen.
Arguing that Galileo and Copernicus, or Newton are "exactly" like prophets or priests communicating a revelation is laughable as humans inherently question what is around them. No one discovered science or the scientific method, they merely reported their findings and methodologies which others built upon by repeating the tests. It's like saying that humans discovered sex, it is in our nature and quite testable. The great scientists of the past embraced the process that is science but for instance, Einstein still believed in god. He understood their were questions that didn't have a specific answer such as should black people be considered equal to whites or when is abortion okay? Those are not questions which have a scientific answer because they are value judgements. In some cases the plurality rule and all people are deemed equal unless they're Mexican (this irritates me to no end) and in other cases there is no consensus such as with abortion.
Actually I think you miss the point. Science doesn't attempt to answer the questions of morality or ethics as you've mentioned there are other fields of study which explore that very topic. Most people classify science as the act of applying the scientific method. If a question has no distinct answer then the scientific method will not be able to answer it. Science in that respect can give us more data to weigh our decisions such as the whole abortion debate and when to classify life. It's not a question science can answer because the question is subjective. As soon as an egg is fertilized it meets all the scientific classifications for life but many don't see it as distinct life or don't think it should be protected. Science cannot answer that question but it can shed let such as when the fetus can feel pain or verify the process of fertilization to begin wtih.
That is the root of "Scientific Impotence." Many people assume that "scientists" think they can answer all of life's questions with the scientific method and that's simply not true. Science has been perverted by money and politics and so the base questions become flawed because the scientist is trying to reach a conclusion that will support his or her funding organization. This is not true science and also adds to the reason science isn't trusted. Science is not a way of life, it's a process for answering questions that requires constant testing and validation and in other words, more questions.
There are those that take everything too far, don't let the outliers ruin the concept. Science has given a lot to our world and because of that most people won't outright bash the scientific method as a flawed approach unlike a few centuries ago.
Intelligently designed failure I call it. Car companies are getting really good at it as the physics are well understood these days. Even the racks that hold my travel servers fail in an intelligent manner. The wheels all tilt in towards the center so the rack stays upright after it has exceeded it's weight limit due to riding in a truck that lacked airride through. I had 22G rated shock mounts that were torn in half and yet all the hardware was still working when it reached its destination. Gotta love people that test their stuff and plan for it's failure rather than people that way and get surprised.
You suggest this like large companies don't behave stupidly. Look at Microsoft for instance with the whole Expression Media debacle. They had the best digital asset management product available and they did nothing with it. After two years of people asking questions the answer is apparently that MS is selling the wildly successful product to Phase One. It appears that Microsoft only bought Expression Media to develop Silverlight which is used in the rest of their Expression suite. After two years of almost non-existent development the product was still the best and yet MS decided to get rid of it.
Now look at Ford with the Focus. The model they are bringing to the U.S. now is based on the model that has been wildly successful in Europe since 2008, it was a car worth owning then. Why didn't Ford bring it to the U.S. then? I know a lot of us wanted them too. I ended up going with a foreign car because none of the domestics had anything worth owning. Look how badly Chrysler jacked the Charger. At least they did a better job with the Challenger but they priced it out of the sweet spot where it would have competed with the Mustang.
I know people like to blame the UAW, they certainly acted unscrupulously but there was plenty of mismanagement in there too at a time when foreign competition, especially Honda and Toyota, were me attuned to what the U.S. wanted than the domestic companies. They competed fair and square and had a great track record until recently in the case of Toyota.
I prefer the route of the small car that is more than capable of getting out of their way. I've got good suspension and roadside assistance so hitting a shoulder if I have to isn't the end of my world when that giant SUV swerves for no reason apparent reason while braking. This escalation of vehicle size has never made sense to me since SUVs are slow as hell. Even back in my Neon days I had no trouble avoiding them while they were doing some wildly amazing stupid acts including watching a SUV get t-boned at 35mph by a small car and tipping over. It's amazing they achieved such popularity. I guess it's because the station wagon wasn't deemed to be very sexy even though it had the same cargo capacity.
Careful, the Atom N230 with Ion can play 1080p video but it chokes on most of the HD audio stuff. For that you need to go with the N330 dual core Atom. I play bluray movies with that and it works wonderfully. Course I only have one disc because it was on sale so for the most part its just for watching movies I've already ripped.
I didn't have this problem, prior to the upgrade I had trouble printing PDFs too, it would print one page every five minutes, boy was that annoying, not on 10.04 it just works. I did have to reinstall the printer however.
You are correct, if there was documentation or VARs that actually understood the full structure then setting permissions would be easy until you add a new user, then you start all over again.
Then you end up like me where I have a database of stored procedures that lives outside so I can set permissions correctly. It's exceedingly difficult especially since I'm part two man crew that doesn't just do DBA but the sysadmin role as well.
Oracle has half-decent auditing though so you could construct the documentation necessary by simply having accounting do their job. It gets even hairier when you start with reporting packages that expect certain structures and permission sets on top of all of that. Integrations make the whole thing quote a project, not impossible, just exceedingly difficult for a shop like mine where there are only six users. I could see a larger shop going through the effort.
To be honest, it sounds like neither anonymous nor yourself have dealt with ERP systems at a database level. I'll give you a brief overview of why none of that works. First, there are six companies in my database and they do over 100 million in transactions every year. That database is 60,000 tables and there are only six users of the system. The database is only accessible from an accounting or management VLAN for obvious reasons. Going through and figuring out 10s of thousands of tables, triggers, procedures, and functions and granting permissions accordingly is just not going to happen.
I have yet to find an ERP setup that was in my mind sensible. They evolved from flat files and basically just use the database as a filesystem rather than employing the majority of functionality found in most RDBMS. In my current case its even worse as you can't enable multi-master replication of the data since the application does column position math. That means if you add any column for a GUID then the app will break. Fortunately MS developed mirroring which solved a critical high-availability dilemma for me. Now I have two live servers and do an encrypted backup every night. ERP systems are a pain in the ass!
MS isn't at fault for this BS setup, Navision and GP were both terrible even before MS bought them and there is a lot of work to do still before they start behaving like most Microsoft server apps.
That bill only granted amnesty to some people and the scale of the problem was no where near what it is today.
If we weren't busy fighting in two countries thousands of miles away we would have adequate funding for the influx of immigration. The problem as I see it is that no one wants to endure any short term hardship while a new population assimilates. I'm not saying there wouldn't be an impact to our bottom-line for a period of time.
The thing history has shown us though is that the new population can add to our culture and ultimately fuel our economy as opposed to draining it. Right now though, Mexicans are more known for cheaper labor due to current immigration laws. That assumption would go away when they can sue their employer for exploitation which I believe to be the moral high ground.
This idea that everyone around the world would flock to us is interesting too given how a lot of the world dislikes us. I've seen nothing to make me think we'd be flooded much more than we already are. Protectionism lead us into the great depression and now we're using the same attitudes and finding ourselves in another recession. When you make it hard for 20 million people to flourish don't be surprised when they drain your resources.
I do agree that making them citizens isn't necessarily the answer since they violated our laws to get here. Making them legal residents however protected fully by the constitution is a good idea in my mind. The only thing they couldn't do is vote or run for public office. Even that would probably have to change over time though.
The problem is that we have become a nation of poorly thought out laws.
Our current immigration laws violate one of the founding principles of this country. Our Statue of Liberty even has this ideal inscribed on it. Everything you hear said about Mexicans today echoes that of the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, and basically every other ethnic group out there when their mass immigration periods were happening such as the Irish potato famine. Our nation has become so weak that we must limit ourselves? It doesn't make any sense, you say amnesty hasn't worked, to that I say, when was amnesty ever attempted?
I live in Arizona, I know people from a great many different cultures and when you get down to it, we're all basically the same decent people. Yeah, we have our differences but they don't stop us from building a better society together.
The bottom-line is that we have 20 million people in this country that we either need to give a path to citizen or boot them out. Limbo is hurting everyone. I'd say give them a real opportunity to become citizens, those that don't then have no moral ground to stand on and deporting them should be less polarizing for people. Otherwise deporting 20 million people is going to be extremely costly in blood and money.
Actually their annoyed because another company is forcing them increase their development costs. With flash they write one app and dozens of platforms are supported, now they can still do that but they also have to write another app which will only work on Apple devices. This is exactly the fragmentation that kept people from developing for Mac back in the 90s.
Rachel Maddow gets away with a lot of surprising stuff. She's unapologetic and out in the open about her biases which I also like. Fox tries to hide it pretending to be fair and balanced. I'll take honesty anyday. Of course CNN is just a joke of its former self. I don't know if you caught the coverage of the tsunami heading for Hawaii, I have a cousin that lives there so we were checking up on the news while it was happening. I found it better just to go online to get my info and CNN was too busy sensationalizing the issue. That was their chance to shine as I stopped watching CNN years ago, I wanted to give it a try again and now it's gonna be another while.
What makes you think that? If your DNS server doesn't know how to resolve an address it's going to forward to another DNS server, usually your ISPs DNS server in which case they can resolve whatever they want. You'll want a caching service combined with a 3rd party DNS provider that won't hijack your address resolution. That's not particularly hard yet but saying a caching DNS server makes you immune to ISP monkeying is just not true.
The problem with your analogy is that people were denied use of the building. In Childs' case the network was still running, people could VPN in, all was fine except that administrative changes to network topology could not be performed. This is why he was convicted from the sounds. The denial of service was basically a denial of administration. The problem is that everyone screwed up and Childs is the only one getting punished. Why was he allowed to build an entire network without having submitted passwords according to policy? A lot of people weren't doing their job and at least so far, Childs is the only one that saw jail-time over what should have been a civil matter.
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As someone who participates in said classic car auctions I can assure you that new models do carry a lot of appeal both for older and younger generations. The new Shelby GT 500s for instance are highly sought after. Saleen, Roush, and Foose all make great money tapping into that interest. They extend past just the humble Mustang too. People love their cars and people love the connection that the Internet gives them. In a society becoming increasingly fearful of just about everything the Internet provides a security blanket for those too scared to go outside. For those that are social and do get out, the Internet will continue to provide them with ways to do it more and so it's not going anywhere. While Facebook as a single website may disappear social networking won't go anywhere as it just taps into what people do naturally. It is quite natural for a bunch of people to sit at a bar after work and talk about BS much like they do on Facebook.
Prince is just trying to shock people into thinking he's relevant. The fact that people are still listening means that I guess he still is.
The reality is that you have come to your conclusion based on something other than reality. Further reality is that porn producers online were some of the first people to introduce social media and pioneered true network security. Geeks like their porn and have found thousands of ways to distribute it and secure it with many different business models driving it's success. The very first websites online that made profit were porn sites.
The meme didn't come out of nowhere, it is based in reality. While the porn industry doesn't have control over the development of technology they do act as a good guide for what technology will actually get deployed. Hollywood was having lots of problems going HD due to blemishes showing up that couldn't be easily airbrushed like in print media. It was the porn industry that solved the problem and propelled HD into a true platform. The industry was forced at first to adopt HD-DVD but now license restrictions from Sony have been lifted and BD production is in full swing.
I think you are hard pressed to paint the porn industry as anti-technology as that is simply completely utterly not the case. It's a bit like trying to argue that water isn't wet. They didn't hold off HD because they didn't like the platform, they embraced it fully actually and had to wait until they could solve the problems like anyone else that went HD had to do. Even in my industry which is auctions we ran into a lot of problems going HD that held us back for a few years. We're in no way shape or form anti-technology, we just believe that the technology we deploy should help us do our jobs better and reach more people. When the technology matured enough to become beneficial we went and adopted it.
You've been in Steve's reality distortion field too long. If I didn't know better I'd say this was fark. Are you really trying to say that Windows 2000,XP were clones of OS 8 and 9? Cause MacOS 8 and 9 were atrocious causing instabilities everywhere, they couldn't even handle running out of disk space. The iPad is already a clone of other tablets, specifically the Archos Internet tablet which has been on the market for over a year and ran Windows XP and now runs Windows 7.
You give Apple way too much credit, I'm not saying Microsoft deserves any but you portray a woefully inaccurate picture of the landscape. There is no one genuinely trading a Windows XP machine for an iPad. They target fundamentally different markets and have different strengths and weaknesses. The iPad has cost me many hours of lost time and has cost my users many lost hours of productivity as they encounter it's limitations. It's so heavy I can't imagine wanting to read an entire book on it. It's pretty well limited to consuming content which is precisely what it is marketed as. It makes no attempt at content creation which is why it doesn't even include a camera or SD card slot or USB.
When it comes to mobile phones the iPhone was again nothing of a first besides the multi-touch UI. Apple's strength has been in presentation and marketing which is precisely what Microsoft used to be good at. There's no arguing that the strategy leads to business success at the cost of consumer freedom. Those of us that learned our lesson have headed for Android because we are given back the full abilities of our increasingly useful mobile hardware. I also laugh at you considering the iPhone having a full desktop browser. While it is a good browser the lack of flash makes that statement laughable at best and completely disingenuous at worst. My Android phone in contrast has a more full desktop browser but lacks functionality like adblock that I enjoy in my actual desktop browsing. It also has flash and full java capability unlike the iPhone.
As for an open platform being a malware vector I again laugh at your distorted view of reality. As a Windows mobile user and administrator for the better part of the last decade I can assure you that malware on Windows Mobile is few and far between, so few that I've never encountered it although I've certainly read about duped users but Windows mobile since 5.0 has had centrally managed software and full multi-user controls, things the iPhone even with version 4 still lacks. The iPhone makes a half decent toy but even the camera on my Samsung Moment blows the iPhone out of the water and that was Samsung's first attempt at an Android phone. Android lacks the centrally managed functionality that Windows Mobile and Blackberry has so it still has some catching up to do but development is moving quickly as my phone came with Android 1.5 and now has 2.1 which was a significant jump. Exchange support is great now even supporting remote wipe with 2.1. Of course the locks also work unlike the iPhone as shown by the latest version of Ubuntu.
I find it humorous that you think the government has immunity from screw-ups. You might also note that I didn't like the idea but ultimately when corporations are colluding against the populous a new competitor needs to emerge with better ideals. When no competitor is available then what do you have left? A nationalized drilling of a precious resource backed by the government and accountable to the people.
You also completely missed my statement about the AC's argument methods. AC didn't contribute anything to the argument, that is why it was marked as troll.
I actually explained my stance and recognized that it wasn't the best option but one of the few options that would work.
Unlike your mind, mine is actually open as evidenced by my post. The large oil companies have repeatedly screwed consumers and the environment, why should we help them continue to do that on a wildlife preserve no less? This is why I left the door open for smaller oil companies that have a better track record although I honestly don't know any.
Finally, for a private corporation, of which there are very few oil companies that are private, assets are not routinely frozen. Most oil companies are publicly traded and not beholden to any particular country. BP for instance agreed to a 20 billion dollar escrow which sounds like a lot of money but is only half of their profit for one year. Given that lives in the golf have been destroyed and stand to take decades to recover this is hardly equitable.
Sorry, there are no heads rolling at BP, at least not yet, so I fail to see your argument. Private corporations are no more responsible than government organizations and in many cases even less so since they aren't elected.
It's people like you that lead to lakes dying or even catching on fire. Just because we need a commodity doesn't mean the provider gets to bend us over a barrel and rape our environment. If oil companies didn't show such blatant disregard for the environment I would actually support drilling for oil in ANWR as I think it would stabilize a lot of political pressure in the middle east.
I don't agree with the method AC used to reply I understand where that frustration comes from since no one seems to be doing anything to control the oil industry out of fear of reprisal. With corporate entities wielding such level of control something really does need to change like a nationalized drilling of ANWR. I don't really like that idea but it does seem better than giving the contract to BP who has twice shown what can be viewed as criminal negligence in four years or Shell who spills the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez oil spill every year. There aren't a lot of good options but I wouldn't rule out one of the much smaller oil companies that have a better track record.
While you're assessment of the process is accurate you leave out the fact that the bacteria digesting the oil removes oxygen from the water suffocating everything in the area.
It appears to me at least that dispersant were at best a terrible idea based on wildly inaccurate information. If they had known how much oil was actually spilling rather than hiding those facts then they would not have used dispersant.
It remains to be seen whether BP actually did know that the flow of oil was much greater than their initial reports. From what I've seen of other corporate disasters I wouldn't be surprised if one hand didn't know what the other was doing as I've seen companies with only 50 employees that can't affectively communicate especially sensitive issues.
From what I heard the Nigerian government doesn't even mention domestic spills in press briefings on a regular basis. If the local government doesn't seem to care about the spill then why should Americans care for them? It's their border and if they don't want their environment crushed they should regulate. America learned that lesson when lakes caught on fire but seems to have forgotten that lesson in the last decade.
We can't control the conditions inside a sovereign country's border although I definitely think more attention should be given to the problems in the Niger Delta. With Shell claiming that vandalism and sabotage are the main cause you'd think that would be enough for the U.N. to contribute bodies to protect economic as well as environmental concerns.
Wow... simply wow... Ixtoc 1 would beg to differ. That was in 160 feet of water and it took them 9 months to cap it. I know you wanna blame the liberal environmentalists but that is simply not the reason oil is being moved offshore. You ever wonder why the current rig we are dealing with is licensed in a foreign country? The Marshal Islands is home-base for the revenue which is conveniently not taxed.
Given that Ixtoc 1 happened 30 years ago and they are using the same exact techniques to deal with it I have zero faith that it would have been resolved by now if this spill were in 500 feet or less of water.
It's amazing the depths of rationalization going on in BPs favor. They have a history of bad behavior and somehow you come to the conclusion that it's the environmentalists forcing them to take risks? Just four years ago BP was shown to be negligent in many of the same ways. It appears little has changed from what should have been a dramatic wake-up call. Regulations for offshore drilling exist for a reason and it's not to make drilling near shore expensive.
Why? Are people forgetting that it's a computer? As someone who routinely takes notes in business meetings I can assure you that taking notes on a smaller surface is not a problem, most people don't even use full size notebooks, you won't find any in this office because they take up a lot of room when most meetings you're just writing down action items. Then of course there is the side effect that at least with my Windows 7 tablets that can be taught the user's handwriting, the notes you've taken can then fit on a single page of A4 or legal or whatever form factor you find works best in the hard copy world.
Sorry, at least currently, the 9" form factor is great for carrying around and actually using. The tablets in use around here are 12" and they are more than sufficient, the larger screen size only serves to make the devices more expensive. When you want higher res then it's time to hook up an external monitor, something we have in the office everywhere as we like docking stations and they make it so darned easy. There was a lot of excitement over the iPad here although not from me personally until people starting working with them. They just aren't nearly as useful albeit they are definitely simpler to use. Throwing Windows 7 into a kiosk mode isn't that hard though and since I'm starting to use XenApp and XenDesktop we even have our own app store that is available. I have no idea why people think that an interface needs to be 100% customized for touch when you can easily have both.
I won't be paying for the privilege to be locked into Apple anytime soon. Windows will be around a while but clients now have no problem running any flavor of Linux as the Citrix client makes connecting to their virtual desktop easy.
While your assessment of MS is wildly inaccurate for the better part of the last decade it seems like you fail to realize that a lot of issues with OS X don't even require exploits. SMB authentication uses plaintext by default instance despite the fact that it supports IPSec. Course with each release of OS X SMB support has gotten worse and worse. It still works, random disconnects and thumbnails placed all over my network but it still works.
Also, keep in mind that while Linux as a base can be secure it is often not deployed in a manner which is safe. Look at Apache, there is a high frequency of Apache breaches with website defacing due to poor passwords than there were IIS breaches albeit back in the days of IIS 4 things were pretty bad for Microsoft. With process isolation and a number of new security features IIS 7.5 is pretty rock solid however.
Back to OS X, the base OS is mostly secure but again, it's the applications that aren't. iTunes is a nightmare for security on both Windows and OS X. Sorry, Apple products aren't secure, look at the poor security implemented with the iPhone and the newest release of Ubuntu bypassing the pin. This doesn't happen with either my Android or Windows Mobile phones and I know it doesn't happen with Blackberry phones either.
The bottom line is that platforms are only as secure as management cares to make them. Security and productivity are often at odds in corporate America whereas consumer level products just outright don't care about security to make things "Just Work."
Google's approach makes a lot of sense, they'll have 20,000ish beta testers if they can get them all on ChromeOS. I'm not sure why they gave users the option of OS X given the hardcore lock-in that ensues. Seems like they are just making it harder on themselves. If they don't think ChromeOS is ready the go with a distro that will be similar so you can practice deployment skills and be ready when Chrome is. Instead they'll develop two different deployment strategies to handle both Apple and Linux. There are certainly products that do both but now you have two sets of patches to test and deploy.
Science didn't give us nukes or bioweapons, people did based on the knowledge they gained through the application of the scientific method. Science requires no faith. You can't argue that faith is the same as observation because observation in order to be accepted needs to be reproducible again and again. I haven't seen anything in any religion that is as reproducible as say the interaction of oxygen and hydrogen.
Arguing that Galileo and Copernicus, or Newton are "exactly" like prophets or priests communicating a revelation is laughable as humans inherently question what is around them. No one discovered science or the scientific method, they merely reported their findings and methodologies which others built upon by repeating the tests. It's like saying that humans discovered sex, it is in our nature and quite testable. The great scientists of the past embraced the process that is science but for instance, Einstein still believed in god. He understood their were questions that didn't have a specific answer such as should black people be considered equal to whites or when is abortion okay? Those are not questions which have a scientific answer because they are value judgements. In some cases the plurality rule and all people are deemed equal unless they're Mexican (this irritates me to no end) and in other cases there is no consensus such as with abortion.
Actually I think you miss the point. Science doesn't attempt to answer the questions of morality or ethics as you've mentioned there are other fields of study which explore that very topic. Most people classify science as the act of applying the scientific method. If a question has no distinct answer then the scientific method will not be able to answer it. Science in that respect can give us more data to weigh our decisions such as the whole abortion debate and when to classify life. It's not a question science can answer because the question is subjective. As soon as an egg is fertilized it meets all the scientific classifications for life but many don't see it as distinct life or don't think it should be protected. Science cannot answer that question but it can shed let such as when the fetus can feel pain or verify the process of fertilization to begin wtih.
That is the root of "Scientific Impotence." Many people assume that "scientists" think they can answer all of life's questions with the scientific method and that's simply not true. Science has been perverted by money and politics and so the base questions become flawed because the scientist is trying to reach a conclusion that will support his or her funding organization. This is not true science and also adds to the reason science isn't trusted. Science is not a way of life, it's a process for answering questions that requires constant testing and validation and in other words, more questions.
There are those that take everything too far, don't let the outliers ruin the concept. Science has given a lot to our world and because of that most people won't outright bash the scientific method as a flawed approach unlike a few centuries ago.
Intelligently designed failure I call it. Car companies are getting really good at it as the physics are well understood these days. Even the racks that hold my travel servers fail in an intelligent manner. The wheels all tilt in towards the center so the rack stays upright after it has exceeded it's weight limit due to riding in a truck that lacked airride through. I had 22G rated shock mounts that were torn in half and yet all the hardware was still working when it reached its destination. Gotta love people that test their stuff and plan for it's failure rather than people that way and get surprised.
You suggest this like large companies don't behave stupidly. Look at Microsoft for instance with the whole Expression Media debacle. They had the best digital asset management product available and they did nothing with it. After two years of people asking questions the answer is apparently that MS is selling the wildly successful product to Phase One. It appears that Microsoft only bought Expression Media to develop Silverlight which is used in the rest of their Expression suite. After two years of almost non-existent development the product was still the best and yet MS decided to get rid of it.
Now look at Ford with the Focus. The model they are bringing to the U.S. now is based on the model that has been wildly successful in Europe since 2008, it was a car worth owning then. Why didn't Ford bring it to the U.S. then? I know a lot of us wanted them too. I ended up going with a foreign car because none of the domestics had anything worth owning. Look how badly Chrysler jacked the Charger. At least they did a better job with the Challenger but they priced it out of the sweet spot where it would have competed with the Mustang.
I know people like to blame the UAW, they certainly acted unscrupulously but there was plenty of mismanagement in there too at a time when foreign competition, especially Honda and Toyota, were me attuned to what the U.S. wanted than the domestic companies. They competed fair and square and had a great track record until recently in the case of Toyota.
I prefer the route of the small car that is more than capable of getting out of their way. I've got good suspension and roadside assistance so hitting a shoulder if I have to isn't the end of my world when that giant SUV swerves for no reason apparent reason while braking. This escalation of vehicle size has never made sense to me since SUVs are slow as hell. Even back in my Neon days I had no trouble avoiding them while they were doing some wildly amazing stupid acts including watching a SUV get t-boned at 35mph by a small car and tipping over. It's amazing they achieved such popularity. I guess it's because the station wagon wasn't deemed to be very sexy even though it had the same cargo capacity.
Careful, the Atom N230 with Ion can play 1080p video but it chokes on most of the HD audio stuff. For that you need to go with the N330 dual core Atom. I play bluray movies with that and it works wonderfully. Course I only have one disc because it was on sale so for the most part its just for watching movies I've already ripped.
I didn't have this problem, prior to the upgrade I had trouble printing PDFs too, it would print one page every five minutes, boy was that annoying, not on 10.04 it just works. I did have to reinstall the printer however.
You are correct, if there was documentation or VARs that actually understood the full structure then setting permissions would be easy until you add a new user, then you start all over again.
Then you end up like me where I have a database of stored procedures that lives outside so I can set permissions correctly. It's exceedingly difficult especially since I'm part two man crew that doesn't just do DBA but the sysadmin role as well.
Oracle has half-decent auditing though so you could construct the documentation necessary by simply having accounting do their job. It gets even hairier when you start with reporting packages that expect certain structures and permission sets on top of all of that. Integrations make the whole thing quote a project, not impossible, just exceedingly difficult for a shop like mine where there are only six users. I could see a larger shop going through the effort.
To be honest, it sounds like neither anonymous nor yourself have dealt with ERP systems at a database level. I'll give you a brief overview of why none of that works. First, there are six companies in my database and they do over 100 million in transactions every year. That database is 60,000 tables and there are only six users of the system. The database is only accessible from an accounting or management VLAN for obvious reasons. Going through and figuring out 10s of thousands of tables, triggers, procedures, and functions and granting permissions accordingly is just not going to happen.
I have yet to find an ERP setup that was in my mind sensible. They evolved from flat files and basically just use the database as a filesystem rather than employing the majority of functionality found in most RDBMS. In my current case its even worse as you can't enable multi-master replication of the data since the application does column position math. That means if you add any column for a GUID then the app will break. Fortunately MS developed mirroring which solved a critical high-availability dilemma for me. Now I have two live servers and do an encrypted backup every night. ERP systems are a pain in the ass!
MS isn't at fault for this BS setup, Navision and GP were both terrible even before MS bought them and there is a lot of work to do still before they start behaving like most Microsoft server apps.
That bill only granted amnesty to some people and the scale of the problem was no where near what it is today.
If we weren't busy fighting in two countries thousands of miles away we would have adequate funding for the influx of immigration. The problem as I see it is that no one wants to endure any short term hardship while a new population assimilates. I'm not saying there wouldn't be an impact to our bottom-line for a period of time.
The thing history has shown us though is that the new population can add to our culture and ultimately fuel our economy as opposed to draining it. Right now though, Mexicans are more known for cheaper labor due to current immigration laws. That assumption would go away when they can sue their employer for exploitation which I believe to be the moral high ground.
This idea that everyone around the world would flock to us is interesting too given how a lot of the world dislikes us. I've seen nothing to make me think we'd be flooded much more than we already are. Protectionism lead us into the great depression and now we're using the same attitudes and finding ourselves in another recession. When you make it hard for 20 million people to flourish don't be surprised when they drain your resources.
I do agree that making them citizens isn't necessarily the answer since they violated our laws to get here. Making them legal residents however protected fully by the constitution is a good idea in my mind. The only thing they couldn't do is vote or run for public office. Even that would probably have to change over time though.
The problem is that we have become a nation of poorly thought out laws.
Our current immigration laws violate one of the founding principles of this country. Our Statue of Liberty even has this ideal inscribed on it. Everything you hear said about Mexicans today echoes that of the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, and basically every other ethnic group out there when their mass immigration periods were happening such as the Irish potato famine. Our nation has become so weak that we must limit ourselves? It doesn't make any sense, you say amnesty hasn't worked, to that I say, when was amnesty ever attempted?
I live in Arizona, I know people from a great many different cultures and when you get down to it, we're all basically the same decent people. Yeah, we have our differences but they don't stop us from building a better society together.
The bottom-line is that we have 20 million people in this country that we either need to give a path to citizen or boot them out. Limbo is hurting everyone. I'd say give them a real opportunity to become citizens, those that don't then have no moral ground to stand on and deporting them should be less polarizing for people. Otherwise deporting 20 million people is going to be extremely costly in blood and money.
Actually their annoyed because another company is forcing them increase their development costs. With flash they write one app and dozens of platforms are supported, now they can still do that but they also have to write another app which will only work on Apple devices. This is exactly the fragmentation that kept people from developing for Mac back in the 90s.
Rachel Maddow gets away with a lot of surprising stuff. She's unapologetic and out in the open about her biases which I also like. Fox tries to hide it pretending to be fair and balanced. I'll take honesty anyday. Of course CNN is just a joke of its former self. I don't know if you caught the coverage of the tsunami heading for Hawaii, I have a cousin that lives there so we were checking up on the news while it was happening. I found it better just to go online to get my info and CNN was too busy sensationalizing the issue. That was their chance to shine as I stopped watching CNN years ago, I wanted to give it a try again and now it's gonna be another while.
What makes you think that? If your DNS server doesn't know how to resolve an address it's going to forward to another DNS server, usually your ISPs DNS server in which case they can resolve whatever they want. You'll want a caching service combined with a 3rd party DNS provider that won't hijack your address resolution. That's not particularly hard yet but saying a caching DNS server makes you immune to ISP monkeying is just not true.
The problem with your analogy is that people were denied use of the building. In Childs' case the network was still running, people could VPN in, all was fine except that administrative changes to network topology could not be performed. This is why he was convicted from the sounds. The denial of service was basically a denial of administration. The problem is that everyone screwed up and Childs is the only one getting punished. Why was he allowed to build an entire network without having submitted passwords according to policy? A lot of people weren't doing their job and at least so far, Childs is the only one that saw jail-time over what should have been a civil matter.