... from what I can tell, the Atlantic is pretty much the cleanest ocean left.
I think they're all pretty dirty and polluted with plastic. The Atlantic has the Sargasso Sea, AKA the Great Atlantic Garbage Dump. Whereas the recently expanded USA marine reserve in the Pacific is considered one of the most pristine regions of all the oceans... for now.
You can't win. Hey, but good news is good news, I'll take it.
Well, that's not the point and unless you went to UNH in the early 90's, I doubt you know the content of my *undergraduate* curriculum (ie, no classes on Paleozoic marine life). I do know the answers, although for the most part I can only offer educated guesses of the extemporaneous and non-succinct variety. My point is that articles like this gloss over or avoid entirely some of the underlying principles involved and this leads many people to dismiss the headline which in this case translates to "More methane may be escaping into the environment as a consequence of global warming". Enter the fart jokes.
Sure, science folk and reasonably educated people like me don't require deep background to form opinions, but most people do. Since it's rarely provided, lay readers retreat to their default stance which, more often than not, is to ignore it and possibly support public figures who promote lassiez-faire exploitation of natural resources.
Many of the responses to my original question would have been nice additions to the OL.
... that I think naturally come up with stories like this. Despite my science background from college (marine bio, actually, but I never use it), I find it hard to answer questions that true science novices might have such as:
(o) Why is methane bad? It's one of the gases that get trapped in the atmosphere and prevent light from escaping, which warms the planet. Um... I think.
(o) If it floats ups into the upper atmosphere, doesn't it just float into space? Uh.... no. Gravity.... I think.
(o) So those trapped gases must have been in the air at some point, millions of years ago, and then planet did just fine. So what's there to worry about? Uh.....
Sounds great it my brain, but when I vocalize it I realize how easy it is for uninitiated to suspect bullshit and assume there isn't anything to worry about, that this is just a ploy to funnel more money into the coffers of the science research community. Very frustrating.
Why should Americans have to change their habits? I notice that you aren't suggesting that Not-Americans call soccer "association football". Typical Not-American high-falootinry - you guys think you're everybody.
Re:Can Oscar's be given posthumously?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1
Because Heath Ledger deserves one.
End of story.
Sorry to be an Oscar party pooper, but that's ridiculous. I'm not saying that he doesn't deserve to be considered - I enjoyed his performance too - but a posthumous presentation shouldn't be preordained any more that a regular humous one. There are many performances yet to be considered. It's July. Seven months to go.
And what about Aaron Eckhart? In many ways, his performance was much more complex and dramatic.
Randomizing UDP source ports does not solve the problem, it only makes it more difficult to impersonate the responding DNS server. Secure DNS makes this kind of impersonation impossible, or at least allows us to bask in the warm glow of impossible.
The DJB vs BIND thing is an illusion. Whatever everyone agrees is the best implementation should win and I doubt that Paul Vixie or anyone else at ISC thinks differently.
But it has become abundantly clear to me that DJB and his minions (of which I assume you are one) have failed to matter in most ways, not because of your ideas, but because of the brusque, immature manner in which those ideas are submitted for consideration, outside the standards committees which have served the Internet well for 30 years.
I've seen a lot of good responses here, covering several different strategies, attitudes/perspectives, and of course, our favorite products. Let me add another dimension: user education.
1. Create an FAQ that covers all the big boogie monsters in spam: false positives, false negatives, spam backscatter, MAIL FROMs are 100% forgeable and offer no guarantee of identity, outright blocking by rarely works anymore, and above all, no spam system -anywhere- is perfect.
2. Provide your users with a meaningful way to report false positives and negatives. You don't have to provide guarantees, just let them know that they're being heard.
3. This is the most important one: Show them the statistics. If you're blocking 2,000 a day, illustrate! This can be particularly dramatic in a large organization like mine, where 95% of SMTP connections/messages get dropped. A nice little bar graph puts little miss bitchy-face's 1-2 spams per day in stark perspective.
On the other hand, old draftsmen will be all dead soon, so this perception of natural will go away.
One day, the old draftsman will be the computer users who cut their teeth using programs like ed, vi, emacs, pine, and even old Word Perfect 5.1. I've spent the last 20 years searching for keyboard shortcuts for every application that I depend on. It's actually hard for me use more "natural" approaches like multi-touch.
But it's probably the way to go. As much as I like vi, its command/mode syntax is basically an abomination.
You are mistaken. Recently, my 55-year-old aunt, a Boston College Law School grad, called me to ask me how to copy a URL link into an e-mail message. Now, she used *none* of those words in her request, so it took me some time to translate.
The answer to her question was simple of course (on a Mac: CMD-L, CMD-C, CMD-`, CMD-V). But my instructions fell on deaf ears for two reasons: one, she didn't understand how to perform keystroke combinations and two, she didn't understand that her e-mail client was just another Web browser window.
Multi-touch is for people like my aunt, people whose brains lack the circuitry to utilize arbitrary, abstract tools (even old Mr. QWERTY) to perform otherwise objective tasks.
This may work for a time, but if you don't at least make some worthy attempt to document what you do, the process will be forced on you -- or around you -- by an impatient management. Better, more transparent processes will be built up in nearby offices, staffed by new people, and then one day a neatly dressed contractor will walk into your dark mossy cave and tell you what the new procedures are, perhaps in a colorfully tabbed binder, leaving you with the unpleasant task of climbing onto the back of somebody else's shiny new conveyance. Or, you could just walk out the door and hop on the next turnip truck that passes by.
You may not be replaced. But you'll be made irrelevant.
No matter though, these articles are just springboards for people to complain about their companies IT department. Enjoy the bitchfest.
Hear, hear. Mod +2 Insightful I would also add that it's impossible to generalize IT vs Management without breaking outside of the context of a single organizational situation.
First, get the obvious out of the way: There are bad IT departments, there are bad managers, and other times there are both or neither. Duh. It's all a question of mission.
Second, find the guys who know how to articulate and evaluate the technical mission: these are your managers.
Third, find the guys who know how to implement the technical mission: IT.
Sure, there are things in between, angles and dangles, but who cares? If you want to generalize, generalize. The rest, it seems to me, is failings of hiring and personalities (the aforementioned "bitchfest"), and are too specific to be useful to the kinds of discussion articles such as these coyly elicit.
Before this becomes a big GOP-bashing party, let's not be so tunnel-visioned to believe that this could never happen on the blue side of the aisle.
Um, IRRELEVANT. I'm sure you think your contribution to this discussion was made in the spirit of grand perspective, but look closely at what you're saying: we, the GOP-bashing Slashdot corps, should soften our rhetoric and temper our judgement because Democrats could POTENTIALLY violate the Act as well. Your honor, before we go forward with this impeachment proceeding, let's not pretend that Ken Star could never have had his pole smoked by an intern as well. We all could have! I mean, really. Let's think about that. REALLY hard. A veritable oralpalooza across this nation could be going on right now. And if that's true, than can the President really be guilty of anything except... participating? Is that a crime now? Taking part? Your Honor... I implore you! End this farce and set this man free before you realize I am completely full of bat guano.
I demanded a change in government back in 2004,four years after I thought I had participated in the election of Al Gore. But does this supposed scandal really rise to the severity of other Bush atrocities, like the suppression of scientific opinion in government agencies; suppression of contrary intelligence reports during the run-up to the Iraq War, evidence that might have prevented the formation of the coalition of the willing or the passage of Congress's war authorization; Abu Graib; the NSA wiretapping tyranny?
So far, all we seem to have *here* is an inelegant attempt to circumvent the -- what's it? -- the Presidential Records Act? So e-mail offers an easier way to communicate and thus more communication. Unlike phone calls, however, or hushed conversations in the Hart Senate building, this communication is digitally stored by the sender, the recipient, and potentially intervening mail relay servers. More recorded information means more spotlights on the machinery of government, a net plus for the American people. To the extent that the Bushies appeared to have tried to push some of this surplus info aside via the clumsy use/misuse of RNC accounts, this investigation is warranted and, if malfeasance there be, its practioners should feel the searing shame of a shaking finger and perhaps a stern tsk-tsk-tsk.
But it ain't that big 'a deal. Pretty freaking small potatoes, in my humble O. Now lets see those 2001 oil company meeting minutes, Cheney, what say?
Er.. aren't there some stories that transcend the typical boundaries of the Slashdot? What did we do on 9/11? The fallout of this event will affect student civil liberties all over America. Once the "we gotta do *something*" people take over, it's going to get spectacularly ugly. After they find his My Space page, this might even become a YRO issue. This is *very* relevant.
We're going to see the demise of a lot of beatnick/hippy-era authors, the frickin geniuses who defined absurdism as a novel, in the next ten years. We lost Joseph Heller in '99 (Catch-22). The last living Illuminatus dude just died, I think, in penury. Mailer Lives, but how much longer? DeLillo is getting old... who else should we add to the death watch? Phillip Roth.... still stuck in time.
Dangit, you beat me to it. It is definitely the severed, shrunken head of the Pinnochio robot Johnny-5. Mod parent up please. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_5.
The proper thing to do here is:
- Ask myspace to take the page down
- Secretly install keyloggers in the school computers, get the culprit's myspace account, and put furry porn on it Possibly the most reasonable, proportional suggestion I've seen so far. We're definitely losing our focus here. Cyber-bullying is not a new problem, it's an old problem in new XXclothesXX skin; translucent, slippery skin. But as worthy as that is of discussion, the salient point of TFA is that the principal doesn't have much in the way of skin himself. This dude is about as sly as an angry goat.
NoScript breaks Digg thumbs on my Mac but not my Ubuntu. Weird. Fortunately, I don't really care. Now if it broke Slashdottit.... well, I'd lead the the mob to their headquarters myself.
Seriously, though...if I need a particle accelerator to push a current through plastic, is it really practical? Make it work on an AA and we'll start talking quantity.
No where in TRA does it say that you need a particle accelerator. This is a technology in its infancy -- the inventor even says that it will be several years it's mature enough to be marketable; ie, more experimentation will be required before Best Buy starts palcing orders. Obviously this won't go anywhere if it's cost-prohibitive or otherwise impractical. Assuming that this lady's results are genuine, what we have here is a new branch in plastics and , um... conducto-dynamics... or however you categorize it. IANAPhysicist. Good news in any case.
Hey! Troll? What the hell, man... I get modded "troll" for goofing around in a forum about a beer-throwing fridge? Good grief. My first troll mod... damn.
Slashdot Mirror
What corporations control Python?
... from what I can tell, the Atlantic is pretty much the cleanest ocean left.
I think they're all pretty dirty and polluted with plastic. The Atlantic has the Sargasso Sea, AKA the Great Atlantic Garbage Dump. Whereas the recently expanded USA marine reserve in the Pacific is considered one of the most pristine regions of all the oceans... for now.
You can't win. Hey, but good news is good news, I'll take it.
Well, that's not the point and unless you went to UNH in the early 90's, I doubt you know the content of my *undergraduate* curriculum (ie, no classes on Paleozoic marine life). I do know the answers, although for the most part I can only offer educated guesses of the extemporaneous and non-succinct variety. My point is that articles like this gloss over or avoid entirely some of the underlying principles involved and this leads many people to dismiss the headline which in this case translates to "More methane may be escaping into the environment as a consequence of global warming". Enter the fart jokes.
Sure, science folk and reasonably educated people like me don't require deep background to form opinions, but most people do. Since it's rarely provided, lay readers retreat to their default stance which, more often than not, is to ignore it and possibly support public figures who promote lassiez-faire exploitation of natural resources.
Many of the responses to my original question would have been nice additions to the OL.
... that I think naturally come up with stories like this. Despite my science background from college (marine bio, actually, but I never use it), I find it hard to answer questions that true science novices might have such as:
(o) Why is methane bad? It's one of the gases that get trapped in the atmosphere and prevent light from escaping, which warms the planet. Um... I think.
(o) If it floats ups into the upper atmosphere, doesn't it just float into space? Uh.... no. Gravity.... I think.
(o) So those trapped gases must have been in the air at some point, millions of years ago, and then planet did just fine. So what's there to worry about? Uh.....
Sounds great it my brain, but when I vocalize it I realize how easy it is for uninitiated to suspect bullshit and assume there isn't anything to worry about, that this is just a ploy to funnel more money into the coffers of the science research community. Very frustrating.
I have not noticed that. I'm guessing that your observation is derived from anecdotal, possibly apocryphal audits.
Let the grumpy-pants anarchy-baiters grumble. The system can always use more disorder, whatever its present condition.
The was a young lad named Mork
Who was always a'horking his bork
His father said "Mork
Quit horking yer bork
Your Bork's for to Fork not Hork".
[apologies to Durcan and his gherkin]
Why should Americans have to change their habits? I notice that you aren't suggesting that Not-Americans call soccer "association football". Typical Not-American high-falootinry - you guys think you're everybody.
Because Heath Ledger deserves one.
End of story.
Sorry to be an Oscar party pooper, but that's ridiculous. I'm not saying that he doesn't deserve to be considered - I enjoyed his performance too - but a posthumous presentation shouldn't be preordained any more that a regular humous one. There are many performances yet to be considered. It's July. Seven months to go.
And what about Aaron Eckhart? In many ways, his performance was much more complex and dramatic.
Randomizing UDP source ports does not solve the problem, it only makes it more difficult to impersonate the responding DNS server. Secure DNS makes this kind of impersonation impossible, or at least allows us to bask in the warm glow of impossible.
The DJB vs BIND thing is an illusion. Whatever everyone agrees is the best implementation should win and I doubt that Paul Vixie or anyone else at ISC thinks differently.
But it has become abundantly clear to me that DJB and his minions (of which I assume you are one) have failed to matter in most ways, not because of your ideas, but because of the brusque, immature manner in which those ideas are submitted for consideration, outside the standards committees which have served the Internet well for 30 years.
Here's hoping this venture doesn't one day inspire an heir of Keith Moon to name another up-and-coming English rock band.
I've seen a lot of good responses here, covering several different strategies, attitudes/perspectives, and of course, our favorite products. Let me add another dimension: user education.
1. Create an FAQ that covers all the big boogie monsters in spam: false positives, false negatives, spam backscatter, MAIL FROMs are 100% forgeable and offer no guarantee of identity, outright blocking by rarely works anymore, and above all, no spam system -anywhere- is perfect.
2. Provide your users with a meaningful way to report false positives and negatives. You don't have to provide guarantees, just let them know that they're being heard.
3. This is the most important one: Show them the statistics. If you're blocking 2,000 a day, illustrate! This can be particularly dramatic in a large organization like mine, where 95% of SMTP connections/messages get dropped. A nice little bar graph puts little miss bitchy-face's 1-2 spams per day in stark perspective.
Spam sucks the big one, boy howdy. Cheers!
One day, the old draftsman will be the computer users who cut their teeth using programs like ed, vi, emacs, pine, and even old Word Perfect 5.1. I've spent the last 20 years searching for keyboard shortcuts for every application that I depend on. It's actually hard for me use more "natural" approaches like multi-touch.
But it's probably the way to go. As much as I like vi, its command/mode syntax is basically an abomination.
You are mistaken. Recently, my 55-year-old aunt, a Boston College Law School grad, called me to ask me how to copy a URL link into an e-mail message. Now, she used *none* of those words in her request, so it took me some time to translate.
The answer to her question was simple of course (on a Mac: CMD-L, CMD-C, CMD-`, CMD-V). But my instructions fell on deaf ears for two reasons: one, she didn't understand how to perform keystroke combinations and two, she didn't understand that her e-mail client was just another Web browser window.
Multi-touch is for people like my aunt, people whose brains lack the circuitry to utilize arbitrary, abstract tools (even old Mr. QWERTY) to perform otherwise objective tasks.
This may work for a time, but if you don't at least make some worthy attempt to document what you do, the process will be forced on you -- or around you -- by an impatient management. Better, more transparent processes will be built up in nearby offices, staffed by new people, and then one day a neatly dressed contractor will walk into your dark mossy cave and tell you what the new procedures are, perhaps in a colorfully tabbed binder, leaving you with the unpleasant task of climbing onto the back of somebody else's shiny new conveyance. Or, you could just walk out the door and hop on the next turnip truck that passes by.
You may not be replaced. But you'll be made irrelevant.
First, get the obvious out of the way: There are bad IT departments, there are bad managers, and other times there are both or neither. Duh. It's all a question of mission.
Second, find the guys who know how to articulate and evaluate the technical mission: these are your managers.
Third, find the guys who know how to implement the technical mission: IT.
Sure, there are things in between, angles and dangles, but who cares? If you want to generalize, generalize. The rest, it seems to me, is failings of hiring and personalities (the aforementioned "bitchfest"), and are too specific to be useful to the kinds of discussion articles such as these coyly elicit.
Um, IRRELEVANT. I'm sure you think your contribution to this discussion was made in the spirit of grand perspective, but look closely at what you're saying: we, the GOP-bashing Slashdot corps, should soften our rhetoric and temper our judgement because Democrats could POTENTIALLY violate the Act as well. Your honor, before we go forward with this impeachment proceeding, let's not pretend that Ken Star could never have had his pole smoked by an intern as well. We all could have! I mean, really. Let's think about that. REALLY hard. A veritable oralpalooza across this nation could be going on right now. And if that's true, than can the President really be guilty of anything except... participating? Is that a crime now? Taking part? Your Honor... I implore you! End this farce and set this man free before you realize I am completely full of bat guano.
I demanded a change in government back in 2004,four years after I thought I had participated in the election of Al Gore. But does this supposed scandal really rise to the severity of other Bush atrocities, like the suppression of scientific opinion in government agencies; suppression of contrary intelligence reports during the run-up to the Iraq War, evidence that might have prevented the formation of the coalition of the willing or the passage of Congress's war authorization; Abu Graib; the NSA wiretapping tyranny?
So far, all we seem to have *here* is an inelegant attempt to circumvent the -- what's it? -- the Presidential Records Act? So e-mail offers an easier way to communicate and thus more communication. Unlike phone calls, however, or hushed conversations in the Hart Senate building, this communication is digitally stored by the sender, the recipient, and potentially intervening mail relay servers. More recorded information means more spotlights on the machinery of government, a net plus for the American people. To the extent that the Bushies appeared to have tried to push some of this surplus info aside via the clumsy use/misuse of RNC accounts, this investigation is warranted and, if malfeasance there be, its practioners should feel the searing shame of a shaking finger and perhaps a stern tsk-tsk-tsk.
But it ain't that big 'a deal. Pretty freaking small potatoes, in my humble O. Now lets see those 2001 oil company meeting minutes, Cheney, what say?
Er.. aren't there some stories that transcend the typical boundaries of the Slashdot? What did we do on 9/11? The fallout of this event will affect student civil liberties all over America. Once the "we gotta do *something*" people take over, it's going to get spectacularly ugly. After they find his My Space page, this might even become a YRO issue. This is *very* relevant.
We're going to see the demise of a lot of beatnick/hippy-era authors, the frickin geniuses who defined absurdism as a novel, in the next ten years. We lost Joseph Heller in '99 (Catch-22). The last living Illuminatus dude just died, I think, in penury. Mailer Lives, but how much longer? DeLillo is getting old... who else should we add to the death watch? Phillip Roth.... still stuck in time.
Dangit, you beat me to it. It is definitely the severed, shrunken head of the Pinnochio robot Johnny-5. Mod parent up please. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_5.
NoScript breaks Digg thumbs on my Mac but not my Ubuntu. Weird. Fortunately, I don't really care. Now if it broke Slashdottit.... well, I'd lead the the mob to their headquarters myself.
No where in TRA does it say that you need a particle accelerator. This is a technology in its infancy -- the inventor even says that it will be several years it's mature enough to be marketable; ie, more experimentation will be required before Best Buy starts palcing orders. Obviously this won't go anywhere if it's cost-prohibitive or otherwise impractical. Assuming that this lady's results are genuine, what we have here is a new branch in plastics and , um... conducto-dynamics... or however you categorize it. IANAPhysicist. Good news in any case.Hey! Troll? What the hell, man... I get modded "troll" for goofing around in a forum about a beer-throwing fridge? Good grief. My first troll mod... damn.