Maybe the briefing was useful back in the early days of commercial aviation, but not anymore. Most people these days have flown so many times they already know about the flotation seat cushion and oxygen air masks.
Besides, if it were that critical, people with books and magazines would be forced to put them away and listen to the safety instructions. They'd also wake people up who were already napping. Do you see that happening?
I think it's a great idea, and will pledge some money.
I also think other subjects could use a basic text as well - say math textbooks. All those high schools and colleges spending fortunes for textbooks when the basic material hasn't changed appreciably in hundreds of years. School districts could save money on book purchases and focus on teaching, contributing homework problems, etc.
If the grassroots don't organize then all will be lost. There is too much money to be made closing it all up, overcommercializing it, and using it to extract maximum revenue from compliant consumers.
Oh my! So Ayn Rand's invisible for-profit free-market hand won't ensure proper stewardship of this resource?!?! How many arch-capitalists heads will explode I wonder.
Even if that's true, it leaves the Republicans as law evaders and war criminals.
And as for the current President and blame, please, he's had to shovel out a world's worth of crap the bush/cheney war crimes administration dumped on the world. All while they still claim the wars were a good idea, not a mistake, etc.
This rant is a clear example of why libertarian thinking is total bullshit. This just won't work in the real world.
Forcing corporations to only do business on its own property, and only deal with externalities with immediate neighbors? That might sound great, but it worthless. 3 seconds into this paradise of greedy-self-regulation and all the corporations involved will simply setup off-shore holding companies and do all the dirty work through under-funded contractors. E.g. BP wouldn't drill anymore, their subsidiary based out of the country would contract the drilling to Joe's Fracking Company, possibly another division of themselves, who in turn would only be capitalized to some absurd low amount, like $10 million. Then when Joe's Fracking Company fucks up and shits all over the place, they can only be sued for $10 million before declaring bankruptcy and escaping the harm they inflicted.
And as for there being no such thing are public property - what? Corporations sure as hell didn't gain that land via winning wars, conquest, shoving the original people off and taking over by force (granted, not such a proud moment in history). Why the fuck should corporations have claim to something they had zero part in getting? I wouldn't sell corporations jack unless they plan on having their own military and court system to defend their claim. Instead, they should LEASE the land they use, subject to annual rents that float based on their profit margin. Don't like it? Too damn bad, come to a private arrangement elsewhere, the catch-all solution to every libertarian problem.
I know... is it start 2 unfunded pointless wars and cut taxes, divert money into propping up the financial sector at the expense of everything else, block a recovering economy by debt ceiling bullshit coupled with a poorly implement budget cuts, while preserving tax breaks for the wealthiest corporations in the history of the world?
Defund education to the point where nobody learns anything anyway, and jack up the cost of college to the point where only the richest 5% can afford it, even though most colleges in the US these days tend to be run as 'profit centers' rather than as institutes of learning.
Ah yes, piling on massive education debt (let free market pricing tuition rise until blood is squeezed from aspiring students) which survives bankrupty. That'll help things along certainly! But destroying the education system will take a generation or two, so instituting corporate feudalism is probably faster.
joined a C#.Net shop was the happiest day of my life. Slam it all you like, but for UI development, Boost and MFC/Win32 is the worst platform to develop on unless you are a clueless sadomasochist that enjoys pain and suffering.
MFC was pretty nasty, especially back in the late 90's when it was changing around quite a bit. I switched to Windows Forms when it became available and now I'm stuck, kinda used to that and finding it a tough go to use WPF. I can relate to your comment, I like C# and am glad to be away from C++.
So let's see... complaints about politician that suck, and the military gets to clean up their mess. Well yeah, that's the system, military is under civilian control and gets stuck making the impossible happen.
When we look at this in a historical context, it becomes clear exactly just how dangerous a military response to an IT crisis would be.
And what would the civilian response be? Punt the blame to someone else, deny a problem exists, bribe congress to create laws to mask corporate inaction? Wouldn't want to touch those profit margins when it is cheaper just to ignore the real problem and declare tampering illegal. I'm not sure you grasp what it is the military does when the shit hits the fan enough for them to be called on.
But tasking the military with this protection, with the current command staff and structure, is intrinsically dangerous. In layman's terms, they don't know what they're doing.
And civilians or private corporation do? If private corporations actually DID understand what they were supposed to do, wouldn't we have nothing to worry about because they would have already taken care of security problems and infrastructure protection? There wouldn't be any bugs in critical systems at all, amirite?
fluid and dynamic environment where individual soldier-actors within it are afforded a wide degree of freedom to make individual judgement calls.
Yeah right. The analogy you're describing is like some low level IT grunt at megacorp incorporated deciding to fix a bug in a live production system for a client, on their own, with no approval or supervision, by rewriting a critical component in their favorite language that nobody else knows or supports, and deploying it without testing.
Things will work a little different when your actions may be construed as an act of war against a foreign power.
What I've seen so far is that the people who would call upon these military assets are completely uninformed about what they are realistically capable of, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the costs and risks involved.
So yeah, politicians generally aren't elected for their depth of IT knowledge...
Most of the people in the military are underinformed about this as well, but they are improving at (for an institution) a remarkable rate. They are still far behind.
Where do you get this from? Metrics pulled out of your ass? The military is large, covering people from mechanics to doctors to attorneys to combat fighters to command to technical folks. I could easily point out large tech companies I've worked for where probably 50% of the workforce didn't know jack about technical details either, since they were sales, legal, accountants, or support staff.
I do a quick access, it pulls the list and I see what's new. I don't get what Google reader was, or why I would care.
Seriously, I'm missing the problem here, why do you need something special for that?
I have 100+ RSS feeds. What you're describing doesn't sound like it scales at all. I'm not going through 100+ bookmarks to see what's new, I want an RSS reader to display new items.
funded by government contracts. You left that key thing out.
If for-profit corporations created and funded internet, it would be a multiple isolated enclaves of non-compatible protocols, with toll-keepers at the gateways.
Consider if Microsoft created internet. How would things be different? Well it would only be for IE and Windows clients, OSX and Linux users would be told to run Windows in a VM to access it (selling another Windows license to non-Windows users), your home page would be forced and unchangeably set to MSN, search would be funneled through the Bing equivalent (although with no Google, Bing wouldn't have evolved to be a search engine and instead would be basically a curated list of vendors that paid to be there, a truly modern yellow pages so to speak) the browser window would be split in half with the content you want to view on one-side and unblockable ads running on the other side, and Steve Ballmer would rape your ass day and night while holding your eyelids open with toothpicks forced to view the ads.
I guess being that there isn't a central authority, there isn't a way to force everyone to upgrade.
As far as I can tell, since bitcoin validity depends on a majority vote (essentially), and more people are using the 0.7 client that something newer, there is no incentive for people on 0.7 to upgrade until the bug is fixed. Why would ayn randian selfish liberterians upgrade and help out validating other people's newer bitcoins?
Argh, replying to my reply because I left off part of what I wanted to say.
set my own hours, never work more than 40 hrs/wk and get great benefits (and lots of free beer). maybe you were just in a bad location?
this industry is great.
Like the original post this was a reply to, my 2nd job out of college was with, let's just say a large software corporation in the Pacific Northwest.
I worked 60+ hours a week for 3 years. Evenings, Saturdays, Holidays, hell I even worked one day of my vacation (as in, I was out of town visiting some friends where I went to college. That happened to be in the same city as a large OEM computer manufacturer. I went in to the vendor on my vacation to take a look at a problem. Yeah.)
When I complained about the workload, my boss generally had the attitude "fuck you and quit, there are 9 other people waiting to take your job".
Basically, Mr. Anon Coward working for the defense industry, which is plump with government largesse (not all of it bad, but I sure hope you aren't one of those dumbfuck republitardservaterians with their idiot hypocrisy about government spending), and who possibly has not ever worked in Corporate "we'd-rape-your-ass-for-profit-if-it-were-legal" America, I have this to say: FUCK YOU you dipshit. 2 years out of college and you think you know everything? You don't have a goddamn clue.
Bolded for emphasis... obviously what you did doesn't scale and won't work for EVERYONE going into CS. Even the U.S. citizens can't ALL work for the defense industry.
Except for changes to every computer, embedded or otherwise, that would normally "fall back" and thus have the wrong time for half the year, there is zero effort involved. If you have zero responsibility for maintaining anything, yes, there's zero effort.
So? It isn't like when daylight time starts/end is fixed in stone forever, it changes too (was Oct-Apr for a long time and now Nov-Mar, and that's not considering all the zillion exceptions around the world and even in the U.S.) so there is always the potential for ongoing maintenance to time code anyway.
It would be minimal effort for regular people, and one patch to get rid of the stupid system on computers. Hell, most I've used lately (granted, not embedded devices) even have a checkbox for whether or not to do the time adjustment anyway.
Why not? Fedex and UPS have perfected delivery of packages so why not the mail?
FedEx and UPS both use the post office for delivery of small packages, the expensive "last mile" cases.
I'm not sure what magic the USPS possesses that private industry couldn't do better anyway.
How about Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution.
Barring that, how about mail rates that make sense?
A flat rate for letters is a National Infrastructure thing. Kinda of like how a flat monthly rate for Internet access affects usage, versus metered connections.
I've never lived in a state where the tolls were retired and the booths torn down.
I have, so they exist. For example, the Dallas-Fort Worth turnpike, which was a tollway but now isn't.
[From ref website]The section of Interstate 30 between Dallas and Fort Worth was once a tollway known as the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike; however, it is no longer tolled.
Good lord, last year it was a 12 hour outage on leap day, this year it was a 12 hour (as far as I can tell) outage due to expired certificates. They won't be able to claim six 9's uptime for ~274 years!
At the rate of a half day of failure every year, so far, I'm not even sure I'd trust Azure for storage no matter what the discount they offer.
Maybe at the time when they were working on the 9.7" iPad, that was the One True Size - the screen technology and all that stuff wasn't good enough for a 7" tablet. Nobody would have bought a 7" tablet if screen issues would have inflated the price too much.
Technology advanced and things are different now. There are such things as engineering tradeoffs.
I think people need to get unstuck from taking a quote from the past. It's easy to take current tech and pricing and available and say WELL OH CRAP WHY DIDN'T THEY DO THAT BACK THEN? and gloss over various concerns like maybe it just wasn't possible (read: doable at the reasonable price point).
This "problem" of having the House and Senate agree is something every bill has faced through the entire time this country has existed. The normal process is pass bills, then have a "conference committee" to iron out the differences, then bring those revised versions up.
That's funny, when the GOP barely won in the past, they've always immediately claimed mandates and so forth. Yet that apparently only work FOR them. Well fuck them, they don't get to arbitrarily decide when the majority votes means something. Besides, they've only won the popular vote 1 time out of the last 6. Ideally the GOP will waste away to be a footnote of craptastic corrupted idiocy in the future.
And you don't understand how the U.S. government is supposed to work. Let's examine ACA. That was passed by a majority of both houses of Congress, who in turn were elected by their citizens. The President signed it. It was upheld by the Supreme Court. Yet the GOP, the butthole of politics, tries at every step to kill or unfund it.
What EXACTLY do republitards suggest as a mechanism to running a democracy, if this MOST OBVIOUSLY constitutional method of passing and enacting laws, is apparently not good enough? Republitards don't believe in the legitimacy of government, except when they control all branches. So fuck them again, scumbags that they are.
And as for voting, yeah, lots of people don't vote. Makes us kind of hypocritical when we invade other countries for bullshit reasons, mostly having to do with beefing up profits and defense contractors that the previous VP was head of, under the theory we're bringing them freedom and democracy. Those same unassailable values that various dumbasses here don't bother to use?
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Maybe the briefing was useful back in the early days of commercial aviation, but not anymore. Most people these days have flown so many times they already know about the flotation seat cushion and oxygen air masks.
Besides, if it were that critical, people with books and magazines would be forced to put them away and listen to the safety instructions. They'd also wake people up who were already napping. Do you see that happening?
I think it's a great idea, and will pledge some money.
I also think other subjects could use a basic text as well - say math textbooks. All those high schools and colleges spending fortunes for textbooks when the basic material hasn't changed appreciably in hundreds of years. School districts could save money on book purchases and focus on teaching, contributing homework problems, etc.
If the grassroots don't organize then all will be lost. There is too much money to be made closing it all up, overcommercializing it, and using it to extract maximum revenue from compliant consumers.
Oh my! So Ayn Rand's invisible for-profit free-market hand won't ensure proper stewardship of this resource?!?! How many arch-capitalists heads will explode I wonder.
Must be a thing with Democrats.
Even if that's true, it leaves the Republicans as law evaders and war criminals.
And as for the current President and blame, please, he's had to shovel out a world's worth of crap the bush/cheney war crimes administration dumped on the world. All while they still claim the wars were a good idea, not a mistake, etc.
This rant is a clear example of why libertarian thinking is total bullshit. This just won't work in the real world.
Forcing corporations to only do business on its own property, and only deal with externalities with immediate neighbors? That might sound great, but it worthless. 3 seconds into this paradise of greedy-self-regulation and all the corporations involved will simply setup off-shore holding companies and do all the dirty work through under-funded contractors. E.g. BP wouldn't drill anymore, their subsidiary based out of the country would contract the drilling to Joe's Fracking Company, possibly another division of themselves, who in turn would only be capitalized to some absurd low amount, like $10 million. Then when Joe's Fracking Company fucks up and shits all over the place, they can only be sued for $10 million before declaring bankruptcy and escaping the harm they inflicted.
And as for there being no such thing are public property - what? Corporations sure as hell didn't gain that land via winning wars, conquest, shoving the original people off and taking over by force (granted, not such a proud moment in history). Why the fuck should corporations have claim to something they had zero part in getting? I wouldn't sell corporations jack unless they plan on having their own military and court system to defend their claim. Instead, they should LEASE the land they use, subject to annual rents that float based on their profit margin. Don't like it? Too damn bad, come to a private arrangement elsewhere, the catch-all solution to every libertarian problem.
Most of that doesn't matter when lined up against the phone's camera massive advantage: it is always with me.
DSLR cameras do take better pics, but then it's another device I have to carry around. And for 80% of the pics I take, the phone is good enough.
Quickest way to destroy a country?
I know... is it start 2 unfunded pointless wars and cut taxes, divert money into propping up the financial sector at the expense of everything else, block a recovering economy by debt ceiling bullshit coupled with a poorly implement budget cuts, while preserving tax breaks for the wealthiest corporations in the history of the world?
Defund education to the point where nobody learns anything anyway, and jack up the cost of college to the point where only the richest 5% can afford it, even though most colleges in the US these days tend to be run as 'profit centers' rather than as institutes of learning.
Ah yes, piling on massive education debt (let free market pricing tuition rise until blood is squeezed from aspiring students) which survives bankrupty. That'll help things along certainly! But destroying the education system will take a generation or two, so instituting corporate feudalism is probably faster.
joined a C# .Net shop was the happiest day of my life. Slam it all you like, but for UI development, Boost and MFC /Win32 is the worst platform to develop on unless you are a clueless sadomasochist that enjoys pain and suffering.
MFC was pretty nasty, especially back in the late 90's when it was changing around quite a bit. I switched to Windows Forms when it became available and now I'm stuck, kinda used to that and finding it a tough go to use WPF. I can relate to your comment, I like C# and am glad to be away from C++.
So let's see... complaints about politician that suck, and the military gets to clean up their mess. Well yeah, that's the system, military is under civilian control and gets stuck making the impossible happen.
When we look at this in a historical context, it becomes clear exactly just how dangerous a military response to an IT crisis would be.
And what would the civilian response be? Punt the blame to someone else, deny a problem exists, bribe congress to create laws to mask corporate inaction? Wouldn't want to touch those profit margins when it is cheaper just to ignore the real problem and declare tampering illegal. I'm not sure you grasp what it is the military does when the shit hits the fan enough for them to be called on.
But tasking the military with this protection, with the current command staff and structure, is intrinsically dangerous. In layman's terms, they don't know what they're doing.
And civilians or private corporation do? If private corporations actually DID understand what they were supposed to do, wouldn't we have nothing to worry about because they would have already taken care of security problems and infrastructure protection? There wouldn't be any bugs in critical systems at all, amirite?
fluid and dynamic environment where individual soldier-actors within it are afforded a wide degree of freedom to make individual judgement calls.
Yeah right. The analogy you're describing is like some low level IT grunt at megacorp incorporated deciding to fix a bug in a live production system for a client, on their own, with no approval or supervision, by rewriting a critical component in their favorite language that nobody else knows or supports, and deploying it without testing.
Things will work a little different when your actions may be construed as an act of war against a foreign power.
What I've seen so far is that the people who would call upon these military assets are completely uninformed about what they are realistically capable of, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the costs and risks involved.
So yeah, politicians generally aren't elected for their depth of IT knowledge...
Most of the people in the military are underinformed about this as well, but they are improving at (for an institution) a remarkable rate. They are still far behind.
Where do you get this from? Metrics pulled out of your ass? The military is large, covering people from mechanics to doctors to attorneys to combat fighters to command to technical folks. I could easily point out large tech companies I've worked for where probably 50% of the workforce didn't know jack about technical details either, since they were sales, legal, accountants, or support staff.
and I've yet to see evidence to the contrary. Hyperbole, allegations, lies .. these all come in droves. Proof? Not a drop
Did you see the Mandiant info release of a few weeks ago?
http://intelreport.mandiant.com/
I do a quick access, it pulls the list and I see what's new. I don't get what Google reader was, or why I would care.
Seriously, I'm missing the problem here, why do you need something special for that?
I have 100+ RSS feeds. What you're describing doesn't sound like it scales at all. I'm not going through 100+ bookmarks to see what's new, I want an RSS reader to display new items.
Maybe someone could explain what's not working so I know what I'm missing.
How about legal DVD playback?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/10/25/2229236/feds-continue-to-consider-linux-users-criminals-for-watching-dvds
and created by for-profit entities.
funded by government contracts. You left that key thing out.
If for-profit corporations created and funded internet, it would be a multiple isolated enclaves of non-compatible protocols, with toll-keepers at the gateways.
Consider if Microsoft created internet. How would things be different? Well it would only be for IE and Windows clients, OSX and Linux users would be told to run Windows in a VM to access it (selling another Windows license to non-Windows users), your home page would be forced and unchangeably set to MSN, search would be funneled through the Bing equivalent (although with no Google, Bing wouldn't have evolved to be a search engine and instead would be basically a curated list of vendors that paid to be there, a truly modern yellow pages so to speak) the browser window would be split in half with the content you want to view on one-side and unblockable ads running on the other side, and Steve Ballmer would rape your ass day and night while holding your eyelids open with toothpicks forced to view the ads.
What keeps Bitcoin on the top has always been the network effect.
And therefore wouldn't the same network effect of BitCoin users on the 0.7 protocol keep the 0.7 version on top?
This sort of thing was solved a long time ago, but because it's "old", people just dismiss it out of hand.
It's called versioning the protocol and having compatibility lists.
Don't you need a central authority to maintain, push, and require the standard?
That's exactly what isn't part of BitCoin; ergo the "old" solution is no solution here.
I guess being that there isn't a central authority, there isn't a way to force everyone to upgrade.
As far as I can tell, since bitcoin validity depends on a majority vote (essentially), and more people are using the 0.7 client that something newer, there is no incentive for people on 0.7 to upgrade until the bug is fixed. Why would ayn randian selfish liberterians upgrade and help out validating other people's newer bitcoins?
Argh, replying to my reply because I left off part of what I wanted to say.
set my own hours, never work more than 40 hrs/wk and get great benefits (and lots of free beer). maybe you were just in a bad location?
this industry is great.
Like the original post this was a reply to, my 2nd job out of college was with, let's just say a large software corporation in the Pacific Northwest.
I worked 60+ hours a week for 3 years. Evenings, Saturdays, Holidays, hell I even worked one day of my vacation (as in, I was out of town visiting some friends where I went to college. That happened to be in the same city as a large OEM computer manufacturer. I went in to the vendor on my vacation to take a look at a problem. Yeah.)
When I complained about the workload, my boss generally had the attitude "fuck you and quit, there are 9 other people waiting to take your job".
Basically, Mr. Anon Coward working for the defense industry, which is plump with government largesse (not all of it bad, but I sure hope you aren't one of those dumbfuck republitardservaterians with their idiot hypocrisy about government spending), and who possibly has not ever worked in Corporate "we'd-rape-your-ass-for-profit-if-it-were-legal" America, I have this to say: FUCK YOU you dipshit. 2 years out of college and you think you know everything? You don't have a goddamn clue.
and work for a defense contractor
Bolded for emphasis... obviously what you did doesn't scale and won't work for EVERYONE going into CS. Even the U.S. citizens can't ALL work for the defense industry.
Except for changes to every computer, embedded or otherwise, that would normally "fall back" and thus have the wrong time for half the year, there is zero effort involved. If you have zero responsibility for maintaining anything, yes, there's zero effort.
So? It isn't like when daylight time starts/end is fixed in stone forever, it changes too (was Oct-Apr for a long time and now Nov-Mar, and that's not considering all the zillion exceptions around the world and even in the U.S.) so there is always the potential for ongoing maintenance to time code anyway.
It would be minimal effort for regular people, and one patch to get rid of the stupid system on computers. Hell, most I've used lately (granted, not embedded devices) even have a checkbox for whether or not to do the time adjustment anyway.
Why not? Fedex and UPS have perfected delivery of packages so why not the mail?
FedEx and UPS both use the post office for delivery of small packages, the expensive "last mile" cases.
I'm not sure what magic the USPS possesses that private industry couldn't do better anyway.
How about Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution.
Barring that, how about mail rates that make sense?
A flat rate for letters is a National Infrastructure thing. Kinda of like how a flat monthly rate for Internet access affects usage, versus metered connections.
I've never lived in a state where the tolls were retired and the booths torn down.
I have, so they exist. For example, the Dallas-Fort Worth turnpike, which was a tollway but now isn't.
[From ref website]The section of Interstate 30 between Dallas and Fort Worth was once a tollway known as the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike; however, it is no longer tolled.
Ref: http://www.interstate-guide.com/i-030.html
Good lord, last year it was a 12 hour outage on leap day, this year it was a 12 hour (as far as I can tell) outage due to expired certificates. They won't be able to claim six 9's uptime for ~274 years!
At the rate of a half day of failure every year, so far, I'm not even sure I'd trust Azure for storage no matter what the discount they offer.
Maybe at the time when they were working on the 9.7" iPad, that was the One True Size - the screen technology and all that stuff wasn't good enough for a 7" tablet.
Nobody would have bought a 7" tablet if screen issues would have inflated the price too much.
Technology advanced and things are different now. There are such things as engineering tradeoffs.
I think people need to get unstuck from taking a quote from the past. It's easy to take current tech and pricing and available and say WELL OH CRAP WHY DIDN'T THEY DO THAT BACK THEN? and gloss over various concerns like maybe it just wasn't possible (read: doable at the reasonable price point).
This "problem" of having the House and Senate agree is something every bill has faced through the entire time this country has existed. The normal process is pass bills, then have a "conference committee" to iron out the differences, then bring those revised versions up.
That's funny, when the GOP barely won in the past, they've always immediately claimed mandates and so forth. Yet that apparently only work FOR them. Well fuck them, they don't get to arbitrarily decide when the majority votes means something. Besides, they've only won the popular vote 1 time out of the last 6. Ideally the GOP will waste away to be a footnote of craptastic corrupted idiocy in the future.
And you don't understand how the U.S. government is supposed to work. Let's examine ACA. That was passed by a majority of both houses of Congress, who in turn were elected by their citizens. The President signed it. It was upheld by the Supreme Court. Yet the GOP, the butthole of politics, tries at every step to kill or unfund it.
What EXACTLY do republitards suggest as a mechanism to running a democracy, if this MOST OBVIOUSLY constitutional method of passing and enacting laws, is apparently not good enough? Republitards don't believe in the legitimacy of government, except when they control all branches. So fuck them again, scumbags that they are.
And as for voting, yeah, lots of people don't vote. Makes us kind of hypocritical when we invade other countries for bullshit reasons, mostly having to do with beefing up profits and defense contractors that the previous VP was head of, under the theory we're bringing them freedom and democracy. Those same unassailable values that various dumbasses here don't bother to use?