No, Stalin is held responsible in the deeper sections of the history books for anywhere between 10 and 30 million deaths, mostly through starvation and famine, not methodically like the Nazis.
It's ironic, in a way. Germany to this day bends over backwards to distance itself from Nazi times, knowing that collectively it can never apologize enough. Japan seems to be doing the opposite. If it's not talked about, it never happened.
that it's way too cynical to justify the killing of 210K by saying that it prevented many more from being killed.
well, it seems that way, because we can never go back and prove the corrolary.
What about everyone who knew more or less what was happening in the German concentration camps before they were actually "discovered" by the Allied forces as they marched through Poland and Germany?
In the small-world picture, the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appear bad. What if we hadn't, and the Soviet Union, which was on the verge of being able to move its forces from Western Europe to Siberia and then to Japan, had instead invaded Japan in the closing days of WWII? The Soviets had about 40 years or so of bad memories to pay them back for...
The nukes were a warning shot to the Soviets as anything else.
We all have our hypocricies. Pick yours carefully.
This is the most retarded statement I have ever encountered about heat pumps. Heat pumps average 3 or 4 HUNDRED percent efficiency. There's fuck-all waste heat from the compressor heating your house. And I fail to see what the fuck this has to do with the GP's post. Heat pumps work well where the temperatures are not extreme. They do not work well in Minnesota, for example. It's too cold in the winter and too hot/humid in the summer. Even where heat pumps are used for both heating and AC in the South (because the winters are mild, so heat pumps are way more effient than a traditional electric or gas-heated furnace), they still use dedicated AC units, because running the heat pump in reverse is not as thermally efficient as a dedicated air conditioner unit.
Basically, they're both the same, but the AC is optimized to provide maximum cooling only on one end.
Even hybrids are a boondoggle compared to diesel engines.
You do forget that some of the more efficient diesel-powered vehicles are hybrids (railroad locomotives), too...
The most thermally efficient hybrids would, of course, use diesel engines. But I'm not so sure fuel economy-wise, that with their added weight they would come out ahead.
Next up, Biofuel. It's cheap! It's effecient! And if you were truly worried about the world farmlands, you'd be *advocating* this. The more biofuel that goes into production, the more the need for farmlands, and farmlands will grow in size. Thus, overall food output will increase and we will be able to transport that same food further, for cheaper than oil.
This is assuming that most of the land not under agricultural production is adequate for the task. This is simply not so. Either the soil is inadequate, there is not enough water available (but the soil is awesome), or the climate is not conducive to it. Add to the fact that the most productive agriculture lands happen to almost coincide with being desirable places to live for most people, and we've got a problem.
Mandating that water can no longer be pumped from the Oglalla Aquifer will put a humongous hole in US ag production. There is not enough farm land available on either cost where water might be available.
You would then need to factor in trying to make water available for biomass farming in the midwest, so that is another huge source of inefficiency and/or cost.
Other ideas, like growing algae/kelp in the ocean, are also dependent on various factors that are not feasible to fix or overcome, either.
Simply mowing down Amazonia to grow GMO corn and soybeans for biomass won't really work, either, for more than 5-10 years.
Besides, you wouldn't want to eat corn destined for production into corn oil products or animal feed. It's not bad for you per se, it's just really about as edible as eating hagus. Sweet corn is really a pretty small chunk of corn grown in the US.
The energy lost in separating the hydrogen and oxygen in electrolysis is not fully regained as heat when the two are combusted together, even if that were 100% complete (which it never is).
220V@60A is just two 30-amp lines - the neutral wires are tied together, and the hot wires are used for power. Not a big deal. That is how your electrical appliance circuits are set up at the box in the first place.
Hmm... a 1000 watt heater that only produces 8500 BTU of hot air is less efficient than one that produces 9000 BTU.
It's really an argument about relevant efficiency. Both consume the same amount of energy, but one provides more intended benefit than the other.
Which is why furnaces, air conditioners, refrigerators, etc., all have various metrics of efficiency on them (a 12 SERE air conditioner is more efficient, and more expensive, than a 10 SERE AC, even if they both pull the same amount of power when operating).
It's like accounting. People bemoan companies that produce profit solely by no capital or research investments, and only by squeezing every last expense to a minimum (funny how those expense limits don't affect you if your job title includes 'CxO','VP', etc).
So what? They're upstream in this case regardless.
It's a really expensive version of a fake fireplace that uses IR heat lamps to throw heat into the room while a "fire filter" rolls around one or two white incandescent lamps to make the fire effect, or putting an electric heater under your TV while you play that 8 hr video someone took of an actual fireplace fire.
In this case, the emissions *IN THE HOUSE* are the concern, not the emissions to the environment. Which is the jusitifcation for electrical space heaters over kerosene ones in the house, too.
Gas is expensive on the left coast, plain and simple. PDXrs complain about $2.30-$2.40/gal gas, but it only gets more expensive the further south or north from PDX you go (yes, been both ways in the last month, PDX->Sunny Ego, PDX->Bellingham, WA).
Traffic is bad, but doesn't compare to Seattle, Chicago, San Diego/LA.
If you don't like Multnomah County's tax, it's not too hard to move away from that, but still be "in Portland". Move up to Vancouver like everyone else, for example.
If you've never lived anywhere else as an adult, PDX has its warts. If you have, PDX is pretty dang cool compared to the rest of the country's larger cities.
I'll take a Critical Mass event over some dumbfuck who rolls his SUV on one of the bridges in the area any time.
Do you remember how fucked up PDX traffic was when that roll of sheet steel rolled off the bed of the semi truck on the Terwilliger Curves? Now explain to me the annoyance factor of CM (route around it) or protesters (again, route around it). It took a few hours to actually remove the steel, (incident happened about 1:30pm that day, traffic was still in the shitpan at 7:00 pm, when I left work, and I did not dare try to get on I-5, as it was as bolluxed NB as it was SB).
...or, you happen to move from one area where one chain of stores is owned by the same parent corporation as a different chain where you're moving to.
I make it a point to use my Dominick's card whenif I happen to shop at a Safeway. I don't care one bit that it's linked to my old address in Illinois, same with my Jewel/Osco card when buying chocochip cookies at Albertson's.
I guess I try to keep my shopping rather local if I can, even if it costs more and the service seems to be worse (yeah, right) than the big chains.
Do I know the owners of Roth's Grocery stores in Oregon? Nope. But I'd rather do that then help make Safeway, Wal-Mart or Alberton's any richer than I have to. Yes, they employ people in the area, but so does Roth's, so that argument is moot to me.
You mean a lot like Sinn Fein with regards to the Irish Republican Army in the 70s and 80s (and into the 90s)?
Let's get some white-bread relevance here.
There were people in the US who were funneling $$$ to the IRA, yet at the same time paying lip service that "terrorism is bad".
That Sinn Fein likes to call itself the "political arm" of the IRA, it really has been the propaganda arm of it, and it is probably safe to paint the group as tacitly approving terrorism by others to further its means, much like European kings and queens giving Letters to pirate captains to raid the ships of their enemies (like Sir Francis Drake), but offering a means of plausible deniability if a stink was made in the royal courts.
As far as the current spate of anti-Western violence, I think by looking at the numbers that for the 1800+ US military members that have been killed in various and sundry ways, that those doing the killing have killed 2-5x their fellow citizens, so it's hard really to say that it's "the west that suffers for it".
Some people like wallowing in shit as much as they say they hate doing it. And they do what they can to make everyone else wallow in it too.
I think if you took the average Iraqi Shiite or Sunni, an Afghani or whatever, they just want to live their lifes, see their children grow up, and provide themselves and their families with food and shelter. But the shit-wallowers are using them (and we are too, let's be honest) as pawns and bullet catchers trying to further various "political" ideologies.
Is it realistic to think that if the US pulls out of the area (maybe after detonating nuclear munitions in Iraq's oil wells...) that the shit will stop? How does the shit in the Darfur region of Sudan have anything whatsoever to do with the United States? Well, if the US pulls out of Iraq, then it's back to the same kind of situation with Sunnis trying to get back to being the toppers in society, in other words, civil war until another Saddam Hussein comes along (whether he is Sunni or Shi'ite), Iran and the Taliban causing all sorts of mischief, and Russia continuing business as usual, selling RPGs, AKs and plastic explosives to whomever is wagging the $$$, even better if they're blowing up Americans.
With the university, this would be true of the lab machines, but what of the private machines in the dorm? If the mailbox or mail server is owned by the University, even if the e-mail is ultimately d/l to the student's personal computer, the service is owned by the University.
Notice that the University is not attempting to filter messages from Yahoo, HotMail, GMail, etc., merely e-mail that is processed through their mail servers.
If you really want all that Spam, then by all means get someone to hook you up with a GMail account or set yourself up with a Yahoo account.
While you may own your phone equipment in your house, you do not own anything past the demarc (i.e., the phone box on the outside of your house).
No different really that Comcast owns your cable TV decoder, or DirecTV/DishNetwork owns the card in your satellite decoder.
If, like most companies, the student's University-supplied e-mail is hosted by Exchange, then the University sure can filter that email before Outlook gets it onto the student's computer.
No, I don't believe your analysis is correct. Actually, it's not far off.
It certainly isn't true that because it is "your machine" you have the right to block anything that comes to it.
Really? Then why do I have a firewall (block network traffic selectively)? Why do I have "spam filters" on my e-mail?
A phone company may own the phone network and switching equipment, but that doesn't give them the right to block, particularly selectively, what they choose to block.
As a public carrier (as defined by the FCC), no, you're right. But they sure can set so-called Quality of Service metrics, etc. There is nothing stopping them from providing less through bandwidth for traffic and requests originating or terminating outside of their network. What will happen when SBC (or Telestra, BT, DT, et al) decide that they need to hop on the VoIP bandwagon, and, well, their stuff just works better than Vonage, Cisco, etc. VoIP hardware with non-SBC-registered MAC addresses? Hmm..."Quality of Service".
A university may own the student's mailboxes, but that doesn't mean that the university has the right to selectively filter the student's incoming mail.
It may not have the right to filter a particular student's e-mail, but it sure does have the right to filter *all* e-mail messages equally, just like it has the right to filter all employee e-mail, etc. It even has the right to segment off the dorms, student network, etc. from employee/staff/research networks, and deal with them separately. It's the University's network, they can define how it gets used.
My ISP filters my e-mail through its antispam/antivirus software, in addition to my e-mail provider, etc. and Grisoft AV on my computer.
Notice how no university got sued when they started blocking Napster, KaZaa, etc. on the dorm networks. Just like no ISP has gotten sued by a user because their e-mail gets spam-filtered (but they probably do get a non-zero amount of hate mail because either their mailing lists they subscribe to have had their domain black-listed or otherwise determined to be "spam", and have quite a battle not getting them filtered out).
I only wish I could pay the post office to do the same thing to my physical mail box.
Much of what you attribute to a craft can be attributed to engineering as well. A bridge can be visually quite artful. A traffic system can be almost beautiful in its elegance and simplicity.
From who's perspective, the designer's or the thousands of suckers stuck in it on their daily slog to work?
A bridge is "beautiful" only when those ponying up the $$$ are willing to pay a little extra for aesthetic details. No way is the engineering sacrificed for aesthetics, nor for making maintenance tougher. Most highway bridges being built now are paying extra $$$ up front to minimize maintenance costs over 20 years or more. Cable-stayed bridges? Yes, they look cool, but they're also very low maintenance compared to a suspension bridge. The only reason the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge is also a suspension bridge is because it's going to sit right next to the old one (and for this area, a suspension bridge really is the only option, because otherwise Washington would have paid for something else far less elegant (it's on the website for it).
Software engineering will be far more like electrical engineering, which is more about design, and elegance is far more a part of good design (except in medical electronics...). There is little liability in consumer electronics. Sell 1 million iPods, it's a business decision if a few have bad batteries. Screw up an implanted heart defibrillator, and people will die.
And engineers who graduate from an accredited school I believe often end up as an apprentice under a professional, until they themselves take the professional engineer's exam and become a licensed engineer.
Gotta justify your tuition to MIT? Anyone can take the professional engineer exams, just like you can take the Bar exam w/o having a JD first (like Frank Abagnale). (I worked with a state traffic engineer [yes, he passed the Professional Engineer exam... Hi, Ed) who's BS was in geography, not civil engineering).
IMO, the big problem with software engineering is that it isn't enough like other engineering disciplines.
Well, it is far more like electrical engineering than mechanical engineering, which in general is pretty dang conservative.
Really it's just that software engineering is still a relatively new field. In time, I imagine people in general will be less tolerant of poorly written software, and the profession will stabilize to be more like the traditional engineering fields.
No, software "engineering" is far more creative. You're given a set of parameters. You are not constrained by material limits except really for time (and thus, money). The more physical the engineering excercise, the more comprimises that must be made, and elegance will take a wayside for economics and liability. There is no "overbuild by 2x" in programming. How do you overbuild a stack? You don't, and you can't, unless you consider handling exceptions in a reasonable and meaningful way as "overbuilding" (I don't).
Maybe you are thinking more about systems engineering: the pointyheads expect the website to take 10000 trans/sec when it's launched, and expect it to drop to about 200/sec in 5 days - so you lease the infrastructure to handle it, or get the pointyheads that it's a wise investment to keep it around for next time, and pay for it up front (gotta use up that capital budget before the FY ends!). Which is no different than: we anticipate that no more than 10% of the toilets will be simultaneously flushed in the Sears Tower, but better plan for 50% (or whatever the national code book says for buildings over 10 stories tall).
This has nothing to do with time that software "engineering" has existed.
As far as people getting tired of poorly written software, how will you (the end-user, help desk analyst, etc) be able to tell? You won't.
As engineers, we are liable to our products....but not software engineers. Bridges, cars, etc., do not come with big huge no-liability stickers on them and limits of warrantability and merchantability ("replacement of the media").
Until states start licensing software engineers like they do real Engineers (those licenses do imply liability for design...), then you'll have a point.
Oh, and bridges DO collapse, but it's usually the fault of mother nature or other external forces (government entities who will not provide maintenance funds, asshats who drive log trucks across covered bridges exceeding the weight limit by 2-5x...).
Also, do you really think that you could go stand outside of the white house and yell about how much of a failure you think Bush is? I don't. I think you would get stopped, and quickly.
Well, drive along the iron fence along Constitution Avenue, and there is always several someones there protesting this or that, with their signs in view of the White House and all the traffic.
Of course, if you use Google Maps to look at the satellite pics of the White House (at maximum zoom), the tops of the White House, and the buildings next to it, have been photoshopped... and the US Capital has been seriously de-rezzed.
You mean, like whatever optimizations to the BSD TCP stack that Microsoft finally started using to get rid of winsock and all that? It's probably because MS used the BSD tcp/ip stack that Windows has (, uses and respects) a hosts file and services file, just like your fave *nix box does.
At least MS didn't buy the winsock people out (like they did with Spyglass).
Banning nailclippers at the airport checkpoint is no substitute for 100 citizens paying attention to the people around them... i.e. the creepy guy acting stupid planting a bomb!!
especially when a simple Bic pen is FAR more dangerous (or a mechanical drafting pencil, where the lead has been replaced with a nail...).
People who only speak one language from any country are usually likely to look down on people who don't speak their language.
That pretty much sums up most of the antipathy between "Southerners" and "Yanks" in the US (it's mostly a one-sided affair, actually. Bring up the Civil War to most Americans, and it usually invokes great moments of oblivity, like, "what's a civil war?". Yet to a Southerner, it's like getting Howard Stern to talk about the FCC...
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No, Stalin is held responsible in the deeper sections of the history books for anywhere between 10 and 30 million deaths, mostly through starvation and famine, not methodically like the Nazis.
It's ironic, in a way. Germany to this day bends over backwards to distance itself from Nazi times, knowing that collectively it can never apologize enough. Japan seems to be doing the opposite. If it's not talked about, it never happened.
that it's way too cynical to justify the killing of 210K by saying that it prevented many more from being killed.
well, it seems that way, because we can never go back and prove the corrolary.
What about everyone who knew more or less what was happening in the German concentration camps before they were actually "discovered" by the Allied forces as they marched through Poland and Germany?
In the small-world picture, the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appear bad. What if we hadn't, and the Soviet Union, which was on the verge of being able to move its forces from Western Europe to Siberia and then to Japan, had instead invaded Japan in the closing days of WWII? The Soviets had about 40 years or so of bad memories to pay them back for...
The nukes were a warning shot to the Soviets as anything else.
We all have our hypocricies. Pick yours carefully.
This is the most retarded statement I have ever encountered about heat pumps. Heat pumps average 3 or 4 HUNDRED percent efficiency. There's fuck-all waste heat from the compressor heating your house.
And I fail to see what the fuck this has to do with the GP's post.
Heat pumps work well where the temperatures are not extreme. They do not work well in Minnesota, for example. It's too cold in the winter and too hot/humid in the summer. Even where heat pumps are used for both heating and AC in the South (because the winters are mild, so heat pumps are way more effient than a traditional electric or gas-heated furnace), they still use dedicated AC units, because running the heat pump in reverse is not as thermally efficient as a dedicated air conditioner unit.
Basically, they're both the same, but the AC is optimized to provide maximum cooling only on one end.
H2 "burns" with a cherry red flame. Adjusting the O2 probably adds enough color to yellow it up.
Even hybrids are a boondoggle compared to diesel engines.
You do forget that some of the more efficient diesel-powered vehicles are hybrids (railroad locomotives), too...
The most thermally efficient hybrids would, of course, use diesel engines. But I'm not so sure fuel economy-wise, that with their added weight they would come out ahead.
Next up, Biofuel. It's cheap! It's effecient! And if you were truly worried about the world farmlands, you'd be *advocating* this. The more biofuel that goes into production, the more the need for farmlands, and farmlands will grow in size. Thus, overall food output will increase and we will be able to transport that same food further, for cheaper than oil.
This is assuming that most of the land not under agricultural production is adequate for the task. This is simply not so. Either the soil is inadequate, there is not enough water available (but the soil is awesome), or the climate is not conducive to it. Add to the fact that the most productive agriculture lands happen to almost coincide with being desirable places to live for most people, and we've got a problem.
Mandating that water can no longer be pumped from the Oglalla Aquifer will put a humongous hole in US ag production. There is not enough farm land available on either cost where water might be available.
You would then need to factor in trying to make water available for biomass farming in the midwest, so that is another huge source of inefficiency and/or cost.
Other ideas, like growing algae/kelp in the ocean, are also dependent on various factors that are not feasible to fix or overcome, either.
Simply mowing down Amazonia to grow GMO corn and soybeans for biomass won't really work, either, for more than 5-10 years.
Besides, you wouldn't want to eat corn destined for production into corn oil products or animal feed. It's not bad for you per se, it's just really about as edible as eating hagus. Sweet corn is really a pretty small chunk of corn grown in the US.
The energy lost in separating the hydrogen and oxygen in electrolysis is not fully regained as heat when the two are combusted together, even if that were 100% complete (which it never is).
220V@60A is just two 30-amp lines - the neutral wires are tied together, and the hot wires are used for power. Not a big deal. That is how your electrical appliance circuits are set up at the box in the first place.
Hmm... a 1000 watt heater that only produces 8500 BTU of hot air is less efficient than one that produces 9000 BTU.
It's really an argument about relevant efficiency. Both consume the same amount of energy, but one provides more intended benefit than the other.
Which is why furnaces, air conditioners, refrigerators, etc., all have various metrics of efficiency on them (a 12 SERE air conditioner is more efficient, and more expensive, than a 10 SERE AC, even if they both pull the same amount of power when operating).
It's like accounting. People bemoan companies that produce profit solely by no capital or research investments, and only by squeezing every last expense to a minimum (funny how those expense limits don't affect you if your job title includes 'CxO','VP', etc).
So what? They're upstream in this case regardless.
It's a really expensive version of a fake fireplace that uses IR heat lamps to throw heat into the room while a "fire filter" rolls around one or two white incandescent lamps to make the fire effect, or putting an electric heater under your TV while you play that 8 hr video someone took of an actual fireplace fire.
In this case, the emissions *IN THE HOUSE* are the concern, not the emissions to the environment. Which is the jusitifcation for electrical space heaters over kerosene ones in the house, too.
Gas is expensive on the left coast, plain and simple. PDXrs complain about $2.30-$2.40/gal gas, but it only gets more expensive the further south or north from PDX you go (yes, been both ways in the last month, PDX->Sunny Ego, PDX->Bellingham, WA).
Traffic is bad, but doesn't compare to Seattle, Chicago, San Diego/LA.
If you don't like Multnomah County's tax, it's not too hard to move away from that, but still be "in Portland". Move up to Vancouver like everyone else, for example.
If you've never lived anywhere else as an adult, PDX has its warts. If you have, PDX is pretty dang cool compared to the rest of the country's larger cities.
I'll take a Critical Mass event over some dumbfuck who rolls his SUV on one of the bridges in the area any time.
Do you remember how fucked up PDX traffic was when that roll of sheet steel rolled off the bed of the semi truck on the Terwilliger Curves? Now explain to me the annoyance factor of CM (route around it) or protesters (again, route around it). It took a few hours to actually remove the steel, (incident happened about 1:30pm that day, traffic was still in the shitpan at 7:00 pm, when I left work, and I did not dare try to get on I-5, as it was as bolluxed NB as it was SB).
...or, you happen to move from one area where one chain of stores is owned by the same parent corporation as a different chain where you're moving to.
I make it a point to use my Dominick's card whenif I happen to shop at a Safeway. I don't care one bit that it's linked to my old address in Illinois, same with my Jewel/Osco card when buying chocochip cookies at Albertson's.
I guess I try to keep my shopping rather local if I can, even if it costs more and the service seems to be worse (yeah, right) than the big chains.
Do I know the owners of Roth's Grocery stores in Oregon? Nope. But I'd rather do that then help make Safeway, Wal-Mart or Alberton's any richer than I have to. Yes, they employ people in the area, but so does Roth's, so that argument is moot to me.
You mean a lot like Sinn Fein with regards to the Irish Republican Army in the 70s and 80s (and into the 90s)?
Let's get some white-bread relevance here.
There were people in the US who were funneling $$$ to the IRA, yet at the same time paying lip service that "terrorism is bad".
That Sinn Fein likes to call itself the "political arm" of the IRA, it really has been the propaganda arm of it, and it is probably safe to paint the group as tacitly approving terrorism by others to further its means, much like European kings and queens giving Letters to pirate captains to raid the ships of their enemies (like Sir Francis Drake), but offering a means of plausible deniability if a stink was made in the royal courts.
As far as the current spate of anti-Western violence, I think by looking at the numbers that for the 1800+ US military members that have been killed in various and sundry ways, that those doing the killing have killed 2-5x their fellow citizens, so it's hard really to say that it's "the west that suffers for it".
Some people like wallowing in shit as much as they say they hate doing it. And they do what they can to make everyone else wallow in it too.
I think if you took the average Iraqi Shiite or Sunni, an Afghani or whatever, they just want to live their lifes, see their children grow up, and provide themselves and their families with food and shelter. But the shit-wallowers are using them (and we are too, let's be honest) as pawns and bullet catchers trying to further various "political" ideologies.
Is it realistic to think that if the US pulls out of the area (maybe after detonating nuclear munitions in Iraq's oil wells...) that the shit will stop? How does the shit in the Darfur region of Sudan have anything whatsoever to do with the United States? Well, if the US pulls out of Iraq, then it's back to the same kind of situation with Sunnis trying to get back to being the toppers in society, in other words, civil war until another Saddam Hussein comes along (whether he is Sunni or Shi'ite), Iran and the Taliban causing all sorts of mischief, and Russia continuing business as usual, selling RPGs, AKs and plastic explosives to whomever is wagging the $$$, even better if they're blowing up Americans.
With the university, this would be true of the lab machines, but what of the private machines in the dorm?
If the mailbox or mail server is owned by the University, even if the e-mail is ultimately d/l to the student's personal computer, the service is owned by the University.
Notice that the University is not attempting to filter messages from Yahoo, HotMail, GMail, etc., merely e-mail that is processed through their mail servers.
If you really want all that Spam, then by all means get someone to hook you up with a GMail account or set yourself up with a Yahoo account.
While you may own your phone equipment in your house, you do not own anything past the demarc (i.e., the phone box on the outside of your house).
No different really that Comcast owns your cable TV decoder, or DirecTV/DishNetwork owns the card in your satellite decoder.
If, like most companies, the student's University-supplied e-mail is hosted by Exchange, then the University sure can filter that email before Outlook gets it onto the student's computer.
No, I don't believe your analysis is correct.
Actually, it's not far off.
It certainly isn't true that because it is "your machine" you have the right to block anything that comes to it.
Really? Then why do I have a firewall (block network traffic selectively)? Why do I have "spam filters" on my e-mail?
A phone company may own the phone network and switching equipment, but that doesn't give them the right to block, particularly selectively, what they choose to block.
As a public carrier (as defined by the FCC), no, you're right. But they sure can set so-called Quality of Service metrics, etc. There is nothing stopping them from providing less through bandwidth for traffic and requests originating or terminating outside of their network. What will happen when SBC (or Telestra, BT, DT, et al) decide that they need to hop on the VoIP bandwagon, and, well, their stuff just works better than Vonage, Cisco, etc. VoIP hardware with non-SBC-registered MAC addresses? Hmm..."Quality of Service".
A university may own the student's mailboxes, but that doesn't mean that the university has the right to selectively filter the student's incoming mail.
It may not have the right to filter a particular student's e-mail, but it sure does have the right to filter *all* e-mail messages equally, just like it has the right to filter all employee e-mail, etc. It even has the right to segment off the dorms, student network, etc. from employee/staff/research networks, and deal with them separately. It's the University's network, they can define how it gets used.
My ISP filters my e-mail through its antispam/antivirus software, in addition to my e-mail provider, etc. and Grisoft AV on my computer.
Notice how no university got sued when they started blocking Napster, KaZaa, etc. on the dorm networks. Just like no ISP has gotten sued by a user because their e-mail gets spam-filtered (but they probably do get a non-zero amount of hate mail because either their mailing lists they subscribe to have had their domain black-listed or otherwise determined to be "spam", and have quite a battle not getting them filtered out).
I only wish I could pay the post office to do the same thing to my physical mail box.
You're obviously not a salaried employee.
Might as well throw in "islamic fundamentalist" in the same breath, too.
Much of what you attribute to a craft can be attributed to engineering as well. A bridge can be visually quite artful. A traffic system can be almost beautiful in its elegance and simplicity.
From who's perspective, the designer's or the thousands of suckers stuck in it on their daily slog to work?
A bridge is "beautiful" only when those ponying up the $$$ are willing to pay a little extra for aesthetic details. No way is the engineering sacrificed for aesthetics, nor for making maintenance tougher. Most highway bridges being built now are paying extra $$$ up front to minimize maintenance costs over 20 years or more. Cable-stayed bridges? Yes, they look cool, but they're also very low maintenance compared to a suspension bridge. The only reason the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge is also a suspension bridge is because it's going to sit right next to the old one (and for this area, a suspension bridge really is the only option, because otherwise Washington would have paid for something else far less elegant (it's on the website for it).
Software engineering will be far more like electrical engineering, which is more about design, and elegance is far more a part of good design (except in medical electronics...). There is little liability in consumer electronics. Sell 1 million iPods, it's a business decision if a few have bad batteries. Screw up an implanted heart defibrillator, and people will die.
And engineers who graduate from an accredited school I believe often end up as an apprentice under a professional, until they themselves take the professional engineer's exam and become a licensed engineer.
Gotta justify your tuition to MIT? Anyone can take the professional engineer exams, just like you can take the Bar exam w/o having a JD first (like Frank Abagnale). (I worked with a state traffic engineer [yes, he passed the Professional Engineer exam... Hi, Ed) who's BS was in geography, not civil engineering).
IMO, the big problem with software engineering is that it isn't enough like other engineering disciplines.
Well, it is far more like electrical engineering than mechanical engineering, which in general is pretty dang conservative.
Really it's just that software engineering is still a relatively new field. In time, I imagine people in general will be less tolerant of poorly written software, and the profession will stabilize to be more like the traditional engineering fields.
No, software "engineering" is far more creative. You're given a set of parameters. You are not constrained by material limits except really for time (and thus, money). The more physical the engineering excercise, the more comprimises that must be made, and elegance will take a wayside for economics and liability. There is no "overbuild by 2x" in programming. How do you overbuild a stack? You don't, and you can't, unless you consider handling exceptions in a reasonable and meaningful way as "overbuilding" (I don't).
Maybe you are thinking more about systems engineering: the pointyheads expect the website to take 10000 trans/sec when it's launched, and expect it to drop to about 200/sec in 5 days - so you lease the infrastructure to handle it, or get the pointyheads that it's a wise investment to keep it around for next time, and pay for it up front (gotta use up that capital budget before the FY ends!).
Which is no different than: we anticipate that no more than 10% of the toilets will be simultaneously flushed in the Sears Tower, but better plan for 50% (or whatever the national code book says for buildings over 10 stories tall).
This has nothing to do with time that software "engineering" has existed.
As far as people getting tired of poorly written software, how will you (the end-user, help desk analyst, etc) be able to tell? You won't.
As engineers, we are liable to our products. ...but not software engineers. Bridges, cars, etc., do not come with big huge no-liability stickers on them and limits of warrantability and merchantability ("replacement of the media").
Until states start licensing software engineers like they do real Engineers (those licenses do imply liability for design...), then you'll have a point.
Oh, and bridges DO collapse, but it's usually the fault of mother nature or other external forces (government entities who will not provide maintenance funds, asshats who drive log trucks across covered bridges exceeding the weight limit by 2-5x...).
Also, do you really think that you could go stand outside of the white house and yell about how much of a failure you think Bush is? I don't. I think you would get stopped, and quickly.
Well, drive along the iron fence along Constitution Avenue, and there is always several someones there protesting this or that, with their signs in view of the White House and all the traffic.
Of course, if you use Google Maps to look at the satellite pics of the White House (at maximum zoom), the tops of the White House, and the buildings next to it, have been photoshopped... and the US Capital has been seriously de-rezzed.
Are these 'onerous' demands?
They are if they're from Congress, instead of something like the National Science Federation, or any other peer group of scientists.
MS could enhance the system
You mean, like whatever optimizations to the BSD TCP stack that Microsoft finally started using to get rid of winsock and all that? It's probably because MS used the BSD tcp/ip stack that Windows has (, uses and respects) a hosts file and services file, just like your fave *nix box does.
At least MS didn't buy the winsock people out (like they did with Spyglass).
But quantity is a quality all its own...
After all, it's worked remarkably well for Microsoft for more than 20 years.
Banning nailclippers at the airport checkpoint is no substitute for 100 citizens paying attention to the people around them... i.e. the creepy guy acting stupid planting a bomb!!
especially when a simple Bic pen is FAR more dangerous (or a mechanical drafting pencil, where the lead has been replaced with a nail...).
People who only speak one language from any country are usually likely to look down on people who don't speak their language.
That pretty much sums up most of the antipathy between "Southerners" and "Yanks" in the US (it's mostly a one-sided affair, actually. Bring up the Civil War to most Americans, and it usually invokes great moments of oblivity, like, "what's a civil war?". Yet to a Southerner, it's like getting Howard Stern to talk about the FCC...