Unfortunately, it remains the case that Slashdot seriously believes that the RIAA is a massive, monopolistic, music publisher as opposed to an industry group that represents publishers.
Thanks for putting that so succinctly. I've always sort of scratched my head over the fact that an audience with such a mile-deep capacity for remembering obscure acronyms so routinely gets confused on this point. There are all sorts of small-time publishers, little labels, and others in the biz that allow the RIAA to handle some of the legal and lobbying work that they simply don't have the time, money, or inclination to tackle on their own (since those labels would rather be concentrating on finding, recording, and promoting new talent and material). The RIAA is a trade association. Made up of dues-paying people and organizations that choose to be a part of the group, and each year decide if they want to continue to be so. Within that group are bitter rivals that compete with each other on contracts, hiring, marketing, and in every other way. The notion that it's a couple of evil extras from a bad X-Files episode sitting around trying to do things like the summary of this post implies, but which (if you RTFA) is BS on the face of it... it's actually sort of embarassing, how readily the local groupthink subscribes to some of these mythologies.
Instead of building one large ark and setting up for one large catastrophic failure, build lots of smaller arks that can fly in formation. If one runs into an asteroid or breaks down, the rest will be OK. It may even be possible to allow for transportation between the different arks.
This sounds like "a rag-tag fleet of..." never mind. I like the new BSG better, anyway.
None of them are of a "constitutional nature." They are executive in nature, since it's the executive that's signing the bill. It doesn't change the bill, it simply states the executive's comments on the bill. The C-in-C can't really function with out a budget (congress steps in, there), can if he's found to be actually operating outside of the law or a constitutional interpretation of a new law wind up in court, or the legislature can refine the law to cut down on ambiguity. Just because Clinton, or Bush, or any future president makes a point of stating their position/opinion on a new law as it is signed doesn't change the law, or remove any of the remedies or checks for an administration that acts outside that law. A signing statement is more less just like the nonsensical "non-binding resolution" that Pelosi was stamping her feet about. She says it's the "will of the people," but of course it's just an empty, media-grabbing, opinion-stating bit of politicized blather that doesn't in any way actually change anything. Just like a signing statement.
The "sitting US president?" You mean, sort of like Clinton before him? Or Carter? Or Kennedy? Or do mean that you don't like the fact that anyone on that office feels like they should write down, for the record and for history, the context in which they are signing a piece of legislation? Because whether they jot down a signing statement or not, you still get to vote for someone else. The court system and the legislature can still change the viability of any such signed legislation. Or are you just hoping that by not mentioning the long history of signing statements, that you'll get a few more conspiracy theorists signed up on your team?
Is that like being sort of pregnant? The guy just talked his pets in the legislature to allow him to rule by fiat. He's busy nationalizing industries that other people invested in and paid for. He controls the media, beats up and jails his political opponents, and is an all around jackass. It's bad enough that people like Joe Kennedy like to portray him as some sort of saint, but using him (and Castro) as some sort of victorious case study for Stallman's crusading is not, I think, all that helpful. Unless you like the way Chavez is going. Because in his country, companies like Red Hat would shortly wind up being The Ministry Of Software, and the "evil capitalists" that took the risks to found it, paid the people who got it up and running, and made it a viable enterprise would simply be shoved out the door. It's happening right now in that country, and it's going to get worse.
You have to accept the fact that, in America, the Republican party has been in large part co-opted by ultra-religious interests
I'm not sure why this was modded as flamebait, actually. I think one can reasonably debate whether the religious loons have co-opted the Republican party or whether they're simply unbearably annoying and loud enough to get a lot of media coverage. Exactly the same thing could be said of the most toxic, leftiest-side of the Democratic party. It's not so much the policy platforms that are shaped by either extreme, it's the completely unwarranted media coverage that the extremes on both side receive. That presents a distorted picture, and fuels each side's opposition to label their entire opposition as a lump with the extremes they loathe. Meanwhile, guys like Rudy G. (the very antithesis of a religious fundy) are polling higher than anyone else on the Republican side. Coverage of that? Nah... it's all about Mitt Romney's Mormanism (yeesh!).
I mean, not being perfect (or representing yourself as being so) at detecting the deceit of a lying user does not mean you have a "role in the assault" on a child. This should have been tossed out before it wasted as much court time as it did. Shame about the situation, but the girl's parents are entirely to blame, here. Don't know about your 13 year old daughter's social life and face-time meetings with strangers? Easier to sue, obviously.
Y2K was over-hyped and used by many in the IT industry as a cash cow. You appear to have been employed by this cash cow
Let's look at an example, shall we? A real-time inventory system, written in about 30 different modules, based on VFP. Tons of function-based table indexes, all sorts of low-level date sorting problems, field validations, etc., that would not work post-1.1.2000. Period. It took three people about 600 hours to find and fix this stuff, and then another two weeks to test against data on a sandbox system, and then a long couple of days to re-index several tens of millions of records, deploy patched code to servers, and then audit the live system. Your solution, which would be to just let it fail and see what needed to be fixed, would have run that company out of business. Loss of customers (who rely on timely data and performance), loss of spoilable inventory. Inability to forecast, procure, receive, and pay for goods. In an industry with very tight margins and some competition. Your approach: business failure, loss of jobs. Fixing it in advance: completely successful and nowhere nearly as expensive (assuming that business failure can even be considered an "expense").
You seem to be operating under the delusion that fixing Y2K problems in an enterprise with thousands of users across hundreds of systems, databases, and processes that would have failed is the same as fixing a bug you've just uncovered in a recently deployed system. That's complete crap, and you know it. When you roll out something new, you prepare for the prospect of bugs, and you have people test. Thousands of businesses were operating on systems that had fundamental date-related flaws built into them and used for years passing such tests. I didn't build those flawed systems, I fixed them. If they weren't fixed, the systems would have failed.
Shortly after 1/1/2000, I was approached by several customers that thought they'd handle things the way you're proposing. They had problems like total database corruption, inability to run payroll or deal with state and federal taxes, and bad sorts causing things like medical and personnel records getting completely hosed. The more dramatic ones included businesses that abruptly lost the ability to conduct their online businesses, and lost tens of thousands of dollars in the short run, and customers more permanently. I sure hope you don't give any advice about such matters for a living.
would have been like a normal day in this respect, except for a slightly higher rate than usual.
If, by "slightly higher rate," you mean "which completely shuts down the business" than you'd be right. But you're not. And when it takes people who have the time to calmly plan the fixes for such problems hundreds of hours to wrap up the work, what do you think it will take when you're called in to solve the problem under the gun, while the company is bouncing checks, losing its credit rating, laying off workers? Just because you wouldn't build systems that would require such remediation doesn't mean they weren't out there in droves. And you didn't hear about them because nobody was proud about it. I'm proud of bailing a bunch of those sorry asses out of the situation, though, and I didn't do it in a userous way, though I could have.
There were, in fact, almost no important failures due to Y2K
Exactly. Did you think it was freakin' magic, or something?
How can you see who's going to a google cache in your weblog?
Because though Google caches the page, viewing the cached page still causes your browser to fetch the images off of your server, on the fly. The hits on the images show up in your logs with Google's cached page as the referrer. It's very clear when this happens, just like when leeching mirror sites do the same thing as a way of "creating" content against which they can run their own ads.
No, the poster is exactly right. The bird flu is the new Y2K. That is, lots of people who know what they are doing are working hard at mitigating the risks while the press jabbers on blindly with scare stores.
If you're right, then the poster was right by accident, or in the wrong way. I read his comment to mean that a flu pandemic risk isn't any worse than the "fake" Y2K risk. Check his tone, and you'll see what I mean. He didn't see any airplanes fall out of the sky on 1/1/00, so he's making it sound like there was no big deal after all. Which is complete BS.
You do understand, right, that such a pandemic would last for many weeks at least, and probably many months? It's great that you have the savings (in cash, at hand) and the supplies to not have to worry about interacting with the outside world for months on end... but most people would still be seriously hoping to preserve their career and make sure that the company or organization they work for is still intact and able to cut them a paycheck when the dust settles.
This sort of thing isn't like a hurricane or a 9/11. Just read up on the 1918 pandemic. "Heading for the hills" sounds great... which hills are you going to head to? What food, potable water, and shelter will you and a few tens of millions of other people (who will be bringing the virus with them) be using once you get there? If it gets into human-to-human pandemic mode, you're right that YouTube won't mean much of anything (especially because Google will probably just shut the damn thing down) - but I think that the normal keeping-the-family-alive stuff is also going to be a lot more challenging than most people are prepared to even consider. Of course, any preparation that includes stopping people from congregating in public or that regulates where and how you line up for food will just be seen by the shrill idiots as more of Teh Evil Fashionists taking power. No-win. Can't prepare most people, and can't save 'em, either. Oh well.
think corporations/businesses infrastructure would cripple before the internet does.
Yes. Not to mention, if there really were a pandemic, the odds are that at least some of the people managing the company would be personally impacted, or would have family that was. People would be Freaking Out, and not doing nearly so good a job managing newly-hatched tele-workers. I think this is much more about organizations that are already good at this stuff functioning while others simply won't. But in a real mess of a pandemic, the local cable providers and other ISPs are simply going to fall flat anyway. 'Net access is going to die early and hard, I think.
Ah, here we go. Look, what do you suppose would have happened to the economy if no one had done any Y2K remediation? I was very busy in advance of that roll-over, and a good number of the clients I worked with would have been out of business without substantial system upgrades. Not just BIOS patches, but extensive code reviews and fixes to giant, sprawling, interdependent systems. For companies that operate (as so many do) on a just-in-time basis for goods and materials, even a week's downtime could mean bankruptcy. Multiply that times thousands of businesses, and you've got a major hit. Some of those are companies that supply medical materials, or deal with food processing, or deal with fuel. You surely aren't one of those people who thought it all could have been simply left well enough alone, are you? I directly experienced work that, left undone, would have resulted in financial ruin for organizations employing thousands of people and delivering important products and services to millions of people.
275 cases of it out of 8 billion people does not a pandemic make
And right up until the flu pandemic of 1918 killed millions of people, it wasn't a pandemic either. Do you approach everything in life with a "we'll deal with it after it happens" strategy? Sometimes that's not as effective. Like, when you can't pay your employees after 1/1/2000, or you're dead from a highly contagious virus and whatnot.
he's a grammar nazi and had a tone of jackassery, but he's got a point
Well, I guess I'll take that as a tolerable deal. In the future, I'll aim for more point, less jackassery. Jackasses make me jackassish - it's a weakness.
That is violent agreement. It is not physical violence. There are more definitions to the word than just that.
I would challenge you to find more than one out of a thousand native English speakers that would ever use the word "violent" in that context. With close to 40 years of regular English conversation and extensive reading, I think I can comfortably say that I've never come across anyone constructively using it that way. I have, though, come across plenty of people who toss out words like "violent" or "fascist" or similarly loaded words as part of an indignant (but weak) bit of rhetoric. It usually betrays a certain awareness on the part of the person using it that they are on thin ice, debate-wise.
attack it, even if, as you directly state here, that position does not make sense
People who use an ambiguous, or particularly nonsensical twist of language while trying to make a point that is only semi-related to an ill-conceived, or outright wrong position on something... they need "attacking" (to use your word) because otherwise the semantics of the conversation will get in the way of seeing their basic wrongness.
And what is the cause of the outbreaks? Is it because prions spontaneously form in cows? Or is it that the disease would not exist without the practice of feeding cow parts to other cows? If it is the latter, then the disease would not exist without the practice. Thus, the cause of the spread of the disease is cownabilism. In common speech, that means that feeding cows to other cows causes the disease.
Except, as already pointed out, the disease was known and observed before that practice, and even after that practice, its frequency is very low. And the variants of the same disease that are found in the wild (among other hoofed animals) show up in occasionally dense clusters, and even across large swaths of a given region's population of that species. The cause of the disease is the cause of the disease (the prion). Those factors that may or may not influence the speed or long-term impact of the disease are just that: modifiers to the vectors that spread (not cause) or mitigate the disease's effects in a population. I'm mystified that you can't (or don't think that other people can) handle the distinction between things that cause a disease, and things that cause the disease's spread to de/accelerate. You're asserting that "common speech" conflates those two things (which is another way of saying that that's a "common person's" understanding), even as you suggest that, sometimes, you'd personally make the distinction. How spectacularly condescending of you. And how odd that you'd want to bash someone (especially on a tech/science-oriented web site!) for making the distinction and for encouraging discourse that keeps causality in mind.
A disease is a disease. The spread of it is the spread of it. They are two separate things, and to pretend that you wisely know the difference, but that "common people" can't be expected to sort it out or grapple with the difference - that's the most shallow, and empty flavor of arrogance.
Curiously, while there are plenty of things to pick apart in any number of my hurried posts, there's really nothing wrong with the snipped you echoed back. It's not particularly elegant, but nor is it incorrect. Break it down:
Sometimes it's eaier to test a negative snippet with its opposite:
"your" and "you're" don't meaning anything at all like one another
vs:
"your" and "you're" mean something like one another
Which is incorrect, notionally, but illustrates the validity of the clause (syntax-wise).
Hating someone because they look/act/think different then your is pure ignorance. Any culture that promotes this behavior is crippling humanity.
While, as platitudes go, that's not as bad as most... you can't really assume that all actions are equal? Personally, I feel very righteous in thinking less of someone of their thinking and acting includes a demonstrated willingness to kill me because I don't worship their god(s). Should I really feel completely neutral towards (or ever embrace) a culture that thinks my wife shouldn't be allowed to drive a car or be out in public without me escorting her? Should I consider as equal (or, equally worthy) a culture that would consider it appropriate for me to kill her if someone raped her? These things are not tied to race. But when you get enough people who hang out together and handle things like that the same way, you've got an identifiable culture.
And to suggest that if I dislike such a culture that it's me crippling humanity (because I'm not treating everyone equally)... well, that's just moral relativism, pure and simple. I hope you can see the irony in proclaiming that a person's behavior (say, in their dislike for a certain culture's ways) is something you can't stand. Because in making that proclomation, you are doing exactly the same thing.
A spelling nazi who is actually racist to people who don't spell correctly?
That's pretty funny.
Not racist (obviously!). Pointing out that someone who is making a one-sentence rant about "punks" might want to make one of the key words in that rant actually function, grammar-wise, in its intended role. I'm scarcely perfect, typing/editing-wise, especially when doing five things at once. But someone else's more-than-slightly witless jab (followed up, classicly, by a "people who disagree with me should be lined up and shot" retort) that betrays a lot of Not Getting It about what differentiates one group of people from the next... didn't want to let it just sit there. But you're more fun to hear from, obviously. Possessivessly sspeaking, of courssely.
Anybody that only plays games that meet their culture should all be lined up and "shot".
Well, I think that takes care of any questions about your culture.
Who the hell do you think your are calling me a twit just because I didn't feel like using a contraction.
Well, since "your" and "you're" don't meaning anything at all like one another, you might as well as have used the word "brick" or "xylophone" instead. I rather think people are twits if they are sitting in front of a globe-spanning network interacting with other people in a complex manner on a range of interesting topics... and they still choose their written words because the word sounds similar to the word they actually mean to be using. I think "twit," actually, is a rather mild term for that sort of thing, especially when the original cognitive disconnect came in the middle of a race-rant. I'm certainly glad that people like you don't have the authority to line people up and shoot them - despite your wishes - because you'd probably shoot Mr. Smyth when you meant to shoot Mr. Smith.
Apparently, you are agreeing with someone in a violent manner
I'll confess that I don't know what this means.
But no matter what it means, there's really no mechanism on a discussion board for "violence" to even enter into it. So, right there, I kind of have to wonder about your take on things.
Regardless, prions are the cause of mad cow disease. Always have been, always will be. People did see the syndrome, rarely, long before it cropped up in slightly more tiny numbers in the last several decades. It's not like it was seen, but not named until it was seen ever so slightly more often. On the other hand, our entire culture is reaching such depths of science illiteracy, that it is in no way pedantic to get people to actually embrace the differences between causation and correlation, or disease and symptom, or dangerous protein strands and greater proximity TO then. The version of the prions that impact elk and deer are quite common in some wild herds in the midwest, and those deer do not eat each other. They get it from living in proximity to each other, and encountering each other's droppings, wounds, etc.
Every school kid should understand the difference between causes and vectors. If we use your approach, we'd be teaching people that say gay sex causes AIDS (as opposed to HIV, which actually causes it). Just how badly do you underestimate other people's intellect? Do you want people to not understand the underlying cause of problems that might impact them, their society, their economy, etc? If you're ever wondering why people complain about elitist academic types, there you have it, right there.
Yeah! Or, if you're some twit that doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're" - causing some people to think that maybe it's never about race, but about culture. Some cultures emphasize things (like articulate communication) that are hugely helpful in some pursuits, and others emphasize other things. Obviously your culture doesn't sweat the details of whether or not the people you're bitching to can actually parse your words in a useful way. But, hey, to each their own. Just don't get cranky when people make snap judgements about your character when the equivalent of visual cultural indicators (in this case, the way you communicate) immediately dispose people to thinking less of you. It's not racism, it's culturalism... and (hint, here!) it pretty much always has been. For much of human history, race has been a pretty good indicator of cultural affiliation. Those days are pretty much completely gone now, obviously. So instead, you just watch what people do (or whether they care to differentiate between the possesive "your" and "you're," the contraction of "you are"). Screw skin pigment... do you play characters that match your culture? I'm honestly asking.
How come Europe has so much better public transit then?
Population density. Ancient civilization centers (most US cities haven't been around as long as many individual European townhouses).
If you're pretending that the geography and history of the two scenarios is the same, then right there you've completely killed off any credibility you have on this entire subject. You want to reduce emissions in a way that actually matters? Why aren't you spending all of this energy preaching nuclear energy? One or two nukes, in place of plants burning coal and natural gas, will do more than taking away the minivans of every family in a large city and replacing them with cars so small it takes three of them to move the same group of people between the same two points.
I'm one of the evil SUV owners you're blathering about. I telecommute at least 4 days a week, with no need to even start the vehicle at all. But then, some days I'm driving around with 500 pounds of rackmount servers as payload. Or six people, two dogs, and a big pile of gear. Renting a vehicle large enough to handle that, 4 or 5 times per month, would cost at least twice what it costs me just to own the vehicle and use it when I need it (not to mention I don't have to get transportation to where the vehicle is, and back again when I'm done). In heavy snow, when our local public transportation essentially fails entirely, and the grocery delivery services all say they can't function, and all of my neighbors' compact cars are completely useless, guess who is always asked to get people around, including kids to the doctor, etc?
Assuming you can lump all truck owners into one big Evil Bucket, while completely skipping over the fact that electricy generation is far, far more dirty and carbonating than the difference between an SUV and some other passenger vehicle that can even approach the same carrying capacity - that's just intellectual dishonesty. When I do social things with several friends, we take one less efficient vehicle (mine), and leave three other vehicles parked. Suddenly, my lower-mileage vehicle is getting the best mileage per person that we could possibly arrange. Evil! That's me.
I also seem to recall hearing that cow canibalism is what's causing "Mad Cow" disease.
You're recalling incorrectly.
"Mad Cow" disease (along with its other variants, like the kind we get naturally, or the type that shows up in wild hoofstock like deer and elk) is caused by prions. These occur naturally. When an infected cow's neural material makes its way into the feed of other cows, there is a chance that the other cow could wind up with the disease. Just like there is a chance of a cow sick from a virus or bacterial infection passing it along to other cattle. You're confusing the cause of a disease with one of the means by which it's spread. Two totally different things.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it remains the case that Slashdot seriously believes that the RIAA is a massive, monopolistic, music publisher as opposed to an industry group that represents publishers.
Thanks for putting that so succinctly. I've always sort of scratched my head over the fact that an audience with such a mile-deep capacity for remembering obscure acronyms so routinely gets confused on this point. There are all sorts of small-time publishers, little labels, and others in the biz that allow the RIAA to handle some of the legal and lobbying work that they simply don't have the time, money, or inclination to tackle on their own (since those labels would rather be concentrating on finding, recording, and promoting new talent and material). The RIAA is a trade association. Made up of dues-paying people and organizations that choose to be a part of the group, and each year decide if they want to continue to be so. Within that group are bitter rivals that compete with each other on contracts, hiring, marketing, and in every other way. The notion that it's a couple of evil extras from a bad X-Files episode sitting around trying to do things like the summary of this post implies, but which (if you RTFA) is BS on the face of it... it's actually sort of embarassing, how readily the local groupthink subscribes to some of these mythologies.
Instead of building one large ark and setting up for one large catastrophic failure, build lots of smaller arks that can fly in formation. If one runs into an asteroid or breaks down, the rest will be OK. It may even be possible to allow for transportation between the different arks.
This sounds like "a rag-tag fleet of..." never mind. I like the new BSG better, anyway.
None of them are of a "constitutional nature." They are executive in nature, since it's the executive that's signing the bill. It doesn't change the bill, it simply states the executive's comments on the bill. The C-in-C can't really function with out a budget (congress steps in, there), can if he's found to be actually operating outside of the law or a constitutional interpretation of a new law wind up in court, or the legislature can refine the law to cut down on ambiguity. Just because Clinton, or Bush, or any future president makes a point of stating their position/opinion on a new law as it is signed doesn't change the law, or remove any of the remedies or checks for an administration that acts outside that law. A signing statement is more less just like the nonsensical "non-binding resolution" that Pelosi was stamping her feet about. She says it's the "will of the people," but of course it's just an empty, media-grabbing, opinion-stating bit of politicized blather that doesn't in any way actually change anything. Just like a signing statement.
The "sitting US president?" You mean, sort of like Clinton before him? Or Carter? Or Kennedy? Or do mean that you don't like the fact that anyone on that office feels like they should write down, for the record and for history, the context in which they are signing a piece of legislation? Because whether they jot down a signing statement or not, you still get to vote for someone else. The court system and the legislature can still change the viability of any such signed legislation. Or are you just hoping that by not mentioning the long history of signing statements, that you'll get a few more conspiracy theorists signed up on your team?
almost dictatorial
Is that like being sort of pregnant? The guy just talked his pets in the legislature to allow him to rule by fiat. He's busy nationalizing industries that other people invested in and paid for. He controls the media, beats up and jails his political opponents, and is an all around jackass. It's bad enough that people like Joe Kennedy like to portray him as some sort of saint, but using him (and Castro) as some sort of victorious case study for Stallman's crusading is not, I think, all that helpful. Unless you like the way Chavez is going. Because in his country, companies like Red Hat would shortly wind up being The Ministry Of Software, and the "evil capitalists" that took the risks to found it, paid the people who got it up and running, and made it a viable enterprise would simply be shoved out the door. It's happening right now in that country, and it's going to get worse.
How about a "fundie exchange program?"
Yes! Sort of like using matter/anti-matter to simultaneously destroy both while also producing useful energy. Excellent plan.
You have to accept the fact that, in America, the Republican party has been in large part co-opted by ultra-religious interests
I'm not sure why this was modded as flamebait, actually. I think one can reasonably debate whether the religious loons have co-opted the Republican party or whether they're simply unbearably annoying and loud enough to get a lot of media coverage. Exactly the same thing could be said of the most toxic, leftiest-side of the Democratic party. It's not so much the policy platforms that are shaped by either extreme, it's the completely unwarranted media coverage that the extremes on both side receive. That presents a distorted picture, and fuels each side's opposition to label their entire opposition as a lump with the extremes they loathe. Meanwhile, guys like Rudy G. (the very antithesis of a religious fundy) are polling higher than anyone else on the Republican side. Coverage of that? Nah... it's all about Mitt Romney's Mormanism (yeesh!).
I mean, not being perfect (or representing yourself as being so) at detecting the deceit of a lying user does not mean you have a "role in the assault" on a child. This should have been tossed out before it wasted as much court time as it did. Shame about the situation, but the girl's parents are entirely to blame, here. Don't know about your 13 year old daughter's social life and face-time meetings with strangers? Easier to sue, obviously.
Y2K was over-hyped and used by many in the IT industry as a cash cow. You appear to have been employed by this cash cow
Let's look at an example, shall we? A real-time inventory system, written in about 30 different modules, based on VFP. Tons of function-based table indexes, all sorts of low-level date sorting problems, field validations, etc., that would not work post-1.1.2000. Period. It took three people about 600 hours to find and fix this stuff, and then another two weeks to test against data on a sandbox system, and then a long couple of days to re-index several tens of millions of records, deploy patched code to servers, and then audit the live system. Your solution, which would be to just let it fail and see what needed to be fixed, would have run that company out of business. Loss of customers (who rely on timely data and performance), loss of spoilable inventory. Inability to forecast, procure, receive, and pay for goods. In an industry with very tight margins and some competition. Your approach: business failure, loss of jobs. Fixing it in advance: completely successful and nowhere nearly as expensive (assuming that business failure can even be considered an "expense").
You seem to be operating under the delusion that fixing Y2K problems in an enterprise with thousands of users across hundreds of systems, databases, and processes that would have failed is the same as fixing a bug you've just uncovered in a recently deployed system. That's complete crap, and you know it. When you roll out something new, you prepare for the prospect of bugs, and you have people test. Thousands of businesses were operating on systems that had fundamental date-related flaws built into them and used for years passing such tests. I didn't build those flawed systems, I fixed them. If they weren't fixed, the systems would have failed.
Shortly after 1/1/2000, I was approached by several customers that thought they'd handle things the way you're proposing. They had problems like total database corruption, inability to run payroll or deal with state and federal taxes, and bad sorts causing things like medical and personnel records getting completely hosed. The more dramatic ones included businesses that abruptly lost the ability to conduct their online businesses, and lost tens of thousands of dollars in the short run, and customers more permanently. I sure hope you don't give any advice about such matters for a living.
would have been like a normal day in this respect, except for a slightly higher rate than usual.
If, by "slightly higher rate," you mean "which completely shuts down the business" than you'd be right. But you're not. And when it takes people who have the time to calmly plan the fixes for such problems hundreds of hours to wrap up the work, what do you think it will take when you're called in to solve the problem under the gun, while the company is bouncing checks, losing its credit rating, laying off workers? Just because you wouldn't build systems that would require such remediation doesn't mean they weren't out there in droves. And you didn't hear about them because nobody was proud about it. I'm proud of bailing a bunch of those sorry asses out of the situation, though, and I didn't do it in a userous way, though I could have.
There were, in fact, almost no important failures due to Y2K
Exactly. Did you think it was freakin' magic, or something?
I know. I was pointing out the irony.
And another thing: I think it's possible you were pointing out the irony.
Sorry, my obviousometer was down for maintenance this morning.
How can you see who's going to a google cache in your weblog?
Because though Google caches the page, viewing the cached page still causes your browser to fetch the images off of your server, on the fly. The hits on the images show up in your logs with Google's cached page as the referrer. It's very clear when this happens, just like when leeching mirror sites do the same thing as a way of "creating" content against which they can run their own ads.
No, the poster is exactly right. The bird flu is the new Y2K. That is, lots of people who know what they are doing are working hard at mitigating the risks while the press jabbers on blindly with scare stores.
If you're right, then the poster was right by accident, or in the wrong way. I read his comment to mean that a flu pandemic risk isn't any worse than the "fake" Y2K risk. Check his tone, and you'll see what I mean. He didn't see any airplanes fall out of the sky on 1/1/00, so he's making it sound like there was no big deal after all. Which is complete BS.
You do understand, right, that such a pandemic would last for many weeks at least, and probably many months? It's great that you have the savings (in cash, at hand) and the supplies to not have to worry about interacting with the outside world for months on end ... but most people would still be seriously hoping to preserve their career and make sure that the company or organization they work for is still intact and able to cut them a paycheck when the dust settles.
This sort of thing isn't like a hurricane or a 9/11. Just read up on the 1918 pandemic. "Heading for the hills" sounds great... which hills are you going to head to? What food, potable water, and shelter will you and a few tens of millions of other people (who will be bringing the virus with them) be using once you get there? If it gets into human-to-human pandemic mode, you're right that YouTube won't mean much of anything (especially because Google will probably just shut the damn thing down) - but I think that the normal keeping-the-family-alive stuff is also going to be a lot more challenging than most people are prepared to even consider. Of course, any preparation that includes stopping people from congregating in public or that regulates where and how you line up for food will just be seen by the shrill idiots as more of Teh Evil Fashionists taking power. No-win. Can't prepare most people, and can't save 'em, either. Oh well.
think corporations/businesses infrastructure would cripple before the internet does.
Yes. Not to mention, if there really were a pandemic, the odds are that at least some of the people managing the company would be personally impacted, or would have family that was. People would be Freaking Out, and not doing nearly so good a job managing newly-hatched tele-workers. I think this is much more about organizations that are already good at this stuff functioning while others simply won't. But in a real mess of a pandemic, the local cable providers and other ISPs are simply going to fall flat anyway. 'Net access is going to die early and hard, I think.
Bird flu is the new Y2K
Ah, here we go. Look, what do you suppose would have happened to the economy if no one had done any Y2K remediation? I was very busy in advance of that roll-over, and a good number of the clients I worked with would have been out of business without substantial system upgrades. Not just BIOS patches, but extensive code reviews and fixes to giant, sprawling, interdependent systems. For companies that operate (as so many do) on a just-in-time basis for goods and materials, even a week's downtime could mean bankruptcy. Multiply that times thousands of businesses, and you've got a major hit. Some of those are companies that supply medical materials, or deal with food processing, or deal with fuel. You surely aren't one of those people who thought it all could have been simply left well enough alone, are you? I directly experienced work that, left undone, would have resulted in financial ruin for organizations employing thousands of people and delivering important products and services to millions of people.
275 cases of it out of 8 billion people does not a pandemic make
And right up until the flu pandemic of 1918 killed millions of people, it wasn't a pandemic either. Do you approach everything in life with a "we'll deal with it after it happens" strategy? Sometimes that's not as effective. Like, when you can't pay your employees after 1/1/2000, or you're dead from a highly contagious virus and whatnot.
he's a grammar nazi and had a tone of jackassery, but he's got a point
Well, I guess I'll take that as a tolerable deal. In the future, I'll aim for more point, less jackassery. Jackasses make me jackassish - it's a weakness.
That is violent agreement. It is not physical violence. There are more definitions to the word than just that.
I would challenge you to find more than one out of a thousand native English speakers that would ever use the word "violent" in that context. With close to 40 years of regular English conversation and extensive reading, I think I can comfortably say that I've never come across anyone constructively using it that way. I have, though, come across plenty of people who toss out words like "violent" or "fascist" or similarly loaded words as part of an indignant (but weak) bit of rhetoric. It usually betrays a certain awareness on the part of the person using it that they are on thin ice, debate-wise.
attack it, even if, as you directly state here, that position does not make sense
People who use an ambiguous, or particularly nonsensical twist of language while trying to make a point that is only semi-related to an ill-conceived, or outright wrong position on something... they need "attacking" (to use your word) because otherwise the semantics of the conversation will get in the way of seeing their basic wrongness.
And what is the cause of the outbreaks? Is it because prions spontaneously form in cows? Or is it that the disease would not exist without the practice of feeding cow parts to other cows? If it is the latter, then the disease would not exist without the practice. Thus, the cause of the spread of the disease is cownabilism. In common speech, that means that feeding cows to other cows causes the disease.
Except, as already pointed out, the disease was known and observed before that practice, and even after that practice, its frequency is very low. And the variants of the same disease that are found in the wild (among other hoofed animals) show up in occasionally dense clusters, and even across large swaths of a given region's population of that species. The cause of the disease is the cause of the disease (the prion). Those factors that may or may not influence the speed or long-term impact of the disease are just that: modifiers to the vectors that spread (not cause) or mitigate the disease's effects in a population. I'm mystified that you can't (or don't think that other people can) handle the distinction between things that cause a disease, and things that cause the disease's spread to de/accelerate. You're asserting that "common speech" conflates those two things (which is another way of saying that that's a "common person's" understanding), even as you suggest that, sometimes, you'd personally make the distinction. How spectacularly condescending of you. And how odd that you'd want to bash someone (especially on a tech/science-oriented web site!) for making the distinction and for encouraging discourse that keeps causality in mind.
A disease is a disease. The spread of it is the spread of it. They are two separate things, and to pretend that you wisely know the difference, but that "common people" can't be expected to sort it out or grapple with the difference - that's the most shallow, and empty flavor of arrogance.
Curiously, while there are plenty of things to pick apart in any number of my hurried posts, there's really nothing wrong with the snipped you echoed back. It's not particularly elegant, but nor is it incorrect. Break it down:
Sometimes it's eaier to test a negative snippet with its opposite:
"your" and "you're" don't meaning anything at all like one another
vs:
"your" and "you're" mean something like one another
Which is incorrect, notionally, but illustrates the validity of the clause (syntax-wise).
Hating someone because they look/act/think different then your is pure ignorance. Any culture that promotes this behavior is crippling humanity.
While, as platitudes go, that's not as bad as most... you can't really assume that all actions are equal? Personally, I feel very righteous in thinking less of someone of their thinking and acting includes a demonstrated willingness to kill me because I don't worship their god(s). Should I really feel completely neutral towards (or ever embrace) a culture that thinks my wife shouldn't be allowed to drive a car or be out in public without me escorting her? Should I consider as equal (or, equally worthy) a culture that would consider it appropriate for me to kill her if someone raped her? These things are not tied to race. But when you get enough people who hang out together and handle things like that the same way, you've got an identifiable culture.
And to suggest that if I dislike such a culture that it's me crippling humanity (because I'm not treating everyone equally)... well, that's just moral relativism, pure and simple. I hope you can see the irony in proclaiming that a person's behavior (say, in their dislike for a certain culture's ways) is something you can't stand. Because in making that proclomation, you are doing exactly the same thing.
A spelling nazi who is actually racist to people who don't spell correctly?
That's pretty funny.
Not racist (obviously!). Pointing out that someone who is making a one-sentence rant about "punks" might want to make one of the key words in that rant actually function, grammar-wise, in its intended role. I'm scarcely perfect, typing/editing-wise, especially when doing five things at once. But someone else's more-than-slightly witless jab (followed up, classicly, by a "people who disagree with me should be lined up and shot" retort) that betrays a lot of Not Getting It about what differentiates one group of people from the next... didn't want to let it just sit there. But you're more fun to hear from, obviously. Possessivessly sspeaking, of courssely.
Anybody that only plays games that meet their culture should all be lined up and "shot".
Well, I think that takes care of any questions about your culture.
Who the hell do you think your are calling me a twit just because I didn't feel like using a contraction.
Well, since "your" and "you're" don't meaning anything at all like one another, you might as well as have used the word "brick" or "xylophone" instead. I rather think people are twits if they are sitting in front of a globe-spanning network interacting with other people in a complex manner on a range of interesting topics... and they still choose their written words because the word sounds similar to the word they actually mean to be using. I think "twit," actually, is a rather mild term for that sort of thing, especially when the original cognitive disconnect came in the middle of a race-rant. I'm certainly glad that people like you don't have the authority to line people up and shoot them - despite your wishes - because you'd probably shoot Mr. Smyth when you meant to shoot Mr. Smith.
Apparently, you are agreeing with someone in a violent manner
I'll confess that I don't know what this means.
But no matter what it means, there's really no mechanism on a discussion board for "violence" to even enter into it. So, right there, I kind of have to wonder about your take on things.
Regardless, prions are the cause of mad cow disease. Always have been, always will be. People did see the syndrome, rarely, long before it cropped up in slightly more tiny numbers in the last several decades. It's not like it was seen, but not named until it was seen ever so slightly more often. On the other hand, our entire culture is reaching such depths of science illiteracy, that it is in no way pedantic to get people to actually embrace the differences between causation and correlation, or disease and symptom, or dangerous protein strands and greater proximity TO then. The version of the prions that impact elk and deer are quite common in some wild herds in the midwest, and those deer do not eat each other. They get it from living in proximity to each other, and encountering each other's droppings, wounds, etc.
Every school kid should understand the difference between causes and vectors. If we use your approach, we'd be teaching people that say gay sex causes AIDS (as opposed to HIV, which actually causes it). Just how badly do you underestimate other people's intellect? Do you want people to not understand the underlying cause of problems that might impact them, their society, their economy, etc? If you're ever wondering why people complain about elitist academic types, there you have it, right there.
Why would it matter unless your some racist punk
Yeah! Or, if you're some twit that doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're" - causing some people to think that maybe it's never about race, but about culture. Some cultures emphasize things (like articulate communication) that are hugely helpful in some pursuits, and others emphasize other things. Obviously your culture doesn't sweat the details of whether or not the people you're bitching to can actually parse your words in a useful way. But, hey, to each their own. Just don't get cranky when people make snap judgements about your character when the equivalent of visual cultural indicators (in this case, the way you communicate) immediately dispose people to thinking less of you. It's not racism, it's culturalism... and (hint, here!) it pretty much always has been. For much of human history, race has been a pretty good indicator of cultural affiliation. Those days are pretty much completely gone now, obviously. So instead, you just watch what people do (or whether they care to differentiate between the possesive "your" and "you're," the contraction of "you are"). Screw skin pigment... do you play characters that match your culture? I'm honestly asking.
How come Europe has so much better public transit then?
Population density. Ancient civilization centers (most US cities haven't been around as long as many individual European townhouses).
If you're pretending that the geography and history of the two scenarios is the same, then right there you've completely killed off any credibility you have on this entire subject. You want to reduce emissions in a way that actually matters? Why aren't you spending all of this energy preaching nuclear energy? One or two nukes, in place of plants burning coal and natural gas, will do more than taking away the minivans of every family in a large city and replacing them with cars so small it takes three of them to move the same group of people between the same two points.
I'm one of the evil SUV owners you're blathering about. I telecommute at least 4 days a week, with no need to even start the vehicle at all. But then, some days I'm driving around with 500 pounds of rackmount servers as payload. Or six people, two dogs, and a big pile of gear. Renting a vehicle large enough to handle that, 4 or 5 times per month, would cost at least twice what it costs me just to own the vehicle and use it when I need it (not to mention I don't have to get transportation to where the vehicle is, and back again when I'm done). In heavy snow, when our local public transportation essentially fails entirely, and the grocery delivery services all say they can't function, and all of my neighbors' compact cars are completely useless, guess who is always asked to get people around, including kids to the doctor, etc?
Assuming you can lump all truck owners into one big Evil Bucket, while completely skipping over the fact that electricy generation is far, far more dirty and carbonating than the difference between an SUV and some other passenger vehicle that can even approach the same carrying capacity - that's just intellectual dishonesty. When I do social things with several friends, we take one less efficient vehicle (mine), and leave three other vehicles parked. Suddenly, my lower-mileage vehicle is getting the best mileage per person that we could possibly arrange. Evil! That's me.
I also seem to recall hearing that cow canibalism is what's causing "Mad Cow" disease.
You're recalling incorrectly.
"Mad Cow" disease (along with its other variants, like the kind we get naturally, or the type that shows up in wild hoofstock like deer and elk) is caused by prions. These occur naturally. When an infected cow's neural material makes its way into the feed of other cows, there is a chance that the other cow could wind up with the disease. Just like there is a chance of a cow sick from a virus or bacterial infection passing it along to other cattle. You're confusing the cause of a disease with one of the means by which it's spread. Two totally different things.