We used to be a lot more sensible about this: if you so aggregiously attacked society that you've essentially declared a permanent contempt for it and willingness to harm it, then you get something special: like being a laborer for life. You know, the salt mines, that sort of thing. Now we've got all these great labor saving devices, so it sort of takes the fun out of knowing that child rapists are breaking up rocks to make road gravel (meaning, it's not cost efficient, so they're still a drain on society, not a cheap asset). I've seen programs where lifers are put to work doing things like making wiring harnesses or other actitivies for which it remains difficult to employ robots. Sounds like a great alternative to outsourcing some manufacturing to China, if you ask me.
Oh, I don't know. Seems to have worked just fine so far.
Considering the flack they get, I'd say it really hasn't worked for them at all, and that they've learned from that. Again, I say this as someone who works with one of their biggest business software partners - they really do get it (that they can't just BS about what they're going to release), because it costs them huge amounts of loyalty in the consulting ranks, and that shapes the direction of the adoption of their big ticket accounting products (not that anyone on Slashdot ever talks about Great Plains, Solomon, or any of the rest of that universe!).
Just for the record, I think that sex offenders are among the worse kind of human beings around. I also think that politicians who use fear of terrorist attacks to push their agendas of invading countries they don't like and secret laws that suspend basic civil liberties to be even worse.
Um, gee... at the risk of falling into a big fat, Off Topic trap here, I think you're reaching a bit. First, be sure to spread your complaints about changes in law enforcement tools to both sides of the political spectrum, since those new laws were enthusiastically passed in the wake of an actual terrorist attack (not the threat of one) by both parties. And, I think your posture towards the administration will come across a little less shrill if you don't characterize the motivations for taking out the Taliban and Saddam as "not liking" the countries involved. It's more a matter of not tolerating the tyrants that had taken over those countries.
Be sure to check with the intelligence provided by the Russians, the French, the Germans, the Italians, and many others before thinking that serious, genuine concern about WMD trafficking didn't play a role in the recent military actions. Of course Saddam had them. He used them! We saw piles of them, and subsequently (as he was taking daily pot shots at the UN-backed flights protecting the no-fly zones over the Kurds that Saddam loved to use them on) refused to say, despite UN resolutions that he do, what he did with them. The likeliest place for all that VX gas and the rest is, of course, Syria. Where, just as before we invaded (when Saddam did regular business both ways in weapons, cash, and more), terrorism is the local hobby. The reason that fear of WMD-enabled terrorism worked as a political motivator is because it was and is a reasonable position to take based on what we knew (and still know).
Changing the regime in Irag, and letting those people live in a democratic society not run by brutal Stalinist punks like Saddam and his two charming sons (who put political opponents through the wood chipper and tortured the soccer team for not winning the Olympics) was the policy of the Clinton administration, too. The difference was that the stakes got much higher, and the opacity of the Baathist regime's inner workings, combined with their steadfast refusal to do anything but obfuscate and play games about the weapons inspections they agreed to, over and over (after being kicked out of a country they had just invaded) to openly permit... those developments made action necessary. And taking that action, and freeing Afghanistan from the Taliban, has already started to do just what was intended. Check with Lybia (now spending money on things other than imported Pakistanti nuke technology), or with Lebanon (happily kicking out the Syrian military bullies running the place), or with the first glimmers of municipal democracy in Egypt and even Saudi Arabia for whether acting was a good thing to do.
The medievalist, theocratic thugs that want to keep people from voting, women from working, and freedom from existing through the middle east, are now showing their true colors by blowing up innocent people in Iraq. The locals hate them, and people are signing up for police and military jobs there expressly out of disgust for what those insurgents are trying to do there. They had enough of that with the last unelected, brutal family regime, and they're done with it. But now they get to do something about it, and that country has ceased to be a government-sanctioned thoroughfare for terrorists and arms shipments to and from the places that support them. Hopefully Syria will wake up, and Iran will succumb to the more clear-thinking, younger part of their population, and make conflict of the sort that Saddam started (and eventually fell to) a thing of the past. As for terrorists, all we need is fewer places for them to comfortably camp out and from which to get millions in cash. That doesn't happen in months, it takes years - but at
preventing them from considering any new laws until after several months since the crime,
If we waited several months after any repeat sex offender did some evil deed to a kid before we did anything about it, we'd never do anything about it. This happens over and over again, and that's the ones we know about. This is more of a steady boiling issue, not a flare-up.
and actually attaching a tracking device to a person, like a tagged animal, would involve so much legal fighting that it would probably end up in the US Supreme court
You mean, just like the Supreme Court would surely strike down putting someone behind bars, just like a caged animal? Or using tasers to mange a violent prisoner, just like you'd use a cattle prod on an ornery future flank steak? No, people who act like animals routinely do get treated like them. People who treat children like sex toys are beneath contempt, and fixing something to them for tracking doesn't even put a dent in what they deserve.
I don't suppose you voiced this same concern about Martha Stewart's tracking bracelet, did you? Or is she worse than a child molester, somehow?
But what if it was a wrong place, wrong time drunken haze kind of thing
Well, hopefully it's still going to feel appropriate to lock up someone who rapes someone else, or messes with kids, no matter how drunk or frat-influenced they were. It still goes to their capacity for judgement.
The real difference here would be between, say, an indecent exposure conviction (for unzipping to take a leak while drunk at night in a park someplace), vs. say, getting kids into your car and whatnot. As long as it's clear that a lifetime of being monitored is part of the penalty, the rapists/molesters can hardly complain. And if they're really rehabilitated at some future date, part of that mental awakening would surely include realizing why, as a society, we'd leverage technology that way.
OK, so I submitted the article, and I was pretty much expecting a comment like this. "Bah" seems reasonable. "FUD," perhaps not. Really, the point, from my perspective, was the issue of a filter (like AOL's) that doesn't really swing into action until a fair number of subscribers (who sought out and asked to get the mail!) act to describe the mail as spam. Of course this is going to happen some, but it feels a bit skewed, somehow. So, my question in the summary was really the focus: how bad is the Blamed By Your Subscribers For Doing What They Asked problem?
After years of handling bulk mail for clients, my sense is that this trend is up sharply, and this particular example seemed like a pretty good one (because it's such a small sender with so few recipients, and yet it's been blocked).
I appreciate your larger point. But while I don't think it's AOL's intent or policy to block truly legit mail, and I recognize that the problem is huge and almost impossible to meaningfully police without some friendly fire incidents, I think their threshold is set just a little too low, that's all. And it's damn hard to get it straightened out. And I'm not just picking on AOL here... I keep an old AOL account just for testing purposes, and I own some of their stock. This was intended to be a talking point, and a query about the trends in the recipients' behavior, not so much the need for blocking. Sorry if the tone seemed silly or alarmist - my mistake, there. Hey, who knew/. would actually run the article? I didn't bash Bill Gates even once!
Maybe it's because we've just finished teaching people that the "Unsubscribe" links in (genuine) SPAM aren't to be trusted. So now we're expecting them to know that an "Unsubscribe" link in a legitimate email is OK to click on?!?
Well, a little critical thinking isn't too much to ask for. Especiall when the mail they're looking at is one they asked for. That should make them a little less queasy about clicking the unsubscribe link. With AOL, though, one of the problems may be that certain presentations of the mail will disable links embedded in the body of the message. This means that the user would need to act to enable the link or cut/paste the link to a browser. Woosh! Right over a lot of users' heads (and not just AOL people, that's for sure). So, they just take the apparently easy way out and tell their system to block the mail. No concept that they're telling AOL to treat the sender like a pariah.
I dunno about you, but I'm going to look to a more universal broadcast media (radio, tv) for emergency
Actually, I've very happily used systems like this to get highly localized alerts about other places, where my local broadcasting services would be useless. For example, say you have elderly parents 300 miles away... it's nice, while you're toiling in your cube, to get a little info about impending scary weather in distant Smalltown, and to make a check-up phone call.
Or, say I'm planning on going pheasant hunting in South Dakota in October. Sure there are a thousand ways I can keep an eye on the weather there in the week or so before I leave the east coast, but when you're busy, it's actually nice to get a couple e-mails a day, mixed in with your other work, that will give you a sense of the evolving weather somewhere out of town. In this case it's not an emergency situation, but I'd be annoyed if that sort of stuff was blocked as spam, that's for sure. Of course, I'm annoyed when I can't unsubscribe, too! And that does happen. That's probably when a lot of people click the "spam" button, and poison the well.
That is my experience, actually. AOL rarely seems to block a source until a good number of their users have registered a complaint by clicking the (almost too easy to use) "this is spam" button. I suspect that some people think that's easier than unsubscribing, and don't think about the larger consequences.
If this group was treated as an unbiased reviewers, I'd have more sympathy but as it is, it seems just another corrupted media.
If you RTFA, it appears that they're well aware of the drubbing they took from their last showing to a handful of bloggers, and are expecting the annointed "team 99" crowd to expressly do more of the same, as they get feedback from the wider community. If the software is crap, what possible good will it do MS to pump up demonstrably false notions about the presence or absence of a feature, only to have it turn out not to be true when everybody gets to look at the release? They seem to be going to a lot of trouble to announce, well in advance, that they're going to skip over certain features, or delay others. The bloggers will be an echo chamber for some of that, and a feedback channel. Other than the NDA (which presumably these folks will actually read before signing!), I don't sense any means by which MS would be able to make someone convey a better impression of the OS than they've personally experienced. I work with an MS partner (our firm sells accounting apps and does large scale systems integration, among other things), and we play very much the same role - we scream at MS when end users scream at us, and we preach the solutions when we're comfortable with them ourselves.
To root out Ignorance and replace it with Truthful Knowledge would be the ongoing battle
Now, how is it you're going to "root out" ignorance in places like Afghanistan, where the local monopoly on Truthful Knowledge was wholly owned and operated by the Taliban? You know, the people who would actually take women down to the former soccer field and shoot them at lunch time in front of an audience for: working and sending their daughters to secret classrooms. You know: the Taliban. The medievilist bunch of charming fellows that went out of their way to harbor training camps for that nice Mr. Bin Laden, and who, as a matter of doctrine, destroyed the local historical artifacts (some much older than Islam) in the name of their newly imported Truth.
So, these people were more than willing to kill in order to keep ignorance working as their tool of power. You'd like to educate in that setting, no doubt. There's only one mechanism by which a guy willing to kill women and children in cold blood to make a point about Allah is going to have his behavior changed, and that mechanism is force. In the most recent case, US special forces, Marines, and their associates.
You want to fight ignorance? Ask yourself how you'll fight it when the people actually preaching its perpetuation are willing to kill you to make sure it sticks? It's hard to reason with someone like that as they're shooting you, or running a plane full of jet fuel into your cubicle.
Armed containment of people like that is not mutually exclusive with education. But education cannot exist in a place where killers prop up ignorance and fear. The shortest path to an education-friendly environment is the prompt removal of thugs like that. And we have the ability. Just ask the working women and school kids in Afghanistan.
We send men and women off to die in war ever year. Yet the expansion of human horizons through the exploration of space by willing people is "too dangerous".
First, no one (except the medievalist wack jobs preaching to the suicide bombers) sends soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen people off to die. If that's how you think of it, then sending police out on the street every day is "sending them do die," just like sending firefighters out to burning buildings is "sending them to die." That whole line of thinking is an empty bit of rhetorical nonsense designed to prick the emotions of people without any sort of critical thinking skills.
As for expanding our horizons as being "too dangerous" (as is rarely said, but often implied in media coverage), too dangerous to whom? The most common thing I hear in the news, especially following a loss of vehicle or crew on a NASA mission, is something along the lines of "What a waste! We could wipe out all of poverty if we took all that money and gave it to hungry people and made better schools."
I'm sure there are plenty of people here that will back NASA and wish them more funding, while also wishing more funding for schools. Saying it's either-or is a false dichotomy, just like saying that space research and defense are either-or (their typically very complementary, actually).
And I'd rather see people "spending" their lives willingly on something the truly believe in for the betterment of all mankind, than for any squabble over territory or natural resources.
Because I know some personally, and am comfortable conservatively extrapolating, I think we can say that there are plenty of people in the military that are indeed willing to risk their lives. And they don't see freeing people from theocratic tyranny and Stalinist thugs, or protecting fragile new democracies as a "squabbles." A more forward-looking world (as such because of fewer Saddams, or Talibans, as recent examples) is something that a lot of men and women (including some that volunteer to go into harm's way) consider just as worthy as a moon base. Personally, I think both are worth way more resources than either get. Doesn't mean that every bit of work done by NASA or DOD makes sense, but there are sound practical and idealogical motivations in both areas.
It's not a question of having a solid opinion -- it's jumping to conclusions about the implications of what the OP said, and distorting the discussion along your predefined political lines, which seem highly simplistic -- e.g. what does John Kerry have to do with this? You're part of the problem in the sense that you don't contribute anything, you only distort along entirely predictable, but utterly misguided, lines.
The post I responded to could not have been simpler (in its ridicule of some scientists) or more obvious in its sarcastic reference to (in his caps) "THE WAR ON TERRORISM". So, let's see: we have the poster saying "It's kind of a funny to watch us [my emphasis] scientists..." meaning that he includes himself in that group (of scientists). But through his obvious disdain for those scientists that "stoop so low" as to consider how to increase their funding, he's immediately making the thread an adversarial one, and doing so against the backdrop of the conflict that's occurring on the current administration's watch. Without articulating anything that would broaden the observation beyond the direct denigration of some scientists, or suggest that his take on fighting terrorism is anything other than partisan, the person I replied to went (through an obviously considered brevity) to a lot of trouble to be "filtered," "binary," and entirely political. Political about funding research, political about a conflict which (despite his implications), because of the unconventional nature of the attacks we face, rely hugely on science and technology to expose threat details, minimize the need for the use of traditional military tactics, and get behind the scenes to the sorts of people preaching medeival theocratic nonsense to young suicide bombers.
I didn't jump to conclusions about the post, I read between the (short) lines. Short of assuming that he considers Islamist (and every other flavor) terrorism no big deal (if that's his take, then all bets are off, here, rational-conversation-wise), and short of assuming that liberalized, democratized states in the middle east are too much to expect of the people living there and would have no impact in mitigating the threats to the west, I can't imagine that the original poster's tone was anything other than partisan. It's not simplistic to boil this down to the basics - it's the only way to get people to put their cards on the table. Tap dancing around one's contempt for, say, the Bush administration, by making snarky comments about other scientists - it's not elevated, unbiased, unfilterd, unbinary, or anything else other than thinly veiled flamebaiting, and I treated it as such. Shouldn't feed the trolls, I know.
I wonder how MSN search compares to Google in terms of hardware versus load.
Pretty much of an apples/oranges problem there, though. Yes, a search is a search is a search... but there are very different things going on relative to MSN membership, Google AdSense ads, and so on. Very different back-end processes and business issues would completely eclipse, I suspect, discussions about the individual web servers' OS. IIS on Win2003 may not be every slashdotter's cup of tea, but it's not orders of magnitude different from other servers in its ability to serve up a page. It's all that other behind-the-scenes tomfoolerly that both sites are doing that are what really weigh them down and burn up the CPU cycles. It's the database architecture and plumbing that really makes this stuff fascinating (and mysterious, if you don't work there).
You're the one inserting your simplistic binary political filter into the situation. In so doing, you become part of the problem.
Really? What party am I representing? Certainly I'm not the party that refers to scientists as "stooping so low" as to get funding for their research, or assumes that they're Muslim-haters for doing so. I'm sure you find the earlier poster's articulate meanderings to be nuanced examples of open-minded wonderfulness, of course.
But out of curiosity: how does having a solid opinion about something contribute to "the problem?" You seem to have a solid opinion about me, so are you part of the problem?
And, from where in anything I said to you do infer that I think the phrase "homeland" was a better choice of phrase than "domestic" or "border." Didn't say it, imply it, or give you any reason to infer it. You seem to hate the idea that someone might wrongly form a rash opinion of another culture, but you're happy to bark BS ad hominem attacks at me while imagining me to be your ideal hate target. What political party am I in? What color am I? Am I religious? Am I wealthy? You sure seem to know who my "people" are. Love the irony!
people who keep on doing whatever they've done for the last 20 years but who now ask for more money
Right, because more direct and immediate uses for a technology outside of pure research usually places a larger burden on the research team or the institution that houses them. If you've got something that you know will have (in the case we're talking about) security implications, you can bet that your days as a simple gee-whiz-ain't-the-universe-cool researcher are going to be complicated by security clearances, contracts, and other things that make it more expensive just to be you. But beyond that, it's really not any different than suddenly realizing that something you're working on has immediate uses in any popular, well-funded activity, including private industry. Sure, micro-fusion devices are immediately useful for neutron-related bomb detecting, etc., but what if they had immediate cancer-fighting promise, as well (I know, bad example). The same scientists would absolutely mention that out loud, too, and absolutely hope for a cash infusion from the med-tech sector to give them more needed research horsepower. You're the one that's presuming words in their mouths or racist motives in their heads just because they recognize the utility of something they're working on.
their research miraculously MIGHT help detecting bombs, muslims or people of other faith in general
Do you even hear yourself? So, if the next Timothy McVeigh can be caught before a dirty bomb he's about to set off in Berkeley can hurt people - knowing that something you're working on could contribute to that, and looking to push funding for that work as a side project of your basic research is a bad thing? Where are you getting "people of other faith" anywhere in this, except in your own mind? Granted, it's a very small but obnoxious fraction of the people of the Muslim faith that are the most loudly screaming that democracy is evil, and which blow up people waiting in line to get a job just to make a point, but it's not only them. Technology to detect bombs is not itself race-oriented, though your comments seem drenched in that way of thinking. Oh, and please work on phrases like "objecting at" before you call other people morons. Your tone is shrill enough without making it worse, and impacting your credibility, with lousy grammar.
come up with the weirdest reasons why further research on the subject might help in the WAR AGAINST TERRORISM
So, being able to detect WMD materials being smuggled through ports or airports fails to help stop terrorists how? What part of guys who want to kill you smuggling in, say, refined uranium, is it not useful to stop? How is it not helping a scientist, or his institution, to point out something that obvious, and to benefit from having more people and resources interested in his research?
So, let me guess: if John Kerry had been elected, there'd be no need to find ways to detect fissile material in shipboard containers, right? I'm astounded, though shouldn't be, that you were modded insightful for that little bit of partisan ranting. Science and security are not mutually exclusive, and some of the best funded science programs on the planet enjoy defense dollars as part of the recipe. Stoop so low. Man, that's the pot-head calling the kettle black.
Well, ideally, a fixed, funded system would be nice
I'm a little foggy, here. Fixed by what standards? And, funded by whom? If not by investors... then, what... tax dollars?
that the market is simply fickle
I've noticed that the open source community is pretty damn fickle, too. But that's the whole point, isn't it? That the market (of users, some of which vote with their wallet as investors) is the most nimble way to shape production to demand.
There wouldn't be much "venture" if those investments were a sure thing. VCs throw a lot of money around and hope that once in a while it sticks, and more than make up for the ones that don't. They're a little more conservative now than they were a few years ago, but that's cyclical. But $10m each (more or less) for 71 different companies is enough to count. I'd be curious, though, where $95M went with Turbolinux.
Interesting, too, that the Red Hat board member specifically talks about the comfort he feels in having big bucks backing that shop. It will be interesting to see if the few million that SugarCRM raised can possibly keep them going up against MS's CRM group, and hosted apps like SalesForce.com.
OK, so you've got complete contempt for artists that use large companies to take care of their business dealings (gee, so they can worry about making music, not chasing down $0.85 on every CD that's sold... which, by the way, means that in your example, we're dealing with someone who sells 20 CDs per quarter - I think it's safe to say that a lot of people, including Metallica, do a lot better than that). So, with all that contempt for stupid artists, why would you want to listen to their music? Why would you want to watch their stupid movies? If they're so dumb, surely you don't have any interest in what they produce, and neither does anyone else... so how come millions of files containing their work are continually being ripped?
It's interesting that you're spouting the usual nonsense, though (that all this costs an artist is $12.37, four times a year). Even more interesting that you're posting anonymously, because of course, that is the cowardly thing to do. That, and say that it's the "failed business model" that's compelling you to rip off the people you claim to respect (by wanting their work).
If you walked past an electronics store that had been almost completely looted by a drunken mob after a college football game, would you call that store a failed business model, and feel comfortable taking their last DVD player? I mean, obviously planning on staying in business is silly, since everyone else is ripping them off, so that changes the rules, right?
And, by the way, why are you even trying this line of argument? Can't spell "iTunes"? How exactly is an artist being strangled by iTunes? If an artist wants to work with a label, let them, and don't rip them off. Surely you can be entertained by all of the fabulous artists that have agreed to make music and movies outside of the normal industry channels. What? Not much to pick from there? Then, since you're obviously broke, you're just going to have to keep ripping off the creative people you like. Might as well stiff the chef at your favorite restaurant, too (since every dollar you spend there isn't going into his pocket, either).
Do you intend that Excel is portable??? I don't think so.
Sorry I wasn't clearer. I meant you can easily e-mail the file to another user, or share it on a network, and have it work on any other machine that can run Excel, without having to do an install or other work.
Even people who are fairly technically literate, or well versed in law, often don't see the distinction between theft and infringement.
Oh, I think people understand it better than you're giving them credit for. The real issue is that they don't care that there's a difference, because, at a gut level, they know (and you should) that the issue is the same: somebody wants something, and doesn't want to pay what the owner is asking for it. This has zero, nothing to do with the legal distinction between infringement and traditional theft. This is a cultural thing.
Just to make another analogy, it's like the New York broken window issue. Sure, breaking glass in the street and jaywalking are trivial up against, say, street corner drug dealing or mugging. But by being "draconian" about the little stuff, they've completely changed the atmosphere, and made the general tolerance for crime go back down closer to where it should be. That's exactly where we need to be with kids while they're still in junior and senior high school. That huge audience for music can't go through their ethically formative years thinking that it's mainstream and normal and right just to make off with whatever you want because you've found a technical means by which to do it. That sense of entitlement, and the numbing to the fact that they're consuming, without paying, for something that costs money and talent to produce - are going to make for some real shocked kids when they start trying to run their own businesses or justify the raise they want from their boss. Being able to get around paying an artist for their work may seem like a short term improvement in cash flow, but so does shoplifting if you don't care. I know ignoring someone's copyright and their asking price for their music is not, legally, the same as pocketing the CD in the store. But it is the same thing, morally. It's wanting something, and not wanting to pay what's being asked for it. And taking it anyway.
If you want to form a non-profit to educate the masses, how about educating them on just the simple basics of You Can't Just Have Things Because You Want Them, and If You Say You Like The Artist So Much, Why Do You Want To Make Them Your Pet Entertainment Slave?
In an ideal world, the judiciary represents the populace
No, the judiciary represents the constitution, which very wisely often calls for behavior, or limits, or the lifting of limits, that the simple majority don't like. The judiciary also continually reaffirms copyright law, which benefits people like me, and every artist that the music pirates say they like (just not enough to buy their music).
I'd hope them to be much smarter than the average asshole on the street though
You must mean the average asshole that's willing to pay for the things they want? You're above all of that though? Above average, and thus deserving of free entertainment? That last sentence of yours sure says a lot about you.
What about making a real professional job using a [Postgre|My]SQL database instead and a web server?
Portability. Not everyone has access to a web server, even running locally. Just about everyone in the business world knows, loves, and uses Excel. So it's a natural fit.
Slashdot Mirror
We used to be a lot more sensible about this: if you so aggregiously attacked society that you've essentially declared a permanent contempt for it and willingness to harm it, then you get something special: like being a laborer for life. You know, the salt mines, that sort of thing. Now we've got all these great labor saving devices, so it sort of takes the fun out of knowing that child rapists are breaking up rocks to make road gravel (meaning, it's not cost efficient, so they're still a drain on society, not a cheap asset). I've seen programs where lifers are put to work doing things like making wiring harnesses or other actitivies for which it remains difficult to employ robots. Sounds like a great alternative to outsourcing some manufacturing to China, if you ask me.
Oh, I don't know. Seems to have worked just fine so far.
Considering the flack they get, I'd say it really hasn't worked for them at all, and that they've learned from that. Again, I say this as someone who works with one of their biggest business software partners - they really do get it (that they can't just BS about what they're going to release), because it costs them huge amounts of loyalty in the consulting ranks, and that shapes the direction of the adoption of their big ticket accounting products (not that anyone on Slashdot ever talks about Great Plains, Solomon, or any of the rest of that universe!).
Just for the record, I think that sex offenders are among the worse kind of human beings around. I also think that politicians who use fear of terrorist attacks to push their agendas of invading countries they don't like and secret laws that suspend basic civil liberties to be even worse.
Um, gee... at the risk of falling into a big fat, Off Topic trap here, I think you're reaching a bit. First, be sure to spread your complaints about changes in law enforcement tools to both sides of the political spectrum, since those new laws were enthusiastically passed in the wake of an actual terrorist attack (not the threat of one) by both parties. And, I think your posture towards the administration will come across a little less shrill if you don't characterize the motivations for taking out the Taliban and Saddam as "not liking" the countries involved. It's more a matter of not tolerating the tyrants that had taken over those countries.
Be sure to check with the intelligence provided by the Russians, the French, the Germans, the Italians, and many others before thinking that serious, genuine concern about WMD trafficking didn't play a role in the recent military actions. Of course Saddam had them. He used them! We saw piles of them, and subsequently (as he was taking daily pot shots at the UN-backed flights protecting the no-fly zones over the Kurds that Saddam loved to use them on) refused to say, despite UN resolutions that he do, what he did with them. The likeliest place for all that VX gas and the rest is, of course, Syria. Where, just as before we invaded (when Saddam did regular business both ways in weapons, cash, and more), terrorism is the local hobby. The reason that fear of WMD-enabled terrorism worked as a political motivator is because it was and is a reasonable position to take based on what we knew (and still know).
Changing the regime in Irag, and letting those people live in a democratic society not run by brutal Stalinist punks like Saddam and his two charming sons (who put political opponents through the wood chipper and tortured the soccer team for not winning the Olympics) was the policy of the Clinton administration, too. The difference was that the stakes got much higher, and the opacity of the Baathist regime's inner workings, combined with their steadfast refusal to do anything but obfuscate and play games about the weapons inspections they agreed to, over and over (after being kicked out of a country they had just invaded) to openly permit... those developments made action necessary. And taking that action, and freeing Afghanistan from the Taliban, has already started to do just what was intended. Check with Lybia (now spending money on things other than imported Pakistanti nuke technology), or with Lebanon (happily kicking out the Syrian military bullies running the place), or with the first glimmers of municipal democracy in Egypt and even Saudi Arabia for whether acting was a good thing to do.
The medievalist, theocratic thugs that want to keep people from voting, women from working, and freedom from existing through the middle east, are now showing their true colors by blowing up innocent people in Iraq. The locals hate them, and people are signing up for police and military jobs there expressly out of disgust for what those insurgents are trying to do there. They had enough of that with the last unelected, brutal family regime, and they're done with it. But now they get to do something about it, and that country has ceased to be a government-sanctioned thoroughfare for terrorists and arms shipments to and from the places that support them. Hopefully Syria will wake up, and Iran will succumb to the more clear-thinking, younger part of their population, and make conflict of the sort that Saddam started (and eventually fell to) a thing of the past. As for terrorists, all we need is fewer places for them to comfortably camp out and from which to get millions in cash. That doesn't happen in months, it takes years - but at
preventing them from considering any new laws until after several months since the crime,
If we waited several months after any repeat sex offender did some evil deed to a kid before we did anything about it, we'd never do anything about it. This happens over and over again, and that's the ones we know about. This is more of a steady boiling issue, not a flare-up.
and actually attaching a tracking device to a person, like a tagged animal, would involve so much legal fighting that it would probably end up in the US Supreme court
You mean, just like the Supreme Court would surely strike down putting someone behind bars, just like a caged animal? Or using tasers to mange a violent prisoner, just like you'd use a cattle prod on an ornery future flank steak? No, people who act like animals routinely do get treated like them. People who treat children like sex toys are beneath contempt, and fixing something to them for tracking doesn't even put a dent in what they deserve.
I don't suppose you voiced this same concern about Martha Stewart's tracking bracelet, did you? Or is she worse than a child molester, somehow?
But what if it was a wrong place, wrong time drunken haze kind of thing
Well, hopefully it's still going to feel appropriate to lock up someone who rapes someone else, or messes with kids, no matter how drunk or frat-influenced they were. It still goes to their capacity for judgement.
The real difference here would be between, say, an indecent exposure conviction (for unzipping to take a leak while drunk at night in a park someplace), vs. say, getting kids into your car and whatnot. As long as it's clear that a lifetime of being monitored is part of the penalty, the rapists/molesters can hardly complain. And if they're really rehabilitated at some future date, part of that mental awakening would surely include realizing why, as a society, we'd leverage technology that way.
OK, so I submitted the article, and I was pretty much expecting a comment like this. "Bah" seems reasonable. "FUD," perhaps not. Really, the point, from my perspective, was the issue of a filter (like AOL's) that doesn't really swing into action until a fair number of subscribers (who sought out and asked to get the mail!) act to describe the mail as spam. Of course this is going to happen some, but it feels a bit skewed, somehow. So, my question in the summary was really the focus: how bad is the Blamed By Your Subscribers For Doing What They Asked problem?
/. would actually run the article? I didn't bash Bill Gates even once!
After years of handling bulk mail for clients, my sense is that this trend is up sharply, and this particular example seemed like a pretty good one (because it's such a small sender with so few recipients, and yet it's been blocked).
I appreciate your larger point. But while I don't think it's AOL's intent or policy to block truly legit mail, and I recognize that the problem is huge and almost impossible to meaningfully police without some friendly fire incidents, I think their threshold is set just a little too low, that's all. And it's damn hard to get it straightened out. And I'm not just picking on AOL here... I keep an old AOL account just for testing purposes, and I own some of their stock. This was intended to be a talking point, and a query about the trends in the recipients' behavior, not so much the need for blocking. Sorry if the tone seemed silly or alarmist - my mistake, there. Hey, who knew
Maybe it's because we've just finished teaching people that the "Unsubscribe" links in (genuine) SPAM aren't to be trusted. So now we're expecting them to know that an "Unsubscribe" link in a legitimate email is OK to click on?!?
Well, a little critical thinking isn't too much to ask for. Especiall when the mail they're looking at is one they asked for. That should make them a little less queasy about clicking the unsubscribe link. With AOL, though, one of the problems may be that certain presentations of the mail will disable links embedded in the body of the message. This means that the user would need to act to enable the link or cut/paste the link to a browser. Woosh! Right over a lot of users' heads (and not just AOL people, that's for sure). So, they just take the apparently easy way out and tell their system to block the mail. No concept that they're telling AOL to treat the sender like a pariah.
I dunno about you, but I'm going to look to a more universal broadcast media (radio, tv) for emergency
Actually, I've very happily used systems like this to get highly localized alerts about other places, where my local broadcasting services would be useless. For example, say you have elderly parents 300 miles away... it's nice, while you're toiling in your cube, to get a little info about impending scary weather in distant Smalltown, and to make a check-up phone call.
Or, say I'm planning on going pheasant hunting in South Dakota in October. Sure there are a thousand ways I can keep an eye on the weather there in the week or so before I leave the east coast, but when you're busy, it's actually nice to get a couple e-mails a day, mixed in with your other work, that will give you a sense of the evolving weather somewhere out of town. In this case it's not an emergency situation, but I'd be annoyed if that sort of stuff was blocked as spam, that's for sure. Of course, I'm annoyed when I can't unsubscribe, too! And that does happen. That's probably when a lot of people click the "spam" button, and poison the well.
That is my experience, actually. AOL rarely seems to block a source until a good number of their users have registered a complaint by clicking the (almost too easy to use) "this is spam" button. I suspect that some people think that's easier than unsubscribing, and don't think about the larger consequences.
If this group was treated as an unbiased reviewers, I'd have more sympathy but as it is, it seems just another corrupted media.
If you RTFA, it appears that they're well aware of the drubbing they took from their last showing to a handful of bloggers, and are expecting the annointed "team 99" crowd to expressly do more of the same, as they get feedback from the wider community. If the software is crap, what possible good will it do MS to pump up demonstrably false notions about the presence or absence of a feature, only to have it turn out not to be true when everybody gets to look at the release? They seem to be going to a lot of trouble to announce, well in advance, that they're going to skip over certain features, or delay others. The bloggers will be an echo chamber for some of that, and a feedback channel. Other than the NDA (which presumably these folks will actually read before signing!), I don't sense any means by which MS would be able to make someone convey a better impression of the OS than they've personally experienced. I work with an MS partner (our firm sells accounting apps and does large scale systems integration, among other things), and we play very much the same role - we scream at MS when end users scream at us, and we preach the solutions when we're comfortable with them ourselves.
To root out Ignorance and replace it with Truthful Knowledge would be the ongoing battle
Now, how is it you're going to "root out" ignorance in places like Afghanistan, where the local monopoly on Truthful Knowledge was wholly owned and operated by the Taliban? You know, the people who would actually take women down to the former soccer field and shoot them at lunch time in front of an audience for: working and sending their daughters to secret classrooms. You know: the Taliban. The medievilist bunch of charming fellows that went out of their way to harbor training camps for that nice Mr. Bin Laden, and who, as a matter of doctrine, destroyed the local historical artifacts (some much older than Islam) in the name of their newly imported Truth.
So, these people were more than willing to kill in order to keep ignorance working as their tool of power. You'd like to educate in that setting, no doubt. There's only one mechanism by which a guy willing to kill women and children in cold blood to make a point about Allah is going to have his behavior changed, and that mechanism is force. In the most recent case, US special forces, Marines, and their associates.
You want to fight ignorance? Ask yourself how you'll fight it when the people actually preaching its perpetuation are willing to kill you to make sure it sticks? It's hard to reason with someone like that as they're shooting you, or running a plane full of jet fuel into your cubicle.
Armed containment of people like that is not mutually exclusive with education. But education cannot exist in a place where killers prop up ignorance and fear. The shortest path to an education-friendly environment is the prompt removal of thugs like that. And we have the ability. Just ask the working women and school kids in Afghanistan.
We send men and women off to die in war ever year. Yet the expansion of human horizons through the exploration of space by willing people is "too dangerous".
First, no one (except the medievalist wack jobs preaching to the suicide bombers) sends soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen people off to die. If that's how you think of it, then sending police out on the street every day is "sending them do die," just like sending firefighters out to burning buildings is "sending them to die." That whole line of thinking is an empty bit of rhetorical nonsense designed to prick the emotions of people without any sort of critical thinking skills.
As for expanding our horizons as being "too dangerous" (as is rarely said, but often implied in media coverage), too dangerous to whom? The most common thing I hear in the news, especially following a loss of vehicle or crew on a NASA mission, is something along the lines of "What a waste! We could wipe out all of poverty if we took all that money and gave it to hungry people and made better schools."
I'm sure there are plenty of people here that will back NASA and wish them more funding, while also wishing more funding for schools. Saying it's either-or is a false dichotomy, just like saying that space research and defense are either-or (their typically very complementary, actually).
And I'd rather see people "spending" their lives willingly on something the truly believe in for the betterment of all mankind, than for any squabble over territory or natural resources.
Because I know some personally, and am comfortable conservatively extrapolating, I think we can say that there are plenty of people in the military that are indeed willing to risk their lives. And they don't see freeing people from theocratic tyranny and Stalinist thugs, or protecting fragile new democracies as a "squabbles." A more forward-looking world (as such because of fewer Saddams, or Talibans, as recent examples) is something that a lot of men and women (including some that volunteer to go into harm's way) consider just as worthy as a moon base. Personally, I think both are worth way more resources than either get. Doesn't mean that every bit of work done by NASA or DOD makes sense, but there are sound practical and idealogical motivations in both areas.
It's not a question of having a solid opinion -- it's jumping to conclusions about the implications of what the OP said, and distorting the discussion along your predefined political lines, which seem highly simplistic -- e.g. what does John Kerry have to do with this? You're part of the problem in the sense that you don't contribute anything, you only distort along entirely predictable, but utterly misguided, lines.
The post I responded to could not have been simpler (in its ridicule of some scientists) or more obvious in its sarcastic reference to (in his caps) "THE WAR ON TERRORISM". So, let's see: we have the poster saying "It's kind of a funny to watch us [my emphasis] scientists..." meaning that he includes himself in that group (of scientists). But through his obvious disdain for those scientists that "stoop so low" as to consider how to increase their funding, he's immediately making the thread an adversarial one, and doing so against the backdrop of the conflict that's occurring on the current administration's watch. Without articulating anything that would broaden the observation beyond the direct denigration of some scientists, or suggest that his take on fighting terrorism is anything other than partisan, the person I replied to went (through an obviously considered brevity) to a lot of trouble to be "filtered," "binary," and entirely political. Political about funding research, political about a conflict which (despite his implications), because of the unconventional nature of the attacks we face, rely hugely on science and technology to expose threat details, minimize the need for the use of traditional military tactics, and get behind the scenes to the sorts of people preaching medeival theocratic nonsense to young suicide bombers.
I didn't jump to conclusions about the post, I read between the (short) lines. Short of assuming that he considers Islamist (and every other flavor) terrorism no big deal (if that's his take, then all bets are off, here, rational-conversation-wise), and short of assuming that liberalized, democratized states in the middle east are too much to expect of the people living there and would have no impact in mitigating the threats to the west, I can't imagine that the original poster's tone was anything other than partisan. It's not simplistic to boil this down to the basics - it's the only way to get people to put their cards on the table. Tap dancing around one's contempt for, say, the Bush administration, by making snarky comments about other scientists - it's not elevated, unbiased, unfilterd, unbinary, or anything else other than thinly veiled flamebaiting, and I treated it as such. Shouldn't feed the trolls, I know.
I wonder how MSN search compares to Google in terms of hardware versus load.
Pretty much of an apples/oranges problem there, though. Yes, a search is a search is a search... but there are very different things going on relative to MSN membership, Google AdSense ads, and so on. Very different back-end processes and business issues would completely eclipse, I suspect, discussions about the individual web servers' OS. IIS on Win2003 may not be every slashdotter's cup of tea, but it's not orders of magnitude different from other servers in its ability to serve up a page. It's all that other behind-the-scenes tomfoolerly that both sites are doing that are what really weigh them down and burn up the CPU cycles. It's the database architecture and plumbing that really makes this stuff fascinating (and mysterious, if you don't work there).
It's horrible! That means that we're up to nearly, let's see, carry the one... um, less than one thousandth of a percent of the population.
You're the one inserting your simplistic binary political filter into the situation. In so doing, you become part of the problem.
Really? What party am I representing? Certainly I'm not the party that refers to scientists as "stooping so low" as to get funding for their research, or assumes that they're Muslim-haters for doing so. I'm sure you find the earlier poster's articulate meanderings to be nuanced examples of open-minded wonderfulness, of course.
But out of curiosity: how does having a solid opinion about something contribute to "the problem?" You seem to have a solid opinion about me, so are you part of the problem?
you people
And, from where in anything I said to you do infer that I think the phrase "homeland" was a better choice of phrase than "domestic" or "border." Didn't say it, imply it, or give you any reason to infer it. You seem to hate the idea that someone might wrongly form a rash opinion of another culture, but you're happy to bark BS ad hominem attacks at me while imagining me to be your ideal hate target. What political party am I in? What color am I? Am I religious? Am I wealthy? You sure seem to know who my "people" are. Love the irony!
people who keep on doing whatever they've done for the last 20 years but who now ask for more money
Right, because more direct and immediate uses for a technology outside of pure research usually places a larger burden on the research team or the institution that houses them. If you've got something that you know will have (in the case we're talking about) security implications, you can bet that your days as a simple gee-whiz-ain't-the-universe-cool researcher are going to be complicated by security clearances, contracts, and other things that make it more expensive just to be you. But beyond that, it's really not any different than suddenly realizing that something you're working on has immediate uses in any popular, well-funded activity, including private industry. Sure, micro-fusion devices are immediately useful for neutron-related bomb detecting, etc., but what if they had immediate cancer-fighting promise, as well (I know, bad example). The same scientists would absolutely mention that out loud, too, and absolutely hope for a cash infusion from the med-tech sector to give them more needed research horsepower. You're the one that's presuming words in their mouths or racist motives in their heads just because they recognize the utility of something they're working on.
their research miraculously MIGHT help detecting bombs, muslims or people of other faith in general
Do you even hear yourself? So, if the next Timothy McVeigh can be caught before a dirty bomb he's about to set off in Berkeley can hurt people - knowing that something you're working on could contribute to that, and looking to push funding for that work as a side project of your basic research is a bad thing? Where are you getting "people of other faith" anywhere in this, except in your own mind? Granted, it's a very small but obnoxious fraction of the people of the Muslim faith that are the most loudly screaming that democracy is evil, and which blow up people waiting in line to get a job just to make a point, but it's not only them. Technology to detect bombs is not itself race-oriented, though your comments seem drenched in that way of thinking. Oh, and please work on phrases like "objecting at" before you call other people morons. Your tone is shrill enough without making it worse, and impacting your credibility, with lousy grammar.
come up with the weirdest reasons why further research on the subject might help in the WAR AGAINST TERRORISM
So, being able to detect WMD materials being smuggled through ports or airports fails to help stop terrorists how? What part of guys who want to kill you smuggling in, say, refined uranium, is it not useful to stop? How is it not helping a scientist, or his institution, to point out something that obvious, and to benefit from having more people and resources interested in his research?
So, let me guess: if John Kerry had been elected, there'd be no need to find ways to detect fissile material in shipboard containers, right? I'm astounded, though shouldn't be, that you were modded insightful for that little bit of partisan ranting. Science and security are not mutually exclusive, and some of the best funded science programs on the planet enjoy defense dollars as part of the recipe. Stoop so low. Man, that's the pot-head calling the kettle black.
Well, ideally, a fixed, funded system would be nice
I'm a little foggy, here. Fixed by what standards? And, funded by whom? If not by investors... then, what... tax dollars?
that the market is simply fickle
I've noticed that the open source community is pretty damn fickle, too. But that's the whole point, isn't it? That the market (of users, some of which vote with their wallet as investors) is the most nimble way to shape production to demand.
There wouldn't be much "venture" if those investments were a sure thing. VCs throw a lot of money around and hope that once in a while it sticks, and more than make up for the ones that don't. They're a little more conservative now than they were a few years ago, but that's cyclical. But $10m each (more or less) for 71 different companies is enough to count. I'd be curious, though, where $95M went with Turbolinux.
Interesting, too, that the Red Hat board member specifically talks about the comfort he feels in having big bucks backing that shop. It will be interesting to see if the few million that SugarCRM raised can possibly keep them going up against MS's CRM group, and hosted apps like SalesForce.com.
OK, so you've got complete contempt for artists that use large companies to take care of their business dealings (gee, so they can worry about making music, not chasing down $0.85 on every CD that's sold... which, by the way, means that in your example, we're dealing with someone who sells 20 CDs per quarter - I think it's safe to say that a lot of people, including Metallica, do a lot better than that). So, with all that contempt for stupid artists, why would you want to listen to their music? Why would you want to watch their stupid movies? If they're so dumb, surely you don't have any interest in what they produce, and neither does anyone else... so how come millions of files containing their work are continually being ripped?
It's interesting that you're spouting the usual nonsense, though (that all this costs an artist is $12.37, four times a year). Even more interesting that you're posting anonymously, because of course, that is the cowardly thing to do. That, and say that it's the "failed business model" that's compelling you to rip off the people you claim to respect (by wanting their work).
If you walked past an electronics store that had been almost completely looted by a drunken mob after a college football game, would you call that store a failed business model, and feel comfortable taking their last DVD player? I mean, obviously planning on staying in business is silly, since everyone else is ripping them off, so that changes the rules, right?
And, by the way, why are you even trying this line of argument? Can't spell "iTunes"? How exactly is an artist being strangled by iTunes? If an artist wants to work with a label, let them, and don't rip them off. Surely you can be entertained by all of the fabulous artists that have agreed to make music and movies outside of the normal industry channels. What? Not much to pick from there? Then, since you're obviously broke, you're just going to have to keep ripping off the creative people you like. Might as well stiff the chef at your favorite restaurant, too (since every dollar you spend there isn't going into his pocket, either).
Do you intend that Excel is portable??? I don't think so.
Sorry I wasn't clearer. I meant you can easily e-mail the file to another user, or share it on a network, and have it work on any other machine that can run Excel, without having to do an install or other work.
Even people who are fairly technically literate, or well versed in law, often don't see the distinction between theft and infringement.
Oh, I think people understand it better than you're giving them credit for. The real issue is that they don't care that there's a difference, because, at a gut level, they know (and you should) that the issue is the same: somebody wants something, and doesn't want to pay what the owner is asking for it. This has zero, nothing to do with the legal distinction between infringement and traditional theft. This is a cultural thing.
Just to make another analogy, it's like the New York broken window issue. Sure, breaking glass in the street and jaywalking are trivial up against, say, street corner drug dealing or mugging. But by being "draconian" about the little stuff, they've completely changed the atmosphere, and made the general tolerance for crime go back down closer to where it should be. That's exactly where we need to be with kids while they're still in junior and senior high school. That huge audience for music can't go through their ethically formative years thinking that it's mainstream and normal and right just to make off with whatever you want because you've found a technical means by which to do it. That sense of entitlement, and the numbing to the fact that they're consuming, without paying, for something that costs money and talent to produce - are going to make for some real shocked kids when they start trying to run their own businesses or justify the raise they want from their boss. Being able to get around paying an artist for their work may seem like a short term improvement in cash flow, but so does shoplifting if you don't care. I know ignoring someone's copyright and their asking price for their music is not, legally, the same as pocketing the CD in the store. But it is the same thing, morally. It's wanting something, and not wanting to pay what's being asked for it. And taking it anyway.
If you want to form a non-profit to educate the masses, how about educating them on just the simple basics of You Can't Just Have Things Because You Want Them, and If You Say You Like The Artist So Much, Why Do You Want To Make Them Your Pet Entertainment Slave?
In an ideal world, the judiciary represents the populace
No, the judiciary represents the constitution, which very wisely often calls for behavior, or limits, or the lifting of limits, that the simple majority don't like. The judiciary also continually reaffirms copyright law, which benefits people like me, and every artist that the music pirates say they like (just not enough to buy their music).
I'd hope them to be much smarter than the average asshole on the street though
You must mean the average asshole that's willing to pay for the things they want? You're above all of that though? Above average, and thus deserving of free entertainment? That last sentence of yours sure says a lot about you.
What about making a real professional job using a [Postgre|My]SQL database instead and a web server?
Portability. Not everyone has access to a web server, even running locally. Just about everyone in the business world knows, loves, and uses Excel. So it's a natural fit.