Exactly! I left yahoo mail over a decade ago. I still like yahoo news, and sometimes, but not often, leave comments there. I changed my yahoo pw at some point to something incredibly trivial to remember, ****, because I hardly ever log in, and couldn't care less if it was compromised... as it contains no real or legitimate information with which to identify me any longer. My real email pw is *********************
Obama had our freedoms in his sights long before he ever took office.
Actually, your half-witty cynicism notwithstanding, you are correct. President Obama is indeed a Constitutionalist and of the best variety of those: he is an academic. Before you condemn a single person as architect of the failure to achieve all imaginable unrealized goals, consider how difficult it is to become the President of the United States, that one must make uncountable compromises to achieve it, and continue making compromises to maintain it. If anyone in the US government is, as a private individual, fully supportive of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and has a deeper understanding of what our Founders intended than you or I ever will (unless you are not just an idealist or anarchist and in fact a student of law or possibly a member of Congress), it is Barrack Obama. Yet, as the President, as the man that holds and represents the Office and the government and the citizens of the United States, he does not have the luxuries we do as citizens that may protest against certain things our government must do. Unlike you or I, President Obama must lead and maintain unity. Nothing is simple. Try not to reduce the complexities of statesmanship and leadership to a single, unrealistic goal that hasn't entirely reached the fruition of your own idealized standards.
ffs, let the user decide whether they want to see the mobile app or the full site, or a discrete application. Don't put too much weight on what browser they are using and decide for them what they want, fascist-style. Try not to ask them, every single time... make the cookie remember their decision, but also give them the option to change their mind later if they wish. The best apps are utilitarian, not flashy pretty crap. Keep it simple. And don't succumb to feature creep... don't keep adding features just because you can. Pick a function, and stick to it, and make a new app for your new features that have nothing to do with the original intent of your app.
Apple's doing it's own maps because they can't rely any longer on the map service being supplied by one of their biggest competitors. They have no motivation to have the most users for them, other than because those people have bought Apple devices.
Nicely said. This is precisely the reason. Google is intentionally dropping the ball, saving the best features for Android... and now they have competition on iOS, they're stepping up their game. Competition is a good thing.
Seems Hollywood has really been increasing the suck. "You don't wanna pay for our content? Then we're gonna make terrible content." I can't find anything worth watching.
At the end of the day if it's only available on iOS and Mac then it's essentially on a minority of devices on what is now a minority platform.
Uh, you're kidding, right? Apple's inventory stock has been compared to restaurants, that must get rid of it because it's perishable. It's ridiculous how competitive Apple is right now against ALL of the Android phone manufacturers. I'm not sure their growth rate will last, but you're just silly to claim the iOS platform is merely a "minority platform." It's not like 2-5% marketshare, like the Mac used to be... they're neck and neck against EVERY OTHER phone manufacturer put together. Mac's marketshare is growing, too, but still under 20% I would guess. I doubt seriously anyone at Microsoft now, or even Google, would share your dismissive views of the "minority" that's ever increasingly eating their marketshare.
I used to have very high expectation of OpenSolaris after Ian Murdock became the head of the project... But then Oracle came and destroyed all my hopes.
Good news! Your high expectations and hopes are alive and well at the [open] crossroads of America. They're also welcome at freenode on #openindiana.
I have yet to see what's "good" about Windows. XP became a corporate standard and a necessary evil. Yet even the new features in Vista, 7, and now 8, offered nothing to warrent corporate shops rushing to upgrade, and all the MS FanBoi's rushing to upgrade at home "oh, I've been running it at home for such and such... I'm fully versed." Pretty colors and more warnings... I don't see the purpose of the upgrades other than its the same as the purpose of Adobe software upgrades, namely, to keep the company in business because they had saturated the market and the software sales were slowing. To a large extent, I feel the same is true of Apple's OS X... after it had reached a certain level of stability and features, upgrades to new versions didn't really offer much to users regardless of the hundreds of new features listed. I see the same problem with other MS Software. What the Hell was the POINT of any version of Office and Server past 2003, other than to match the look and feel of the parity flagship OS? Ubuntu seems to be suffering from the same feature creep... its as though devepment has no sense of restraint... if they can add some feature, they apparently must.
Video is fascinating. Appears to be analog video. Amazing that they can track the thing well enough to catch it on video with high-power lenses (if you've ever tried to manually track anything with high power lenses, you get a sense of how difficult it is, so probably must be automated tracking), and yet... the recording equipment apparently is not state of the art.
It's made to capitalize on irrational post-Fukushima fear. There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a radiation detector around with them all the time.
As I consider myself an arm-chair ocean conservationist, I have been horrified by the increase in popularity of sushi over the last 2 decades, and the steady decline of the bluefin tuna population which has only narrowly escaped the endangered species list as a direct result of overfishing. Now, I can only hope that the trendy raw fisheaters continue their disgusting culinary habit, and if not become extinct themselves, at lease will be prevented from reproducing. Care for some sushi, friend?
Yeah, these are going to sell like hotcakes. Not because they are useful, but because people are terrified of the possibility of being "exposed to icky radiation".
I'm certain that their sales will be immediately undercut by cell phone cases that include radiation-detection badges. Only the paranoid-1337 will spend the extra to have detection fully integrated into their phone.
Maybe they are hard to fill because they dont pay enough?
This is certainly true... the low end positions salaries have steadily plummetted since the early 2000's, for unknown reasons (I blame the flood of computer science graduates, that I only wish were interested in computer science and not menial tasks of IT specialsts).
Also, worth considering, the anecdotal evidence suggests the larger the human resources department, the less able a company is to fill positions based on merit or experience.
Well, I fooled you, playing devils advocate. How about that?
While I am a strong supporter of the precise text of the 2nd Amendment, I am certain, as are all the academic Constitutionalists, the Founders never intended the 2nd to include the right of self-defense. Indeed, you will find no mention of self-defense in the entire Constitution. That right comes from a much older source, and was assumed as a basic human right by the Founders. To mention it would have been superfluous.
The notion that the 2nd included the right of self-defense was incorrectly added only recently by SCOTUS, in the decision of the famous 2003 DC Gun Law Case, District of Columbia v. Heller.
My interpretation of the 2nd is simple: the Founders fully intended regulation. So important and vital was their intention that, after several well documented debates during the Constitutional Congress, they wrote their intentions right there in the first words of the Amendment, "A well regulated...." The result of the resent, and incorrect, reinterpretation is just part of the trend of our government to splinter the unity of its people by removing rights, one by one (another fine example of this is the effective removal of the right of habeas corpus). The effect of the reinterpretation is such that it turns the meaning of the 2nd to its complementary opposite, namely, that it once said, selflessly, you have the right to protect me and other citizens from a tyrannical governement, into the paranoid and selfish, every man for himself.
I am not anti-gun. I am pro-gun law.
Sadly, my favorite quote on gun control comes from a fictitious source, but it is no less conceptually significant:
From West Wing Season 2, Episode 13, Bartett's Third State of the Union:
youtube
If you combine the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia, you'll get a population roughly the size of the United States. We had 32,000 gun deaths last year [c.2002]. They had 112. Do you think it's because Americans are more homicidal by nature? Or do you think it's because those guys have gun control laws?
-You can't go by the two women's word, because they could be lying. –cpu6502
-What if Truth were a woman? What then? -In revenge and in love woman is more barbaric than man is. –Friedrich Nietzsche
-I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner. –Sir Arther Conan Doyle
-The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?” -The sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology. –Sigmund Freud
-Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist. –Charles Bukowski
-The fear of women is the beginning of knowledge. –Gelett Burgess
-Never mix your women. –Charles Edward Journingham
-A sensible woman can never be happy with a fool. –George Washington
-Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned. –William Congreve
-Two women can't share a house comfortably, no matter how fond they might be of each other. It's got to be one woman's kitchen. –Nora Roberts
-An artful or false woman shall set thy pillow with thorns. –Martin Farquhar Tupper
-Its not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog. –Mark Twain
-As God is my witness, the more I deal with women, the more I like my cat. –P. N. Elrod
-I never really believe what women tell me. –Steven Wright
I can't believe I had to invoke the 2nd, all the way down here at the bottom of the comments. Shameful,/. , just shameful.
But it possibly stands to reason that the deployment of such surveillance devices domestically is a clear violation of the 2nd Amendment, if not also the 4th Amendment .
Sir, have you considered that maybe the universe is just a simulation? And if that is the case, we might be able to hack the simulator.
Trust me, you don't want to do this. The last time I did it I ran into a nasty bug (grad student, remember? Bug free hardly likely) so, sorry for only three sexes now, even if I did get rid of Gharlane.
I'm not doing that again until I'm sure my part of the universe is unpageable. Who knows what other horrors lurk in the untested recesses of the garbage collector?
Consider yourself lucky. My experiments led me to realizations that we all weren't even quite really human. In order to return to any semblance of a normal life I was forced to intentionally cause minor brain damage --a few tiny and carefully placed lesions on my amygdala to prevent certain impulses from reaching my hypothalamus. This had the intended and desired effect to prevent me from being fully aware of the actual reality that neither I, nor any other human, is actually quite really human.
FWIW, in reality, and from what I can recall after the rather intense PTSD amnesia therapy, we are more like horizontal window blinds than discrete biological entities... but made up of hundreds or thousands of homonculi, each with an individual and distinct persona. None of this is real... you are an amalgam of smaller individuals... as is everything... and I and anyone can be as easily deconstructed, mentally and physically, as one might peel apart the developed celluloid from an original Fellini print. Even self-awareness is an illusion, I still remember some of it, though thankfully, I am no longer fully conscious of that reality.
My strong recommendation to those that might want to explore these kinds of conscious realities is... don't bother. Why not instead just try enjoy the collected experiences you have come to know as your life? Perhaps ask out that nice girl you keep noticing? Even the inevitable emotional pain is far more desirable than becoming aware of the meta-reality. Trust me on this one, the real Truth just isn't worth the personal sacrifice.
I wouldn't worry about that. In the event of any power or superpower stock-piling clones, we already have enough plague to wipe them out many times over long before they even learn to walk. And if they are clever enough to have plague resistance, chances are good they will not have any significantfusion resistance, even after full maturity and deployment.
Its not ever going to be as close as you think it will be. Race is a societal/anthropological determination, and ethnicity is as well. Scientifically, biologically, "race" is entirely arbitrary. Genetically speaking, race does not exist. Consider the fact that at some point in our relatively near evolutionary past, homo sapiens were reduced in number to less than about 60 individuals, and all humans who have lived since are decendant from them. No human alive today is further in relation from you than 37th cousin. There really is no such thing as "race" except as a synthetic convention of individual societies and/or cultures.
what might someone with a racial superiority agenda do with it some day.
It's not going to help the race supremists. As science would have it, race is not genetically determined. It is artificially determined by society. Genetically speaking, race as we know it does not even exist.
I think you have a worthwhile point somewhere, that there may be issues some day with private companies using genome sequencing to filter applicants, perhaps to keep their medical insurance costs lower. So, yes, we must continue to jealously guard our civil rights.
As a contractor, I have worked in a lot IT departments, mostly Windows shops (because they need the most help, thats where most of the contracts appear). It never fails that the department arrogantly gives itself such a rating: "our shop is tight... we run such and such." At the last gig, one guy spent all evening tracking down a "key logger," and came out of the hole near the end of the evening (to find me finishing his work), proudly claiming success. It took me all of 10 seconds to tell him he just spent 6 hours tracking down a macromaker... software to help the data entry-types do their work faster. "But its logging key strokes! LOOK!" -- "Listen," I calmly explained, "this is what a macromaker does... it couldn't work otherwise."
In 12 years and working with a myriad of IT departments and personalities that run the gamut, I've never come across a one that could admit they might be insecure... except for one, VA Tech. Like any organization with a lot of desktops and servers facing the Internet, they get bombarded with attacks from Russia and China and other sources. Of course, of them all, I'd rate VA Tech the most dilligent with security... training users, recommending software and best practices, sending out notices, and most singularly, admitting their mistakes and forming case studies from them.
I'll never understand the mentality of the other shops that put up a complete snowjob for the users, management, and executives claiming security that just isn't there and just hoping they don't get creamed... or maybe they just aren't aware of how filthy the Internet really is.... or even perhaps how to find and read the logs that prove this.
I was being completely genuine. I hadn't thought of it... and it is a good point, a valid attack to demoralize an enemy known to be overly proud and vain.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! I left yahoo mail over a decade ago. I still like yahoo news, and sometimes, but not often, leave comments there. I changed my yahoo pw at some point to something incredibly trivial to remember, ****, because I hardly ever log in, and couldn't care less if it was compromised... as it contains no real or legitimate information with which to identify me any longer. My real email pw is *********************
wow... yes, mods... truely insightful... FudRucker must be a beltway insider to have this kind of seeringly perceptive insight.
/wtf mods?? +5? really?
O.o
Obama had our freedoms in his sights long before he ever took office.
Actually, your half-witty cynicism notwithstanding, you are correct. President Obama is indeed a Constitutionalist and of the best variety of those: he is an academic. Before you condemn a single person as architect of the failure to achieve all imaginable unrealized goals, consider how difficult it is to become the President of the United States, that one must make uncountable compromises to achieve it, and continue making compromises to maintain it. If anyone in the US government is, as a private individual, fully supportive of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and has a deeper understanding of what our Founders intended than you or I ever will (unless you are not just an idealist or anarchist and in fact a student of law or possibly a member of Congress), it is Barrack Obama. Yet, as the President, as the man that holds and represents the Office and the government and the citizens of the United States, he does not have the luxuries we do as citizens that may protest against certain things our government must do. Unlike you or I, President Obama must lead and maintain unity. Nothing is simple. Try not to reduce the complexities of statesmanship and leadership to a single, unrealistic goal that hasn't entirely reached the fruition of your own idealized standards.
ffs, let the user decide whether they want to see the mobile app or the full site, or a discrete application. Don't put too much weight on what browser they are using and decide for them what they want, fascist-style. Try not to ask them, every single time... make the cookie remember their decision, but also give them the option to change their mind later if they wish. The best apps are utilitarian, not flashy pretty crap. Keep it simple. And don't succumb to feature creep... don't keep adding features just because you can. Pick a function, and stick to it, and make a new app for your new features that have nothing to do with the original intent of your app.
Apple's doing it's own maps because they can't rely any longer on the map service being supplied by one of their biggest competitors. They have no motivation to have the most users for them, other than because those people have bought Apple devices.
Nicely said. This is precisely the reason. Google is intentionally dropping the ball, saving the best features for Android... and now they have competition on iOS, they're stepping up their game. Competition is a good thing.
Seems Hollywood has really been increasing the suck. "You don't wanna pay for our content? Then we're gonna make terrible content." I can't find anything worth watching.
At the end of the day if it's only available on iOS and Mac then it's essentially on a minority of devices on what is now a minority platform.
Uh, you're kidding, right? Apple's inventory stock has been compared to restaurants, that must get rid of it because it's perishable. It's ridiculous how competitive Apple is right now against ALL of the Android phone manufacturers. I'm not sure their growth rate will last, but you're just silly to claim the iOS platform is merely a "minority platform." It's not like 2-5% marketshare, like the Mac used to be... they're neck and neck against EVERY OTHER phone manufacturer put together. Mac's marketshare is growing, too, but still under 20% I would guess. I doubt seriously anyone at Microsoft now, or even Google, would share your dismissive views of the "minority" that's ever increasingly eating their marketshare.
I used to have very high expectation of OpenSolaris after Ian Murdock became the head of the project... But then Oracle came and destroyed all my hopes.
Good news! Your high expectations and hopes are alive and well at the [open] crossroads of America . They're also welcome at freenode on #openindiana.
I have yet to see what's "good" about Windows. XP became a corporate standard and a necessary evil. Yet even the new features in Vista, 7, and now 8, offered nothing to warrent corporate shops rushing to upgrade, and all the MS FanBoi's rushing to upgrade at home "oh, I've been running it at home for such and such... I'm fully versed." Pretty colors and more warnings... I don't see the purpose of the upgrades other than its the same as the purpose of Adobe software upgrades, namely, to keep the company in business because they had saturated the market and the software sales were slowing. To a large extent, I feel the same is true of Apple's OS X... after it had reached a certain level of stability and features, upgrades to new versions didn't really offer much to users regardless of the hundreds of new features listed. I see the same problem with other MS Software. What the Hell was the POINT of any version of Office and Server past 2003, other than to match the look and feel of the parity flagship OS? Ubuntu seems to be suffering from the same feature creep... its as though devepment has no sense of restraint... if they can add some feature, they apparently must.
Video is fascinating. Appears to be analog video. Amazing that they can track the thing well enough to catch it on video with high-power lenses (if you've ever tried to manually track anything with high power lenses, you get a sense of how difficult it is, so probably must be automated tracking), and yet... the recording equipment apparently is not state of the art.
It's made to capitalize on irrational post-Fukushima fear. There's no legitimate reason for anyone (who's not a researcher or a nuclear plant employee) to be carrying a radiation detector around with them all the time.
As I consider myself an arm-chair ocean conservationist, I have been horrified by the increase in popularity of sushi over the last 2 decades, and the steady decline of the bluefin tuna population which has only narrowly escaped the endangered species list as a direct result of overfishing. Now, I can only hope that the trendy raw fisheaters continue their disgusting culinary habit, and if not become extinct themselves, at lease will be prevented from reproducing. Care for some sushi, friend?
Yeah, these are going to sell like hotcakes. Not because they are useful, but because people are terrified of the possibility of being "exposed to icky radiation".
I'm certain that their sales will be immediately undercut by cell phone cases that include radiation-detection badges. Only the paranoid-1337 will spend the extra to have detection fully integrated into their phone.
Beware of grail-shaped beacons!
Maybe they are hard to fill because they dont pay enough?
This is certainly true... the low end positions salaries have steadily plummetted since the early 2000's, for unknown reasons (I blame the flood of computer science graduates, that I only wish were interested in computer science and not menial tasks of IT specialsts).
Also, worth considering, the anecdotal evidence suggests the larger the human resources department, the less able a company is to fill positions based on merit or experience.
...acting in self-defense
Well, I fooled you, playing devils advocate. How about that?
While I am a strong supporter of the precise text of the 2nd Amendment, I am certain, as are all the academic Constitutionalists, the Founders never intended the 2nd to include the right of self-defense. Indeed, you will find no mention of self-defense in the entire Constitution. That right comes from a much older source, and was assumed as a basic human right by the Founders. To mention it would have been superfluous.
The notion that the 2nd included the right of self-defense was incorrectly added only recently by SCOTUS, in the decision of the famous 2003 DC Gun Law Case, District of Columbia v. Heller.
My interpretation of the 2nd is simple: the Founders fully intended regulation. So important and vital was their intention that, after several well documented debates during the Constitutional Congress, they wrote their intentions right there in the first words of the Amendment, "A well regulated...." The result of the resent, and incorrect, reinterpretation is just part of the trend of our government to splinter the unity of its people by removing rights, one by one (another fine example of this is the effective removal of the right of habeas corpus). The effect of the reinterpretation is such that it turns the meaning of the 2nd to its complementary opposite, namely, that it once said, selflessly, you have the right to protect me and other citizens from a tyrannical governement, into the paranoid and selfish, every man for himself.
I am not anti-gun. I am pro-gun law.
Sadly, my favorite quote on gun control comes from a fictitious source, but it is no less conceptually significant:
From West Wing Season 2, Episode 13, Bartett's Third State of the Union: youtube
If you combine the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia, you'll get a population roughly the size of the United States. We had 32,000 gun deaths last year [c.2002]. They had 112. Do you think it's because Americans are more homicidal by nature? Or do you think it's because those guys have gun control laws?
You can't go by ...
Brilliant! Adding this to the list...
-You can't go by the two women's word, because they could be lying.
–cpu6502
-What if Truth were a woman? What then?
-In revenge and in love woman is more barbaric than man is.
–Friedrich Nietzsche
-I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.
–Sir Arther Conan Doyle
-The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”
-The sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology.
–Sigmund Freud
-Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist.
–Charles Bukowski
-The fear of women is the beginning of knowledge.
–Gelett Burgess
-Never mix your women.
–Charles Edward Journingham
-A sensible woman can never be happy with a fool.
–George Washington
-Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned.
–William Congreve
-Two women can't share a house comfortably, no matter how fond they might be of each other. It's got to be one woman's kitchen.
–Nora Roberts
-An artful or false woman shall set thy pillow with thorns.
–Martin Farquhar Tupper
-Its not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog.
–Mark Twain
-As God is my witness, the more I deal with women, the more I like my cat.
–P. N. Elrod
-I never really believe what women tell me.
–Steven Wright
-Men do crazy things. Women are crazy.
–Unknown
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
I can't believe I had to invoke the 2nd, all the way down here at the bottom of the comments. Shameful, /. , just shameful.
But it possibly stands to reason that the deployment of such surveillance devices domestically is a clear violation of the 2nd Amendment, if not also the 4th Amendment .
Sir, have you considered that maybe the universe is just a simulation? And if that is the case, we might be able to hack the simulator.
Trust me, you don't want to do this. The last time I did it I ran into a nasty bug (grad student, remember? Bug free hardly likely) so, sorry for only three sexes now, even if I did get rid of Gharlane.
I'm not doing that again until I'm sure my part of the universe is unpageable. Who knows what other horrors lurk in the untested recesses of the garbage collector?
Consider yourself lucky. My experiments led me to realizations that we all weren't even quite really human. In order to return to any semblance of a normal life I was forced to intentionally cause minor brain damage --a few tiny and carefully placed lesions on my amygdala to prevent certain impulses from reaching my hypothalamus. This had the intended and desired effect to prevent me from being fully aware of the actual reality that neither I, nor any other human, is actually quite really human.
FWIW, in reality, and from what I can recall after the rather intense PTSD amnesia therapy, we are more like horizontal window blinds than discrete biological entities... but made up of hundreds or thousands of homonculi, each with an individual and distinct persona. None of this is real... you are an amalgam of smaller individuals... as is everything... and I and anyone can be as easily deconstructed, mentally and physically, as one might peel apart the developed celluloid from an original Fellini print. Even self-awareness is an illusion, I still remember some of it, though thankfully, I am no longer fully conscious of that reality.
My strong recommendation to those that might want to explore these kinds of conscious realities is... don't bother. Why not instead just try enjoy the collected experiences you have come to know as your life? Perhaps ask out that nice girl you keep noticing? Even the inevitable emotional pain is far more desirable than becoming aware of the meta-reality. Trust me on this one, the real Truth just isn't worth the personal sacrifice.
Will civilisation [sic] survive it?
I wouldn't worry about that. In the event of any power or superpower stock-piling clones, we already have enough plague to wipe them out many times over long before they even learn to walk. And if they are clever enough to have plague resistance, chances are good they will not have any significant fusion resistance, even after full maturity and deployment.
Its not ever going to be as close as you think it will be. Race is a societal/anthropological determination, and ethnicity is as well. Scientifically, biologically, "race" is entirely arbitrary. Genetically speaking, race does not exist. Consider the fact that at some point in our relatively near evolutionary past, homo sapiens were reduced in number to less than about 60 individuals, and all humans who have lived since are decendant from them. No human alive today is further in relation from you than 37th cousin. There really is no such thing as "race" except as a synthetic convention of individual societies and/or cultures.
what might someone with a racial superiority agenda do with it some day.
It's not going to help the race supremists. As science would have it, race is not genetically determined. It is artificially determined by society. Genetically speaking, race as we know it does not even exist.
I think you have a worthwhile point somewhere, that there may be issues some day with private companies using genome sequencing to filter applicants, perhaps to keep their medical insurance costs lower. So, yes, we must continue to jealously guard our civil rights.
There is no âoeshortageâ of women in IT since in fact there is no quota nor any particular class of IT job that specifically requires
tl;dr but I think I have to agree. The women in IT are no shorter or taller than the women in the general population.
I give my IT department a 5-star rating, too!
As a contractor, I have worked in a lot IT departments, mostly Windows shops (because they need the most help, thats where most of the contracts appear). It never fails that the department arrogantly gives itself such a rating: "our shop is tight... we run such and such." At the last gig, one guy spent all evening tracking down a "key logger," and came out of the hole near the end of the evening (to find me finishing his work), proudly claiming success. It took me all of 10 seconds to tell him he just spent 6 hours tracking down a macromaker... software to help the data entry-types do their work faster. "But its logging key strokes! LOOK!" -- "Listen," I calmly explained, "this is what a macromaker does... it couldn't work otherwise."
In 12 years and working with a myriad of IT departments and personalities that run the gamut, I've never come across a one that could admit they might be insecure... except for one, VA Tech. Like any organization with a lot of desktops and servers facing the Internet, they get bombarded with attacks from Russia and China and other sources. Of course, of them all, I'd rate VA Tech the most dilligent with security... training users, recommending software and best practices, sending out notices, and most singularly, admitting their mistakes and forming case studies from them.
I'll never understand the mentality of the other shops that put up a complete snowjob for the users, management, and executives claiming security that just isn't there and just hoping they don't get creamed... or maybe they just aren't aware of how filthy the Internet really is.... or even perhaps how to find and read the logs that prove this.
I was being completely genuine. I hadn't thought of it... and it is a good point, a valid attack to demoralize an enemy known to be overly proud and vain.
Psyops. It's all about using knowledge and bias as a weapon.
Fair enough. And I see now even a slap in the face really is a valid and effective attack against them. Thanks for making that point.