>>I went to update my favorite free IDE, Dev C++, yesterday and noticed that it had not been updated since 2005!
Is this necessarily a bad thing?
For every "it doesn't have snazzy new feature x" there's a "it hasn't broken/lost feature y". And you're comfortable and familiar with it. Stability has its advantages. Plus you *can* update the underlying programs if you really need to; they just haven't been rolled into an updated single package.
I'm an embedded systems programmer; we use IAR's ARM IDE at work (definitely NOT free). I used Eclipse briefly on a contract project, and I use DevC++ for my own little home stuff since using it for a course a few years ago. There's a balance point between staying on the bleeding edge, and working with existing fielded non-changing hardware that needs very stable updates from a stable development environment.
Could criminals use those pictures to case the property? Yes. But they could have also driven down the street to accomplish the same thing.
Absolutely. But now they can do it with almost no effort, at no expense, from the comfort of their homes, scanning a target area far enough from home to divert suspicion yet close enough to reach . . . Oh, and it's not just the houses; it's the cars and anything else in the front yard. And let's not forget about the various affiliation symbols that help zealots select their targets.
If you've grown up in a small town and always felt safe, and never seen a stranger drive down the block (I went to school with people like that), by all means don't worry yourself. If you grew up in Manhattan (as I did), rubbing shoulders with hundreds or thousands of strangers on a daily basis, perhaps you feel numbers breed anonymity. Google is taking quietly-public places and suddenly making them ultra-public, and I think ignoring the negative possibilities is as wrong as concentrating on them.
You want the comforts of living in a highly public place like a city, you get the downsides of it being a highly public place.
There's a big spectrum here, and at some point a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. I live on a quiet street in the suburbs; not private, but not highly public. With StreetView, suddenly EVERYPLACE is highly public.
You don't object to StreetView everywhere; do you feel as comfortable with police cameras everywhere? Would you feel as comfortable if a policeman stopped in front of your house and took photos?
Or how about a person you found threatening because of his grooming / suit / uniform / piercing / vehicle / music / whatever (NB - for some people, that's the policeman)? Suddenly, at no effort or risk on their part, the full spectrum of the world from top to bottom could be sitting outside your house.
We should be able, as a species, to deploy and fix satellites, because we depend on them so much at this point. We should be able to maintain working samples of the bleeding edge of our technology and reach. The money spent on space stuff doesn't just get ground up and burned as fuel; it pays for the development and upkeep of part of what keeps our technological civilization working.
We shouldn't forget subsistence farming and medieval tools, because they're always good techniques to have in a pinch and might come in useful. And we also shouldn't abandon the most forward edge of our capabilities, because at some point we'll need it. Even if we never go beyond the moon, or even much beyond high orbit.
Throughout its history, NASA has seemed to feel that part of having "the right stuff" is taking incredible activities and achievements and making them incredibly boring. Even allowing for them being extra slow and careful, this represents the culmination of a lot of work by a lot of people to exacting standards, and it deserves at least as much hype as the last Olympic opening ceremony. NASA manages to turn it into a bus ride.
Come on, there was barely enough of a thread for a TV episode. Changing history is older than "It's a Wonderful Life", let alone "City on the edge of forever". It's tougher to be novel and thought-provoking after multiple Treks, and Babylon 5 and Firefly and Battlestar Galactica (the new one).
OTOH it was fun to watch. I was entertained. It's a movie. We can hope for better . . . or at least not ruining itself like the continual retouching of Star Wars. (Han shot first, dammit! And Kirk would too!)
Though a few more twenty-somethings. (I'm old enough to have been terrified of the Gorn the first time.)
Good clean fun. Characters spot on, even if not very developed (e.g.: yes, McKoy mostly one-liners, but done in just the right Southern-gentleman style). Some logic quibbles that even the clever alternate-history deprecated-consistency concept can't ignore: In ST:TOS they didn't have families on board yet, so how would Kirk have been born on a ship? Why does Enterprise Engineering look lower-tech than *today* when the Kelvin bridge 20 years earlier looks so tech? Never mind, just leave your brain at home.
I compare it to "Lord of the Rings": it would have been impossible to do it perfectly, cover all the details, and satisfy everyone completely, so one must judge it on its own merit and and on whether it reaches the correct tone. LOTR was a success precisely because it was satisfying to the zillion individual imaginations of book fans *and* reached non-fans as well. Similarly, Star Trek is a fun action/adventure movie with enough of the familiar setting to work for fans and enough standalone entertainment to please non-fans.
On twisting words into "nothing to do with its obvious intention": apparently intentions are not so obvious. See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/05/2117205&art_pos=17 for a brand new example of two opposite opinions on the wording of a single contract.
"... non-competes hamper a person's ability to traverse the marketplace freely for work,... [or] the agreements actually afford freedom to develop technology without the fear of IP theft." (Unless maybe the intent is to protect the company at the expense of the individual, in which case they're in complete agreement...)
you are divorcing the law from what the intent of the law is supposed to be....
that a law can be twisted into some other meaning that has nothing to do with its obvious intention is not a good argument against passing a law.
A knife can be used for good or ill. The surgeon's scalpel has a small precise blade and a secure handle; the chef's knife may be larger and more dangerous but still has a secure handle. What I see of this bill is so broadly worded as to be all blade and no handle, likely to do as much damage on the wrong side as the right.
Legal wordings are twisted all the time. It's part of what lawyers do for a living. Look at the laws about "privacy" that actually define how UN-private your information can be. Look at the debates about misleading wording of ballot initiatives so that one has to vote "no" to mean "yes". Look at the US Supreme Court cases that debate the meaning of words, or the Canadian case that turned on the precise location of a comma. Consider how many legends and fables in multiple cultures depend on the EXACT wording of a pledge, or spell, or command.
Good intent must be followed with clear and precise wording, and I don't see that here. Not yet, at least.
Sorry, I was being brief and thereby unclear. I agree with your stated conditions for defining "bad speech", and agree with you and another poster that the INTENT of this bill is certainly good and the bill sponsors are full of good intentions. The reality as currently written, however, is "sweepingly general", and we know which road those intentions can unwittingly pave.
Consider even your conditions, which I specifically agree have only the best of intentions, with the freely-available example of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show: target a specific individual (Bush, Cheney) for an extended period (4 years at least) if they are mentally unstable (Stewart was openly accusing Cheney of being paranoid, megalomaniac, and generally a nut case). This free speech (1) clearly intended as entertainment as either satire or shock-humor, and (2) possibly also a serious political commentary, would seem to be actionable under your conditions. OF COURSE that's not what you meant, but if someone wanted to stop such speech that's a tool they could use, just like the RICO laws have been used against people who have nothing to do with the original "crime organizations" that were targeted. If the case were brought, Stewart might not lose and get thrown in jail, but he'd spend a lot of money and time in court defending himself, and the prospect alone would seriously chill such open speech.
People *should* be punished for harming other people, and I agree with you that cyberbullying causes real harm. I'm just not ready to submit to constant surveillance of myself and everybody else to prevent a potential problem, because I think it sets up an assumption that everybody is guilty until proven innocent.
the most hardcore free speech zealot understands why you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre. therefore, everyone recognizes that yes, there actually ARE limits to free speech.
Yes, there are. And they are already codified and have precedents. We don't need a sweepingly general restatement that could expand those limits to just about anything negative.
But how can I know if I don't like your blog until I read it? And continue checking it forever? And then once I've read something that I don't like, it's YOUR fault for posting something hurtful to me.
Gee, properly read, this probably makes *every* online post actionable.
This is just a clarification of "harassment" as it already exists. It's not an attempt to shut down blogs.
I would amend: This is PROBABLY INTENDED as just a clarification of "harassment", but is so broadly defined that it is dangerous. I don't understand why "harassment" needs such specific extension to electronic communications, either. Anything online should just automatically come under "publication" because it's "distributed to the public" as much as any newpaper or magazine ever was.
... It doesn't hurt the cause that two of the largest Nasa facilities are in traditionally Republican areas - Texas and Florida.
I think you're confusing cause and effect here. The facilities were located there in the first place, along with the prospect of the industries that would grow up nearby, in exchange for the congressional votes to fund them. (It helps that Florida has the most rotational spin of the continental US, being closest to the equator, but that's just a bonus.)
It's a module, not the whole station. Name it, and take the publicity. Or make sensible rules, like we have for stamps and money, that we only name things for people dead long enough to have stable reputations. (gee, maybe that would help in other contexts as well . ..)
Don't you realize there were people here in the US arguing that we *should* have nuked Afghanistan after 9/11? Heck, I'll bet Cheney was one of them, and he was right at Bush's elbow. Americans wanted retaliation, yes, but we also like to think of ourselves as the good guys, so we try very hard to retaliate against the right people. I have to believe that there were enough sane people in the room (at the White House) reminding the extremists that we weren't 99.9% sure of *anything*. The problem in some other groups and countries is that the extremists rule the show, and they seem willing to operate on a lot less certainty.
Afghanistan wasn't scorched earth. We can scorch things much worse than that.
Maybe the political figures think that way because most common people think that way. Your own example turns the other way - Palestinians were at work every day in Israel for years and years, until a comparative handful of troublemakers caused enough death to force firm action. Israel manages to have quiet borders, if not formal peace, with its neighbors - except the comparative handful of troublemakers who keep splashing gasoline on the fire. And they keep insisting loud and long that they won't talk or compromise because they don't recognize the "other side" that they would have to talk to. Tell the truth - wouldn't you get irritated if your town were being shelled by the neighboring town?
*You* are allowed to base your choices on factors outside the immediate selection domain. For example, you can select "fair trade" foods based on their sources even if the price is higher, and you can avoid buying gasoline from a company that spilled oil even if the price is lower. You have freedom of choice.
In exactly the same way, if you were going to see a doctor or lawyer or accountant, you would try to research them to make the most suitable choice for your needs, and avoid someone who has a conflict of interest.
/.ers have too narrow a viewpoint. We actually envision doing this. Instead, let's publicize to the entire "normal" non-technical world how the government expects everyone to keep two years' logs of all of their communications, like all of your phone call records, so they can be inspected at any time. After all, cordless phones on standard frequencies are totally unsecured, and someone might have made a call to a terrorist on your phone line, so maybe you should record your phone line too. THAT is something that the average person can understand as (1) a burden to maintain, (2) an invasion of privacy, and (3) a change from presumed innocence to presumed guilt. That last one is the most dangerous. It used to be authorities had to prove I was doing something wrong; this bill seems to say that I have to continually maintain and update my records to prove that I was not doing something wrong, and it is assumed that if I can't produce those records then I'm hiding something and am guilty. Very, very dangerous.
The teacher in a classroom is legally responsible for the safety and security of the students in his/her charge (technically "children" even if 17 years and 364 days old); and is also legally responsible to the administration to follow the rules of the school; and is also restricted by many rules of interaction with students. I urge the libertarians posting to consider how they might handle contradictory directives which can lead very quickly to immediate removal from one's job (plus, due to the nature of the job license, being forbidden to get another such job *anywhere* *ever* again). Escalation to higher authority is typically the only safe solution, and that higher authority will also take the safe road of overreacting. After all, charges can always be dropped.
And that also means legally responsible for knowing where those students are at all times. To the poster whose child stopped at the bathroom without seeking permission, you are reasonable in being annoyed that the child received a disciplinary note, but you would be HORRIFIED if a child had an asthma attack and died and nobody noticed that a child was missing until the next class change.
Being adversarial with police and other authority figures, especially when you are guaranteed to be caught in a lie, is not a particularly good tactic either. It guarantees that they have something to pin on you even if the original issue evaporates.
Once upon a time, when I started working with computers, you had a very dumb terminal connected to a remote computer. For lots of years the objective was to bring more intelligence closer to the user; editing terminals led to local storage. At the point where we could have individual computers all to ourselves, anyone acknowledging the splintering effect - the fact that you couldn't add back the cycles and memory to make one big computer - was mocked as a throwback to the outdated mainframe days. Same for anyone pointing out the problems with backup and maintenance. After all, why would you want to leave your work under the thumb of the people in the glass house when you can have your very own personal computer?
Since then we've been trying to find the best way to split the load between local and remote intelligence, distributing processing across communications, whether it's for business applications or multiplayer games. And most important, we have found that one solution does not fit all problems. Sometimes distributed knowledge addresses the problem or enables a brand new activity (like the multiplayer games); sometimes close direct access offers the most speed or best function (like Google's massive data centers).
So now, after we can put multi-gigahertz multi-core processors and gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage at the disposal of each individual, people are reinventing the remote mainframe. Call it a server, call it a cloud, whatever.
It is to laugh.
Those who will not learn from history are doomed to rediscover lots of things at their own cost.
Once upon a time, in the 1960s, in the dawn of the multitasking OS concept, there was Multics. It had no distinction between files and data; after all, a file is just a backing store for a piece of data currently mapped into RAM. Since RAM was expensive and small, and paging had to handle everything anyway, the data object that we think of as a file just gets paged in as it is accessed.
Unix was inspired by Multics.
As for eliminating languages to prevent bad code, it's been done too - by Pr1mos, on Pr1me Computers, which you may notice doesn't exist any more. So it's not so much "we prevent you from doing bad things" as "we make it hard for you to describe bad things to do so we don't have to work hard to prevent you."
Those who will not learn from history have to make their own mistakes at their own cost.
History matters.
...why don't some people understand that...teachers have to teach to the standards?
Windows != "standards".
"teaching to standards" == "what the school district told the teacher to be teaching, and what the teacher assigned the kids to be doing during class". Nothing to do with the content.
And cell phones shouldn't be on during the school day, any more than they should be on in meetings at work. Be here now.
My son is also 23. My high school had an IBM 1130. It was the size of two large desks. We used punch cards. Chaff is fun.
I've done telephone systems that had to be ultra-reliable for 911 (US police/fire/medic) and other secure systems. Sarcastic error messages in the administrative log are one thing; undocumented functions popping up in front of hospital staff or policemen is quite another.
Try the other direction: Start treating your co-workers like colleagues and partners instead of confusing cleverness and smart-assed-ness. Start treating the people who pay you as customers, and give them the same quality work you expect from people you hire. Start taking pride in your work.
>>You really have one shot to win or lose the customer, the expectations are exceedingly high, and every product has to pretty much be "lights out" from the start.
Welcome back to: The Mainframe Era. In the days of the IBM 360, we were slow and careful because the costs of anything going wrong were astronomical (percentage-wise, at least). Changes or installations couldn't require a reboot because downtime was expensive - and long. Like a rocket, everything had to work right the first time it was deployed.
As I read about Agile, it isn't about being "fast" - it's about being slow and careful in a more rapid way. Do things a little at a time so you can be confident in each step, and can add lots of little steps rapidly with similar confidence.
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>>I went to update my favorite free IDE, Dev C++, yesterday and noticed that it had not been updated since 2005!
Is this necessarily a bad thing?
For every "it doesn't have snazzy new feature x" there's a "it hasn't broken/lost feature y". And you're comfortable and familiar with it. Stability has its advantages. Plus you *can* update the underlying programs if you really need to; they just haven't been rolled into an updated single package.
I'm an embedded systems programmer; we use IAR's ARM IDE at work (definitely NOT free). I used Eclipse briefly on a contract project, and I use DevC++ for my own little home stuff since using it for a course a few years ago. There's a balance point between staying on the bleeding edge, and working with existing fielded non-changing hardware that needs very stable updates from a stable development environment.
Could criminals use those pictures to case the property? Yes. But they could have also driven down the street to accomplish the same thing.
Absolutely. But now they can do it with almost no effort, at no expense, from the comfort of their homes, scanning a target area far enough from home to divert suspicion yet close enough to reach . . . Oh, and it's not just the houses; it's the cars and anything else in the front yard. And let's not forget about the various affiliation symbols that help zealots select their targets.
If you've grown up in a small town and always felt safe, and never seen a stranger drive down the block (I went to school with people like that), by all means don't worry yourself. If you grew up in Manhattan (as I did), rubbing shoulders with hundreds or thousands of strangers on a daily basis, perhaps you feel numbers breed anonymity. Google is taking quietly-public places and suddenly making them ultra-public, and I think ignoring the negative possibilities is as wrong as concentrating on them.
You want the comforts of living in a highly public place like a city, you get the downsides of it being a highly public place.
There's a big spectrum here, and at some point a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. I live on a quiet street in the suburbs; not private, but not highly public. With StreetView, suddenly EVERYPLACE is highly public.
You don't object to StreetView everywhere; do you feel as comfortable with police cameras everywhere? Would you feel as comfortable if a policeman stopped in front of your house and took photos?
Or how about a person you found threatening because of his grooming / suit / uniform / piercing / vehicle / music / whatever (NB - for some people, that's the policeman)? Suddenly, at no effort or risk on their part, the full spectrum of the world from top to bottom could be sitting outside your house.
We should be able, as a species, to deploy and fix satellites, because we depend on them so much at this point. We should be able to maintain working samples of the bleeding edge of our technology and reach. The money spent on space stuff doesn't just get ground up and burned as fuel; it pays for the development and upkeep of part of what keeps our technological civilization working.
We shouldn't forget subsistence farming and medieval tools, because they're always good techniques to have in a pinch and might come in useful. And we also shouldn't abandon the most forward edge of our capabilities, because at some point we'll need it. Even if we never go beyond the moon, or even much beyond high orbit.
Throughout its history, NASA has seemed to feel that part of having "the right stuff" is taking incredible activities and achievements and making them incredibly boring. Even allowing for them being extra slow and careful, this represents the culmination of a lot of work by a lot of people to exacting standards, and it deserves at least as much hype as the last Olympic opening ceremony. NASA manages to turn it into a bus ride.
There was a story?
Come on, there was barely enough of a thread for a TV episode. Changing history is older than "It's a Wonderful Life", let alone "City on the edge of forever". It's tougher to be novel and thought-provoking after multiple Treks, and Babylon 5 and Firefly and Battlestar Galactica (the new one).
OTOH it was fun to watch. I was entertained. It's a movie. We can hope for better . . . or at least not ruining itself like the continual retouching of Star Wars. (Han shot first, dammit! And Kirk would too!)
Though a few more twenty-somethings. (I'm old enough to have been terrified of the Gorn the first time.)
Good clean fun. Characters spot on, even if not very developed (e.g.: yes, McKoy mostly one-liners, but done in just the right Southern-gentleman style). Some logic quibbles that even the clever alternate-history deprecated-consistency concept can't ignore: In ST:TOS they didn't have families on board yet, so how would Kirk have been born on a ship? Why does Enterprise Engineering look lower-tech than *today* when the Kelvin bridge 20 years earlier looks so tech? Never mind, just leave your brain at home.
I compare it to "Lord of the Rings": it would have been impossible to do it perfectly, cover all the details, and satisfy everyone completely, so one must judge it on its own merit and and on whether it reaches the correct tone. LOTR was a success precisely because it was satisfying to the zillion individual imaginations of book fans *and* reached non-fans as well. Similarly, Star Trek is a fun action/adventure movie with enough of the familiar setting to work for fans and enough standalone entertainment to please non-fans.
It's the "block the VOIP" feature which tested much more positively than "kill the annoying guy on the phone" with focus groups.
Odd, I would have expected the latter to be much more entertaining. Certainly more so than the movie.
On twisting words into "nothing to do with its obvious intention": apparently intentions are not so obvious. See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/05/2117205&art_pos=17 for a brand new example of two opposite opinions on the wording of a single contract.
... [or] the agreements actually afford freedom to develop technology without the fear of IP theft." (Unless maybe the intent is to protect the company at the expense of the individual, in which case they're in complete agreement...)
"... non-competes hamper a person's ability to traverse the marketplace freely for work,
you are divorcing the law from what the intent of the law is supposed to be. ...
that a law can be twisted into some other meaning that has nothing to do with its obvious intention is not a good argument against passing a law.
A knife can be used for good or ill. The surgeon's scalpel has a small precise blade and a secure handle; the chef's knife may be larger and more dangerous but still has a secure handle. What I see of this bill is so broadly worded as to be all blade and no handle, likely to do as much damage on the wrong side as the right.
Legal wordings are twisted all the time. It's part of what lawyers do for a living. Look at the laws about "privacy" that actually define how UN-private your information can be. Look at the debates about misleading wording of ballot initiatives so that one has to vote "no" to mean "yes". Look at the US Supreme Court cases that debate the meaning of words, or the Canadian case that turned on the precise location of a comma. Consider how many legends and fables in multiple cultures depend on the EXACT wording of a pledge, or spell, or command.
Good intent must be followed with clear and precise wording, and I don't see that here. Not yet, at least.
Sorry, I was being brief and thereby unclear. I agree with your stated conditions for defining "bad speech", and agree with you and another poster that the INTENT of this bill is certainly good and the bill sponsors are full of good intentions. The reality as currently written, however, is "sweepingly general", and we know which road those intentions can unwittingly pave.
Consider even your conditions, which I specifically agree have only the best of intentions, with the freely-available example of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show: target a specific individual (Bush, Cheney) for an extended period (4 years at least) if they are mentally unstable (Stewart was openly accusing Cheney of being paranoid, megalomaniac, and generally a nut case). This free speech (1) clearly intended as entertainment as either satire or shock-humor, and (2) possibly also a serious political commentary, would seem to be actionable under your conditions. OF COURSE that's not what you meant, but if someone wanted to stop such speech that's a tool they could use, just like the RICO laws have been used against people who have nothing to do with the original "crime organizations" that were targeted. If the case were brought, Stewart might not lose and get thrown in jail, but he'd spend a lot of money and time in court defending himself, and the prospect alone would seriously chill such open speech.
People *should* be punished for harming other people, and I agree with you that cyberbullying causes real harm. I'm just not ready to submit to constant surveillance of myself and everybody else to prevent a potential problem, because I think it sets up an assumption that everybody is guilty until proven innocent.
the most hardcore free speech zealot understands why you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre. therefore, everyone recognizes that yes, there actually ARE limits to free speech.
Yes, there are. And they are already codified and have precedents. We don't need a sweepingly general restatement that could expand those limits to just about anything negative.
But how can I know if I don't like your blog until I read it? And continue checking it forever? And then once I've read something that I don't like, it's YOUR fault for posting something hurtful to me.
Gee, properly read, this probably makes *every* online post actionable.
This is just a clarification of "harassment" as it already exists. It's not an attempt to shut down blogs.
I would amend: This is PROBABLY INTENDED as just a clarification of "harassment", but is so broadly defined that it is dangerous. I don't understand why "harassment" needs such specific extension to electronic communications, either. Anything online should just automatically come under "publication" because it's "distributed to the public" as much as any newpaper or magazine ever was.
... It doesn't hurt the cause that two of the largest Nasa facilities are in traditionally Republican areas - Texas and Florida.
I think you're confusing cause and effect here. The facilities were located there in the first place, along with the prospect of the industries that would grow up nearby, in exchange for the congressional votes to fund them. (It helps that Florida has the most rotational spin of the continental US, being closest to the equator, but that's just a bonus.)
.)
It's a module, not the whole station. Name it, and take the publicity. Or make sensible rules, like we have for stamps and money, that we only name things for people dead long enough to have stable reputations. (gee, maybe that would help in other contexts as well . .
Don't you realize there were people here in the US arguing that we *should* have nuked Afghanistan after 9/11? Heck, I'll bet Cheney was one of them, and he was right at Bush's elbow. Americans wanted retaliation, yes, but we also like to think of ourselves as the good guys, so we try very hard to retaliate against the right people. I have to believe that there were enough sane people in the room (at the White House) reminding the extremists that we weren't 99.9% sure of *anything*. The problem in some other groups and countries is that the extremists rule the show, and they seem willing to operate on a lot less certainty.
Afghanistan wasn't scorched earth. We can scorch things much worse than that.
Maybe the political figures think that way because most common people think that way. Your own example turns the other way - Palestinians were at work every day in Israel for years and years, until a comparative handful of troublemakers caused enough death to force firm action. Israel manages to have quiet borders, if not formal peace, with its neighbors - except the comparative handful of troublemakers who keep splashing gasoline on the fire. And they keep insisting loud and long that they won't talk or compromise because they don't recognize the "other side" that they would have to talk to. Tell the truth - wouldn't you get irritated if your town were being shelled by the neighboring town?
*You* are allowed to base your choices on factors outside the immediate selection domain. For example, you can select "fair trade" foods based on their sources even if the price is higher, and you can avoid buying gasoline from a company that spilled oil even if the price is lower. You have freedom of choice.
In exactly the same way, if you were going to see a doctor or lawyer or accountant, you would try to research them to make the most suitable choice for your needs, and avoid someone who has a conflict of interest.
Why should someone hiring *you* be any different?
/.ers have too narrow a viewpoint. We actually envision doing this. Instead, let's publicize to the entire "normal" non-technical world how the government expects everyone to keep two years' logs of all of their communications, like all of your phone call records, so they can be inspected at any time. After all, cordless phones on standard frequencies are totally unsecured, and someone might have made a call to a terrorist on your phone line, so maybe you should record your phone line too. THAT is something that the average person can understand as (1) a burden to maintain, (2) an invasion of privacy, and (3) a change from presumed innocence to presumed guilt. That last one is the most dangerous. It used to be authorities had to prove I was doing something wrong; this bill seems to say that I have to continually maintain and update my records to prove that I was not doing something wrong, and it is assumed that if I can't produce those records then I'm hiding something and am guilty. Very, very dangerous.
The teacher in a classroom is legally responsible for the safety and security of the students in his/her charge (technically "children" even if 17 years and 364 days old); and is also legally responsible to the administration to follow the rules of the school; and is also restricted by many rules of interaction with students. I urge the libertarians posting to consider how they might handle contradictory directives which can lead very quickly to immediate removal from one's job (plus, due to the nature of the job license, being forbidden to get another such job *anywhere* *ever* again). Escalation to higher authority is typically the only safe solution, and that higher authority will also take the safe road of overreacting. After all, charges can always be dropped.
And that also means legally responsible for knowing where those students are at all times. To the poster whose child stopped at the bathroom without seeking permission, you are reasonable in being annoyed that the child received a disciplinary note, but you would be HORRIFIED if a child had an asthma attack and died and nobody noticed that a child was missing until the next class change.
Being adversarial with police and other authority figures, especially when you are guaranteed to be caught in a lie, is not a particularly good tactic either. It guarantees that they have something to pin on you even if the original issue evaporates.
Once upon a time, when I started working with computers, you had a very dumb terminal connected to a remote computer. For lots of years the objective was to bring more intelligence closer to the user; editing terminals led to local storage. At the point where we could have individual computers all to ourselves, anyone acknowledging the splintering effect - the fact that you couldn't add back the cycles and memory to make one big computer - was mocked as a throwback to the outdated mainframe days. Same for anyone pointing out the problems with backup and maintenance. After all, why would you want to leave your work under the thumb of the people in the glass house when you can have your very own personal computer?
Since then we've been trying to find the best way to split the load between local and remote intelligence, distributing processing across communications, whether it's for business applications or multiplayer games. And most important, we have found that one solution does not fit all problems. Sometimes distributed knowledge addresses the problem or enables a brand new activity (like the multiplayer games); sometimes close direct access offers the most speed or best function (like Google's massive data centers).
So now, after we can put multi-gigahertz multi-core processors and gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage at the disposal of each individual, people are reinventing the remote mainframe. Call it a server, call it a cloud, whatever.
It is to laugh.
Those who will not learn from history are doomed to rediscover lots of things at their own cost.
Once upon a time, in the 1960s, in the dawn of the multitasking OS concept, there was Multics. It had no distinction between files and data; after all, a file is just a backing store for a piece of data currently mapped into RAM. Since RAM was expensive and small, and paging had to handle everything anyway, the data object that we think of as a file just gets paged in as it is accessed.
Unix was inspired by Multics.
As for eliminating languages to prevent bad code, it's been done too - by Pr1mos, on Pr1me Computers, which you may notice doesn't exist any more. So it's not so much "we prevent you from doing bad things" as "we make it hard for you to describe bad things to do so we don't have to work hard to prevent you."
Those who will not learn from history have to make their own mistakes at their own cost. History matters.
Windows != "standards".
"teaching to standards" == "what the school district told the teacher to be teaching, and what the teacher assigned the kids to be doing during class". Nothing to do with the content.
And cell phones shouldn't be on during the school day, any more than they should be on in meetings at work. Be here now.
My son is also 23. My high school had an IBM 1130. It was the size of two large desks. We used punch cards. Chaff is fun.
I've done telephone systems that had to be ultra-reliable for 911 (US police/fire/medic) and other secure systems. Sarcastic error messages in the administrative log are one thing; undocumented functions popping up in front of hospital staff or policemen is quite another.
Try the other direction: Start treating your co-workers like colleagues and partners instead of confusing cleverness and smart-assed-ness. Start treating the people who pay you as customers, and give them the same quality work you expect from people you hire. Start taking pride in your work.
Cripes. Grow a brain larger than your pair.
>>You really have one shot to win or lose the customer, the expectations are exceedingly high, and every product has to pretty much be "lights out" from the start.
Welcome back to: The Mainframe Era. In the days of the IBM 360, we were slow and careful because the costs of anything going wrong were astronomical (percentage-wise, at least). Changes or installations couldn't require a reboot because downtime was expensive - and long. Like a rocket, everything had to work right the first time it was deployed.
As I read about Agile, it isn't about being "fast" - it's about being slow and careful in a more rapid way. Do things a little at a time so you can be confident in each step, and can add lots of little steps rapidly with similar confidence.