Either way, who controls the DNSs in China? It will be no great trick for the Chinese government to slowly (or quickly) swing requests for google.cn away from Google and point them at Yahoo, Bing, or whoever else is still cooperating. Google.cn will just cease to exist as a real destination.
Send everyone back to TTY dumb terminals. One set of apps for everyone, controlled in the central computing facility by a couple guys in white lab coats trying to stay warm in the meat freezer cum datacenter. All this distributed computing independence nonsense has gotten way out of hand.
Yep, I noticed the "dirty little secret" with my father after a heart bypass. He was a retired mathematician, learned in the old days with slide rules. He could do sums in his head faster than most people with a calculator. After the surgery, not so much. It took weeks and months before he got close to being as sharp as before. He's still very good, but not at the top pitch he was before the surgery.
Someone puts locks on something that appeals to you. Thus they make it more appealing for you to steal it. Had the locks not been there, would it have appealed less?
Pirating is less about them trying to keep the content away from you, and more about your willingness to steal something when you think you can get away with it.
An isolated failure with no particularly big consequences. The story tries to make DRM look bad, but really, is this the first time a critical demo went bad at an embarrassing moment?
Hate on DRM all you want for all the evils it might contain. I do. But this is a nothing story.
Irrational in your opinion is not irrational in everyone's opinion. If it were obvious no one would be debating it.
One of the hallmarks of good administration is good risk management. Being able to discern what you believe to be correct and taking action, but also hedging your bets against being wrong, and getting a good, or minimally bad, result anyway.
Failure due to overcaution and failure due to carelessness are both failures. So you guard against both.
Grabbing the girl and preventing an assault, really good. Grabbing the girl and preventing nothing, but causing some minimal trauma to her, not too bad, we might have to apologize. Ignoring the situation and someone dies, really bad. Ignoring the situation and nothing happens, moderately OK (just another day at school). Decision: grab her.
Somewhat silly. It isn't a black and white argument of All or Nothing.
In this case, The State, the university, has several courses of action open to it. It can expel her from the university, suspend her from school for a period of time, kick her out of the class, put her on academic probation, send her to counseling, or do nothing at all. Arrest is only one part of a continuum of things that might be done. Trial and Punishment the same.
Once they discovered the threat, they had some duty to act. They certainly can't just stand by and do nothing while their students are threatened. Once they determined the threat came from the source it purported to be, a student on their campus, with access to the tools she said she wanted to use against someone, should they again stand by and do nothing until she actually carries it out? Of course not. The threat gains more credibility, and the duty to prevent lawless action strengthens.
She is "innocent" in the sense of not having been convicted of anything. That is important, but not the only factor. If she is in fact planing to carry out a crime, taking steps to further it, and in the process of completing it, all of those are criminally actionable.
More important, on a college campus she would be subject to administrative rules, one of which no doubt "don't attack your professors". Another is probably "don't be disruptive of the educational setting". Making threats is disruptive, and clearly it was communicated, that is why they know it existed. The administration could certainly take action on anything like that based on whatever it knows when she gets scooped up.
To just stand by and do nothing at all until she had committed an overt violent crime is just silly. Not when the means to discover the threat and prevent the act is at hand. She'll get the chance to explain why it was all said in jest later. And the target will be alive to hear it.
Because if she isn't charged with a crime, she's being punished for something that is apparently completely legal to do in public -- and being punished for doing so. Is that the lesson we want to teach? That someone merely needs to be offended to visit personal hardship and grief on their head?
No. You've drawn the wrong lesson.
First, making a threat in a semi-public place really could be construed as a crime. Just because she wasn't slapped with it on Day One doesn't mean it will not happen.
Second, punishment can rightly come from many quarters. The administrators of the campus still have a responsibility to maintain order and safety on the campus. They are not powerless to remove threatening and disruptive students under their own authority. It doesn't have to be a criminal matter before they act. If they decide it is reasonable that her presence makes it unreasonably difficult for the other students to get an education, she gets the boot.
Any student gets some leeway for Academic Freedom, Freedom of Speech, and just ordinary human failings. But it isn't infinite. You don't get to just say anything anywhere and expect no repercussions short of a criminal trial. It is foreseeable that some people may object to what she wrote and may react badly to it. The fact she failed to realize that already shows poor judgment on her part.
What the fuck is it that you american's live in such state of paranoia?
After you ignore enough "meaningless" threats and they come true anyway, you develop a sense of overweening caution. Idle chatter doesn't seem so idle when you have dead bodies staring back at you, and the guy told you it would happen *IN ADVANCE*.
Don't like a distro? Good, use something else. That should be the end of it, but it isn't, because it's not good enough that you use what you like, the other guy must also use what you like, right?
It is not enough that I be in the right. It must also be proven that all the rest of you are wrong. Only then can I savor my triumph.
If someone left the hydrant running, does that make the water yours to take? No.
If someone puts you in charge of their computers to maintain, does that mean they are playthings for your own personal uses now? No.
If you ask someone to watch your home for a week while you are away, and you come back to see the remains of a week long neo-Roman orgy, complete with sacrifices, are you OK with that? No.
One cent per hour per machine. Real cost of electricity is maybe $.12 - $.15/kWH, so he was using maybe 12% of the capacity. That seems a conservative estimate to me, considering they are probably idle much more than that. All those cycles would have been wasted, but they were not his to scoop up and use as he pleased.
First question, "How is installing this software on all the district machines and running it for the past 10 years related to the requirements of your employment?"
In other words, who told you to do it, or how did you decide it needed to be done? If it was just for your own fun, where is that covered in your scope of employment?
Playing solitaire (or WoW) on lunch break is one thing, 5000 unauthorized installations is something else.
It isn't that he was using more, or even less, electricity by running SETI@Home. The fact that he was using government electricity for non-governmental purposes is the problem. It is no different than hooking up a hose to a county fire hydrant to fill your personal swimming pool. You benefit, they pay.
SETI@Home as a background process probably does not significantly slow down the machine for the typical user. They never notice the lost cycles. So it isn't like you really slowed down the responsiveness of the machines.
But there is the consideration of whether the machines were running (switched on) when they normally would not have been. If it would normally be off instead of in screen saver, it is 100% waste, from the county point of view.
True, but they were not bound to work for The Man, except that no other opportunity presented itself.
At least in theory, they could walk away from the mine, or farm or whatever with no legal penalty or restriction, as long as they paid their debts. Since the only way to make money was to work for the guy you owed money to, you were stuck, morally. But there wasn't a fence holding you back.
Perhaps you do, and you might be moraly right. But at least in the US, the military draft was not ended by the national ban on slavery. The US federal courts and Supreme Court ruled it was not covered, and the draft continued off and on for another 110 years after the 13th Amendment. Other nations take pretty much the same attitude.
More interesting to me are the power supply designs. Explicitly exposing the 12v and 5v busses, so a single external one can power an entire rack. Saves a lot of energy by eliminating inverter/rectifier pairs at the data center UPS and power supply.
If ordinary commercial power supplies and office/home UPSs had this, we would all benefit tremendously.
Obviously in your own mind you are fully justified in these beliefs. But where is the evidence to back up any of it? I mean, where is it out here in the real world, where the rest of us can see it?
some sort of PR disaster for Google (maybe their search engine is powered by Puppy juice).
From: Google Public Relations, Marketing, and Research
To: Chief, Search Engine Operations
Subject: Extraction alternatives::Urgent::
There are already hints in the wind. If this breaks it will ruin us! I'm still waiting on that progress update from you. If snips and snails alone aren't getting the job done, keep looking, but hurry!
Some good news, we've found an offshore company to shell the "shelters" under, but someone is going to notice we have a lot more Puppy Chow going in than Puppies coming out.
Watch those match algorithms. This could prove to be a rather disturbing way to meet your long lost sibling.
OTOH it could make a Great Jerry Springer / Dr Phil episode.
Slashdot Mirror
Some technology, man was not meant to play with.
and if you do play with it, you'll go blind.
Either way, who controls the DNSs in China? It will be no great trick for the Chinese government to slowly (or quickly) swing requests for google.cn away from Google and point them at Yahoo, Bing, or whoever else is still cooperating. Google.cn will just cease to exist as a real destination.
Send everyone back to TTY dumb terminals. One set of apps for everyone, controlled in the central computing facility by a couple guys in white lab coats trying to stay warm in the meat freezer cum datacenter. All this distributed computing independence nonsense has gotten way out of hand.
Yep, I noticed the "dirty little secret" with my father after a heart bypass. He was a retired mathematician, learned in the old days with slide rules. He could do sums in his head faster than most people with a calculator. After the surgery, not so much. It took weeks and months before he got close to being as sharp as before. He's still very good, but not at the top pitch he was before the surgery.
Someone puts locks on something that appeals to you. Thus they make it more appealing for you to steal it. Had the locks not been there, would it have appealed less?
Pirating is less about them trying to keep the content away from you, and more about your willingness to steal something when you think you can get away with it.
An isolated failure with no particularly big consequences. The story tries to make DRM look bad, but really, is this the first time a critical demo went bad at an embarrassing moment?
Hate on DRM all you want for all the evils it might contain. I do. But this is a nothing story.
Irrational in your opinion is not irrational in everyone's opinion. If it were obvious no one would be debating it.
One of the hallmarks of good administration is good risk management. Being able to discern what you believe to be correct and taking action, but also hedging your bets against being wrong, and getting a good, or minimally bad, result anyway.
Failure due to overcaution and failure due to carelessness are both failures. So you guard against both.
Grabbing the girl and preventing an assault, really good. Grabbing the girl and preventing nothing, but causing some minimal trauma to her, not too bad, we might have to apologize. Ignoring the situation and someone dies, really bad. Ignoring the situation and nothing happens, moderately OK (just another day at school). Decision: grab her.
Somewhat silly. It isn't a black and white argument of All or Nothing.
In this case, The State, the university, has several courses of action open to it. It can expel her from the university, suspend her from school for a period of time, kick her out of the class, put her on academic probation, send her to counseling, or do nothing at all. Arrest is only one part of a continuum of things that might be done. Trial and Punishment the same.
Once they discovered the threat, they had some duty to act. They certainly can't just stand by and do nothing while their students are threatened. Once they determined the threat came from the source it purported to be, a student on their campus, with access to the tools she said she wanted to use against someone, should they again stand by and do nothing until she actually carries it out? Of course not. The threat gains more credibility, and the duty to prevent lawless action strengthens.
She is "innocent" in the sense of not having been convicted of anything. That is important, but not the only factor. If she is in fact planing to carry out a crime, taking steps to further it, and in the process of completing it, all of those are criminally actionable.
More important, on a college campus she would be subject to administrative rules, one of which no doubt "don't attack your professors". Another is probably "don't be disruptive of the educational setting". Making threats is disruptive, and clearly it was communicated, that is why they know it existed. The administration could certainly take action on anything like that based on whatever it knows when she gets scooped up.
To just stand by and do nothing at all until she had committed an overt violent crime is just silly. Not when the means to discover the threat and prevent the act is at hand. She'll get the chance to explain why it was all said in jest later. And the target will be alive to hear it.
Because if she isn't charged with a crime, she's being punished for something that is apparently completely legal to do in public -- and being punished for doing so. Is that the lesson we want to teach? That someone merely needs to be offended to visit personal hardship and grief on their head?
No. You've drawn the wrong lesson.
First, making a threat in a semi-public place really could be construed as a crime. Just because she wasn't slapped with it on Day One doesn't mean it will not happen.
Second, punishment can rightly come from many quarters. The administrators of the campus still have a responsibility to maintain order and safety on the campus. They are not powerless to remove threatening and disruptive students under their own authority. It doesn't have to be a criminal matter before they act. If they decide it is reasonable that her presence makes it unreasonably difficult for the other students to get an education, she gets the boot.
Any student gets some leeway for Academic Freedom, Freedom of Speech, and just ordinary human failings. But it isn't infinite. You don't get to just say anything anywhere and expect no repercussions short of a criminal trial. It is foreseeable that some people may object to what she wrote and may react badly to it. The fact she failed to realize that already shows poor judgment on her part.
What the fuck is it that you american's live in such state of paranoia?
After you ignore enough "meaningless" threats and they come true anyway, you develop a sense of overweening caution. Idle chatter doesn't seem so idle when you have dead bodies staring back at you, and the guy told you it would happen *IN ADVANCE*.
It is not enough that I be in the right. It must also be proven that all the rest of you are wrong. Only then can I savor my triumph.
I thought everyone knew that.
If someone left the hydrant running, does that make the water yours to take? No.
If someone puts you in charge of their computers to maintain, does that mean they are playthings for your own personal uses now? No.
If you ask someone to watch your home for a week while you are away, and you come back to see the remains of a week long neo-Roman orgy, complete with sacrifices, are you OK with that? No.
$1M / 10 years = $100,000/year
$100,000/year / 5000 machines = $20/year/machine
$20/year/machine / 10 month(school-year) = $2/month/machine
$2/month/machine / 20 days/month / 10 hours/day = $.01/hour/machine.
One cent per hour per machine. Real cost of electricity is maybe $.12 - $.15/kWH, so he was using maybe 12% of the capacity. That seems a conservative estimate to me, considering they are probably idle much more than that. All those cycles would have been wasted, but they were not his to scoop up and use as he pleased.
First question, "How is installing this software on all the district machines and running it for the past 10 years related to the requirements of your employment?"
In other words, who told you to do it, or how did you decide it needed to be done? If it was just for your own fun, where is that covered in your scope of employment?
Playing solitaire (or WoW) on lunch break is one thing, 5000 unauthorized installations is something else.
It isn't that he was using more, or even less, electricity by running SETI@Home. The fact that he was using government electricity for non-governmental purposes is the problem. It is no different than hooking up a hose to a county fire hydrant to fill your personal swimming pool. You benefit, they pay.
SETI@Home as a background process probably does not significantly slow down the machine for the typical user. They never notice the lost cycles. So it isn't like you really slowed down the responsiveness of the machines.
But there is the consideration of whether the machines were running (switched on) when they normally would not have been. If it would normally be off instead of in screen saver, it is 100% waste, from the county point of view.
You insensitive clod! I'm too old to remember when Slashdot was cool!
At least in theory, they could walk away from the mine, or farm or whatever with no legal penalty or restriction, as long as they paid their debts. Since the only way to make money was to work for the guy you owed money to, you were stuck, morally. But there wasn't a fence holding you back.
Perhaps you do, and you might be moraly right. But at least in the US, the military draft was not ended by the national ban on slavery. The US federal courts and Supreme Court ruled it was not covered, and the draft continued off and on for another 110 years after the 13th Amendment. Other nations take pretty much the same attitude.
More interesting to me are the power supply designs. Explicitly exposing the 12v and 5v busses, so a single external one can power an entire rack. Saves a lot of energy by eliminating inverter/rectifier pairs at the data center UPS and power supply. If ordinary commercial power supplies and office/home UPSs had this, we would all benefit tremendously.
Obviously in your own mind you are fully justified in these beliefs. But where is the evidence to back up any of it? I mean, where is it out here in the real world, where the rest of us can see it?
some sort of PR disaster for Google (maybe their search engine is powered by Puppy juice).
From: Google Public Relations, Marketing, and Research ::Urgent::
To: Chief, Search Engine Operations
Subject: Extraction alternatives
There are already hints in the wind. If this breaks it will ruin us! I'm still waiting on that progress update from you. If snips and snails alone aren't getting the job done, keep looking, but hurry!
Some good news, we've found an offshore company to shell the "shelters" under, but someone is going to notice we have a lot more Puppy Chow going in than Puppies coming out.
Most of us don't worry about that kind of DNA sampling.
Watch those match algorithms. This could prove to be a rather disturbing way to meet your long lost sibling. OTOH it could make a Great Jerry Springer / Dr Phil episode.
Thou shalt not examine this tablet too closely.
Wasn't Larrabee the hapless assistant to the Chief of Control? Just a weird coincidence I hope.