He did allow that reading physics textbooks in coffee shops was a good way to pick up girls.
I was going to say something pithy like "tells you something about that guy's credibility" but then I realized, reading physics books in coffee shops to impress girls was the one thing I never tried. So maybe it does work!
Also, you might do some research before submission to see if you haven't just discovered something that people have know about for the last 200 years, but you haven't talked to the right math professor to know about.
Or you could just submit your patent application in the U.S., so even if people have known about it for 200 years, the patent examiners won't notice.;-)
As long as they don't start using the technologies on the citizens of the US. Do you trust them?
No. But if you take away their technology to spy on citizens, you also take away their ability to spy on enemies. Technology is like that. People can use it for Good Things or Bad Things. We learned that in the 20th century.
Actually, the military being able to crack encryption is in some sense a Good Thing. It enables them to conduct espionage and counter-espionage against adversaries such as North Korea and Al-Quaeda. Yeah that's kind of a Cold War mentality, but what is "cyber warfare" if not Cold War II?
If your tank leaked onto my property before we had such laws then no I don't think it's fair to charge you for it. Foresight doesn't really enter into it -- the question is whether or not the activity is legal at the time it occurs.
It's impossible to pass a law that anticipates every possible way one person could harm someone else's person or property. The operative concepts here are torts and negligence. I believe those are necessary concepts to a fair legal system, so I guess that's where we differ.
If a carbon tax is imposed do you think it would be fair to retroactively impose it on every single living American for every single gallon of gasoline they ever burned?
The purpose of the proposed carbon tax isn't punishment, it's not even remediation, it's social engineering to get people to conserve and switch to renewable energy. So making it retroactive isn't really on the horizon.
Let's alter the situation a little. For the sake of argument take it as granted that reality is as environmentalists say: say global warming is a Bad Thing, and it's due to burning fossil fuels. Suppose further there were a feasible way to undo the damage. Should America have to pay the lion's share of the money to implement the fix? Well, yes! Proportional to the fossil fuel consumption of the country. Should individuals have to pay proportionally to their past fuel use? If everyone had kept all their receipts, I don't see why not. But it's completely hypothetical because there is no way to assess after the fact who used what, at what time.
Turn the argument on its head. Suppose I don't foresee that my gas tank is going to leak into your well, but it does. Should my lack of foresight and contingency planning absolve me of liability!?
Weren't a bunch of Congress-critters talking about raising the oil spill liability limit in order to compel BP to pay more money? How is that compatible with the prohibition on ex post facto laws?
Maybe it's not. Congress passes unconstitutional laws all the time. That's why we need the Supreme Court.
For that matter, how is the Superfund program compatible? It's punishing companies for actions that weren't illegal at the time they engaged in them.
IANAL but my first thought is that the Superfund program is not punishment, it's remediation for the damage the company did. I can store gasoline on my property and it's not illegal, but if it leaks into my neighbor's well I am responsible for cleaning it up. Note that in my opinion I don't deserve to be punished for the leaky gas tank, but on the other hand whether the cleanup is small change or drives me to bankruptcy I should still have to pay it regardless.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the rest of the world has been messing with (and messing up) the middle east much more recently than the crusades.
I can see how you get that impression. I was responding specifically to the Crusades because talking about the Crusades as having anything to do with modern conflict really gets my ire. It shows the speaker is thinking on the level of tribal hatred rather than a rational socio-political level. You don't hear Native Americans inciting violence against England, France, and Spain because they colonized their homeland 500 years ago. They have far more cause to complain than the Arabs do about the Crusades.
With regard to the more recent issues (say since the fall of the Ottoman Empire c. 1922) then yes, the Arabs in particular have received plenty of rough and unfair treatment in my opinion. We can talk about British imperialism, we can talk about American hegemony, we can talk about Isreal's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967.
I would point out that when the Arabs have been able to get some kind of respect and accommodation from Isreal, it's been from peaceful overtures. Sadat got Sinai back through the Camp David Accords. It was through non-violent strikes and protests (the First Intifada) that the Palestinians won the right to form the Palestinian Authority. I think they'd be a lot closer to self-rule if they hadn't re-ignited the violence back in 2000 (Second Intifada).
One of the main reasons why we have such a strained relationship with the Middle East the fact that we have messed with the people in that region in a hostile way for a long time: Crusades
It's quite a stretch to say "we" messed with the Middle East in the Crusades! I wasn't born at that time; neither was my country. Neither was any current nation-state in Western Europe, unless you count Vatican City.
Yeah it's true at one point our distant ancestors fought their distant ancestors. Inability to get over a conflict that happened 900 years ago is a big part of what's holding back certain parts of the world. England and France are buddies now. That Hundred Years' War thing is completely forgotten. The U.S. and Japan are friends in spite of the nuclear attacks on Japan just 65 years ago. On the other end of the spectrum take a look at the Balkans. Just 10 years ago they were still massacring each other over feuds that go back to the freakin' Dark Ages. WTF? At some point it stops sounding like a legitimate grievance and starts sounding like an excuse to perpetuate the hatred. Maybe that's why France, England, and Japan are world-leading democracies and the Balkans and the Middle East are backward-ass dumps.
One asshat, that's an outlier; an entire frigging country of government backed asshats, that's a problem.
Yup, some Muslim countries are run by asshats. I put Pakistan on that list, along with the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, and the Taliban which may or may not count as a government depending whom you ask. Also Saudi Arabia and Iran belong on that list.
On the other hand there are Muslim countries that are reasonable to deal with and seem to share social/civic values with in the West: for example Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia, India (not majority Muslim but there are a whole lotta Muslims living there), probably lots of others. So yes, Pakistan is a problem, but when we start to show some indignation I'm saying we should be indignant about Pakistan, not about Islam.
The real distinction is between theocratic and secular governments. Theocratic governments tend to be the asshats. Incidentally what Osama Bin Laden and his ilk claim to want is to set up Muslim theocratic regimes all over the world. So he's sort of the self-proclaimed king of the asshats.
What I really don't get is why there are just as many U.S. allies on my "asshat" list as there are on my "non-asshat" list. Who wants to be friends with the asshats? I think it has something to do with oil, or maybe with not learning the lessons of history.
What do you really expect for a religion literally meaning "submission" and where the very founder spread it at the point of a sword
What I really expect is for people to be able to tell the difference between an entire religion, and one asshat who claims to follow that religion. You can claim that the behavior of the asshat characterizes the entire religion, but that doesn't make it so.
Since no one else has attempted to answer this yet, I'll give it a shot. Swear words are swear words because they cause offense. We have a socially agreed-upon set of words that are designated as vulgar and offensive. It does not matter what those words are in particular, indeed the set can change over time. What matters is that when someone chooses those words you know he's going out of his way to be offensive, and usually he's trying to offend the listen in order to get more attention.
I concede the point that government and industry are awash in misconfigured, insecure, and buggy code. However, I fail to see how developing more code in-house will result in code that is more secure and less buggy. Where will the expertise in secure coding come from? From TFA:
As a result, there are fewer and fewer people inside the agencies who understand what it takes to write and deploy good software.
So, if that is true, how exactly will it coding in-house help? There's no one in-house who can do it right and that's the whole problem!
Ranum's thesis seems to be "contractors suck" but buried in his article is the kernel of the real issue in my opinion: project managers don't understand security and aren't accountable for making their products secure. If they did and they were, we would get more secure code regardless of whether the development were in-house or outsourced.
So Ranum seems to think that the solution is to create more government jobs (maybe he wants one or something), but really I see this as a management challenge. If large institutions can set a priority on security and develop expertise in their managers, then I think the picture will start to look better. Until that happens, I don't think playing musical chairs with the development team is going to help.
What Ranum is proposing is simply yet another fake silver bullet.
It's the right-wingers in general that, apparently, are far more likely to get violent...
There have been plenty of left-wing extremists as well: the Black Panthers, Simbionese Liberation Army, Weathermen Underground, etc. Tendency toward violence is not a left/right thing, it's an asshat/non-asshat thing.
And, does using a treadmill reduce their milk production? I would bet it does. I never worked on a farm but I grew up in dairy country. Getting cows to consistently produce is both complicated, and vitally important to the survival of a dairy farm. The wholesale price of milk is only in the low tens of dollars per hundredweight, whereas the electricity produced by the treadmill is worth maybe one dollar per hour, if that. So if the use of the treadmill perturbs milk production even slightly, it's a money loser for the dairy farmer.
On the other hand the farmer could just construct a windmill in the pasture and get lots more electricity without affecting his feed costs or production at all.
Why we insist on feeding 75% of our grain production to ruminants baffles me.
For beef cattle, we do it because they bulk up faster on grain than on grass. It is possible to buy range-fed beef, though if I recall it is substantially more expensive. The rancher is a business man and he makes better profits feeding grain to his cattle to get them ready for slaughter. This in turn enables him to sustain his (usually modest) livelihood and enable the consumer to afford beef as a staple rather than as a luxury. If all beef were range-fed then the economics of beef production would be totally different.
For dairy cattle, they are often range-fed in my region (New England) but due to freezing temperatures cattle have to be fed on silage in the winter. Otherwise they'd stop producing milk and we'd either have to import milk from outside the region, or go without.
So, we feed 75% of our grain production to cattle so we can have readily available beef and milk. Why we think we need so much beef is another question, and one that does make me scratch my head a little.
TFA says nothing about re-classifying Pluto out of the "dwarf planet" category. In fact there is no FA, only a picture. And it's quite obvious from that picture that Pluto far exceeds the 300 km radius that is the proposed threshold.
Re:It's more complicated than that
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
But if you support an idea you must support the idea taken to the (il)logical extreme!
Aha! You've revealed yourself as a high-ranking official in a major U.S. political party! Now, the question is, which one?;-)
It's more complicated than that
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As far as I know, Apple dropped "trusted" computing support in 2006. They dropped DRM for iTunes in 2009. And of course MacOS X is based on FreeBSD and major portions of the OS are open source.
So the fact that they make a few completely closed products doesn't fully characterize their entire culture of openness vs. closedness. The truth is more complicated. I am no Apple fanboi (I'm a Ubuntu fanboi) but I consider MacOS to be a lot more "open" than Windows, in some ways at least. For instance, MacOS ships with development tools.
I wonder whether that has to do with the incentive and reward system for the investigators. Presumably their success is measured by how many of their investigations lead to convictions, whereas in my opinion they should be measured by how often their evidence is upheld in court.
the time and resources they spend on personal items while getting paid by me is no less than stealing
If they're assembly-line workers, then probably yes. If they fall in the "knowledge" category, then I disagree in principle. To expect a human to mentally function at top efficiency without breaks and diversions is not reasonable. So, if you are the kind of employer who has hourly-wage employees with scheduled breaks, then you have a right to complain if your workers are slacking off on the clock. If not, then I think you are shooting yourself in the foot with a policy that equates employees taking a necessary 10-minute break every 2 hours with "stealing."
Obviously, if their personal activities are interfering with their productivity then that is another matter. I think you should evaluate your employees on productivity and overall quality of work, not on whether they keep their noses to the grindstone all day, every day.
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I was going to say something pithy like "tells you something about that guy's credibility" but then I realized, reading physics books in coffee shops to impress girls was the one thing I never tried. So maybe it does work!
Or you could just submit your patent application in the U.S., so even if people have known about it for 200 years, the patent examiners won't notice. ;-)
No. But if you take away their technology to spy on citizens, you also take away their ability to spy on enemies. Technology is like that. People can use it for Good Things or Bad Things. We learned that in the 20th century.
Since September 11, 2001.
Or you could go back further, to July 26, 1939. But the real answer is, espionage has been a good thing ever since there have been enemies.
I for one am all in favor of having fewer enemies. But for the ones that can't be ignored or reconciled, espionage is a Good Thing.
Actually, the military being able to crack encryption is in some sense a Good Thing. It enables them to conduct espionage and counter-espionage against adversaries such as North Korea and Al-Quaeda. Yeah that's kind of a Cold War mentality, but what is "cyber warfare" if not Cold War II?
It's impossible to pass a law that anticipates every possible way one person could harm someone else's person or property. The operative concepts here are torts and negligence. I believe those are necessary concepts to a fair legal system, so I guess that's where we differ.
The purpose of the proposed carbon tax isn't punishment, it's not even remediation, it's social engineering to get people to conserve and switch to renewable energy. So making it retroactive isn't really on the horizon.
Let's alter the situation a little. For the sake of argument take it as granted that reality is as environmentalists say: say global warming is a Bad Thing, and it's due to burning fossil fuels. Suppose further there were a feasible way to undo the damage. Should America have to pay the lion's share of the money to implement the fix? Well, yes! Proportional to the fossil fuel consumption of the country. Should individuals have to pay proportionally to their past fuel use? If everyone had kept all their receipts, I don't see why not. But it's completely hypothetical because there is no way to assess after the fact who used what, at what time.
Turn the argument on its head. Suppose I don't foresee that my gas tank is going to leak into your well, but it does. Should my lack of foresight and contingency planning absolve me of liability!?
Maybe it's not. Congress passes unconstitutional laws all the time. That's why we need the Supreme Court.
IANAL but my first thought is that the Superfund program is not punishment, it's remediation for the damage the company did. I can store gasoline on my property and it's not illegal, but if it leaks into my neighbor's well I am responsible for cleaning it up. Note that in my opinion I don't deserve to be punished for the leaky gas tank, but on the other hand whether the cleanup is small change or drives me to bankruptcy I should still have to pay it regardless.
I can see how you get that impression. I was responding specifically to the Crusades because talking about the Crusades as having anything to do with modern conflict really gets my ire. It shows the speaker is thinking on the level of tribal hatred rather than a rational socio-political level. You don't hear Native Americans inciting violence against England, France, and Spain because they colonized their homeland 500 years ago. They have far more cause to complain than the Arabs do about the Crusades.
With regard to the more recent issues (say since the fall of the Ottoman Empire c. 1922) then yes, the Arabs in particular have received plenty of rough and unfair treatment in my opinion. We can talk about British imperialism, we can talk about American hegemony, we can talk about Isreal's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967.
I would point out that when the Arabs have been able to get some kind of respect and accommodation from Isreal, it's been from peaceful overtures. Sadat got Sinai back through the Camp David Accords. It was through non-violent strikes and protests (the First Intifada) that the Palestinians won the right to form the Palestinian Authority. I think they'd be a lot closer to self-rule if they hadn't re-ignited the violence back in 2000 (Second Intifada).
It's quite a stretch to say "we" messed with the Middle East in the Crusades! I wasn't born at that time; neither was my country. Neither was any current nation-state in Western Europe, unless you count Vatican City.
Yeah it's true at one point our distant ancestors fought their distant ancestors. Inability to get over a conflict that happened 900 years ago is a big part of what's holding back certain parts of the world. England and France are buddies now. That Hundred Years' War thing is completely forgotten. The U.S. and Japan are friends in spite of the nuclear attacks on Japan just 65 years ago. On the other end of the spectrum take a look at the Balkans. Just 10 years ago they were still massacring each other over feuds that go back to the freakin' Dark Ages. WTF? At some point it stops sounding like a legitimate grievance and starts sounding like an excuse to perpetuate the hatred. Maybe that's why France, England, and Japan are world-leading democracies and the Balkans and the Middle East are backward-ass dumps.
You mean I can break even after only four years? Sign me up!
Yup, some Muslim countries are run by asshats. I put Pakistan on that list, along with the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, and the Taliban which may or may not count as a government depending whom you ask. Also Saudi Arabia and Iran belong on that list.
On the other hand there are Muslim countries that are reasonable to deal with and seem to share social/civic values with in the West: for example Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia, India (not majority Muslim but there are a whole lotta Muslims living there), probably lots of others. So yes, Pakistan is a problem, but when we start to show some indignation I'm saying we should be indignant about Pakistan, not about Islam.
The real distinction is between theocratic and secular governments. Theocratic governments tend to be the asshats. Incidentally what Osama Bin Laden and his ilk claim to want is to set up Muslim theocratic regimes all over the world. So he's sort of the self-proclaimed king of the asshats.
What I really don't get is why there are just as many U.S. allies on my "asshat" list as there are on my "non-asshat" list. Who wants to be friends with the asshats? I think it has something to do with oil, or maybe with not learning the lessons of history.
What I really expect is for people to be able to tell the difference between an entire religion, and one asshat who claims to follow that religion. You can claim that the behavior of the asshat characterizes the entire religion, but that doesn't make it so.
Since no one else has attempted to answer this yet, I'll give it a shot. Swear words are swear words because they cause offense. We have a socially agreed-upon set of words that are designated as vulgar and offensive. It does not matter what those words are in particular, indeed the set can change over time. What matters is that when someone chooses those words you know he's going out of his way to be offensive, and usually he's trying to offend the listen in order to get more attention.
I concede the point that government and industry are awash in misconfigured, insecure, and buggy code. However, I fail to see how developing more code in-house will result in code that is more secure and less buggy. Where will the expertise in secure coding come from? From TFA:
So, if that is true, how exactly will it coding in-house help? There's no one in-house who can do it right and that's the whole problem!
Ranum's thesis seems to be "contractors suck" but buried in his article is the kernel of the real issue in my opinion: project managers don't understand security and aren't accountable for making their products secure. If they did and they were, we would get more secure code regardless of whether the development were in-house or outsourced.
So Ranum seems to think that the solution is to create more government jobs (maybe he wants one or something), but really I see this as a management challenge. If large institutions can set a priority on security and develop expertise in their managers, then I think the picture will start to look better. Until that happens, I don't think playing musical chairs with the development team is going to help.
What Ranum is proposing is simply yet another fake silver bullet.
It turns out the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank pretty much agrees with that assessment.
There have been plenty of left-wing extremists as well: the Black Panthers, Simbionese Liberation Army, Weathermen Underground, etc. Tendency toward violence is not a left/right thing, it's an asshat/non-asshat thing.
And, does using a treadmill reduce their milk production? I would bet it does. I never worked on a farm but I grew up in dairy country. Getting cows to consistently produce is both complicated, and vitally important to the survival of a dairy farm. The wholesale price of milk is only in the low tens of dollars per hundredweight, whereas the electricity produced by the treadmill is worth maybe one dollar per hour, if that. So if the use of the treadmill perturbs milk production even slightly, it's a money loser for the dairy farmer.
On the other hand the farmer could just construct a windmill in the pasture and get lots more electricity without affecting his feed costs or production at all.
For beef cattle, we do it because they bulk up faster on grain than on grass. It is possible to buy range-fed beef, though if I recall it is substantially more expensive. The rancher is a business man and he makes better profits feeding grain to his cattle to get them ready for slaughter. This in turn enables him to sustain his (usually modest) livelihood and enable the consumer to afford beef as a staple rather than as a luxury. If all beef were range-fed then the economics of beef production would be totally different.
For dairy cattle, they are often range-fed in my region (New England) but due to freezing temperatures cattle have to be fed on silage in the winter. Otherwise they'd stop producing milk and we'd either have to import milk from outside the region, or go without.
So, we feed 75% of our grain production to cattle so we can have readily available beef and milk. Why we think we need so much beef is another question, and one that does make me scratch my head a little.
I wanna get one of these for my cat so I can see what he does all day while I'm at work.
TFA says nothing about re-classifying Pluto out of the "dwarf planet" category. In fact there is no FA, only a picture. And it's quite obvious from that picture that Pluto far exceeds the 300 km radius that is the proposed threshold.
Aha! You've revealed yourself as a high-ranking official in a major U.S. political party! Now, the question is, which one? ;-)
As far as I know, Apple dropped "trusted" computing support in 2006. They dropped DRM for iTunes in 2009. And of course MacOS X is based on FreeBSD and major portions of the OS are open source.
So the fact that they make a few completely closed products doesn't fully characterize their entire culture of openness vs. closedness. The truth is more complicated. I am no Apple fanboi (I'm a Ubuntu fanboi) but I consider MacOS to be a lot more "open" than Windows, in some ways at least. For instance, MacOS ships with development tools.
I wonder whether that has to do with the incentive and reward system for the investigators. Presumably their success is measured by how many of their investigations lead to convictions, whereas in my opinion they should be measured by how often their evidence is upheld in court.
If they're assembly-line workers, then probably yes. If they fall in the "knowledge" category, then I disagree in principle. To expect a human to mentally function at top efficiency without breaks and diversions is not reasonable. So, if you are the kind of employer who has hourly-wage employees with scheduled breaks, then you have a right to complain if your workers are slacking off on the clock. If not, then I think you are shooting yourself in the foot with a policy that equates employees taking a necessary 10-minute break every 2 hours with "stealing."
Obviously, if their personal activities are interfering with their productivity then that is another matter. I think you should evaluate your employees on productivity and overall quality of work, not on whether they keep their noses to the grindstone all day, every day.