Maybe I am a freak, but to quote Davork, I get no spam. Gmail's filter catches pretty much everything. Once on a blue moon one will slip through, but I can tolerate one penis pump add every month or two. It might be true that a lot of spam is passing back and forth across the networks, but from a user point of view, it never makes it to me.
From what I see, end users get very little spam actually delivered. I remember a decade ago when fixing computers for many internet neophytes, and more often than not 80%-90% of their inboxes were spam. I never see that anymore. In fact, the only people I hear bitching about spam these days are admins who actually monitor spam filters. This may be sad news for them, but end users, not so much.
I'd like to see the statistic on what percentage of all that spam actually gets delivered, as opposed to blocked.
When someone claims there's no good music, it means they've been herded into the cafeteria line that the RIAA has set up for them through mainstream radio, MTV, music stores, and whatever other avenues are used for music promotion.
While I agree with a lot of what you are saying, it needs to be pointed out that the research being quoted here is precisely about that RIAA cafeteria line, or at least heavily slanted towards it. I sincerely doubt those indie band CDs hawked after shows are counted much, if at all.
And that *is* a large part of the problem: namely that the dominating industry cartel is failing to market music that appeals to large swaths of the music-loving public. As someone over 40, I am constantly discovering great music that is new *to me*, but very little of what I discover is actually new or current, and of what is new, virtually none of it is by people who haven't been slugging it out for years.
Simply put, despite actively searching out music in the ways you describe, I don't see much new and/or young musical talent developing outside the RIAA cartel, nor have I felt any compelling reason to peruse a retail CD rack for nearly a decade. While I won't claim good new music doesn't exist, if I'm not finding any while actively looking, then that is definitely a failure of the marketplace.
I remember when I was around 12 and started becoming interested in music, I recorded a lot of music off of FM radio. Later, when I started buying records, I can remember initially thinking how weirdly different many of the songs I had liked from the radio sounded off of vinyl. Before long, however, I came to prefer the vinyl sound and tended to dislike the tinnier sound of FM radio.
I also remember reading something about Les Paul years ago where it described the last phase of his process of mixing songs back in the 50s had him using a low wattage AM transmitter and listening to the track over his car radio to determine the best mix for the environment where most people would be listening.
Googling someone to see if they're a Nazi child molester on the no-fly list is perfectly legal, and as a hiring manager, you can bet I'm going to keep doing it.
Just out of curiosity, is it just as legal if your google search finds the person posts on an online forum for, say, cancer patients, to use that as a pre-screen for who might be unacceptable insurance risks? I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Unfortunately, I think it is ultimately wise to divorce your real identity from anything you do online however innocent it might be. (An exception could be made for strictly employment-related or technical stuff, but one should think really hard anytime they put real identity info online.) You never know what information could be used against you in some future situation.
What would have been done when I was in school, a kid who absolutely refused to submit to school authority would likely be expelled, and then the burden would be on the parents to find another school that would take her. It happened more than a few times, though none that I remember were for anything so trivial as this incident. Also note this was long after corporal punishment had been banned in public schools (appox. 25-30 years ago). And I have absolutely no problem with that, if she won't submit to their legal authority, I think it's fair to say that they can't have keep that student on school grounds.
If she is not doing anything that would merit her arrest outside the school walls (and I don't know of any case where a cop could arrest you for not handing over your cellphone outside of suspicion it was used in a crime), I see no reason why the police needed to be involved. If she was under suspicion of hiding drugs or a gun in her asscrack, then bringing in the police is warranted, but refusing to relinquish a cellphone simply doesn't cross that threshold.
Bottom line, I did not see anything in the complaint that would have merited police involvement back when I was in school, and they seemed to handle such things pretty effectively without either the police or corporal punishment. I see no reason why this would be any different today. I'd further add that, as a taxpayer, I see this as a pitiful waste of police resources.
Put enough detail in the document so that you can hand it to a marketing droid and have them successfully complete the procedure.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but it seems to be similar to a process I've been using for documenting processes for less technical users (usually QA testers, operations people, or business analysts). What I do is write up a quick and dirty document that I feel covers the basics. Then I get together as many people who will need to use the procedure as possible, give them the document and an in-person walk-through of the procedure, answering any questions they have, and then they take notes and someone in the group is charged to polish my original document to cover the points that *they* think are important or non-obvious, ideally producing documentation suited to the audience.
It's not a perfect system, but it works a hell of a lot better than when I'd send out documents that would get filed to some doc repository and never be looked at again. It saves me the time and struggle of determining what is too much or too little information, and the people who need the information now own it. It took some lobbying on my part to get buy-in for doing this, but so far it seems to work pretty well. Also, I work in a pretty small shop which makes it easier to try things like this, but I see no reason why a similar workflow couldn't work in a larger shop.
There is a difference between playful misconduct and willful disobedience. Historically the former was handled with detention and the latter with corporal punishment. Since corporal punishment has all but been made illegal what tool do you use?
So the only choices to deal with the willful disobedience of a minor are physical beating or arrest by the police? Who the hell modded that insightful?
I wasn't setting up a straw man, that's how I read your post. I apologize for that, but you're not exactly being clear.
What does "act accordingly" mean? Sounds like "shut up and bend over" to me, but I certainly don't want to misinterpret your meaning. But if you "agree 100%" with my apprehension about privatizing the criminal justice system, I'm not sure why you'd characterize opposition to that as some kind of starry-eyed idealism along the lines of imagining a world with "no crime". There has never been "no crime" anywhere, but privatized prisons is a quite recent phenomenon and again, this story shows us why it's a bad idea. I'm not sure why you seem to have an issue with saying so.
I agree with you 100%... Unfortunately, though, that's not the reality we have to deal with now. We have to make the best of what we have.
If we're going to discuss an ideal world where public services aren't privatized, we might as well go all the way with the idealism and say there would be no crime:)
What this says to me is that unless I think *no* public service can *ever* be privatized, then expediency dictates that I should be willing to accept the privatization of *any* public service. Sorry, I can't accept that.
There are varying degrees to which any public service can be thought of as a core government function. For instance, proposing to privatize the post office or road maintenance are entirely different propositions than privatizing the military, justice system, or international diplomacy, where the former group could be reasonably envisioned but the latter would be perceived to be recipe for untold corruption by virtually everyone, regardless of political ideology. In my view, prison privatization makes no more sense than privatizing the police, courts, military, or State Dept., and I think this very case clearly demonstrates why that view is based on realistic, not idealistic, concerns.
While there is some truth to your point as it would apply to corporations in general, I don't think that makes a very good case that privatizing what have long been considered core government functions is a good idea, which is how I read the GP's post.
I (and, I suspect, even the majority of free market proponents) would not like the idea of privatizing the police or courts. Indeed, I think even publicly-run police and courts using fines and forfeiture as revenue tools has been an unduly corrupting force on our justice system. If privatizing the police and courts is not a good idea, why would privatizing the prison system be?
The current reality is that, in many third world countries, it's not the guy torrenting windows off of the pirate bay that is a problem. It's the guy selling copies on the street corner for ten bucks. This looks to address that issue. It won't solve it, but it at least give some form of meaningful competition.
In a third world country where Microsoft's ability to enforce their licensing is nearly if not entirely non-existent, how does a $10 (legal) crippled copy compete with a $10 (illegal) fully functional copy when the distinction of legal vs. illegal is nil?
The downfall of DRM is all we need to know about efficacy of crippling digital media. It only punishes the dutifully honest, who will eventually end up wondering why the price of honesty is to pay more for greater frustration.
2) Web apps are harder to deploy. That is simply false.
Note that I never said that web apps were harder to deploy, only that in my experience the argument that web apps were significantly less costly to deploy, administer, or maintain has not been the case. Again, *in theory* they should be, but after a decade of involvement with the rollout and maintenance of dozens of enterprise apps (both desktop and browser) to thousands of users, I've never seen the payoff. YMMV, but I know I'm not alone in this assessment.
I have developed Desktop apps and webapps, and my experience is that webapps take longer to develop.
I agree. I was kind of astonished when the article claimed that web apps were faster to develop than traditional apps, where I've never seen that in my experience.
I would note, however, that to develop a desktop app that was as platform-independent as a web app would probably even up the score somewhat. Of course, it does all depend on the specific application.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't even need to click the link to know you were talking about Magma.
YouTube link for the uninitiated.
...Shakespearean Middle English.
Unfortunately, both you and the parent don't seem to have much knowledge of history of the English language.
Middle English is the English of Chaucer.
Shakespeare is considered Early Modern English.
Maybe I am a freak, but to quote Davork, I get no spam. Gmail's filter catches pretty much everything. Once on a blue moon one will slip through, but I can tolerate one penis pump add every month or two. It might be true that a lot of spam is passing back and forth across the networks, but from a user point of view, it never makes it to me.
From what I see, end users get very little spam actually delivered. I remember a decade ago when fixing computers for many internet neophytes, and more often than not 80%-90% of their inboxes were spam. I never see that anymore. In fact, the only people I hear bitching about spam these days are admins who actually monitor spam filters. This may be sad news for them, but end users, not so much.
I'd like to see the statistic on what percentage of all that spam actually gets delivered, as opposed to blocked.
I went to my first orgy when I was 14 (everyone there was underage) and constantly was exposed to sex just hanging out at friend's houses.
Man, did I have the wrong childhood!!
-6, Redundant.
Just because all you did was "drive the getaway car" doesn't mean you're not an accomplice.
About time someone's analogy included a car...
Load the whole OS into ramdisk at bootup. Then have fun.
The whole OS? Most /.ers could load their entire porn collection into ramdisk with 192GB.
The ultimate comeuppence would have been if, after disposing of the dangerous prop, they *were* attacked by a killer bunny.
When someone claims there's no good music, it means they've been herded into the cafeteria line that the RIAA has set up for them through mainstream radio, MTV, music stores, and whatever other avenues are used for music promotion.
While I agree with a lot of what you are saying, it needs to be pointed out that the research being quoted here is precisely about that RIAA cafeteria line, or at least heavily slanted towards it. I sincerely doubt those indie band CDs hawked after shows are counted much, if at all.
And that *is* a large part of the problem: namely that the dominating industry cartel is failing to market music that appeals to large swaths of the music-loving public. As someone over 40, I am constantly discovering great music that is new *to me*, but very little of what I discover is actually new or current, and of what is new, virtually none of it is by people who haven't been slugging it out for years.
Simply put, despite actively searching out music in the ways you describe, I don't see much new and/or young musical talent developing outside the RIAA cartel, nor have I felt any compelling reason to peruse a retail CD rack for nearly a decade. While I won't claim good new music doesn't exist, if I'm not finding any while actively looking, then that is definitely a failure of the marketplace.
It's pining for the DWORDs!
There is no dark side of the moon. As a matter of fact, it's all dark.
Now, get off my lawn.
Speaking of Cleese, I thought that Santino the Chimpanzee Builds a Small Arsenal would make a nice sequel to Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying .
This brought two things to my mind...
I remember when I was around 12 and started becoming interested in music, I recorded a lot of music off of FM radio. Later, when I started buying records, I can remember initially thinking how weirdly different many of the songs I had liked from the radio sounded off of vinyl. Before long, however, I came to prefer the vinyl sound and tended to dislike the tinnier sound of FM radio.
I also remember reading something about Les Paul years ago where it described the last phase of his process of mixing songs back in the 50s had him using a low wattage AM transmitter and listening to the track over his car radio to determine the best mix for the environment where most people would be listening.
Googling someone to see if they're a Nazi child molester on the no-fly list is perfectly legal, and as a hiring manager, you can bet I'm going to keep doing it.
Just out of curiosity, is it just as legal if your google search finds the person posts on an online forum for, say, cancer patients, to use that as a pre-screen for who might be unacceptable insurance risks? I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Unfortunately, I think it is ultimately wise to divorce your real identity from anything you do online however innocent it might be. (An exception could be made for strictly employment-related or technical stuff, but one should think really hard anytime they put real identity info online.) You never know what information could be used against you in some future situation.
Now if I can just find Pee Wee Herman's face on Mars...
I haven't seen Pee Wee Herman, but there are quite a few spots that look like Edward James Olmos' face.
You assume incorrectly.
What would have been done when I was in school, a kid who absolutely refused to submit to school authority would likely be expelled, and then the burden would be on the parents to find another school that would take her. It happened more than a few times, though none that I remember were for anything so trivial as this incident. Also note this was long after corporal punishment had been banned in public schools (appox. 25-30 years ago). And I have absolutely no problem with that, if she won't submit to their legal authority, I think it's fair to say that they can't have keep that student on school grounds.
If she is not doing anything that would merit her arrest outside the school walls (and I don't know of any case where a cop could arrest you for not handing over your cellphone outside of suspicion it was used in a crime), I see no reason why the police needed to be involved. If she was under suspicion of hiding drugs or a gun in her asscrack, then bringing in the police is warranted, but refusing to relinquish a cellphone simply doesn't cross that threshold.
Bottom line, I did not see anything in the complaint that would have merited police involvement back when I was in school, and they seemed to handle such things pretty effectively without either the police or corporal punishment. I see no reason why this would be any different today. I'd further add that, as a taxpayer, I see this as a pitiful waste of police resources.
Put enough detail in the document so that you can hand it to a marketing droid and have them successfully complete the procedure.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but it seems to be similar to a process I've been using for documenting processes for less technical users (usually QA testers, operations people, or business analysts). What I do is write up a quick and dirty document that I feel covers the basics. Then I get together as many people who will need to use the procedure as possible, give them the document and an in-person walk-through of the procedure, answering any questions they have, and then they take notes and someone in the group is charged to polish my original document to cover the points that *they* think are important or non-obvious, ideally producing documentation suited to the audience.
It's not a perfect system, but it works a hell of a lot better than when I'd send out documents that would get filed to some doc repository and never be looked at again. It saves me the time and struggle of determining what is too much or too little information, and the people who need the information now own it. It took some lobbying on my part to get buy-in for doing this, but so far it seems to work pretty well. Also, I work in a pretty small shop which makes it easier to try things like this, but I see no reason why a similar workflow couldn't work in a larger shop.
There is a difference between playful misconduct and willful disobedience. Historically the former was handled with detention and the latter with corporal punishment. Since corporal punishment has all but been made illegal what tool do you use?
So the only choices to deal with the willful disobedience of a minor are physical beating or arrest by the police? Who the hell modded that insightful?
I wasn't setting up a straw man, that's how I read your post. I apologize for that, but you're not exactly being clear.
What does "act accordingly" mean? Sounds like "shut up and bend over" to me, but I certainly don't want to misinterpret your meaning. But if you "agree 100%" with my apprehension about privatizing the criminal justice system, I'm not sure why you'd characterize opposition to that as some kind of starry-eyed idealism along the lines of imagining a world with "no crime". There has never been "no crime" anywhere, but privatized prisons is a quite recent phenomenon and again, this story shows us why it's a bad idea. I'm not sure why you seem to have an issue with saying so.
I agree with you 100%... Unfortunately, though, that's not the reality we have to deal with now. We have to make the best of what we have. If we're going to discuss an ideal world where public services aren't privatized, we might as well go all the way with the idealism and say there would be no crime :)
What this says to me is that unless I think *no* public service can *ever* be privatized, then expediency dictates that I should be willing to accept the privatization of *any* public service. Sorry, I can't accept that.
There are varying degrees to which any public service can be thought of as a core government function. For instance, proposing to privatize the post office or road maintenance are entirely different propositions than privatizing the military, justice system, or international diplomacy, where the former group could be reasonably envisioned but the latter would be perceived to be recipe for untold corruption by virtually everyone, regardless of political ideology. In my view, prison privatization makes no more sense than privatizing the police, courts, military, or State Dept., and I think this very case clearly demonstrates why that view is based on realistic, not idealistic, concerns.
While there is some truth to your point as it would apply to corporations in general, I don't think that makes a very good case that privatizing what have long been considered core government functions is a good idea, which is how I read the GP's post.
I (and, I suspect, even the majority of free market proponents) would not like the idea of privatizing the police or courts. Indeed, I think even publicly-run police and courts using fines and forfeiture as revenue tools has been an unduly corrupting force on our justice system. If privatizing the police and courts is not a good idea, why would privatizing the prison system be?
The current reality is that, in many third world countries, it's not the guy torrenting windows off of the pirate bay that is a problem. It's the guy selling copies on the street corner for ten bucks. This looks to address that issue. It won't solve it, but it at least give some form of meaningful competition.
In a third world country where Microsoft's ability to enforce their licensing is nearly if not entirely non-existent, how does a $10 (legal) crippled copy compete with a $10 (illegal) fully functional copy when the distinction of legal vs. illegal is nil?
The downfall of DRM is all we need to know about efficacy of crippling digital media. It only punishes the dutifully honest, who will eventually end up wondering why the price of honesty is to pay more for greater frustration.
I bet many people in that situation would be willing to offer a small sample of saliva instead...
Or give them a stool sample. Chimpanzee-style.
2) Web apps are harder to deploy. That is simply false.
Note that I never said that web apps were harder to deploy, only that in my experience the argument that web apps were significantly less costly to deploy, administer, or maintain has not been the case. Again, *in theory* they should be, but after a decade of involvement with the rollout and maintenance of dozens of enterprise apps (both desktop and browser) to thousands of users, I've never seen the payoff. YMMV, but I know I'm not alone in this assessment.
I have developed Desktop apps and webapps, and my experience is that webapps take longer to develop.
I agree. I was kind of astonished when the article claimed that web apps were faster to develop than traditional apps, where I've never seen that in my experience.
I would note, however, that to develop a desktop app that was as platform-independent as a web app would probably even up the score somewhat. Of course, it does all depend on the specific application.