I was only desconstructing and disputing the previous analogies of the cashier/car sale and how their issues did not apply to the case of the Apple's actions. Having made that point, I then meant my "morally shaky" comment to apply in the context of the cashier/car sale situations, not the Apple situation. I guess I'm just not writing clearly today and I apologize for giving the wrong impression.:-)
I think these analogies are incorrect in a couple of ways. First, one cashier/one car seller's action does not equal the action of an entire corporation including all the developers, testers, quality assurance and sales personnel. While one person might make a simple mistake of including too much in a sold item, a huge chain of people doing it with thousands or millions of units is tantamount to deliberate action.
Second, keeping the mistaken change or watch found in the new car may be morally shaky but as far as I know is completely legal. When you are given the change, you are given the change. When a car is sold, all of the contents go along with it, including the french fries under the seat and the fuel in the tank.
I personally would give back the incorrect change or expensive watch, but I would be doing so because I felt it was the right thing to do, not because I was legally required to.
That's classic snobbism from self-declared "audiophiles". The truth is, 99% of people won't be able to hear a difference between a well-encoded 128kbp MP3 and the original CD. Of the remaining 1%, 99% won't be able to tell the difference anymore if the MP3 is encoded at or above 256kbps. And that's even with top-of-the-line amplifiers and speakers.
That's funny, I have no trouble at all distinguishing differences among different MP3 bit rates and original CD's, even on fairly lousy computer speakers. On decent stereo equipment, the difference is pretty glaring. I have found that my personal minimum tolerable threshold for MP3 is 160-192 kbps for casual listening while I'm working or otherwise busy. For serious listening, I still go back to the original CD.
Maybe some people just hear better or at least differently. I know that I hear things that my wife and friends never notice, both in music and just ambient noises like monitor squeal and flourescent lights. Maybe I'm in your remaining 1%, but I'm no sonar officer or professional audio tester, "bloody likely" or otherwise. I just know what I can hear and what I like to listen to.
...and yet they know who Hitler was, and more importantly, why what he did was wrong.
Yes, but (most of) those people live in a world where they can go read about it for themselves. In a world where reading a book is illegal, all they will know is the official, sanctioned version of what he did and why it was wrong. And that's not knowledge at all.
Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle) remains banned in Germany.
Who is this Hitler person? I tried to look up his autobiography (Mein Kampf) to find out, but my searches just keep returning something about "access forbidden". Hold on a sec, someone's banging on the door so hard it sounds like they're about to break it down! I'll be right ba...
Re:The Get-Rich-Quick Scheme Taco Should Have Used
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 2
Selling karma would make slashdot too much like the "Real World" where moneyed interests get to speak more loudly than the poor. When I first read this idea I laughed. On second and third sobering thought it made me quite uncomfortable.
If I have complete control over every application that accesses the database then I can ensure that garbage data is not put in.
That is exactly the point. In the real world, you cannot ever have this 100% complete control. Even if you have somehow been given supreme executive database authority in your company, one day you will quit or get run over by a bus. Your successor will be handed a requirement to implement this new little tool that the sales force desperately needs that just happens to require access to this "protected" database. If you had done the job right, almost all the new developer would need to know would be completely described in the database itself. With referential integrity relegated to clients, the developer first has to completely understand the database and all of the client GUI code everywhere.
Let's say he's real good and figures out all of the GUI code. Then the next day, the marketing guys come up with a new requirement for a little app that they need that also accesses the same database. Now you have to completely understand 2 other applications before coding this new one. And it just keeps getting worse and worse as time goes on.
There are tradeoffs involved. Performance problems can often (but not always) be handled by throwing more/better/faster hardware at it. The tradeoff I most often see is that it's usually easier and much quicker to slap client code together than it is to do a good solid system design.
Actually, in my first revision (yes I actually read my posts before I submit) I said pretty much the same thing in another paragraph. With re-reading it with my other points, it came off as rather like beating a dead horse. I do agree with you in principle, though. For better or worse, the victor does indeed write the rules (and the history books). We had just better make sure that we are the victor.:-)
While I agree with you that we should be very careful who we pick for retribution, I must point out one gaping hole in your argument. You seem to be operating under the assumption that this is a simple crime like murder, subject to normal due process under normal civil and federal law. I'm not entirely sure that is the case.
Another point of view is that this attack is an act of war. Working under that assumption, due process and all of the other niceties of normal prosecution go out the window to be replaced by only nominally binding international rules of war. Admittedly, a lot of this might depend on a declaration of war by congress and a lot of judgement by history after the fact. But going into this on the front end, if we do decide that this is an international war-type attack, then the appropriate reponse is not to arrest and prosecute the responsible individuals. The appropriate response is to shoot back until we are sure that our attackers can no longer harm us.
Having said all that, I wholeheartedly agree that we need to be very careful how we approach any answer to the attack. We will have to live with the consequences of our actions for a long time.
I have and I can say without a doubt that being a billionaire would be pretty cool:-) I work for $LARGE_COMPANY which owns many aircraft, including 2 Lear jets for internal corporate use. We have a few flights that we run regularly just because we do it so much that it is cost effective compared to commercial flight. A typical trip would be to drive to our own corporate hanger, walk through to the jet, taxi and take off right on schedule, land and hop out at the jetway (not a terminal) and be driving off in a rental car within a few minutes. Oh, and the leather seating in the Lear is nice, too. After doing this a couple of times, I can say with some authority that the normal delayed, crowded, sardine can commercial flights well and truly suck.
Whoa! That's different from what I just read on my AUP. I note that the top of the page you link says Kansas City. The service that I use is "Road Runner of the Mid-South" and it's AUP is at http://www.midsouth.rr.com/local/terms/tos.shtml
It's different! Hmmm... Note the additional bullet point that disallows you "to host or operate any type of server including but not limited to web, ftp, gaming, mail, wingate, etc. Running such software/hardware is STRICTLY prohibited for residential and business service." The bold, all-caps emphasis on "strictly" is original to the page, I did not add it.
I wonder if they would really insist that I not turn on Web Sharing on my Mac OSX box, especially since it is actually Apache!
Pretty interesting idea. But that patch of empty sky is actually full of a lot of air. The heat has to pass through a lot of air before it gets free in space. Since conduction and convection are much more effective than radiation at transmitting heat, wouldn't you just end up making your local chunk of the atmosphere very warm? Would more of the heat radiate out into space, or would it just circulate around the atmosphere by convection? Also, with enough heat to actually make a difference on a global scale, I would imagine that there would be significant local weather phenomena created from temperature differentials around the giant toaster oven.:-)
Nuh uh to you, too. The system, in this case, is the Earth itself. Once the energy is here, all conversions just move the heat energy around different parts of the "system". And each conversion produces waste heat that gets leaked out into the system at large rather than going to where you want it to go. It doesn't go away until it is radiated out into space. That's just basic thermodynamics.
Also, if heat were "quite willing to radiate off the planet with minimal fuss", then we would have no "solar greenhouse" at all, much less any problems with it. The only difference between greenhouse heat from the Sun and energy sources on the Earth is just the source. Once you have heat, you have to get rid of it (at the right rate), whether it came from the Sun or not.:-)
Now, a more appropriate question is whether we could approach the scale of Earth-impacting solar energy with our own heat producing energy sources like fusion, fission and fossil fuels. I admit I have no idea of their relative magnitude.
Just for the record, what degree would that be and in what discipline and from which recognized institution did you receive it? Seriously, just curious, since you brought it up in the first place as somewhat of a citation of authority, it would give your comments some more context.
We are standing at the base of a Niagara falls of information with our mouths open.
That has got to be one of the best analogies of information overload (Internet and otherwise) that I have heard:-) For attribution's sake, did you come up with it yourself or read it somewhere? Anyway, that's the heart of the problem for any widespread ubiquitous Net pay-per-view system. You're at the bottom of this big wet wall wondering just how much water is about to come down at you from over the top. People will avoid uncertainty like the plague so long as predictable equivalents exist, even if they provably end up paying more for the predictable expense.
It seems to me that MSN and AOL are banking on this psychology as a long term strategy that will eventually win out over the less-tameable (sp?) general Internet. They provide a single predictable source and cost alternative to the multitude of Internet sites with their own pay schedules and diverse measures of value.
Instead of asking which language to use in an introductory CS/programming class, one should ask what concepts need to be learned and in what order, and then pick one or more languages that can illustrate the desired concepts. When the problem is approached that way, any one of several languages will do.
Many have suggested that the most important first step is learning about the machine being programmed, e.g. registers, memory management, addresses, etc. I suggest that this approach is exactly backwards. The early concepts should include basic structured programming constructs like if-then-else, case, subroutines/functions, and building larger programs from smaller pieces. Then you can introduce good, controlled interfaces and information hiding and why it is vitally important do them as well as you can. While you're at this point you can stress the point of documentation and communication, perhaps through a group project where each individual has to use code written by others in their group without being able to look at each other's actual code. These are the very basics of programming.
Then you can introduce concepts like object orientation, polymorphism and overloading. Somewhere along this point things might split up into more or less hardware oriented tracks. The more hardware oriented would get into C, C++ and assembler with maybe some embedded applications. The more business oriented track would introduce persistence/databases with SQL, XHTML, Java and many other language(s). Overlapping subject matter might include human factors (UI), distribution (networking) and parallelism (threads and multiprocessing). Somewhere in there you want to teach lower levels of how things work, e.g. compilers and language theory.
All of the early boring stuff (disciplined structured programming, documentation, communication) is the most important part for a software professional because you always do all of those things regardless of programming language or architecture, no matter where you work. These topics should be covered first, no matter which language you use to cover them. These basics are ironically the stuff that most CS and engineering programs leave out or skip over.
Kinetic energy weapon. I read their safety page and I'm still nervous. Their odds of one in a million for failure modes still seem rather high to me.
Another thing that springs to mind is reference to flywheels as energy storage in science fiction. Harry Harrison uses flywheels as a technological prop for powering motorcycles/monocycles in his Stainless Steel Rat series. You charge (spin up) the flywheel at night and use the stored kinetic energy by day. Use regenerative braking to get back some energy for "free" while you ride. And you get the gyroscope effect to keep the bike upright. Very quiet, simple and clean. Neat idea.
Re:Does it also work for FedEX vehicles?
on
Flywheel UPS
·
· Score: 3
Does it also work for FedEX vehicles?... So that's how those big brown trucks full of packages get around!
Oh, the horror:-) Sorry if this is off-topic, but the image that just sprang to mind is so compelling...
Right now I'm seeing scores of marketeers at FedEx and UPS clutching there hearts over that comment. I don't know which group would be more apoplectic, the FedEx guys for misidentifying their mortal enemy (UPS)'s trucks as FedEx delivery vehicles or UPS for hanging FedEx's our-name-is-a-verb on that oh so distinctive brown truck. You just wiped out two different companies' marketing droids with one swift blow!
there are non-somniacs (sic) who can effortlessly go for weeks at a time without sleeping
I think you mean very little or almost no sleep for weeks. One thing that we definitely do know is that going completely without sleep for much longer that 36 hours at a time produces symptoms in humans remarkably similar to schizophrenia. The human mind needs periodic shutdown/maintenance periods (sleep) far more that the rest of the body. And it has to be certain types of sleep for full effectiveness, most notably the infamous R.E.M. periods and dreams whether remembered or not that play a significant role in the mental housekeeping.
If you are a person who can hit the important sleep states within 6 hours, then more power to you, but try staying awake past a couple of days straight and you will be one sick puppy.
No way! Your new Federal Standard will be MS Windows for the OS, MS IIS for the web server, MS SQL Server for the database, MS Visual C++ as the main development language, MS Office for productivity apps, and so on and on and on....
This is not just your standard anti-MS rant, because I have been-there-done-that with Gov't "standards" efforts, including representing the US Navy on IEEE POSIX committees, only to watch it all go to waste in the last 7 years of Microsoft's ascendancy.
The movement to an all-Microsoft world in US Gov't IT has been going on for some time now, at least in the Dept. of Defense, all in the name of supposed cost savings from using COTS (Consumer Off-The-Shelf) products. And don't even say that you can buy Linux off the shelf. In the minds of 99% of management types, off-the-shelf means Microsoft, and gov't management is the same as corporate management, only more so in all the bad ways.
And if there is any significant IT standardization across much of the US Federal Gov't, watch out. The US gov't is the single largest procurer (both dollars and volume) of software in the entire world. Overall US Federal Gov't procurement in products and services makes the largest multi-national corporations' all look like piddling chump change. You're dreaming if you think that any Federal CIO would pick a free or open source product for any significant Federal IT standard.
My father is a retired TelCo cable splicer and repairman. Some of his favorite stories are of going into very expensive homes to fix problems with the phones only to find out that the builder used the cheapest possible wire that actually met code. And with the whole house wired with cheap low quality wiring, there is little that he could do to correct problems like cross talk between lines in the home using normal voice frequencies, let alone handling network-type bandwidth.
So, when building a new home, be sure to be personally involved in the wiring and be prepared to have to spell out every detail, because when the builder has a choice, they will always pick the lowest cost option. For instance, if all you're doing is twisted pair, be ready to explicitly require (and pay for) CAT-5, rather than the more common CAT-3 which meets code.
If you have the money, work with a home wiring specialist who knows about wiring a home for networking and multimedia. Get them talking to the general contractor as early as possible to make sure that the wiring goes in right and at the right time. There are some really nice prepackaged wiring harnesses, jacks, plates, panels and assorted goodies out there now. A complete home wiring package with multiple phone, twisted pair ethernet, cable and fiber to every room from a central wiring closet only adds a few thousand dollars to a new home price, which is fiddling small change on a decent >$150K home.
Make sure that we can watch our leaders and police as easily as they can watch us.
And this is, I think, the key point. Even with my rabid distrust of any government, I would be willing to at least consider allowing such surveillance if my government had to be under my constant surveillance as well.
Unfortunately, that's not how it will ever work. Like every other conversation about government and the governed, it is a basic matter of balance of power. The side that has the greater ability to gather information has more power than the other side and will never willingly give up that advantage. And as far as I know, it has never been the case that citizens in any country have won out in this balance of power, so we are always talking about government surveillance of citizens, not the other way around.
It would be a happy day if we were discussing the constant erosion of some government's operational privacy.
Oops, in retrospect my post appears that it may be a little trollish to the Germans here, so I apologize if I gave needless offense. I was reacting to my rage against thought-crime attitudes, not the German/Naziism issue in particular. So, instead let me say, it is not anyone's business whom if anyone I choose to hate, love or feel indifferent toward. Get out of my head, you do not belong in there. The one thing I hate and fear most is someone trying to tell me what to hate and fear. There, maybe that's a little more clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I was only desconstructing and disputing the previous analogies of the cashier/car sale and how their issues did not apply to the case of the Apple's actions. Having made that point, I then meant my "morally shaky" comment to apply in the context of the cashier/car sale situations, not the Apple situation. I guess I'm just not writing clearly today and I apologize for giving the wrong impression. :-)
I think these analogies are incorrect in a couple of ways. First, one cashier/one car seller's action does not equal the action of an entire corporation including all the developers, testers, quality assurance and sales personnel. While one person might make a simple mistake of including too much in a sold item, a huge chain of people doing it with thousands or millions of units is tantamount to deliberate action.
Second, keeping the mistaken change or watch found in the new car may be morally shaky but as far as I know is completely legal. When you are given the change, you are given the change. When a car is sold, all of the contents go along with it, including the french fries under the seat and the fuel in the tank.
I personally would give back the incorrect change or expensive watch, but I would be doing so because I felt it was the right thing to do, not because I was legally required to.
That's classic snobbism from self-declared "audiophiles". The truth is, 99% of people won't be able to hear a difference between a well-encoded 128kbp MP3 and the original CD. Of the remaining 1%, 99% won't be able to tell the difference anymore if the MP3 is encoded at or above 256kbps. And that's even with top-of-the-line amplifiers and speakers.
That's funny, I have no trouble at all distinguishing differences among different MP3 bit rates and original CD's, even on fairly lousy computer speakers. On decent stereo equipment, the difference is pretty glaring. I have found that my personal minimum tolerable threshold for MP3 is 160-192 kbps for casual listening while I'm working or otherwise busy. For serious listening, I still go back to the original CD.
Maybe some people just hear better or at least differently. I know that I hear things that my wife and friends never notice, both in music and just ambient noises like monitor squeal and flourescent lights. Maybe I'm in your remaining 1%, but I'm no sonar officer or professional audio tester, "bloody likely" or otherwise. I just know what I can hear and what I like to listen to.
I am not sure this is really funny.
FYI, I was not smiling when I wrote it. I did not mean it to be funny at all.
Yes, but (most of) those people live in a world where they can go read about it for themselves. In a world where reading a book is illegal, all they will know is the official, sanctioned version of what he did and why it was wrong. And that's not knowledge at all.
Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle) remains banned in Germany.
Who is this Hitler person? I tried to look up his autobiography (Mein Kampf) to find out, but my searches just keep returning something about "access forbidden". Hold on a sec, someone's banging on the door so hard it sounds like they're about to break it down! I'll be right ba...
Selling karma would make slashdot too much like the "Real World" where moneyed interests get to speak more loudly than the poor. When I first read this idea I laughed. On second and third sobering thought it made me quite uncomfortable.
If I have complete control over every application that accesses the database then I can ensure that garbage data is not put in.
That is exactly the point. In the real world, you cannot ever have this 100% complete control. Even if you have somehow been given supreme executive database authority in your company, one day you will quit or get run over by a bus. Your successor will be handed a requirement to implement this new little tool that the sales force desperately needs that just happens to require access to this "protected" database. If you had done the job right, almost all the new developer would need to know would be completely described in the database itself. With referential integrity relegated to clients, the developer first has to completely understand the database and all of the client GUI code everywhere.
Let's say he's real good and figures out all of the GUI code. Then the next day, the marketing guys come up with a new requirement for a little app that they need that also accesses the same database. Now you have to completely understand 2 other applications before coding this new one. And it just keeps getting worse and worse as time goes on.
There are tradeoffs involved. Performance problems can often (but not always) be handled by throwing more/better/faster hardware at it. The tradeoff I most often see is that it's usually easier and much quicker to slap client code together than it is to do a good solid system design.
Actually, in my first revision (yes I actually read my posts before I submit) I said pretty much the same thing in another paragraph. With re-reading it with my other points, it came off as rather like beating a dead horse. I do agree with you in principle, though. For better or worse, the victor does indeed write the rules (and the history books). We had just better make sure that we are the victor. :-)
While I agree with you that we should be very careful who we pick for retribution, I must point out one gaping hole in your argument. You seem to be operating under the assumption that this is a simple crime like murder, subject to normal due process under normal civil and federal law. I'm not entirely sure that is the case.
Another point of view is that this attack is an act of war. Working under that assumption, due process and all of the other niceties of normal prosecution go out the window to be replaced by only nominally binding international rules of war. Admittedly, a lot of this might depend on a declaration of war by congress and a lot of judgement by history after the fact. But going into this on the front end, if we do decide that this is an international war-type attack, then the appropriate reponse is not to arrest and prosecute the responsible individuals. The appropriate response is to shoot back until we are sure that our attackers can no longer harm us.
Having said all that, I wholeheartedly agree that we need to be very careful how we approach any answer to the attack. We will have to live with the consequences of our actions for a long time.
Sadly, I have yet to fly on a private jet
I have and I can say without a doubt that being a billionaire would be pretty cool :-) I work for $LARGE_COMPANY which owns many aircraft, including 2 Lear jets for internal corporate use. We have a few flights that we run regularly just because we do it so much that it is cost effective compared to commercial flight. A typical trip would be to drive to our own corporate hanger, walk through to the jet, taxi and take off right on schedule, land and hop out at the jetway (not a terminal) and be driving off in a rental car within a few minutes. Oh, and the leather seating in the Lear is nice, too. After doing this a couple of times, I can say with some authority that the normal delayed, crowded, sardine can commercial flights well and truly suck.
Whoa! That's different from what I just read on my AUP. I note that the top of the page you link says Kansas City. The service that I use is "Road Runner of the Mid-South" and it's AUP is at http://www.midsouth.rr.com/local/terms/tos.shtml
It's different! Hmmm... Note the additional bullet point that disallows you "to host or operate any type of server including but not limited to web, ftp, gaming, mail, wingate, etc. Running such software/hardware is STRICTLY prohibited for residential and business service." The bold, all-caps emphasis on "strictly" is original to the page, I did not add it.
I wonder if they would really insist that I not turn on Web Sharing on my Mac OSX box, especially since it is actually Apache!
Pretty interesting idea. But that patch of empty sky is actually full of a lot of air. The heat has to pass through a lot of air before it gets free in space. Since conduction and convection are much more effective than radiation at transmitting heat, wouldn't you just end up making your local chunk of the atmosphere very warm? Would more of the heat radiate out into space, or would it just circulate around the atmosphere by convection? Also, with enough heat to actually make a difference on a global scale, I would imagine that there would be significant local weather phenomena created from temperature differentials around the giant toaster oven. :-)
Nuh uh to you, too. The system, in this case, is the Earth itself. Once the energy is here, all conversions just move the heat energy around different parts of the "system". And each conversion produces waste heat that gets leaked out into the system at large rather than going to where you want it to go. It doesn't go away until it is radiated out into space. That's just basic thermodynamics.
Also, if heat were "quite willing to radiate off the planet with minimal fuss", then we would have no "solar greenhouse" at all, much less any problems with it. The only difference between greenhouse heat from the Sun and energy sources on the Earth is just the source. Once you have heat, you have to get rid of it (at the right rate), whether it came from the Sun or not. :-)
Now, a more appropriate question is whether we could approach the scale of Earth-impacting solar energy with our own heat producing energy sources like fusion, fission and fossil fuels. I admit I have no idea of their relative magnitude.
I am a degreed scientist
Just for the record, what degree would that be and in what discipline and from which recognized institution did you receive it? Seriously, just curious, since you brought it up in the first place as somewhat of a citation of authority, it would give your comments some more context.
We are standing at the base of a Niagara falls of information with our mouths open.
That has got to be one of the best analogies of information overload (Internet and otherwise) that I have heard :-) For attribution's sake, did you come up with it yourself or read it somewhere? Anyway, that's the heart of the problem for any widespread ubiquitous Net pay-per-view system. You're at the bottom of this big wet wall wondering just how much water is about to come down at you from over the top. People will avoid uncertainty like the plague so long as predictable equivalents exist, even if they provably end up paying more for the predictable expense.
It seems to me that MSN and AOL are banking on this psychology as a long term strategy that will eventually win out over the less-tameable (sp?) general Internet. They provide a single predictable source and cost alternative to the multitude of Internet sites with their own pay schedules and diverse measures of value.
Instead of asking which language to use in an introductory CS/programming class, one should ask what concepts need to be learned and in what order, and then pick one or more languages that can illustrate the desired concepts. When the problem is approached that way, any one of several languages will do.
Many have suggested that the most important first step is learning about the machine being programmed, e.g. registers, memory management, addresses, etc. I suggest that this approach is exactly backwards. The early concepts should include basic structured programming constructs like if-then-else, case, subroutines/functions, and building larger programs from smaller pieces. Then you can introduce good, controlled interfaces and information hiding and why it is vitally important do them as well as you can. While you're at this point you can stress the point of documentation and communication, perhaps through a group project where each individual has to use code written by others in their group without being able to look at each other's actual code. These are the very basics of programming.
Then you can introduce concepts like object orientation, polymorphism and overloading. Somewhere along this point things might split up into more or less hardware oriented tracks. The more hardware oriented would get into C, C++ and assembler with maybe some embedded applications. The more business oriented track would introduce persistence/databases with SQL, XHTML, Java and many other language(s). Overlapping subject matter might include human factors (UI), distribution (networking) and parallelism (threads and multiprocessing). Somewhere in there you want to teach lower levels of how things work, e.g. compilers and language theory.
All of the early boring stuff (disciplined structured programming, documentation, communication) is the most important part for a software professional because you always do all of those things regardless of programming language or architecture, no matter where you work. These topics should be covered first, no matter which language you use to cover them. These basics are ironically the stuff that most CS and engineering programs leave out or skip over.
Kinetic energy weapon. I read their safety page and I'm still nervous. Their odds of one in a million for failure modes still seem rather high to me.
Another thing that springs to mind is reference to flywheels as energy storage in science fiction. Harry Harrison uses flywheels as a technological prop for powering motorcycles/monocycles in his Stainless Steel Rat series. You charge (spin up) the flywheel at night and use the stored kinetic energy by day. Use regenerative braking to get back some energy for "free" while you ride. And you get the gyroscope effect to keep the bike upright. Very quiet, simple and clean. Neat idea.
Does it also work for FedEX vehicles? ... So that's how those big brown trucks full of packages get around!
Oh, the horror :-) Sorry if this is off-topic, but the image that just sprang to mind is so compelling ...
Right now I'm seeing scores of marketeers at FedEx and UPS clutching there hearts over that comment. I don't know which group would be more apoplectic, the FedEx guys for misidentifying their mortal enemy (UPS)'s trucks as FedEx delivery vehicles or UPS for hanging FedEx's our-name-is-a-verb on that oh so distinctive brown truck. You just wiped out two different companies' marketing droids with one swift blow!
there are non-somniacs (sic) who can effortlessly go for weeks at a time without sleeping
I think you mean very little or almost no sleep for weeks. One thing that we definitely do know is that going completely without sleep for much longer that 36 hours at a time produces symptoms in humans remarkably similar to schizophrenia. The human mind needs periodic shutdown/maintenance periods (sleep) far more that the rest of the body. And it has to be certain types of sleep for full effectiveness, most notably the infamous R.E.M. periods and dreams whether remembered or not that play a significant role in the mental housekeeping.
If you are a person who can hit the important sleep states within 6 hours, then more power to you, but try staying awake past a couple of days straight and you will be one sick puppy.
No way! Your new Federal Standard will be MS Windows for the OS, MS IIS for the web server, MS SQL Server for the database, MS Visual C++ as the main development language, MS Office for productivity apps, and so on and on and on....
This is not just your standard anti-MS rant, because I have been-there-done-that with Gov't "standards" efforts, including representing the US Navy on IEEE POSIX committees, only to watch it all go to waste in the last 7 years of Microsoft's ascendancy.
The movement to an all-Microsoft world in US Gov't IT has been going on for some time now, at least in the Dept. of Defense, all in the name of supposed cost savings from using COTS (Consumer Off-The-Shelf) products. And don't even say that you can buy Linux off the shelf. In the minds of 99% of management types, off-the-shelf means Microsoft, and gov't management is the same as corporate management, only more so in all the bad ways.
And if there is any significant IT standardization across much of the US Federal Gov't, watch out. The US gov't is the single largest procurer (both dollars and volume) of software in the entire world. Overall US Federal Gov't procurement in products and services makes the largest multi-national corporations' all look like piddling chump change. You're dreaming if you think that any Federal CIO would pick a free or open source product for any significant Federal IT standard.
My father is a retired TelCo cable splicer and repairman. Some of his favorite stories are of going into very expensive homes to fix problems with the phones only to find out that the builder used the cheapest possible wire that actually met code. And with the whole house wired with cheap low quality wiring, there is little that he could do to correct problems like cross talk between lines in the home using normal voice frequencies, let alone handling network-type bandwidth.
So, when building a new home, be sure to be personally involved in the wiring and be prepared to have to spell out every detail, because when the builder has a choice, they will always pick the lowest cost option. For instance, if all you're doing is twisted pair, be ready to explicitly require (and pay for) CAT-5, rather than the more common CAT-3 which meets code.
If you have the money, work with a home wiring specialist who knows about wiring a home for networking and multimedia. Get them talking to the general contractor as early as possible to make sure that the wiring goes in right and at the right time. There are some really nice prepackaged wiring harnesses, jacks, plates, panels and assorted goodies out there now. A complete home wiring package with multiple phone, twisted pair ethernet, cable and fiber to every room from a central wiring closet only adds a few thousand dollars to a new home price, which is fiddling small change on a decent >$150K home.
Make sure that we can watch our leaders and police as easily as they can watch us.
And this is, I think, the key point. Even with my rabid distrust of any government, I would be willing to at least consider allowing such surveillance if my government had to be under my constant surveillance as well.
Unfortunately, that's not how it will ever work. Like every other conversation about government and the governed, it is a basic matter of balance of power. The side that has the greater ability to gather information has more power than the other side and will never willingly give up that advantage. And as far as I know, it has never been the case that citizens in any country have won out in this balance of power, so we are always talking about government surveillance of citizens, not the other way around.
It would be a happy day if we were discussing the constant erosion of some government's operational privacy.
Oops, in retrospect my post appears that it may be a little trollish to the Germans here, so I apologize if I gave needless offense. I was reacting to my rage against thought-crime attitudes, not the German/Naziism issue in particular. So, instead let me say, it is not anyone's business whom if anyone I choose to hate, love or feel indifferent toward. Get out of my head, you do not belong in there. The one thing I hate and fear most is someone trying to tell me what to hate and fear. There, maybe that's a little more clear.
They talked a lot about Rights of Expression also. Get this - it doesn't apply to criminals, and Nazis and racists are criminals.
Dissenting opinions will be stamped out like the vermin they are, eh? Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer.