> It's sad that Google is getting punished for "doing the right thing" and being honest about their screw-up.
This comment reminds me of the movie "The Quiz Show", when Van Doren confesses his role in the rigging of the game during a House Committee meeting. At first some people congratulates him for coming forward, but then the chairman says: there is no merit in telling the simple truth. Then everybody applauses.
> Obvious counter - do you know how much explosives you could hide in a wheelchair? (Hell, it's been widely shown that at best, you can only make it mildly inconvenient to get a bomb on an airplane - beyond the laptops and video players having enough empty internal space to hold C4, I recall someone positing a way to soak a paperback in nitro. Reading material + match = boom.)
It is not that easy. C4 is not something you can easily cook in your basement, and all manufacturers are legally bound to inject a specific compound in plastic explosives to make them easily detected by trained dogs. As for paper soaked with nitroglycerine, it would not explode, it would merely burn.
Well, since I have no choice to reply in order not to be called a troll by an Anonymous Coward (*shivers*), here is my answer.
What is democracy, in a nutshell: you can think whatever you want, and if you want your opinion to become public policy, you either vote for someone that is sharing your opinion, or you get elected by people that are sharing your opinion. Does not matter what the opinion is, does not matter if the voters are ignorant or educated, with enough votes anything can become public policy.
It's easy to be in favor of democracy when it's your side that won the election. It's a different thing when the other side is winning. Right wingers are elected and make right wingers decisions: liberals are pissed and call them ignorant and stupid. Liberals are elected and make liberal decisions: right wingers are pissed and call them unamerican and communists. Basically it's just sour grapes, no matter on which side you stand.
Right now in your neighborhood there is probably a guy sitting in a basement, wearing a dirty Spiderman t-shirt and eating Spaghetti-O while watching "Ernest goes to camp" on his VCR. This guy is convinced that Benjamin Franklin was the best president ever and if you ask him about Air America he will tell you that he really liked the movie. Guess what: come election day, his vote will count as much as yours. How you feel about that will tell you if you really believe in democracy.
>> The purpose of democracy is not to be right or wrong. The purpose of democracy is to let people decide for themselves. > Why is it always those defending the Right Wing that say things like that?
You remind me of Bill O'Reilly accusing the ACLU of promoting pedophilia because they defend NAMBLA's freedom of speech.
> You think that democracy can let the people decide fact? Let's have a vote. All those in favor of using the round figure of 5 for pi, raise your hands. Is that democracy? If they vote to change pi, will it actually change pi? And if it doesn't, doesn't that prove democracy doesn't work, since the point is to let people decide things like pi for themselves?
> Silly. If a person lies in such amounts about something like this, the "case" should just be dropped.
It really depends on *who* that person is (or who she is married to).
From the paragraph 15 in the IFUT letter:
"On the one hand she seems to be complaining that Dr Evans was manipulating her to establish himself in a good light with her husband. Yet on the other hand she accuses Dr Evans of sexual harassment. Such a combination is surely unlikely to say the least. The complainant's repeated references to her husband's position in the University is discomforting. It suggests that she may feel that such reminders might get her a more favourable outcome than might otherwise be the case."
> When I say 'help them', what I mean is: help them find a way to live that doesn't involve them imposing their ways on me and anyone else with a brain and a heart.
That changes everything! Now that I understand that you don't want to impose your way on them, that you just want to help them understand how superior your opinion is and that they should recant their shameful dogma, I have no choice but to heartily agree with you.
This being said, since you have such a deep understanding of relativism, then I don't have to explain to you that those people probably want to help you also because they believe that people with a brain and a heart should agree with them. I even suspect that for some of them, people with a different opinion are "dipshits". Tsk tsk.
> They want my tax dollars to fund police stopping anyone off-white.
I'll quote Fred Thompson on this one: "The Times Square bomber wasn't flagged at the airport even though he paid cash for his ticket. Which is understandable. Why would you worry about a nervous, cash-paying Pakistani when there are grandmothers in wheelchairs to be searched?"
Should the police "stop anyone off-white"? I don't think so. But shouldn't they be more suspicious when they see a nervous Pakistani paying his ticket in cash, or when they see young white men in militia uniforms driving around federal buildings in a white Econoline? I mean, at some point one has to stop being self-righteous and let some common sense take over.
> If they want to take my money, and use it in fascist ways, then yes, I'm going to have a major problem with that, and I'm going to say so when I have the chance, as loudly as I dare.
My guess is that if it was up to you, *their* money would be spent on "multicultural education in the Tucson schools". But face it - who got the most votes at the last election? People vote for whoever they want so the public policy is going the way they want. Democracy 101.
> If you don't like it, you can whine at me some more on Slashdot, I reckon, and I'll see you at the polls.
I am not whining at you. I try to respectfully point out that insulting people that disagree with you is not a good start for that great mission of Truth and Dialog you talk about.
Good luck at the polls. I guess you'll enjoy it - after all, a vote is anonymous, just like your comments.
> The problem is not the 25% hardcore dipshits who will always lean this way. Nothing can be done to help them.
In my opinion, the actual problem is that kind of statement. How come someone that does not agree with you should need help? What help? Letting them know that they are wrong and you are right? Don't you see that to them, you are the one that needs help?
The purpose of democracy is not to be right or wrong. The purpose of democracy is to let people decide for themselves. And everywhere it works in the same way: a minority of people is leading the way while the majority is silently following. This is still consent, like it or not.
Freedom is freedom. That includes freedom to choose God, Science, or both, and to influence public policy. If you want to impose your views without having other people trying to do the same, then what you need is not democracy, you need dictatorship.
> As the season has changed, for the first time in something like five months, I've opened a window in the server room I've been working in.
Then the smell was gone, but there was this loud beeping sound. After doing another Google search I found out from a security consultant's blog that it was the break-in alarm on the window.
Big Tobacco health data. Big Pharma test data. Big Oil environmental data. Enron accounting or trading data. Retails sales zappers.
There is no way all this data "tweaking" can be done without involving IT people: DBA's, programmers, techies.
Right now, at this very moment, some of these Digital Era Henchmen are reading Slashdot on iPhones or 32 inch monitors purchased with blood money. And chances are that some of these people are making snide comments about Microsoft or Darl McBride's ethics. Tsk tsk.
Eighty years ago the French engineers built a wall to protect France from Germans. The Germans walked around it and invaded the country.
Ten years ago the French engineers built a nuclear aircraft carrier that was too short to allow planes to land on it. It was also exposing the crew to radiation.
Now they designed a network-based DRM, which was cracked almost immediately, until (surprise!) the servers went down in flame.
> I predict that Microsoft will be unable to adapt and will die a long death until they get brought out in much the same way sun did.
Scenario 1: Microsoft will suddenly start losing money like crazy, the company will be bought by Apple, and everybody will see how clever you were to make this statement.
Scenario 2: Microsoft will do just like it did for 20 years (which is making sh*tloads of money), and nobody will notice your lack of business insight.
The IPCC calling this FUD a "typo" is like Hillary Clinton saying that she "misspoke" when she made up a story about running from sniper fire in Bosnia.
Someone should take back the Nobel prize from Al Gore (he should not be difficult to track down, just look for a big SUV, for a private Jet or for a mansion that needs a dedicated power plant).
Imagine a company that would take a few hundred bucks worth of regular PC parts, add a slightly modified free open-source OS, package the thing in a white shiny box and sell it for a few thousand bucks... What a scam it would be!
> Scambaiting is a fun and relaxing full-contact email sport. It's all about baiting Internet and email scammers into exposing themselves and sharing that humiliation with the entire world.
Slashbaiting is even better: have someone posting a mildly funny story to generate trafic for their website, only to make their web server go down in flames in only a few minutes of exposure on Slashdot.
("Yes Mr Advertiser, I got 200k visitors on my website last January. 199,997 of them between 5h and 5h10 on Jan 3, but still...").
> My company has spent the last year developing a framework for creating games on Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.
The obvious question here is: why don't you use your own tool and generate a bunch of games? Now that you have this terrific code-writing technology, why don't you use it? See, that's the tricky part with that kind of project. If it works, then you should be able to use it yourself; otherwise, why would someone pay for it? And even if you actually designed a magic button that will create games from a bunch of generic parameters, your solution must be cheaper than outsourcing. Good luck with that.
My guess is that you did not write a game factory. What you probably did is follow the "Law of Building Blocks": without a strong business leadership, any small or mid-sized team of developers will spend time and money writing building blocks instead of creating value, until there is a major technology or paradigm shift in the industry or business that makes the building blocks obsolete.
If you really want to sell it instead of using it, the only possible market for your kind of tool is full of weasels and scammers. Just google "affiliates", "referral", "direct marketing" or "SEO" and you will get the list of potential buyers. It's not that bad - it's still a bit better than working for big tobbacco or subprime lenders.
> Changing web habits and greater use of social media will mean consumers will be looking for gadgets that are tuned to specific purposes.
Yeah, sure. As a consumer I really want to load my belt with my phone, my music player, my pda, my pager, my tag reader, my gps, my ebook reader and whatnot. I don't mind having ten different battery-chargers in my living room. What I don't want is a 300$ netbook because it does not have a specific purpose.
Which reminds me: when will best buy sell a Facebook device, a Slashdot reader and a youtube player? Cause I still have three inches left on my belt to hook gadgets.
> "The 12/99 bug"? No wonder you guys had problems. Even one month from Y2K, in the middle of a giant Y2K bugfix project, you were still using 2-digit year numbering
I thought it was pretty obvious, but apparently I should have added "wink-wink" so even the irony-challenged people would understand the joke.
In 99, a friend of mine was doing a live migration from a mainframe software that was too expensive to fix for Y2K. This was a critical billing system for the business so they had to keep the mainframe working until the migration to the new software was complete. The complex project was scheduled to be over on Dec 15.
What they did not expect was that the end-of-month calculation routine in the old software used a "clever" trick: add one month, remove one day...
So on Dec 1st the software went down in flames (and my friend did not get his Y2K bonus).
The Church of the Self-Righteous has its own concept of Trinity:
1) Global warming 2) Darwin's theory of evolution 3) Apple products
Suggesting that any of these three sacred cows is not infaillible is a blasphemy; worse, a mortal sin.
As with any dogma, rebellion only leads to excommunication: 1) Raise an issue about Global Warming: you are an agent of Big Oil, evil and corrupt. 2) Discuss flaws in Darwin's theory of evolution: you are a fundamentalist christian, a bigot and a fool. 3) Disagree with pricing or superiority of Apple products: you are paid by Microsoft, or plain stupid.
It must be really, really awesome to be on the side of Truth all the time.
> You can call me an IT guy, but that doesn't describe my level of expertise.
I work for a big financial company. The other day I was invited to a C-level meeting for some reason, and there was a problem with the projector's remote control. Someone at the table asked: why don't we call the IT guys? The CIO replied: I am an IT guy. And he climbed on his chair to manually power-up the projector (which is bolted to the ceiling).
You can call this guy a manager, an executive, or a IT guy. See if he cares.
> I'm looking at a tech management job at a content company that is trying to become a software company, and they refer to everything about software development, data center operations, and desktop support as 'IT.' I'd like to tell the CEO before I take the job that we have to stop referring to all these people as 'IT people' or I'm not going to be able to attract and retain the top-tier talent that is required
If the "CEO" is meeting people for a "tech management" job, then feel free to share your overinflated view of yourself with him, because he obviously like overinflated job titles himself.
In any case, in the interviews you should definitely bring up your concern with sharing the IT label with the lowly tech people. That way, if you ever get hired, this will mean that you found a company so shallow and phony that you will fit in just right.
Slashdot Mirror
> It's sad that Google is getting punished for "doing the right thing" and being honest about their screw-up.
This comment reminds me of the movie "The Quiz Show", when Van Doren confesses his role in the rigging of the game during a House Committee meeting. At first some people congratulates him for coming forward, but then the chairman says: there is no merit in telling the simple truth. Then everybody applauses.
> Obvious counter - do you know how much explosives you could hide in a wheelchair? (Hell, it's been widely shown that at best, you can only make it mildly inconvenient to get a bomb on an airplane - beyond the laptops and video players having enough empty internal space to hold C4, I recall someone positing a way to soak a paperback in nitro. Reading material + match = boom.)
It is not that easy. C4 is not something you can easily cook in your basement, and all manufacturers are legally bound to inject a specific compound in plastic explosives to make them easily detected by trained dogs. As for paper soaked with nitroglycerine, it would not explode, it would merely burn.
Well, since I have no choice to reply in order not to be called a troll by an Anonymous Coward (*shivers*), here is my answer.
What is democracy, in a nutshell: you can think whatever you want, and if you want your opinion to become public policy, you either vote for someone that is sharing your opinion, or you get elected by people that are sharing your opinion. Does not matter what the opinion is, does not matter if the voters are ignorant or educated, with enough votes anything can become public policy.
It's easy to be in favor of democracy when it's your side that won the election. It's a different thing when the other side is winning. Right wingers are elected and make right wingers decisions: liberals are pissed and call them ignorant and stupid. Liberals are elected and make liberal decisions: right wingers are pissed and call them unamerican and communists. Basically it's just sour grapes, no matter on which side you stand.
Right now in your neighborhood there is probably a guy sitting in a basement, wearing a dirty Spiderman t-shirt and eating Spaghetti-O while watching "Ernest goes to camp" on his VCR. This guy is convinced that Benjamin Franklin was the best president ever and if you ask him about Air America he will tell you that he really liked the movie. Guess what: come election day, his vote will count as much as yours. How you feel about that will tell you if you really believe in democracy.
>> The purpose of democracy is not to be right or wrong. The purpose of democracy is to let people decide for themselves.
> Why is it always those defending the Right Wing that say things like that?
You remind me of Bill O'Reilly accusing the ACLU of promoting pedophilia because they defend NAMBLA's freedom of speech.
> You think that democracy can let the people decide fact? Let's have a vote. All those in favor of using the round figure of 5 for pi, raise your hands. Is that democracy? If they vote to change pi, will it actually change pi? And if it doesn't, doesn't that prove democracy doesn't work, since the point is to let people decide things like pi for themselves?
"Confusion will be my epitaph"
-King Crimson
> Silly. If a person lies in such amounts about something like this, the "case" should just be dropped.
It really depends on *who* that person is (or who she is married to).
From the paragraph 15 in the IFUT letter:
"On the one hand she seems to be complaining that Dr Evans was manipulating her to establish himself in a good light with her husband. Yet on the other hand she accuses Dr Evans of sexual harassment. Such a combination is surely unlikely to say the least. The complainant's repeated references to her husband's position in the University is discomforting. It suggests that she may feel that such reminders might get her a more favourable outcome than might otherwise be the case."
http://felidware.com/DylanEvans/
This whole thing is just politics.
> When I say 'help them', what I mean is: help them find a way to live that doesn't involve them imposing their ways on me and anyone else with a brain and a heart.
That changes everything! Now that I understand that you don't want to impose your way on them, that you just want to help them understand how superior your opinion is and that they should recant their shameful dogma, I have no choice but to heartily agree with you.
This being said, since you have such a deep understanding of relativism, then I don't have to explain to you that those people probably want to help you also because they believe that people with a brain and a heart should agree with them. I even suspect that for some of them, people with a different opinion are "dipshits". Tsk tsk.
> They want my tax dollars to fund police stopping anyone off-white.
I'll quote Fred Thompson on this one:
"The Times Square bomber wasn't flagged at the airport even though he paid cash for his ticket. Which is understandable. Why would you worry about a nervous, cash-paying Pakistani when there are grandmothers in wheelchairs to be searched?"
Should the police "stop anyone off-white"? I don't think so. But shouldn't they be more suspicious when they see a nervous Pakistani paying his ticket in cash, or when they see young white men in militia uniforms driving around federal buildings in a white Econoline? I mean, at some point one has to stop being self-righteous and let some common sense take over.
> If they want to take my money, and use it in fascist ways, then yes, I'm going to have a major problem with that, and I'm going to say so when I have the chance, as loudly as I dare.
My guess is that if it was up to you, *their* money would be spent on "multicultural education in the Tucson schools". But face it - who got the most votes at the last election? People vote for whoever they want so the public policy is going the way they want. Democracy 101.
> If you don't like it, you can whine at me some more on Slashdot, I reckon, and I'll see you at the polls.
I am not whining at you. I try to respectfully point out that insulting people that disagree with you is not a good start for that great mission of Truth and Dialog you talk about.
Good luck at the polls. I guess you'll enjoy it - after all, a vote is anonymous, just like your comments.
> The problem is not the 25% hardcore dipshits who will always lean this way. Nothing can be done to help them.
In my opinion, the actual problem is that kind of statement. How come someone that does not agree with you should need help? What help? Letting them know that they are wrong and you are right? Don't you see that to them, you are the one that needs help?
The purpose of democracy is not to be right or wrong. The purpose of democracy is to let people decide for themselves. And everywhere it works in the same way: a minority of people is leading the way while the majority is silently following. This is still consent, like it or not.
Freedom is freedom. That includes freedom to choose God, Science, or both, and to influence public policy. If you want to impose your views without having other people trying to do the same, then what you need is not democracy, you need dictatorship.
I will never forgive Novell for Groupwise. Pure evil in a red and white box.
> As the season has changed, for the first time in something like five months, I've opened a window in the server room I've been working in.
Then the smell was gone, but there was this loud beeping sound. After doing another Google search I found out from a security consultant's blog that it was the break-in alarm on the window.
Another crazy day at the office.
Big Tobacco health data. Big Pharma test data. Big Oil environmental data. Enron accounting or trading data. Retails sales zappers.
There is no way all this data "tweaking" can be done without involving IT people: DBA's, programmers, techies.
Right now, at this very moment, some of these Digital Era Henchmen are reading Slashdot on iPhones or 32 inch monitors purchased with blood money. And chances are that some of these people are making snide comments about Microsoft or Darl McBride's ethics. Tsk tsk.
Eighty years ago the French engineers built a wall to protect France from Germans. The Germans walked around it and invaded the country.
Ten years ago the French engineers built a nuclear aircraft carrier that was too short to allow planes to land on it. It was also exposing the crew to radiation.
Now they designed a network-based DRM, which was cracked almost immediately, until (surprise!) the servers went down in flame.
Bunch of buffoons.
> I predict that Microsoft will be unable to adapt and will die a long death until they get brought out in much the same way sun did.
Scenario 1: Microsoft will suddenly start losing money like crazy, the company will be bought by Apple, and everybody will see how clever you were to make this statement.
Scenario 2: Microsoft will do just like it did for 20 years (which is making sh*tloads of money), and nobody will notice your lack of business insight.
Humm, it's a tough one.
The IPCC calling this FUD a "typo" is like Hillary Clinton saying that she "misspoke" when she made up a story about running from sniper fire in Bosnia.
Someone should take back the Nobel prize from Al Gore (he should not be difficult to track down, just look for a big SUV, for a private Jet or for a mansion that needs a dedicated power plant).
Imagine a company that would take a few hundred bucks worth of regular PC parts, add a slightly modified free open-source OS, package the thing in a white shiny box and sell it for a few thousand bucks... What a scam it would be!
> So it's a near certainty that before Barack Obama vacates the White House, we'll be out of IPv4 address
When Bush left, there was still plenty of IPv4! Shame to you, Obama.
Buying virtual tractors for a game seems ridiculous, until you compare it with buying virtual fish for a screensaver...
> Scambaiting is a fun and relaxing full-contact email sport. It's all about baiting Internet and email scammers into exposing themselves and sharing that humiliation with the entire world.
Slashbaiting is even better: have someone posting a mildly funny story to generate trafic for their website, only to make their web server go down in flames in only a few minutes of exposure on Slashdot.
("Yes Mr Advertiser, I got 200k visitors on my website last January. 199,997 of them between 5h and 5h10 on Jan 3, but still...").
> My company has spent the last year developing a framework for creating games on Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.
The obvious question here is: why don't you use your own tool and generate a bunch of games? Now that you have this terrific code-writing technology, why don't you use it? See, that's the tricky part with that kind of project. If it works, then you should be able to use it yourself; otherwise, why would someone pay for it? And even if you actually designed a magic button that will create games from a bunch of generic parameters, your solution must be cheaper than outsourcing. Good luck with that.
My guess is that you did not write a game factory. What you probably did is follow the "Law of Building Blocks": without a strong business leadership, any small or mid-sized team of developers will spend time and money writing building blocks instead of creating value, until there is a major technology or paradigm shift in the industry or business that makes the building blocks obsolete.
If you really want to sell it instead of using it, the only possible market for your kind of tool is full of weasels and scammers. Just google "affiliates", "referral", "direct marketing" or "SEO" and you will get the list of potential buyers. It's not that bad - it's still a bit better than working for big tobbacco or subprime lenders.
> Changing web habits and greater use of social media will mean consumers will be looking for gadgets that are tuned to specific purposes.
Yeah, sure. As a consumer I really want to load my belt with my phone, my music player, my pda, my pager, my tag reader, my gps, my ebook reader and whatnot. I don't mind having ten different battery-chargers in my living room. What I don't want is a 300$ netbook because it does not have a specific purpose.
Which reminds me: when will best buy sell a Facebook device, a Slashdot reader and a youtube player? Cause I still have three inches left on my belt to hook gadgets.
I'm impressed. Someone actually found a way to provide a link for an announcement that was not made.
> "The 12/99 bug"? No wonder you guys had problems. Even one month from Y2K, in the middle of a giant Y2K bugfix project, you were still using 2-digit year numbering
I thought it was pretty obvious, but apparently I should have added "wink-wink" so even the irony-challenged people would understand the joke.
In 99, a friend of mine was doing a live migration from a mainframe software that was too expensive to fix for Y2K. This was a critical billing system for the business so they had to keep the mainframe working until the migration to the new software was complete. The complex project was scheduled to be over on Dec 15.
What they did not expect was that the end-of-month calculation routine in the old software used a "clever" trick: add one month, remove one day...
So on Dec 1st the software went down in flames (and my friend did not get his Y2K bonus).
They called it the 12/99 bug.
The Church of the Self-Righteous has its own concept of Trinity:
1) Global warming
2) Darwin's theory of evolution
3) Apple products
Suggesting that any of these three sacred cows is not infaillible is a blasphemy; worse, a mortal sin.
As with any dogma, rebellion only leads to excommunication:
1) Raise an issue about Global Warming: you are an agent of Big Oil, evil and corrupt.
2) Discuss flaws in Darwin's theory of evolution: you are a fundamentalist christian, a bigot and a fool.
3) Disagree with pricing or superiority of Apple products: you are paid by Microsoft, or plain stupid.
It must be really, really awesome to be on the side of Truth all the time.
> You can call me an IT guy, but that doesn't describe my level of expertise.
I work for a big financial company. The other day I was invited to a C-level meeting for some reason, and there was a problem with the projector's remote control. Someone at the table asked: why don't we call the IT guys? The CIO replied: I am an IT guy. And he climbed on his chair to manually power-up the projector (which is bolted to the ceiling).
You can call this guy a manager, an executive, or a IT guy. See if he cares.
> I'm looking at a tech management job at a content company that is trying to become a software company, and they refer to everything about software development, data center operations, and desktop support as 'IT.' I'd like to tell the CEO before I take the job that we have to stop referring to all these people as 'IT people' or I'm not going to be able to attract and retain the top-tier talent that is required
If the "CEO" is meeting people for a "tech management" job, then feel free to share your overinflated view of yourself with him, because he obviously like overinflated job titles himself.
In any case, in the interviews you should definitely bring up your concern with sharing the IT label with the lowly tech people. That way, if you ever get hired, this will mean that you found a company so shallow and phony that you will fit in just right.