Successful resource management is about building and understanding relationships. If you are looking for a slogan, that is it.
It's about building, mediating, and influencing relationships, both with and between others, and leveraging those relationships to solve business problems.
If you have a difficult time emotionally understanding and relating to the people working with and for you, you will have a difficult time becoming a successful resource manager. You need to understand their goals. You need to understand what motivates them. You need to understand and adapt to the dynamics of the relationship they want to have with you!
"The goal here is not to have sensible law, it's to have laws that you can't avoid breaking. i.e. you're instantly guilty."
"The only real solution is to become the people writing the laws. Support your local pirate party, I guess."
That's just,...I'm,...astonished.
You could, you know..., not participate in the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials?
How hard is that? Stop intentionally participating in the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials. Don't push the button to connect to that torrent. Don't click the torrent link.
If these simple, basic acts of self control are truly so difficult for you, I suggest you seek psychiatric help immediately.
Your statements are not reasoned. They are not radical. They are the statements of a 12 year old child who feels he is entitled to take what he wants and do as he pleases without regard for the rule of law and the rest of society.
Just grow up. It's that simple. Grow up and take responsibility for your choices and actions.
"They're worried that these vehicles have already been, or could be, transported inside the United States to be used in an attack, although there is no proof that this has happened."
And note how the Fox News article concedes in the first full paragraph that there is no proof whatsoever that this is happening, but then goes on for another eighteen paragraphs quoting administration sources telling us how deadly afraid we should be of this impending attack.
Stories about the unmanned drones were all over; this wasn't just Fox News.
And I'll remind you, when we got over there we found what we should have known all along: there was no weaponization of unmanned drones whatsoever, certainly not WMDs, they were primitive short range, essentially big model airplanes.
And we also found out in the aftermath that the Air Force analysts had been telling us all long that these unmanned vehicles posed no threat to us or Iraq's neighbors.
The only way you can be sure is to register and vote in the primaries NOW for a candidate who has stood up against the war from the start, and rejects warmongering and militarism in all its forms. That isn't Hillary. That isn't Giuliani. That isn't Obama. That isn't Romney or McCain or Thompson. But if you don't act now, two of those will be your only choices.
Fox News February 24th, 2003 Iraqi Drones May Target U.S. Cities
WASHINGTON -- Iraq could be planning a chemical or biological attack on American cities through the use of remote-controlled "drone" planes equipped with GPS tracking maps, according to U.S. intelligence.
The information about Iraq's unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program has caused a "real concern" among defense personnel, senior U.S. officials tell Fox News. They're worried that these vehicles have already been, or could be, transported inside the United States to be used in an attack, although there is no proof that this has happened.
Secretary of State Colin Powell showed a picture of a small drone plane during his presentation to the U.N. Security Council earlier this month.
"UAVs outfitted with spray tanks constitute an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons," Powell said during his speech. "Iraq could use these small UAVs, which have a wingspan of only a few meters, to deliver biological agents to its neighbors or, if transported, to other countries, including the United States.
[...]
Fool me once once, shame on me, fool me twice, sham... WILL NOT BE FOOLED AGAIN.
"What's your point? There is substantial data supporting both and thus far no data that would rule out the possibility of either. Unlike creationism both could theoretically be disproven given continued observation. Oh wait, you must be one of those crackpots who somehow thinks science is a field for people with CLOSED minds that already believe they know the answers to the big questions."
There is no known scientific evidence of ESP and "paranormal activity".
If you believe you can provide scientific evidence of such powers, Mr Randi stands ready with your check for $1,000,000 (http://www.randi.org/).
Should I tell him to anticipate correspondence from a Mr. "shaitand"?
I didn't think so.
Now why don't you go back to the Neighborhood of Make-believe and play? I believe I hear the trolly coming 'round.
"taking advantage of someone else's inability (read: apathy) towards securing their home network"
This is an awfully arrogant assumption, and hopefully sheds some light on why many Slashdot commentors apparently see nothing wrong with this practice.
How would you, you should ask, tell inability from apathy? What if the person running the router really does not know how to secure it? I know plenty of people who have no clue at all how to secure their wireless routers. Do you think that if they knew you were using it they would be alright with that? That doesn't seem very unlikely.
"Mrs. Smith, we found this man outside your house access your home wireless network." And you expect us to believe Mrs. Smith would be fine with this and tell the officers to let the creepy guy parked outside her home continue? Seriously. That's just bullshit and you know it.
It's no wonder we keep seeing more legislation cracking down on these sorts of activities. It's precisely because people don't accept them, and precisely because they don't know how to protect themselves against them.
It isn't theft, but it is ethically analogous to trespassing in an unlocked house or on unfenced property; let me tell you why.
This wireless internet use has at least the following ethically significant properties: - The resource owner paid and contracted for the resource - The access is unauthorized by the resource owner and is not authorized by any other agreement - The access is undesired by the resource owner - The access violates the owner's expectation to exclusive use of the resource - The resource is limited at any point in time - unauthorized access deprives the owner of concurrent use of some part of what he or she has paid or contracted for - The resource is effectively self-replenishing - unauthorized access does not deprive the owner of full and exclusive access once the unauthorized access has terminated
Even in the best case in which the authorized user uses the resource only when the the resource owner is away from home and not using it, the situation is still ethically analogous to the following activity that most would agree is clearly unethical:
Entering a private unfenced property while the owner is away and sitting down in a vacant yard chair to enjoy the nice view afforded from the property.
The owner of the property may never know of the trespasser. The trespasser leaves few if any traces. The trespasser's use of the resource never deprives the owner's use of the resource.
And yet most people would certainly consider this use to be unethical, at least in a petty sense. Clearly it is within the rights of the property owner to have this activity stopped. And clearly it is within the rights of the rest of the property owners in the community to have the expectation that an individual who trespass on their property ought to be punished or corrected by the legal system in place.
Now, if the trespasser did not know that he was committing the act - not that he did not know it was wrong - such as if his computer connected without his knowledge, that would be a fair defense, but that is not the case here.
Knowing how DHCP and SSID broadcast work doesn't make you immune to the law of the land, and it shouldn't.
This is sort of like when some technology guys decides that if we can just get computers running Linux into sub-Saharan Africa, we'll save the world.
If your grandmother is on a respirator, the last thing she needs is for someone to interrogate her. She's your grandmother, not a dying secret agent.
Listen, just be with her where she can see you. Read a book. Hold her hand. Talk gently to her. Tell her that you're there. Tell her who is in the room with her. Tell her who is coming to see her. Tell her about news in the family. Tell her what your children have been up to.
You know, things people have done for thousands of years to comfort their loved ones who have fallen ill?
Turn off your ipod and your blackberry and think a little, man. Technology may not cause cancer, but apparently it has an affect on common sense.
It is critically important that every American understand what is happening here. The TSA is a government agency. This is not "vote with your dollars" and choose a different airline. This is your federal government detaining and searching you based on how you feel about them. Your government has announced it reserves the right to detain and search you for any reason whatsoever, including bearing the expression of one who holds that same government and its agents, for these very practices, in utter contempt.
And through your hard earned tax dollars you are funding them and their cronies to do this to you. As much as 60% of your working life will be directly to fund the government that is doing this to you, that government whose agents are shouting and you with a boot on your head, with your trousers dropped, and an agent's cold hand - big brother's hand - telling you it is for your own good, that if you would only fall in line they would not have to do this.
But don't worry, so long as you smile, keep your mouth shut, and fall in line, you won't be bothered, citizen.
It is only a matter of time if we do not dramatically reverse course now. If this presidential election comes down to a race between Hillary or Obama and Giuliani, Thompson, or Romney, the decline will only accelerate. If we do not reverse course now, in 8 years we will very likely have passed the point of no return, where these policies are accepted by the populous, where the police state propaganda has thoroughly subdued them, and we will be unable to rouse them to fight.
To avoid this fate you must act now. Get behind a candidate who you can count on not to sell us out to the military industrial complex, who you can count on to wrest us free from the interests of large bankers and financial institutions, who you can count on to defend the letter of the Constitution in its original spirit, for which the blood of many patriots was shed.
And that doesn't mean just posting on internet forums. That means volunteering to travel to, to write to, and to call citizens in the primary states. If we do not get wins for these candidates in the primaries, it will be as good as lost. Now is the time to act to defend your freedom, or you will soon find it has been taken from you and it will be too late. http://www.ronpaul2008.com/
This unique life form is now gone forever. The lessons we could learn by studying it are now lost to eternity. Its unique role in the ecosystem is forever lost.
We destroyed it. We literally choked the life out of it.
Who are we to do this? Are we so confident in our superiority as to believe that a little temporary convenience to dump toxic industrial wastes is worth the complete loss of this life form?
We were up in arms when a islamic government destroyed man made statues of buddha merely hundreds of years old, and yet we as a world sat quietly as a life form 20 million years old was forever wiped from the universe?
I am ashamed to be a human being. If another being or race came to earth and looked down at what we have done with our world and to one another, I would expect them to treat us no better than we have treated this defenseless creature. We are parasites, rotting away the life of a beautiful and wondrous creation.
Enough with the bullshit subscriber numbers
on
Bank Run in Second Life
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"this could supposedly affect 8.5M players even tho most estimates of actual hard core players in the system are in the 5 to low 6 figure range"
Oh give it the fuck up already. It was just 2 weeks ago we covered this. Second Life does not have 8.5M active subscribers. It does not have 5-6M active subscribers. IT DOESN'T HAVE HALF THAT.
Second Life has 20-30,000 active subscribers, THAT IS ALL.
I'm so goddamn sick of this media blitz on Slashdot by Second Life's lame fanbois. You're damn right this is inflammatory, because I and a good number of the rest of the readers here are sick and tired of seeing these folks abuse Slashdot with their little fake media drama, as often as several times a week, to benefit the bottom line of Linden Labs.
At least give us someway to filter these stories out. People who want to stay abreast of the latest little events in this insignificant virtual "meeting place" can read the fan sites instead; I'm sure they do.
"Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people."
Responding to this quote, while from the research that has been done happiness does not seem to be significantly a function of wealth or life expectancy, concluding from this to minimize the very real hardships of poverty reduces the human experience to utilitarianism.
I feel fairly confident in saying that the life I am privileged to is in many ways qualitatively better - though not more valuable - than the life of a member of a hunter gatherer society. How can I make this comparison? On the premise that if neutrally presented with the opportunity to benefit from many of the amenities and conveniences my life affords me, most hunter gatherers would accept the opportunity to avail themselves of these. This to me seems like the appropriate way to make this comparison.
And this doesn't mean they would abandon their traditions and beliefs, and doesn't mean they would leave their land.
It's simply that I surmise most would prefer to have access to modern medicine, to sanitized water, to refrigeration, to vaccinations, than to not. Now, this may not be correct, but it certainly seems to me to be a reasonable, probable hypothesis, and I suspect many would agree.
Although I agree with you that free time is a form of wealth.
According to the article, as a result of the rich reproducing more successfully than the poor and replacing the poor in the jobs and communities, says the author, "Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving,"
In other words, the poor are poor because they are irrational and lazy and passed these values onto their children.
More, he is suggesting not only have these values been passed from rich people in one generation to the next, but in fact that as a result of this period of the rich being overwhelmingly more successful in procreating, rapid biological evolutionary processes have produced genetic advantages in these societies that underscore purely social evolution.
In other words, not only are the poor poor because they are irrational and lazy, but also because their are genetically inferior to their rich masters.
Therefore - and this is suggested later in the article - the reason that today's third world countries have not experienced industrial revolution and modernizations essentially amounts to the following: 1) their peoples are lazy and irrational, and 2) they do not have access to the superior rich genetic lineage that underscored the industrial revolution in England.
Suffice it to say, the primary criticisms of the author's hypotheses by other scientists and historians is the utter lack of convincing and systematic evidence.
"If we charge you directly for your risk, we are creating no economic benefit. It just means that in the future, I'll have to bear the entire cost of my cancer treatments."
Your situation is a little different, isn't it? You have a pre-existing condition. Pre-existing condition coverage controversy has been around for a long time.
Your cancer presumably wasn't predictable. The average joe isn't paying a high premium because you might get cancer, he is paying a high premium because he might get cancer himself, or get hit by a car or any of the many ways people become seriously injured or ill that will become a tremendous cost to the insurance company.
There will also always be a market for insurance coverage that will not be reduced or reevaluated in light of life events. One of the reasons that people have insurance in the first place is so that if they do get, say, cancer, they will have coverage. So long as there are other people who want this sort of unconditional coverage, someone who wants this coverage will be able to buy into this pool and reduce their individual risk just as they do now.
"Instead, employer sponsored group health plans are a form of socialized medicine, but implemented under a private feudal system."
Socialized Medicine means state run health care, nothing more. To the extent that employers receive tax breaks for sponsoring employee health plans, perhaps these plans could be considered socialized (again, to that extent), but this isn't what you are talking about.
You are suggesting that due simply to the structure of these employer sponsored health plans, they warrant being termed socialized, socialized medicine. But this is clearly false. No state, no socialized medicine, not by the clear understanding of the term in modern day policy discourse.
Employer sponsored health plans are thoroughly capitalist entities. They exist because there is market demand for them. You are free to opt in or out of them. And when you do opt out, you do not pay for them.
And there is plenty of competition. Benefits packages are oftentimes the primary consideration of an employee considering employment opportunities. Not only is there competition across insurance companies and across employers, there is also competition across plans. Every employer I have worked for has offered a range of plans, with premium, coverage, and deductable packages to suit every employee situation.
You pay the premiums you do not because your fellow plan participants are fat, or whatever it is you think, but because it truly is enormously costly to provide you essentially unlimited medical care should you be in an accident. And if you get hit by a car walking across the street to lunch, or develop cancer, your BMI or lifestyle will have essentially no affect on the tremendous expense you will be to the insurance company.
You'll have a better appreciation for how insurance works once you've spent some time in an ER or ICU on a ventilator at tens of thousands of dollars a day. And unless you intend to pay out of pocket or decline treatment, you had better have insurance, because nice as I may be, I'd rather not pay for your medical care in tax dollars just so you can save a few bucks every paycheck.
"If we were spending this money on actual threat priorities, we'd be spending it getting out of the crosshairs of foreign energy suppliers."
But the money being spent on this research and all active missile defense research absolutely pales in comparison to what we are spending in Iraq. Yes, we should get out of Iraq - out of the "crosshairs of foreign energy supplies" - but that doesn't mean we can't also continue to pursue missile defense technologies, and secure our borders while we're at it.
In my opinion missile defense is precisely the sort of national security policy that should be supported by someone interested in limited government or interested in limiting U.S. imperialism around the world.
If we have a mature, comprehensive air and space defense solution, we don't have to worry about policing the world, and we don't have to have talk about nuclear first strikes against sovereign nations.
Another reason to prefer many junior developers is that junior developers scale much more cost effectively. On many large internal projects, there is a large amount of work that is both not technically very challenging and yet not automatable. Coding data collection screens, implementing batch processing routines, specifying reports. All of these tasks are time consuming, but none of them are substantially skill-dependent; they are busy work.
This has the effect that "uber" (highly skilled) programmers do not complete the tasks in substantially less time than standard-fare programmers. However, if you follow the author's suggestions, you will still be paying your uber programmers uber salaries to perform this work. But even though they are completing the work only 5-10% faster than standard-fare programmers, you are still paying them 20-50% more.
Had you instead built your organization around a large, dynamic, pluggable pool of junior or standard-fare programmers, you would be able to complete the work at a significant cost savings.
Domain knowledge is the primary difference between a 1 day LOE and a 1 week LOE, not programming "skill".
There is no class of general "uber" programmer that can be brought on to an arbitrary company's internal development project and hit the ground running at a pace 10 or even 2 times that of the standard-fare developers already on the project. This is a complete myth.
However, the domain knowledge gap can in most cases be narrowed very cost effectively through knowledge transfer, training, and tools.
If you skimp on resourcing and experience anywhere in your development organization, it should be on programmers. Inexperienced and unskilled programmers can be compensated for effectively through targeted specification, management, and quality assurance processes. The key is to have processes in place to identify and rectify programmer failure early and often.
Computer programming isn't rocket science, it's bridge building. You have planners and you have builders. Builders pour cement and put rivets in place, and there are processes in place to identify, rectify, and robustly handle individual builder error. Bridges do not arbitrarily drop cars off into the river below due to individual builder error, and neither should software programs crash due to individual programmer error.
"Yeah, that's always been the problem with democracy. Damn government does what the people want rather than doing the *right* thing."
That's why the founders of this nation had the foresight to establish a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy.
Democracy implies majority rule. Majority rule is mob rule. One of their chief concerns was to protect the rights of minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
Between New Deal Democrats AND Republicans, and activist courts, unfortunately those protections have largely fallen by the wayside.
Though it's not fair to say that the government does what the people want, when most people don't vote, and most of those who do vote aren't informed. The government doesn't do what the people wants. The government does what the people LET IT get away with.
"We've had FISA for years and its restrictions are so lax - allowing even for warrants after the fact - that any protest of it can't be for good reason."
Well said, and it helps to know that freedom defending organizations like the ACLU echo this sentiment (http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/31144res20 070731.html).
"There seems to be a lot of ignorance and hyperbole on slashdot regarding FISA.
First, the basics of "FISA". FISA is a statue meant to govern how and when government agencies may gather FOREIGN intelligence. FISA warrants are warrants issued by FISA-established courts authorizing the government to wiretap or survey individuals or phone numbers. A FISA warrant cannot be issued on domestic communications, since American residents and citizens are (yes, still) covered by the United States Constitution's protection against unreasonable search and seizure."
Yes there is, and sellouts like you are peddling an awful lot of it.
What more evidence do we need? Democrats were swept into power on the promise to get us out of Iraq, to restore our liberties that they and their Republican colleagues sold out wholesale after 9/11, and to bring this corrupt administration to justice.
The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
We are still in Iraq and there is no end in sight. Rather than having the backbone to bringing the measure to withdraw back to the floor again and again to push it through, and continue to push their campaign promises in the media, they have effectively given up on the issue, whining to their supporters and the media that it is too hard.
And now these Democrats are actively working with this administration, the same administration they told us is the most corrupt and secretive in history, to sell out yet more of our freedoms, to give yet more power to this president and the executive branch.
They are, our representatives, nearly every one of them, pathetic, spineless, schmucks. They have betrayed us all once again.
And it should come as no surprise, because these are the same Democrats and Republicans who sold us out by writing the president a blank check in Iraq. The same Democrats and Republicans who sold out our liberties by signing onto the biggest forfeiture of our liberties since the establishment of this nation. The same Democrats and Republicans who proudly signed the bill granting retroactive immunity to prosecution for every military and government agent who has tortured, kidnapped, and committed atrocities in our name.
We must act now to take back our liberties, our dignity, and our good name in the world; it is the most important cause of this age. If 2008 leaves us with Giuliani, Hillary, McCain, Obama, Romney, or any of their ilk in office, we will see more of the same and worse, and it will be too late. It will be too late to restore the freedoms that have been stolen from us. 2012 will come and go, and the robbery of the patriot act and the legacy of this administration's unprecedented executive power grab will be solidified in our nation's history and in the public conscience.
If you do not act now, what has been taken from us will never be restored, and your children's children will look back upon this generation, if there is freedom enough to look at all, as the generation that finally lost it all, lost that for which the blood of countless patriots was shed, and November 4th 2008 as the day the Republic finally died.
It is only the office of President of the United States of America that can save us from this fate. And in this battle, Freedom has one final front. Your help is urgently needed this very week. Is your freedom worth even an hour of your time? Now is your opportunity to prove it. You must sign up today. Mission information will be emailed to you directly. http://www.ronpaul2008.com/events/iowa-straw-poll/
Slashdot Mirror
Successful resource management is about building and understanding relationships. If you are looking for a slogan, that is it.
It's about building, mediating, and influencing relationships, both with and between others, and leveraging those relationships to solve business problems.
If you have a difficult time emotionally understanding and relating to the people working with and for you, you will have a difficult time becoming a successful resource manager. You need to understand their goals. You need to understand what motivates them. You need to understand and adapt to the dynamics of the relationship they want to have with you!
"The goal here is not to have sensible law, it's to have laws that you can't avoid breaking. i.e. you're instantly guilty."
...I'm, ...astonished.
"The only real solution is to become the people writing the laws. Support your local pirate party, I guess."
That's just,
You could, you know..., not participate in the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials?
How hard is that? Stop intentionally participating in the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials. Don't push the button to connect to that torrent. Don't click the torrent link.
If these simple, basic acts of self control are truly so difficult for you, I suggest you seek psychiatric help immediately.
Your statements are not reasoned. They are not radical. They are the statements of a 12 year old child who feels he is entitled to take what he wants and do as he pleases without regard for the rule of law and the rest of society.
Just grow up. It's that simple. Grow up and take responsibility for your choices and actions.
...was not President!
"Moral victors are those trying to gain their independence from an occupying force."
Don't go anywhere. I'll go round up my Native American buddies. We'll swing by your place first thing Monday.
We'd like our land back, thank you. It's time to end the illegal occupation.
"But only one side is carrying on a 40 year illegal occupation."
Yes, and we're carrying on a 230+ year illegal occupation of British land.
And we're carrying on a 500 year illegal occupation of Native American land.
Are you ready to turn your home back over to Joe Cherokee? Do you think you have an ethical obligation to? I didn't think so.
If you're not, I suggest you show yourself the door.
And not living in North America doesn't get you anywhere I'm afraid. It's just a matter of how far back you want to go.
"They're worried that these vehicles have already been, or could be, transported inside the United States to be used in an attack, although there is no proof that this has happened."
i n570588.shtml
And note how the Fox News article concedes in the first full paragraph that there is no proof whatsoever that this is happening, but then goes on for another eighteen paragraphs quoting administration sources telling us how deadly afraid we should be of this impending attack.
Stories about the unmanned drones were all over; this wasn't just Fox News.
And I'll remind you, when we got over there we found what we should have known all along: there was no weaponization of unmanned drones whatsoever, certainly not WMDs, they were primitive short range, essentially big model airplanes.
And we also found out in the aftermath that the Air Force analysts had been telling us all long that these unmanned vehicles posed no threat to us or Iraq's neighbors.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/28/iraq/ma
NEVER AGAIN
The only way you can be sure is to register and vote in the primaries NOW for a candidate who has stood up against the war from the start, and rejects warmongering and militarism in all its forms. That isn't Hillary. That isn't Giuliani. That isn't Obama. That isn't Romney or McCain or Thompson. But if you don't act now, two of those will be your only choices.
I have only one thing to say to all you naysayers and administration fanbois: Oh how easily we forget.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,79450,00.html
Fox News
February 24th, 2003
Iraqi Drones May Target U.S. Cities
WASHINGTON -- Iraq could be planning a chemical or biological attack on American cities through the use of remote-controlled "drone" planes equipped with GPS tracking maps, according to U.S. intelligence.
The information about Iraq's unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program has caused a "real concern" among defense personnel, senior U.S. officials tell Fox News. They're worried that these vehicles have already been, or could be, transported inside the United States to be used in an attack, although there is no proof that this has happened.
Secretary of State Colin Powell showed a picture of a small drone plane during his presentation to the U.N. Security Council earlier this month.
"UAVs outfitted with spray tanks constitute an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons," Powell said during his speech. "Iraq could use these small UAVs, which have a wingspan of only a few meters, to deliver biological agents to its neighbors or, if transported, to other countries, including the United States.
[...]
Fool me once once, shame on me, fool me twice, sham... WILL NOT BE FOOLED AGAIN.
"What's your point? There is substantial data supporting both and thus far no data that would rule out the possibility of either. Unlike creationism both could theoretically be disproven given continued observation. Oh wait, you must be one of those crackpots who somehow thinks science is a field for people with CLOSED minds that already believe they know the answers to the big questions."
There is no known scientific evidence of ESP and "paranormal activity".
If you believe you can provide scientific evidence of such powers, Mr Randi stands ready with your check for $1,000,000 (http://www.randi.org/).
Should I tell him to anticipate correspondence from a Mr. "shaitand"?
I didn't think so.
Now why don't you go back to the Neighborhood of Make-believe and play? I believe I hear the trolly coming 'round.
"taking advantage of someone else's inability (read: apathy) towards securing their home network"
This is an awfully arrogant assumption, and hopefully sheds some light on why many Slashdot commentors apparently see nothing wrong with this practice.
How would you, you should ask, tell inability from apathy? What if the person running the router really does not know how to secure it? I know plenty of people who have no clue at all how to secure their wireless routers. Do you think that if they knew you were using it they would be alright with that? That doesn't seem very unlikely.
"Mrs. Smith, we found this man outside your house access your home wireless network." And you expect us to believe Mrs. Smith would be fine with this and tell the officers to let the creepy guy parked outside her home continue? Seriously. That's just bullshit and you know it.
It's no wonder we keep seeing more legislation cracking down on these sorts of activities. It's precisely because people don't accept them, and precisely because they don't know how to protect themselves against them.
It isn't theft, but it is ethically analogous to trespassing in an unlocked house or on unfenced property; let me tell you why.
This wireless internet use has at least the following ethically significant properties:
- The resource owner paid and contracted for the resource
- The access is unauthorized by the resource owner and is not authorized by any other agreement
- The access is undesired by the resource owner
- The access violates the owner's expectation to exclusive use of the resource
- The resource is limited at any point in time - unauthorized access deprives the owner of concurrent use of some part of what he or she has paid or contracted for
- The resource is effectively self-replenishing - unauthorized access does not deprive the owner of full and exclusive access once the unauthorized access has terminated
Even in the best case in which the authorized user uses the resource only when the the resource owner is away from home and not using it, the situation is still ethically analogous to the following activity that most would agree is clearly unethical:
Entering a private unfenced property while the owner is away and sitting down in a vacant yard chair to enjoy the nice view afforded from the property.
The owner of the property may never know of the trespasser. The trespasser leaves few if any traces. The trespasser's use of the resource never deprives the owner's use of the resource.
And yet most people would certainly consider this use to be unethical, at least in a petty sense. Clearly it is within the rights of the property owner to have this activity stopped. And clearly it is within the rights of the rest of the property owners in the community to have the expectation that an individual who trespass on their property ought to be punished or corrected by the legal system in place.
Now, if the trespasser did not know that he was committing the act - not that he did not know it was wrong - such as if his computer connected without his knowledge, that would be a fair defense, but that is not the case here.
Knowing how DHCP and SSID broadcast work doesn't make you immune to the law of the land, and it shouldn't.
This is sort of like when some technology guys decides that if we can just get computers running Linux into sub-Saharan Africa, we'll save the world.
If your grandmother is on a respirator, the last thing she needs is for someone to interrogate her. She's your grandmother, not a dying secret agent.
Listen, just be with her where she can see you. Read a book. Hold her hand. Talk gently to her. Tell her that you're there. Tell her who is in the room with her. Tell her who is coming to see her. Tell her about news in the family. Tell her what your children have been up to.
You know, things people have done for thousands of years to comfort their loved ones who have fallen ill?
Turn off your ipod and your blackberry and think a little, man. Technology may not cause cancer, but apparently it has an affect on common sense.
It is critically important that every American understand what is happening here. The TSA is a government agency. This is not "vote with your dollars" and choose a different airline. This is your federal government detaining and searching you based on how you feel about them. Your government has announced it reserves the right to detain and search you for any reason whatsoever, including bearing the expression of one who holds that same government and its agents, for these very practices, in utter contempt.
And through your hard earned tax dollars you are funding them and their cronies to do this to you. As much as 60% of your working life will be directly to fund the government that is doing this to you, that government whose agents are shouting and you with a boot on your head, with your trousers dropped, and an agent's cold hand - big brother's hand - telling you it is for your own good, that if you would only fall in line they would not have to do this.
But don't worry, so long as you smile, keep your mouth shut, and fall in line, you won't be bothered, citizen.
It is only a matter of time if we do not dramatically reverse course now. If this presidential election comes down to a race between Hillary or Obama and Giuliani, Thompson, or Romney, the decline will only accelerate. If we do not reverse course now, in 8 years we will very likely have passed the point of no return, where these policies are accepted by the populous, where the police state propaganda has thoroughly subdued them, and we will be unable to rouse them to fight.
To avoid this fate you must act now. Get behind a candidate who you can count on not to sell us out to the military industrial complex, who you can count on to wrest us free from the interests of large bankers and financial institutions, who you can count on to defend the letter of the Constitution in its original spirit, for which the blood of many patriots was shed.
And that doesn't mean just posting on internet forums. That means volunteering to travel to, to write to, and to call citizens in the primary states. If we do not get wins for these candidates in the primaries, it will be as good as lost. Now is the time to act to defend your freedom, or you will soon find it has been taken from you and it will be too late. http://www.ronpaul2008.com/
This unique life form is now gone forever. The lessons we could learn by studying it are now lost to eternity. Its unique role in the ecosystem is forever lost.
We destroyed it. We literally choked the life out of it.
Who are we to do this? Are we so confident in our superiority as to believe that a little temporary convenience to dump toxic industrial wastes is worth the complete loss of this life form?
We were up in arms when a islamic government destroyed man made statues of buddha merely hundreds of years old, and yet we as a world sat quietly as a life form 20 million years old was forever wiped from the universe?
I am ashamed to be a human being. If another being or race came to earth and looked down at what we have done with our world and to one another, I would expect them to treat us no better than we have treated this defenseless creature. We are parasites, rotting away the life of a beautiful and wondrous creation.
"this could supposedly affect 8.5M players even tho most estimates of actual hard core players in the system are in the 5 to low 6 figure range"
Oh give it the fuck up already. It was just 2 weeks ago we covered this. Second Life does not have 8.5M active subscribers. It does not have 5-6M active subscribers. IT DOESN'T HAVE HALF THAT.
Second Life has 20-30,000 active subscribers, THAT IS ALL.
I'm so goddamn sick of this media blitz on Slashdot by Second Life's lame fanbois. You're damn right this is inflammatory, because I and a good number of the rest of the readers here are sick and tired of seeing these folks abuse Slashdot with their little fake media drama, as often as several times a week, to benefit the bottom line of Linden Labs.
At least give us someway to filter these stories out. People who want to stay abreast of the latest little events in this insignificant virtual "meeting place" can read the fan sites instead; I'm sure they do.
"Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people."
Responding to this quote, while from the research that has been done happiness does not seem to be significantly a function of wealth or life expectancy, concluding from this to minimize the very real hardships of poverty reduces the human experience to utilitarianism.
I feel fairly confident in saying that the life I am privileged to is in many ways qualitatively better - though not more valuable - than the life of a member of a hunter gatherer society. How can I make this comparison? On the premise that if neutrally presented with the opportunity to benefit from many of the amenities and conveniences my life affords me, most hunter gatherers would accept the opportunity to avail themselves of these. This to me seems like the appropriate way to make this comparison.
And this doesn't mean they would abandon their traditions and beliefs, and doesn't mean they would leave their land.
It's simply that I surmise most would prefer to have access to modern medicine, to sanitized water, to refrigeration, to vaccinations, than to not. Now, this may not be correct, but it certainly seems to me to be a reasonable, probable hypothesis, and I suspect many would agree.
Although I agree with you that free time is a form of wealth.
According to the article, as a result of the rich reproducing more successfully than the poor and replacing the poor in the jobs and communities, says the author, "Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving,"
In other words, the poor are poor because they are irrational and lazy and passed these values onto their children.
More, he is suggesting not only have these values been passed from rich people in one generation to the next, but in fact that as a result of this period of the rich being overwhelmingly more successful in procreating, rapid biological evolutionary processes have produced genetic advantages in these societies that underscore purely social evolution.
In other words, not only are the poor poor because they are irrational and lazy, but also because their are genetically inferior to their rich masters.
Therefore - and this is suggested later in the article - the reason that today's third world countries have not experienced industrial revolution and modernizations essentially amounts to the following: 1) their peoples are lazy and irrational, and 2) they do not have access to the superior rich genetic lineage that underscored the industrial revolution in England.
Suffice it to say, the primary criticisms of the author's hypotheses by other scientists and historians is the utter lack of convincing and systematic evidence.
"If we charge you directly for your risk, we are creating no economic benefit. It just means that in the future, I'll have to bear the entire cost of my cancer treatments."
Your situation is a little different, isn't it? You have a pre-existing condition. Pre-existing condition coverage controversy has been around for a long time.
Your cancer presumably wasn't predictable. The average joe isn't paying a high premium because you might get cancer, he is paying a high premium because he might get cancer himself, or get hit by a car or any of the many ways people become seriously injured or ill that will become a tremendous cost to the insurance company.
There will also always be a market for insurance coverage that will not be reduced or reevaluated in light of life events. One of the reasons that people have insurance in the first place is so that if they do get, say, cancer, they will have coverage. So long as there are other people who want this sort of unconditional coverage, someone who wants this coverage will be able to buy into this pool and reduce their individual risk just as they do now.
"Instead, employer sponsored group health plans are a form of socialized medicine, but implemented under a private feudal system."
Socialized Medicine means state run health care, nothing more. To the extent that employers receive tax breaks for sponsoring employee health plans, perhaps these plans could be considered socialized (again, to that extent), but this isn't what you are talking about.
You are suggesting that due simply to the structure of these employer sponsored health plans, they warrant being termed socialized, socialized medicine. But this is clearly false. No state, no socialized medicine, not by the clear understanding of the term in modern day policy discourse.
Employer sponsored health plans are thoroughly capitalist entities. They exist because there is market demand for them. You are free to opt in or out of them. And when you do opt out, you do not pay for them.
And there is plenty of competition. Benefits packages are oftentimes the primary consideration of an employee considering employment opportunities. Not only is there competition across insurance companies and across employers, there is also competition across plans. Every employer I have worked for has offered a range of plans, with premium, coverage, and deductable packages to suit every employee situation.
You pay the premiums you do not because your fellow plan participants are fat, or whatever it is you think, but because it truly is enormously costly to provide you essentially unlimited medical care should you be in an accident. And if you get hit by a car walking across the street to lunch, or develop cancer, your BMI or lifestyle will have essentially no affect on the tremendous expense you will be to the insurance company.
You'll have a better appreciation for how insurance works once you've spent some time in an ER or ICU on a ventilator at tens of thousands of dollars a day. And unless you intend to pay out of pocket or decline treatment, you had better have insurance, because nice as I may be, I'd rather not pay for your medical care in tax dollars just so you can save a few bucks every paycheck.
"If we were spending this money on actual threat priorities, we'd be spending it getting out of the crosshairs of foreign energy suppliers."
But the money being spent on this research and all active missile defense research absolutely pales in comparison to what we are spending in Iraq. Yes, we should get out of Iraq - out of the "crosshairs of foreign energy supplies" - but that doesn't mean we can't also continue to pursue missile defense technologies, and secure our borders while we're at it.
In my opinion missile defense is precisely the sort of national security policy that should be supported by someone interested in limited government or interested in limiting U.S. imperialism around the world.
If we have a mature, comprehensive air and space defense solution, we don't have to worry about policing the world, and we don't have to have talk about nuclear first strikes against sovereign nations.
Another reason to prefer many junior developers is that junior developers scale much more cost effectively. On many large internal projects, there is a large amount of work that is both not technically very challenging and yet not automatable. Coding data collection screens, implementing batch processing routines, specifying reports. All of these tasks are time consuming, but none of them are substantially skill-dependent; they are busy work.
This has the effect that "uber" (highly skilled) programmers do not complete the tasks in substantially less time than standard-fare programmers. However, if you follow the author's suggestions, you will still be paying your uber programmers uber salaries to perform this work. But even though they are completing the work only 5-10% faster than standard-fare programmers, you are still paying them 20-50% more.
Had you instead built your organization around a large, dynamic, pluggable pool of junior or standard-fare programmers, you would be able to complete the work at a significant cost savings.
Domain knowledge is the primary difference between a 1 day LOE and a 1 week LOE, not programming "skill".
There is no class of general "uber" programmer that can be brought on to an arbitrary company's internal development project and hit the ground running at a pace 10 or even 2 times that of the standard-fare developers already on the project. This is a complete myth.
However, the domain knowledge gap can in most cases be narrowed very cost effectively through knowledge transfer, training, and tools.
If you skimp on resourcing and experience anywhere in your development organization, it should be on programmers. Inexperienced and unskilled programmers can be compensated for effectively through targeted specification, management, and quality assurance processes. The key is to have processes in place to identify and rectify programmer failure early and often.
Computer programming isn't rocket science, it's bridge building. You have planners and you have builders. Builders pour cement and put rivets in place, and there are processes in place to identify, rectify, and robustly handle individual builder error. Bridges do not arbitrarily drop cars off into the river below due to individual builder error, and neither should software programs crash due to individual programmer error.
"Yeah, that's always been the problem with democracy. Damn government does what the people want rather than doing the *right* thing."
That's why the founders of this nation had the foresight to establish a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy.
Democracy implies majority rule. Majority rule is mob rule. One of their chief concerns was to protect the rights of minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
Between New Deal Democrats AND Republicans, and activist courts, unfortunately those protections have largely fallen by the wayside.
Though it's not fair to say that the government does what the people want, when most people don't vote, and most of those who do vote aren't informed. The government doesn't do what the people wants. The government does what the people LET IT get away with.
"We've had FISA for years and its restrictions are so lax - allowing even for warrants after the fact - that any protest of it can't be for good reason."
0 070731.html).
Well said, and it helps to know that freedom defending organizations like the ACLU echo this sentiment (http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/31144res2
"There seems to be a lot of ignorance and hyperbole on slashdot regarding FISA.
0 70731.html.
First, the basics of "FISA". FISA is a statue meant to govern how and when government agencies may gather FOREIGN intelligence. FISA warrants are warrants issued by FISA-established courts authorizing the government to wiretap or survey individuals or phone numbers. A FISA warrant cannot be issued on domestic communications, since American residents and citizens are (yes, still) covered by the United States Constitution's protection against unreasonable search and seizure."
Yes there is, and sellouts like you are peddling an awful lot of it.
I'm sorry, but given the choice I'm going to have to stand with the ACLU on this, and I would encourage others to do the same http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/31144res20
It's also interesting that this is Mr. Nessunolmp's first post on Slashdot.
What more evidence do we need? Democrats were swept into power on the promise to get us out of Iraq, to restore our liberties that they and their Republican colleagues sold out wholesale after 9/11, and to bring this corrupt administration to justice.
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The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
We are still in Iraq and there is no end in sight. Rather than having the backbone to bringing the measure to withdraw back to the floor again and again to push it through, and continue to push their campaign promises in the media, they have effectively given up on the issue, whining to their supporters and the media that it is too hard.
And now these Democrats are actively working with this administration, the same administration they told us is the most corrupt and secretive in history, to sell out yet more of our freedoms, to give yet more power to this president and the executive branch.
They are, our representatives, nearly every one of them, pathetic, spineless, schmucks. They have betrayed us all once again.
And it should come as no surprise, because these are the same Democrats and Republicans who sold us out by writing the president a blank check in Iraq. The same Democrats and Republicans who sold out our liberties by signing onto the biggest forfeiture of our liberties since the establishment of this nation. The same Democrats and Republicans who proudly signed the bill granting retroactive immunity to prosecution for every military and government agent who has tortured, kidnapped, and committed atrocities in our name.
We must act now to take back our liberties, our dignity, and our good name in the world; it is the most important cause of this age. If 2008 leaves us with Giuliani, Hillary, McCain, Obama, Romney, or any of their ilk in office, we will see more of the same and worse, and it will be too late. It will be too late to restore the freedoms that have been stolen from us. 2012 will come and go, and the robbery of the patriot act and the legacy of this administration's unprecedented executive power grab will be solidified in our nation's history and in the public conscience.
If you do not act now, what has been taken from us will never be restored, and your children's children will look back upon this generation, if there is freedom enough to look at all, as the generation that finally lost it all, lost that for which the blood of countless patriots was shed, and November 4th 2008 as the day the Republic finally died.
It is only the office of President of the United States of America that can save us from this fate. And in this battle, Freedom has one final front. Your help is urgently needed this very week. Is your freedom worth even an hour of your time? Now is your opportunity to prove it. You must sign up today. Mission information will be emailed to you directly. http://www.ronpaul2008.com/events/iowa-straw-poll