I've posted plenty of pictures of myself online, but never my real name. Why? Because search algorithms for pictures are nowhere near the effectiveness of text search algorithms. This means that people either stumble across pictures of me (not effective to do any type of tracking), or already know what I look like.
Phone books are nothing like having access to facebook entries, myspace profiles or any similar social networking data. Furthermore, I know that phone book data is in phone books. If I mark facebook data as hidden, I expect it to stay hidden, and not to be available to the first yahoo who claims to be part of some sooopasecrit agency. Apparently, that's not the case, and the reason why this is news. And also the reason why I limit the personal info that I put out there.
One word: undernet. In other words, people will still connect to a worldwide and unregulated network. But it will be through private proxies, the traffic will be encrypted and a good chunk of the routes will run through personal WiFi (or WiMax, if that ever comes to pass) links. And it will be just as chaotic as the old internet, with performance that is just as sucky. The rest will be like XBox Live or AOL - lots of pretty stuff that's easily accessible, and where you get billed 80 cents everytime you look at anything.
The internet won't go away. It will simply move underground.
I worked phone support for a software company for a while. We get all kinds of calls - anything from how do I login to the app to I don't believe the data your app is showing me to it's just broken. One day, my coworker gets a call from someone who obviously is facing some problem and wants it to be taken care of. After about a 2 minute session of standard Question and Answer, my coworker goes silent, puts the guy on hold for a short time, then continues. When he finally hangs up, I ask him what happened. Here's apparently how the conversation went:
Coworker: tell me what's happening. Caller: It's broken, I need it fixed. Coworker: ok, so what is the problem. Caller: It doesn't matter, just open the ticket. Coworker: I need to know what's wrong before I can open the ticket. Caller (screaming now): Do you know what your purpose in life is???? Coworker: Ummmmmmm..... Caller: Your purpose in life is to open this ticket for me!!
And they say there is no such thing as workplace abuse.
What you forgot when you screamed at him was that you were probably the first caller in about 100 who knew what an IP address was. I worked support for a while, and the one thing I learned was to never assume that the caller did or knew anything. When I did, a simple problem took forever to troubleshoot - because I failed to ask the obvious question, and assumed the problem was elsewhere.
This is actually serious business. Several companies have had these informal internal investigations turn into full-fledged audits by the SEC. Furthermore, a number of companies (2 that I remember off the top of my head, and more that are lurking) deemed it necessary to fire their entire executive staff over this stuff.
Backdating options is serious business, as it conflicts with a number of SEC regulations. Think about it - it's all the advantages of stock, without any of its drawbacks.
Apple might be starting this as an internal investigation, but I'd watch this carefully to see how this pans out. Depending on how egregious Apple was with its back dating, consequences might be as benign as restating some earnings to a delisting and a wholesale firing of executives, along with a massive drop in stock price. Time to sell Apple.
Me, Mr. Average Joe, lives on a diet of work, leisure, and sleep.
Here's a suggestion: stop being content being an average joe, and live on a varied diet of work, leisure, sleep, news, adventure (a trip to the local park qualifies), curiosity, sillyness, science, arts, sports..... you get the idea. You don't have to do everything in the order you mentioned. Things can happen simultaneously. Take advantage of that.
And you also don't have to change the world in step 1. Start small. Change the world for someone you know by taking them to a movie they would have never gone to on their own. Go from there.
Bottom line: you are what you settle for. Yes, there are some intrinsic limitations to what you can do on your own, but you'll never find them if you don't test them.
CO2 has been proven to be directly correlated to temperature increases. There's a theory (I'm sure you've heard of green house gases, yes?), a working model, and data that fits the theory. Overwhelmingly. I'm sorry that you're not following the global warming debate, but frankly, that's your issue, not mine.
Regarding your prediction of stable CO2 levels - that'd be a dramatic improvement over the current situation, which forecasts (and currently is) about 7% yearly growth in the best cases where the countries in question are actually doing something. And this is not going to happen unless people drastically change their habits and their demands.
Finally, dealing with climate change will be a LOT harder than trying to stop it or reverse it. The principal mechanism of global warming is known (green house gases, and primarily CO2). The mechanism through which global warming can at least be mitigated is well known. On the other hand, odds-on scenarios of what could happen during the next 50 years of current CO2 increase are dreadfully expensive and disruptive. It will cost me less to cut back on my energy expenses than it will cost me to accomodate the global economic crash that will follow any hypothetical large-scale climatological changes.
Your little snippet was not hard reality - it was little more than smug justification of why it's ok to continue with the current course. It might be the more probably outcome, but self-fulfilling prophecies are too easy to put forward to consider them serious debate.
Air and water pollution might be a large problem as well (and it certainly isn't a hidden problem - ask France), but that doesn't mean that you can't deal with both. Especially since the solution for one might be the solution for the other.
Actually, if you'd read the papers put out by the climatologists, there's plenty of ways things can go wrong. The Atlantic current could not slow down. Temperatures could stop going up. Arctic ice sheets could stop melting. The point is, there are plenty of specific predictions that involve increases and decreases of temperatures. All of which have happened. They might sound like they'd be right if temperatures *either* go up or down, but they do that only if you lop off the critical parts that specify where and when these things should happen.
But go ahead, continue with the ignorance. I hear the call centers in India need more people like you.
Taking your email to heart, I wrote as well. Here's my email:
Hi Michele,
I believe others have already written in support of your refusal to hand over library records without proper warrants or subpoenas being presented. I'd just like to point that in case you are suspended without pay, I (and I'm sure others) would be more than happy to contribute to any fund that you might set up to help you through that time frame.
I believe that you are defending a core principle of American Values, and would be honored to help you through any hard ship your employers might be causing you.
I just hope that I really wouldn't be the only to contribute to any type of emergency fund she opens up.:)
Hey - it's a new angle from the "let's-do-nothing-crowd"! Now we're gonna hear how global warming is really not that bad. Cuz, you know, we'll get some new farmland in Canada. And the Northwest passage will open. And Siberia might actually become livable.
Allright. Now that Siberia is warm and cozy, Canada's lost its mosquitoes and bears that make life so dangerous there and Tibet can grow tulips, let's examine what has to happen for these benefits to be realized. People have to move there. People have to start new lives there. New infrastructure has to be built to accomodate people where people didn't used to live. Migration to these new places means that other places slowly atrophy. All of this costs money. Lots of money. Like trillions of dollars. Not to mention that while some places get better, others get worse. The midwest will become another desert. The Sahara will engulf more countries. Rain forests will cease to be rain forests. Places that might become new rainforests won't be for centuries.
So yes, there'll be benefits to global warming. Yes, it's futile to try to balance a complex system. But it's idiotic to argue that because you can't balance it, you can just whack it with a bat a few times. Or that benefits that will be accrued a long time in the future somehow offset immediate disasters, mass migrations and changes in living conditions.
Just because something doesn't matter on a geological scale doesn't mean you should ignore it. We might just be day-flies to the Rockies and Himalayas, but that just means we need to be even more careful not to change things that could affect a day in the life of a mountain.
Preventing change is not about saving mother earth. Preventing change is about safeguarding our (your, mine, everyone's) current standard of living.
Great. Wonderful. So everytime you can't make something perfect, you give up? Let me guess - because you couldn't get perfect scores on your SATs, you didn't take them either, right? Because you couldn't create the next Mona Lisa, you never drew a doodle. And because you probably were never going to win the NBA championship, you never played a game of pickup ball either.
Fuck. The only people who piss me off more than the head-in-the-sand crowd are the lazy asses who have elevated nihilism to the perfect excuse to never do anything.
Newsflash - if all developed countries cease their CO2 emissions, CO2 emmissions will drop by about 70%. You're telling me that that's not a worthwhile goal? Get off your ass and do something. Even if it's just not driving to your mailbox. CO2 emissions will drop - and maybe just enough to make some difference. If nothing else, it'll mean you did your part.
Soooo...... are you gonna explain why localized cooling has nothing to do with global warming, or are you just going to make funny posts about how things are always simple and straightforward? Didn't think so.
Do a little bit of googling about sexual abuse of minors. There's all kinds of places that have these statistics (I believe 70% or so of minors that were abused were abused either by immediate relatives or very close friends of the family). Note that this statistics applies to minors, especially pre-teens, not adults.
And if you looked at the actual data, the vast majority of the revenue and of the profit was generated by the pachinko business. SegaSammy is a pachinko developer first, a videogame developer second.
Another differentiation is management. Do you want to install new agents on every new machine in your infrastructure? Unless of course you're just talking about network devices, for which SNMP is fine.
Since I install monitoring for a while, I have a question for you - how do you deal with new devices coming onboard?
Here's the other question: how fast do you need your alert? Keep in mind that before an alert gets acted upon, it has to be received, read and investigated.
These are the two areas where agent-less monitoring really shines, and I'm curious what you think of the tradeoffs here.
You're making my point for me. A) he's a comedian. Like George Carlin or Carlos Mencia, they overstate their case to make a point. They know it's preposterous, we know it's preposterous, and we laugh about it. B) If you compare his political diatribes with the speeches of some (elected) European politicians, he actually comes across of fairly center.
The fact that you bring him up as a possible counter troll to Ann Coulter shows just how far on the right the US sits.
You missed one requirement (actually, two) that makes Ann Coulter successful in that area. The requirement is that speech that appears in books, on television or radio has inherently more value and more weight than what your neighbor says. Once that goes out the window, there is no way to move the debate in a particular direction by simply having "anchor trolls". The second requirement is that people don't actually recoil in horror at the statements. The sad truth is that the US is a country with fascist undertones, and has more in common with some fascist dictatorships than it has with a lot of democracies. This means that there is no way to have a left-leaning anchor troll - that would have to be a communist, and we all know what happens to communists here.
I wouldn't so much say that Coulter is shifting the debate to the right - I'd say she is merely exposing sentiments that are already part of the national undercurrent. Which is far scarier.
In other words, she's an intellectual prostitute. Wonderful. I know a few people like that. And I'm convinced the world would be better off if they would just slink back to the primordial ooze they came from.
Clapclapclap! And this, folks, is why you don't want to piss of your employees. Especially the smart ones. They'll start to do things the way they are told to do them, instead of how they are supposed to do them.
It beats the hell out of me why some companies come up with such a hare-brained idea - other than the people who implement this never actually done a day of real work (MBA grads, I'm looking at you) and have no idea how badly they depend on the good will of the grunts.
I'll save your post as a reminder, just in case my company decides to pull the same stunt.
Yup. I actually know some people exactly like that. Doesn't mean it's right or how it should be done. The worst thing is - this stuff is common knowledge among psychiatrists, psychologists and brain researchers. The only people who don't know this are politicians funding detox centers and special interests groups who run these centers.
Media Connect is not a huge app full of bloatware that changes fundamental dlls and registry entries on my laptop? Mmhh. Color me surprised. I didn't expect that from MS. I'll look some more into this.... though it still means that I have to have the laptop on to do the streaming. But at least it's a good stopgap measure.
... they plan on replacing on addiction with another. Good job!
You don't cure addiction by simply replacing the means through which the adrenaline rush is achieved. You cure it (or at least mitigate its negative impact) by improving the person's coping mechanisms. Everything else is snake oil.
Slashdot Mirror
I've posted plenty of pictures of myself online, but never my real name. Why? Because search algorithms for pictures are nowhere near the effectiveness of text search algorithms. This means that people either stumble across pictures of me (not effective to do any type of tracking), or already know what I look like.
Phone books are nothing like having access to facebook entries, myspace profiles or any similar social networking data. Furthermore, I know that phone book data is in phone books. If I mark facebook data as hidden, I expect it to stay hidden, and not to be available to the first yahoo who claims to be part of some sooopasecrit agency. Apparently, that's not the case, and the reason why this is news. And also the reason why I limit the personal info that I put out there.
One word: undernet. In other words, people will still connect to a worldwide and unregulated network. But it will be through private proxies, the traffic will be encrypted and a good chunk of the routes will run through personal WiFi (or WiMax, if that ever comes to pass) links. And it will be just as chaotic as the old internet, with performance that is just as sucky. The rest will be like XBox Live or AOL - lots of pretty stuff that's easily accessible, and where you get billed 80 cents everytime you look at anything.
The internet won't go away. It will simply move underground.
I worked phone support for a software company for a while. We get all kinds of calls - anything from how do I login to the app to I don't believe the data your app is showing me to it's just broken. One day, my coworker gets a call from someone who obviously is facing some problem and wants it to be taken care of. After about a 2 minute session of standard Question and Answer, my coworker goes silent, puts the guy on hold for a short time, then continues. When he finally hangs up, I ask him what happened. Here's apparently how the conversation went:
Coworker: tell me what's happening.
Caller: It's broken, I need it fixed.
Coworker: ok, so what is the problem.
Caller: It doesn't matter, just open the ticket.
Coworker: I need to know what's wrong before I can open the ticket.
Caller (screaming now): Do you know what your purpose in life is????
Coworker: Ummmmmmm.....
Caller: Your purpose in life is to open this ticket for me!!
And they say there is no such thing as workplace abuse.
What you forgot when you screamed at him was that you were probably the first caller in about 100 who knew what an IP address was. I worked support for a while, and the one thing I learned was to never assume that the caller did or knew anything. When I did, a simple problem took forever to troubleshoot - because I failed to ask the obvious question, and assumed the problem was elsewhere.
This is actually serious business. Several companies have had these informal internal investigations turn into full-fledged audits by the SEC. Furthermore, a number of companies (2 that I remember off the top of my head, and more that are lurking) deemed it necessary to fire their entire executive staff over this stuff.
Backdating options is serious business, as it conflicts with a number of SEC regulations. Think about it - it's all the advantages of stock, without any of its drawbacks.
Apple might be starting this as an internal investigation, but I'd watch this carefully to see how this pans out. Depending on how egregious Apple was with its back dating, consequences might be as benign as restating some earnings to a delisting and a wholesale firing of executives, along with a massive drop in stock price. Time to sell Apple.
Here's a suggestion: stop being content being an average joe, and live on a varied diet of work, leisure, sleep, news, adventure (a trip to the local park qualifies), curiosity, sillyness, science, arts, sports..... you get the idea. You don't have to do everything in the order you mentioned. Things can happen simultaneously. Take advantage of that.
And you also don't have to change the world in step 1. Start small. Change the world for someone you know by taking them to a movie they would have never gone to on their own. Go from there.
Bottom line: you are what you settle for. Yes, there are some intrinsic limitations to what you can do on your own, but you'll never find them if you don't test them.
CO2 has been proven to be directly correlated to temperature increases. There's a theory (I'm sure you've heard of green house gases, yes?), a working model, and data that fits the theory. Overwhelmingly. I'm sorry that you're not following the global warming debate, but frankly, that's your issue, not mine.
Regarding your prediction of stable CO2 levels - that'd be a dramatic improvement over the current situation, which forecasts (and currently is) about 7% yearly growth in the best cases where the countries in question are actually doing something. And this is not going to happen unless people drastically change their habits and their demands.
Finally, dealing with climate change will be a LOT harder than trying to stop it or reverse it. The principal mechanism of global warming is known (green house gases, and primarily CO2). The mechanism through which global warming can at least be mitigated is well known. On the other hand, odds-on scenarios of what could happen during the next 50 years of current CO2 increase are dreadfully expensive and disruptive. It will cost me less to cut back on my energy expenses than it will cost me to accomodate the global economic crash that will follow any hypothetical large-scale climatological changes.
Your little snippet was not hard reality - it was little more than smug justification of why it's ok to continue with the current course. It might be the more probably outcome, but self-fulfilling prophecies are too easy to put forward to consider them serious debate.
Air and water pollution might be a large problem as well (and it certainly isn't a hidden problem - ask France), but that doesn't mean that you can't deal with both. Especially since the solution for one might be the solution for the other.
Actually, if you'd read the papers put out by the climatologists, there's plenty of ways things can go wrong. The Atlantic current could not slow down. Temperatures could stop going up. Arctic ice sheets could stop melting. The point is, there are plenty of specific predictions that involve increases and decreases of temperatures. All of which have happened. They might sound like they'd be right if temperatures *either* go up or down, but they do that only if you lop off the critical parts that specify where and when these things should happen.
But go ahead, continue with the ignorance. I hear the call centers in India need more people like you.
I just hope that I really wouldn't be the only to contribute to any type of emergency fund she opens up.
Hey - it's a new angle from the "let's-do-nothing-crowd"! Now we're gonna hear how global warming is really not that bad. Cuz, you know, we'll get some new farmland in Canada. And the Northwest passage will open. And Siberia might actually become livable.
Allright. Now that Siberia is warm and cozy, Canada's lost its mosquitoes and bears that make life so dangerous there and Tibet can grow tulips, let's examine what has to happen for these benefits to be realized. People have to move there. People have to start new lives there. New infrastructure has to be built to accomodate people where people didn't used to live. Migration to these new places means that other places slowly atrophy. All of this costs money. Lots of money. Like trillions of dollars. Not to mention that while some places get better, others get worse. The midwest will become another desert. The Sahara will engulf more countries. Rain forests will cease to be rain forests. Places that might become new rainforests won't be for centuries.
So yes, there'll be benefits to global warming. Yes, it's futile to try to balance a complex system. But it's idiotic to argue that because you can't balance it, you can just whack it with a bat a few times. Or that benefits that will be accrued a long time in the future somehow offset immediate disasters, mass migrations and changes in living conditions.
Just because something doesn't matter on a geological scale doesn't mean you should ignore it. We might just be day-flies to the Rockies and Himalayas, but that just means we need to be even more careful not to change things that could affect a day in the life of a mountain.
Preventing change is not about saving mother earth. Preventing change is about safeguarding our (your, mine, everyone's) current standard of living.
Great. Wonderful. So everytime you can't make something perfect, you give up? Let me guess - because you couldn't get perfect scores on your SATs, you didn't take them either, right? Because you couldn't create the next Mona Lisa, you never drew a doodle. And because you probably were never going to win the NBA championship, you never played a game of pickup ball either.
Fuck. The only people who piss me off more than the head-in-the-sand crowd are the lazy asses who have elevated nihilism to the perfect excuse to never do anything.
Newsflash - if all developed countries cease their CO2 emissions, CO2 emmissions will drop by about 70%. You're telling me that that's not a worthwhile goal? Get off your ass and do something. Even if it's just not driving to your mailbox. CO2 emissions will drop - and maybe just enough to make some difference. If nothing else, it'll mean you did your part.
Soooo...... are you gonna explain why localized cooling has nothing to do with global warming, or are you just going to make funny posts about how things are always simple and straightforward? Didn't think so.
Do a little bit of googling about sexual abuse of minors. There's all kinds of places that have these statistics (I believe 70% or so of minors that were abused were abused either by immediate relatives or very close friends of the family). Note that this statistics applies to minors, especially pre-teens, not adults.
And if you looked at the actual data, the vast majority of the revenue and of the profit was generated by the pachinko business. SegaSammy is a pachinko developer first, a videogame developer second.
Another differentiation is management. Do you want to install new agents on every new machine in your infrastructure? Unless of course you're just talking about network devices, for which SNMP is fine.
Since I install monitoring for a while, I have a question for you - how do you deal with new devices coming onboard? Here's the other question: how fast do you need your alert? Keep in mind that before an alert gets acted upon, it has to be received, read and investigated. These are the two areas where agent-less monitoring really shines, and I'm curious what you think of the tradeoffs here.
You do realize that the word prostitute does not denote a particular gender? Or were you just channeling Hunter Thompson there?
You're making my point for me. A) he's a comedian. Like George Carlin or Carlos Mencia, they overstate their case to make a point. They know it's preposterous, we know it's preposterous, and we laugh about it. B) If you compare his political diatribes with the speeches of some (elected) European politicians, he actually comes across of fairly center.
The fact that you bring him up as a possible counter troll to Ann Coulter shows just how far on the right the US sits.
You missed one requirement (actually, two) that makes Ann Coulter successful in that area. The requirement is that speech that appears in books, on television or radio has inherently more value and more weight than what your neighbor says. Once that goes out the window, there is no way to move the debate in a particular direction by simply having "anchor trolls". The second requirement is that people don't actually recoil in horror at the statements. The sad truth is that the US is a country with fascist undertones, and has more in common with some fascist dictatorships than it has with a lot of democracies. This means that there is no way to have a left-leaning anchor troll - that would have to be a communist, and we all know what happens to communists here.
I wouldn't so much say that Coulter is shifting the debate to the right - I'd say she is merely exposing sentiments that are already part of the national undercurrent. Which is far scarier.
In other words, she's an intellectual prostitute. Wonderful. I know a few people like that. And I'm convinced the world would be better off if they would just slink back to the primordial ooze they came from.
Clapclapclap! And this, folks, is why you don't want to piss of your employees. Especially the smart ones. They'll start to do things the way they are told to do them, instead of how they are supposed to do them.
It beats the hell out of me why some companies come up with such a hare-brained idea - other than the people who implement this never actually done a day of real work (MBA grads, I'm looking at you) and have no idea how badly they depend on the good will of the grunts.
I'll save your post as a reminder, just in case my company decides to pull the same stunt.
Yup. I actually know some people exactly like that. Doesn't mean it's right or how it should be done. The worst thing is - this stuff is common knowledge among psychiatrists, psychologists and brain researchers. The only people who don't know this are politicians funding detox centers and special interests groups who run these centers.
Media Connect is not a huge app full of bloatware that changes fundamental dlls and registry entries on my laptop? Mmhh. Color me surprised. I didn't expect that from MS. I'll look some more into this.... though it still means that I have to have the laptop on to do the streaming. But at least it's a good stopgap measure.
... they plan on replacing on addiction with another. Good job!
You don't cure addiction by simply replacing the means through which the adrenaline rush is achieved. You cure it (or at least mitigate its negative impact) by improving the person's coping mechanisms. Everything else is snake oil.
Interesting. I wonder why the licensing should be different?