Try being sexually harassed and discriminated against as a white male. Good luck with that - I hope you enjoy having your ass grabbed. Make such a claim and you will have them make a rebuttal that gets accepted as gospel - or you'll just be ignored.
Well, as long as the person doing the grabbing is female, not a relative, and not underage... I for one welcome our ass-grabbing overlords.
No one asked for your respect or even for you to listen.
Then why did you bother responding, if you didn't ask or expect anybody to listen? I simply pointed out that you're indulging in ageism yourself when you start painting youngsters as "people just starting out who think they know everything," and the "rare" young people "who value the experience" you bring to the table.
At 35 you're not young, especially in IT. Your touchy response leads me to believe you may end up in the second group of people who are 15 - 25 years older than you are.
It's kind of funny that you're calling my response touchy when your entire post was lamenting how "nobody values my input because I'm old." In your own words, "Wow, I've been programming longer than you've been alive... surely my experience is worth something, isn't it?"
Length of experience means very little, quality of experience means quite a bit. I've known people who make the same dumb mistakes over and over again, and never learn from it; I've also known people who learn the first time they make a mistake, and have learned quite a bit in just a few short years.
So, if I'm destined for the bitter old guy heap, I guess I'll see you there. I'll be the one wearing the ironic "Dinosaur Jr." nametag, Pops.
and those of us trying to deal with people just starting out who think they know everything.
It's rare to find someone who is young who values the experience we dinosaurs bring to the table.
We've been around long enough to have broken it and fixed it again several times over so don't discount our skills just because we're old enough to be your parents.
Sounds like you're indulging in a bit of casual ageism yourself! Delightful, innit?
I'm 35. I work with lots of guys who are 15-25 years older than me; some are quite bright, excellent problem solvers, and their experience is tremendously valuable. Others are obnoxious, stale, inflexible, cantankerous pains in the ass. I value the former. I despise the latter - not because they're old, it's because they behave as if their age automatically confers upon them some sort of infallibility in all things technical.
Not surprisingly, the latter group are also the ones - in my experience - who like to knock me (with ~12 years in the field) as "young," "unseasoned," and "still wet behind the ears," normally while I'm disagreeing with their approach and outlining why it's bad, and why a different approach would be better. Because apparently nothing supports their point quite as well as waving away technical limitations with "you're young, you can't possible understand." The former group tends to explain their proposals in such a way that it is immediately obvious why their approach is a technically superior alternative, instead of being condescending pricks to everybody with less experience.
"Old enough to be my parent" is a secondhand appeal to authority - a) you're not my parent; b) if that's the only reason I should be listening to you, you probably aren't as good at your job as you've judged yourself. People old enough to be my parents earn my respect when I see that they are genuine authorities in the subject matter, they don't automatically get it by virtue of the fact that they've been sitting around the office longer than me. Just as I don't expect someone to assume I'm correct simply because "my college training is more recent than yours" - if I'm correct, then it doesn't matter if I'm young or old; if I'm incorrect, the same applies.
Ex post facto has to do with criminalizing something, and then going after someone for something they did *before* the act was criminalized. The following would be a violation of that, to illustrate:
1) Paul Allen granted Patent # 500 for Method and apparatus for drawing Mr. Poopypants in your browser window in year 1, a browser-based friend similar to MS Office's Clippy. 2) Patent expires after 20 years. 3) Google implements a browser which draws Mr. Poopypants in your browser window in year 25. 4) US Gov't extends terms of patents to 40 years in year 27. 5) Paul Allen sues Google for violating his patent for drawing Mr. Poopypants in year 30, claiming that Google is in violation of his patent and owes him money, and wins, because Google was found guilty of violating a patent in year 25 when the patent had already expired, and had then subsequently been extended.
(Note: the big losers in all of this are the consumers, whose opportunity to have a friendly and technologically advanced Mr. Poopypants implementation in their browser suffers due to the chilling effect of patent litigation and intellectual property laws.)
This would be an example of an ex post facto laws, and Paul Allen would probably be laughed out of court for trying this sort of strategy.
I don't think terminating them early would qualify as the passage of an ex post facto law, because they are not criminalizing something and then prosecuting you for something that wasn't illegal when you did it. There might be legal challenges to the earlier termination of patents, but they should not be prevented from doing so by the prohibition of ex post facto laws.
If you're big enough that you're not just going to be scaling staff up and immediately down again, hire your people in-house.
I agree. But you also have to consider whether state government pay scales are going to allow you to hire the "best" people for the job onto your staff, and I think largely the answer to that is, "No."
This is essentially "data center design" and building the systems to integrate with a host of state services. When you're talking about a project of that complexity, "Hey, you're an Exchange admin, why don't you build out a Fault tolerant, high availability SAN network for ~20 state agencies when you have a couple spare hours?"
Obviously, the contractors can't work in a bubble - the people who will use the systems have to communicate requirements and use cases to the contractors, which requires good management and oversight, but that's not *necessarily* a fault of the contractor if there isn't proper management and oversight of the project from the government. And again, that has nothing to do with "free market" vs. "government," which was really the point I was getting at in my response.
Does the government not have responsibility to: 1) Manage the delivery and implementation of the contracted items, and 2) Verify that what was contracted for is actually delivered?
Are you actually suggesting that a bunch of "average salary" mid-level IT drones would have done a better job at implementing a high availability / fault tolerant system than a private contractor that specializes in design and implementation of this type of system, and has done it dozens of times?
I think it's far more likely that the contractor chosen (Northrop) was chosen less for their skill in this area, and more based on how much money they spent lobbying somebody.
ZING! You really made a great point there about how government is well-suited to do things like this better than private enterprises - we all know that companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and dozens of Financial Services firms know nothing about operating redundant, fault-tolerant, and high-availability systems! This single case has amply demonstrated that the free market is a sham, and the government should pretty much manage everything.
I suspect this has nothing to do with "government" vs. "free market," and everything to do with "we hired a contractor who didn't know what the fuck they were doing, and so our system has design flaws, and so it crashed. Oh, and we also delivered poorly documented requirements, a shitload of scope creep, and gave preference to some contractors' bids because they were friends with the head of our agency!"
Not surprisingly, this is a risk when the support contract goes to the person with the best connections and lobbying, rather than the best design specs and capability.
The source article is a local news outlet in Charlotte, and the article is posted in the "Local News" section - I would guess, to bolster your point, that the people of Salisbury, NC, have a passing familiarity with who David Hoyle is, and so the party was deemed irrelevant to the story.
Well, I suppose they could try to convince a court that "will not charge royalties for AVC/H.264 encoded video that is made available to view via the Internet for free" *doesn't* mean they will not charge royalties for AVC/H.264 encoded video that is made available to view via the internet, for free, but I think that only works on opposite day.
According to TFA, it covers videos that are "free-to-view over the internet."
Sounds to me like, if I charge people to access my site - where they can then view videos of my cat acting stupid - that is not free to view. If I put it up on youtube, or vimeo, or my own site and don't erect a paywall in front of it, then it would be free-to-view, and thus not require royalties.
How about, instead of asking the kids to "plan the most awful attack they can imagine," you ask them to "think about where our city is vulnerable to attack or disaster today, what those attacks could be, and then talk about how to defend against them to minimize casualties and secure things?"
War-gaming & crisis response planning don't stop with "Your bomb goes off in NYC, 1 million dead!" -- that's where they *start*. If you RTFA, that wasn't what the class assignment was about, it was about "kill as many people as possible, and talk about how you'd do it, and what the effects of your chosen attack would be on the human body."
As a thought experiment, imagine if your country was occupied by foreign troops, and you thought it was your duty to get rid of them by killing both the foreigners and also any "collaborators", with this latter word meaning anyone who was not in your resistance network. Then look up the maquis during WWII.
As a thought experiment, why are the "freedom fighters" in the "resistance network" not asked to develop empathy as well?
Creation takes nothing but time, and time - for those without other marketable skills - has very little value.
You know, I've been waiting 35 years for my hit single to write itself. Still hasn't happened. Are you really suggesting that people who write music have "no marketable skills" that make it worth paying for their time?
Independent artists still need to "market" - they need a web site, they need to pay living expenses, travel costs, and promotional costs to tour. Recording the audio track isn't "that expensive," but "paying rent while you record the audio track" often can be.
Record studios aside - if you enjoy somebody's music, why would you ever think that giving them a couple bucks to support them in continuing to create new music that you'll enjoy isn't worth the cost? I don't understand this mentality, it seems remarkably exploitative.
All of the things you mentioned fit under pretty much any legal definition of "surveillance" I can find:
Surveillance involves using means to monitor a person's actions and interactions.
(http://lawbrain.com/wiki/Surveillance)
A legal investigative process entailing a close observing or listening to a person in effort to gather evidentiary information about the commission of a crime, or lesser improper behavior (as with surveillance of wayward spouse in domestic relations proceedings). Wiretapping, eavesdropping, shadowing, tailing, and electronic observation are all examples of this law-enforcement technique.
(http://www.yourdictionary.com/law/surveillance)
Putting a "tail" on someone doesn't require a warrant, but plenty of other forms of surveillance do. There are limits and oversight already in place to deal with this type of technology, why invent a whole new category of law for something when perfectly applicable law and precedent already exists?
This was in response to the GP's notion that "the solution is not to limit the powers of the police, but to let citizens use the same technology to fight corruption." Which is great if you want to cede all your rights to the police and live in constant fear of pissing off one of your neighbors, but not exactly the sort of place I'd like to live.
I can't disagree with that, but the stuff you're listing is more or less a one-time setup cost: The point made by GGP was that deploying to a prod-clone system ('keeping it matching production') takes time - and that should not take any more time or effort than deploying to your existing prod or qa or uat systems.
If it takes great, ongoing manual effort to install your software on a single extra system, you're doing it wrong.
Deploying to an extra "prod-clone" test server should require pretty trivial amounts of people-time if it's set up properly - it's just another test server, if it takes ridiculous amounts of manual effort to deploy to a single extra test server, you're probably doing something remarkably inefficient.
Educational programs will help some of the last one, at the expense of making them more like first world consumers. Everything you listed sounds real nice and sweet. None of it will come anywhere close to saving us. And if this all you have to offer on the subject, then I'm quite done humoring you.
You're completely off your fucking rocker. Seriously.
You start off by stating that mankind is a parasitic disease, and that the current efforts to "save the environment" are nowhere near good enough. I respond, by saying that every step forward is positive, and that mass death is the only solution left if we *don't* use our technology.
You ask what technology will help us?
I list examples of what I'm talking about.
You claim that's not good enough, and that discipline and privation are the only things that will save us.
I say that that's not realistic, because it means mass murder or mass suicide.
You claim that's not what you mean, and cite stone age civilizations as an example of what you mean.
I claim that reverting back to stone age technology isn't reasonable, and since we have "current" technology and you've declared that that's the problem, the only solution is by going forward and improving that technology.
You then say you didn't suggest any what you've repeatedly suggested, I point out you have, and you challenge me to address your statements.
I do, and you're back to claiming it's not good enough, and that technology is the problem.
You're like a fucking dog chasing its fucking tail - your logic is circular and self-defeating, and you basically have decided that self-destruction is the only solution available to man.
So ONE MORE TIME - if you think that suicide is the only solution available to us for survival as a species, then YOU GO FIRST.
Did you bother to read my first response to you way back up top?
At all?
Here, I'll quote it back so you can read it here:
1) First, acknowledge & accept that "letting people die off" is not the fucking solution - a large population isn't the "problem". Population is population, and if you suggest that YOUR family gets to live while MY family should die, well, them's fighting words. And I think we can all agree that a 500 pound bomb and depleted uranium rounds will do a lot of environmental damage, too.
2) Develop sustainable energy sources that do not poison the environment - this means safe nuclear, efficient solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro, cellulosic ethanol from waste, and I'm sure the list goes on; And yes, that solution did include nuclear, because it will not be cost-effective to use a lot of the other sources until economies of scale have helped drive down costs, or some additional technological advances come along.
3) Develop more effective & sustainable food sources - better fertilizers, better crop yields, better distribution methods; there is no reason for a single frigging person on earth today to go hungry - it's a problem of distribution & wealth, not a problem of yields.
4) Develop educational programs - how to care for yourself, how to prevent unwanted pregnancies (third world accounts for "most" of the population growth, thus sustaining the "overpopulation"), how to feed yourself, and create economic opportunities; vocational training programs, microloans, and other programs to leverage the productivity of billions of poor people around the world.
No, driving a prius or riding a bike isn't going to do it. But this is what's pitched to us as "saving the environment." Humans are technologists - tool makers. Telling us to solve a problem while robbing us of the single most useful trait we have which would allow us to solve a problem is no solution at all. None of this happens over night - it's a multi-generational shift; but starting today with driving a prius is still a step. Using fluorescent light bulbs tomorrow is another. It all helps, but let's stop talking about "overpopulation" as if it's a problem that we're going to "solve," unless you're willing to also suggest that we need to start culling our own species.
New tech by itself will only enable more waste and consumption. -- minus "by itself".
You also stated exactly what I quoted above. I didn't omit anything from your statements when I quoted them, those are your words, in context, verbatim.
So, you can refine your statement now, that you "didn't mean what I said," but you DID say those things, and you DID argue vehemently that you were correct in saying those things. And if you didn't mean what you said before, then great, let's get on with the business of developing new, more efficient, cleaner technology, and stop citing stone age civilizations as examples of the people who have it right.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's still illegal. You just haven't been punished for it if you don't get caught.
Well, as long as the person doing the grabbing is female, not a relative, and not underage... I for one welcome our ass-grabbing overlords.
Then why did you bother responding, if you didn't ask or expect anybody to listen? I simply pointed out that you're indulging in ageism yourself when you start painting youngsters as "people just starting out who think they know everything," and the "rare" young people "who value the experience" you bring to the table.
It's kind of funny that you're calling my response touchy when your entire post was lamenting how "nobody values my input because I'm old." In your own words, "Wow, I've been programming longer than you've been alive ... surely my experience is worth something, isn't it?"
Length of experience means very little, quality of experience means quite a bit. I've known people who make the same dumb mistakes over and over again, and never learn from it; I've also known people who learn the first time they make a mistake, and have learned quite a bit in just a few short years.
So, if I'm destined for the bitter old guy heap, I guess I'll see you there. I'll be the one wearing the ironic "Dinosaur Jr." nametag, Pops.
Sounds like you're indulging in a bit of casual ageism yourself! Delightful, innit?
I'm 35. I work with lots of guys who are 15-25 years older than me; some are quite bright, excellent problem solvers, and their experience is tremendously valuable. Others are obnoxious, stale, inflexible, cantankerous pains in the ass. I value the former. I despise the latter - not because they're old, it's because they behave as if their age automatically confers upon them some sort of infallibility in all things technical.
Not surprisingly, the latter group are also the ones - in my experience - who like to knock me (with ~12 years in the field) as "young," "unseasoned," and "still wet behind the ears," normally while I'm disagreeing with their approach and outlining why it's bad, and why a different approach would be better. Because apparently nothing supports their point quite as well as waving away technical limitations with "you're young, you can't possible understand." The former group tends to explain their proposals in such a way that it is immediately obvious why their approach is a technically superior alternative, instead of being condescending pricks to everybody with less experience.
"Old enough to be my parent" is a secondhand appeal to authority - a) you're not my parent; b) if that's the only reason I should be listening to you, you probably aren't as good at your job as you've judged yourself. People old enough to be my parents earn my respect when I see that they are genuine authorities in the subject matter, they don't automatically get it by virtue of the fact that they've been sitting around the office longer than me. Just as I don't expect someone to assume I'm correct simply because "my college training is more recent than yours" - if I'm correct, then it doesn't matter if I'm young or old; if I'm incorrect, the same applies.
Ex post facto has to do with criminalizing something, and then going after someone for something they did *before* the act was criminalized. The following would be a violation of that, to illustrate:
1) Paul Allen granted Patent # 500 for Method and apparatus for drawing Mr. Poopypants in your browser window in year 1, a browser-based friend similar to MS Office's Clippy.
2) Patent expires after 20 years.
3) Google implements a browser which draws Mr. Poopypants in your browser window in year 25.
4) US Gov't extends terms of patents to 40 years in year 27.
5) Paul Allen sues Google for violating his patent for drawing Mr. Poopypants in year 30, claiming that Google is in violation of his patent and owes him money, and wins, because Google was found guilty of violating a patent in year 25 when the patent had already expired, and had then subsequently been extended.
(Note: the big losers in all of this are the consumers, whose opportunity to have a friendly and technologically advanced Mr. Poopypants implementation in their browser suffers due to the chilling effect of patent litigation and intellectual property laws.)
This would be an example of an ex post facto laws, and Paul Allen would probably be laughed out of court for trying this sort of strategy.
I don't think terminating them early would qualify as the passage of an ex post facto law, because they are not criminalizing something and then prosecuting you for something that wasn't illegal when you did it. There might be legal challenges to the earlier termination of patents, but they should not be prevented from doing so by the prohibition of ex post facto laws.
I agree. But you also have to consider whether state government pay scales are going to allow you to hire the "best" people for the job onto your staff, and I think largely the answer to that is, "No."
This is essentially "data center design" and building the systems to integrate with a host of state services. When you're talking about a project of that complexity, "Hey, you're an Exchange admin, why don't you build out a Fault tolerant, high availability SAN network for ~20 state agencies when you have a couple spare hours?"
Obviously, the contractors can't work in a bubble - the people who will use the systems have to communicate requirements and use cases to the contractors, which requires good management and oversight, but that's not *necessarily* a fault of the contractor if there isn't proper management and oversight of the project from the government. And again, that has nothing to do with "free market" vs. "government," which was really the point I was getting at in my response.
Does the government not have responsibility to:
1) Manage the delivery and implementation of the contracted items, and
2) Verify that what was contracted for is actually delivered?
Are you actually suggesting that a bunch of "average salary" mid-level IT drones would have done a better job at implementing a high availability / fault tolerant system than a private contractor that specializes in design and implementation of this type of system, and has done it dozens of times?
I think it's far more likely that the contractor chosen (Northrop) was chosen less for their skill in this area, and more based on how much money they spent lobbying somebody.
ZING! You really made a great point there about how government is well-suited to do things like this better than private enterprises - we all know that companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and dozens of Financial Services firms know nothing about operating redundant, fault-tolerant, and high-availability systems! This single case has amply demonstrated that the free market is a sham, and the government should pretty much manage everything.
I suspect this has nothing to do with "government" vs. "free market," and everything to do with "we hired a contractor who didn't know what the fuck they were doing, and so our system has design flaws, and so it crashed. Oh, and we also delivered poorly documented requirements, a shitload of scope creep, and gave preference to some contractors' bids because they were friends with the head of our agency!"
Not surprisingly, this is a risk when the support contract goes to the person with the best connections and lobbying, rather than the best design specs and capability.
Pretty hard to say that's not the case without actually knowing the city in Western Mass he's talking about, which is why I'm curious.
Your assertions provide no data to support them, so I'd be interested to see any case studies you have to support your argument, too.
I am not arguing it is impossible, I am actually asking for information out of genuine curiosity as to how the local governments make it work.
The source article is a local news outlet in Charlotte, and the article is posted in the "Local News" section - I would guess, to bolster your point, that the people of Salisbury, NC, have a passing familiarity with who David Hoyle is, and so the party was deemed irrelevant to the story.
What city, specifically? Are they paying subisidies to the power companies to provide citizens with "cheap" energy?
Well, I suppose they could try to convince a court that "will not charge royalties for AVC/H.264 encoded video that is made available to view via the Internet for free" *doesn't* mean they will not charge royalties for AVC/H.264 encoded video that is made available to view via the internet, for free, but I think that only works on opposite day.
According to TFA, it covers videos that are "free-to-view over the internet."
Sounds to me like, if I charge people to access my site - where they can then view videos of my cat acting stupid - that is not free to view. If I put it up on youtube, or vimeo, or my own site and don't erect a paywall in front of it, then it would be free-to-view, and thus not require royalties.
That'll happen when pigs fly!
(ba-zing!)
How about, instead of asking the kids to "plan the most awful attack they can imagine," you ask them to "think about where our city is vulnerable to attack or disaster today, what those attacks could be, and then talk about how to defend against them to minimize casualties and secure things?"
War-gaming & crisis response planning don't stop with "Your bomb goes off in NYC, 1 million dead!" -- that's where they *start*. If you RTFA, that wasn't what the class assignment was about, it was about "kill as many people as possible, and talk about how you'd do it, and what the effects of your chosen attack would be on the human body."
As a thought experiment, why are the "freedom fighters" in the "resistance network" not asked to develop empathy as well?
You know, I've been waiting 35 years for my hit single to write itself. Still hasn't happened. Are you really suggesting that people who write music have "no marketable skills" that make it worth paying for their time?
Independent artists still need to "market" - they need a web site, they need to pay living expenses, travel costs, and promotional costs to tour. Recording the audio track isn't "that expensive," but "paying rent while you record the audio track" often can be.
Record studios aside - if you enjoy somebody's music, why would you ever think that giving them a couple bucks to support them in continuing to create new music that you'll enjoy isn't worth the cost? I don't understand this mentality, it seems remarkably exploitative.
All of the things you mentioned fit under pretty much any legal definition of "surveillance" I can find:
(http://lawbrain.com/wiki/Surveillance)
(http://www.yourdictionary.com/law/surveillance)
Putting a "tail" on someone doesn't require a warrant, but plenty of other forms of surveillance do. There are limits and oversight already in place to deal with this type of technology, why invent a whole new category of law for something when perfectly applicable law and precedent already exists?
This was in response to the GP's notion that "the solution is not to limit the powers of the police, but to let citizens use the same technology to fight corruption." Which is great if you want to cede all your rights to the police and live in constant fear of pissing off one of your neighbors, but not exactly the sort of place I'd like to live.
How about we go with the principle that has worked for years, and has stood up reasonably well:
"If the police want to track your movements and surveil you, they need a warrant, issued by a court with the appropriate jurisdiction"?
I can't disagree with that, but the stuff you're listing is more or less a one-time setup cost: The point made by GGP was that deploying to a prod-clone system ('keeping it matching production') takes time - and that should not take any more time or effort than deploying to your existing prod or qa or uat systems.
If it takes great, ongoing manual effort to install your software on a single extra system, you're doing it wrong.
Deploying to an extra "prod-clone" test server should require pretty trivial amounts of people-time if it's set up properly - it's just another test server, if it takes ridiculous amounts of manual effort to deploy to a single extra test server, you're probably doing something remarkably inefficient.
You're completely off your fucking rocker. Seriously.
You start off by stating that mankind is a parasitic disease, and that the current efforts to "save the environment" are nowhere near good enough. I respond, by saying that every step forward is positive, and that mass death is the only solution left if we *don't* use our technology.
You ask what technology will help us?
I list examples of what I'm talking about.
You claim that's not good enough, and that discipline and privation are the only things that will save us.
I say that that's not realistic, because it means mass murder or mass suicide.
You claim that's not what you mean, and cite stone age civilizations as an example of what you mean.
I claim that reverting back to stone age technology isn't reasonable, and since we have "current" technology and you've declared that that's the problem, the only solution is by going forward and improving that technology.
You then say you didn't suggest any what you've repeatedly suggested, I point out you have, and you challenge me to address your statements.
I do, and you're back to claiming it's not good enough, and that technology is the problem.
You're like a fucking dog chasing its fucking tail - your logic is circular and self-defeating, and you basically have decided that self-destruction is the only solution available to man.
So ONE MORE TIME - if you think that suicide is the only solution available to us for survival as a species, then YOU GO FIRST.
Did you bother to read my first response to you way back up top?
At all?
Here, I'll quote it back so you can read it here:
Yes, you said:
New tech by itself will only enable more waste and consumption. -- minus "by itself".
You also stated exactly what I quoted above. I didn't omit anything from your statements when I quoted them, those are your words, in context, verbatim.
So, you can refine your statement now, that you "didn't mean what I said," but you DID say those things, and you DID argue vehemently that you were correct in saying those things. And if you didn't mean what you said before, then great, let's get on with the business of developing new, more efficient, cleaner technology, and stop citing stone age civilizations as examples of the people who have it right.
Distribute =/= create.