When was the last time that Congress did a code review? The whole legislative process can boil down to a typical intern's approach to building software "write code, compile it, if it works, throw it into production until the boss (SCOTUS) says otherwise."
The legislative process needs to be made more deliberate. There need to be teams of lawyers charged with reviewing laws and drafting up use cases. Unfortunately, you won't have that until something can be done to make politicians do their jobs, and not spend all of their time pandering and promoting themselves.
Bills should be accessible in a form similar to patches created by diff. There should be a web service that allows you to retrieve the affected USC titles, merge them, and then apply the new bill as a patch to the federal law so that you can quickly assemble a coherent view of how the law will change.
'Why should I spend millions on enterprise apps when I can do it [with Google] at one-tenth cost and ten times the speed? It's a win-win for me.'
Well, for one, you cannot use Google Apps on any classified network (that would cover most federal employees, as most of the federal government is DoD) unless Google is willing to sell a permanent, certified copy of Google Apps to be loaded onto each network and isolated from the rest of the world. For another, the federal government is already starting to look at using open source software to replace existing components like Oracle that cost way too much for what they are commonly used. Just switching to PostgreSQL for all of the federal databases that are just large bit buckets would probably save a few billion dollars.
Because liberals are much more willing to sue for discrimination, I have worked with some very, very left-wing people. However, conservatives and libertarians often have to be very careful because it is easy for a corporation to follow through on accusations that the mere acceptance of conservative or libertarian beliefs is prima facie evidence of bigotry and other corporate no-nos. I know I would be marginalized or fired for the stuff that I write on my blog, which is why I put my real name only on the Movable Type plugins that I write (which are also not indexed by Google).
In times of abundance, companies can justify spending on open source positions for a variety of reasons, but in times like these, it comes down to numbers: screw the public, what does it do for the company and its shareholders? If you can bring substantial value to those two, then it's business as usual. If not, then you're out of luck.
One thing is for sure, though, and that's that you cannot afford to let your involvement with an OSS project or community affect your job in this economy. If it is getting in the way by becoming a real factor in your work-life balance, then you need to drop it so that you can do the work you need to do and have a decent home life that won't impact your day job.
Those of us who would like to do iPhone development have to buy an iPod Touch if we want to use a "developer device" that isn't our main phone. That so-called "developer device" doesn't even have the full hardware capabilities. Considering the fact that the iPhone is still a fairly buggy platform, you develop on your main phone at your own risk. I've owned my iPhone for 3 months now, and even after reboots and firmware reinstallation, I still cannot get the speakerphone to work anymore.
So please, stop complaining. $399 is not a hefty price tag if you are serious about developing on it. Sure, it would be nice if you had no restrictions, but you do have more freedom than your biggest rival platform.
No idea where that will lead?
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
We know exactly where that will lead: social instability. More crime as the supply of wives and girlfriends dwindles, more marriages between older men and younger women, and possibly the government becoming more aggressive by putting more of these men in its military to utilize their aggression for public purposes.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of women will naturally fail at that key point. No need to write a book that goes beyond that one requirement.
People would trust their government a lot more in general if government officials were held accountable for everything like the general public. God knows we'd have very few lawsuits against police departments in the U.S. if police departments were the first ones on the case to reprimand employees for breaking the law. The main reason why China's government needs so much secrecy is the rampant corruption, brutality and criminality in its ranks.
I have written a number of articles explaining why data retention policies are terrible in words that the average user can understand. The biggest one, IMO, for the average person, is the amount of personal information that their ISP would have to keep on them, and how that would make their ISP an identity theft goldmine for criminals.
Just look at what happens to walled/gated communit
on
Do We Need a New Internet?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In places where the best of the haves hide behind gated communities, you know what happens? That's where the really enterprising criminals go. All of that faux security hasn't done a damn thing in countries like Mexico for the richest, who still have to worry about things like their kids getting kidnapped. The military still faces attacks on its secure networks. The fact is, no one and no institution is an island. If you don't participating in purging the world of ne'erdowellers and their ilk, you are just deluding yourself into thinking that your investment into your own safety is helping to get rid of the problem. That's why I advise friends and family to invest in a dog or two and a gun for defending their home, not a security system that can usually be defeated by a serious criminal.
Let's make vaccine manufacturers as civilly liable for their products as every other manufacturer. Clearly, their products are proven safe now, and there is no possible scientific link between some of these products and serious harm in children, therefore they don't need any extra legal protection.
Funny thing is, I have met people who are very allergic to most vaccines, and my wife knows a woman who lost one or two of her siblings (he was a healthy kid) because of a fatal reaction to one.
This is why I hesitate to let "experts" force major social projects on us. What happens if and when 20 years from now there is serious evidence of a link between autism and some vaccines. The people who mandated them will say "sorry we didn't know," but the parents should be able to say to them "fuck you, you will pay horrifically for what you did to our kids, you miserable social engineers."
They had their chance when they bought all of the rights to BeOS. They could have taken the kernel and a few components and built a new OS on top of that, back before Blackberry and Apple were huge players in this market. Now, this comes along as a me-too product that will probably have very poor performance (a web-based approach on hardware too slow to run something like a V8 or Gecko-style JS engine?!)
Worst of all for Palm, they could have released most of the code to BeOS under the GPL, let others develop it, and that would have had the effect of crushing a lot of their competition from Microsoft.
Unless the voice is recorded, how could it be infringing? Its potential, normal uses are entirely the same use cases that one would get with a book owner choosing to read the public out loud. Some of those are infringing (reading out loud to a public audience), some of them are not (reading at home to your kids). There is no functional difference here between the two unless the Kindle also records the audio for posterity and sharing.
You Are Not a Technologist for lawyers. That would be especially educational on intellectual property where lawyers are often absolutely clueless as to what a "technology" or "invention" actually looks like and how easy it is to make something that they thing is super cool, which we actually know is pretty mundane.
A few years ago, I went into put-up-or-shut-up mode with a lawyer over DRM. She kept saying that we needed the DMCA because it would protect a growing market for "interchangeable, competitive, open DRM" or something to that effect. It basically boiled down to a pipe dream about DRM that is open to competition, not locked down to one vendor and that doesn't balkanize the marketplace. Yeah, I know. I should have asked her if she wanted a cherry on top and for me to add a pony to her list while she was at it.
When I asked her **how** that would happen, when so far, no one has accomplished that, she had no clue. None. I pointed out that it is absolutely ridiculous to think that you can just weave DRM into an OS, and that if you leave it in application space a la iTunes, no one else is forced to use it. Again, no clue.
You may not agree with their economic policies, but they have a point here. There has been a lot of fraud, waste and abuse in the use of the funds from the universal service fund that was set up to subsidize rural communications. Chances are, this $10B would just go into the money pit and end up padding the pockets of the major telecoms rather than being pumped directly into infrastructure development.
If you want to see a real change, then get rid of the franchising laws. If the federal government could help the railroads deal with local and state laws in the 19th century, it can do so today with franchising laws that restrict access to these markets.
There, I'll bet you never thought a conservative-libertarian would champion federal intervention.
If Mozilla were to end up with 95% of the market like IE once had, Opera would no doubt accuse them of price dumping. Not to mention going after them as a non-profit saying that they are a sneaky business masquerading as a non-profit a la the "Church" of Scientology!
I used to like Opera, but they just strike me as a pack of whiny bitches complaining about how it is unfair that Microsoft is so successful. It should be disconcerting to the regulators in the EU that Firefox is also better off, Safari is probably there too and Chrome is also in a position to move past Opera in marketshare. The reason, I think is simply that Gecko and WebKit have become incredibly powerful and between them and IE's rendering engine for desktop Windows developers, who needs a fourth?
However, Microsoft told journalists at last year's Professional Developers Conference that 70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time."
Take a wild guess why an IE user, still the largest browser group on Windows, might have half a dozen or more windows open at once. "Rebuttals" like this do nothing but spread misinformation. Yes, this is stupid on Microsoft's part, but comments like this just make the opposition look stupid.
On my old PC laptop, Ubuntu gets very unresponsive, even with every combination of ATI drivers I use. Both Windows XP and Windows Vista boot as fast, if not faster, on it than Ubuntu did. In fact, Windows Vista was generally more responsive during normal use. There were plenty of times where Vista could easily handle stuff like Firefox with Flash and some other stuff open, but Ubuntu would slow down to a crawl.
Mod me down if you want, but I've found Windows to be faster and more responsive out of the box, especially against modern Linux distributions.
For Obama's sake, this guy better be squeaky clean. God help Obama if Kundra has tax issues with the IRS. Obama has already had 3 appointees shot down over this, and Geithner is under attack by critics for the same issues. The last thing he needs is a fourth confirmed kill (technically a fifth confirmed kill if you consider his decision to drop his original candidate for the CIA chief over some comments vaguely in favor of torture in limited circumstances).
Movable Type Enterprise Edition is probably your best bet. Even Movable Type Open Source is "good enough" for most users, but if you want a CMS that can be integrated into a mostly LAMP stack with the possibility of integrating into a corporate LDAP and Oracle or MS SQL Server, it's the way to go. If you take the time to read over all of the new capabilities for optimizing performance, it can produce some very fast websites and the plugin API is very robust and object-oriented.
In all fairness, I've heard mostly good things about Joomla, so upgrading to the latest version is probably a good move too. I admit that I'm a big fan of Movable Type, but I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't first investigate whether or not the newest version of Joomla makes more sense before you upgrade something as important as your company website.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time that Congress did a code review? The whole legislative process can boil down to a typical intern's approach to building software "write code, compile it, if it works, throw it into production until the boss (SCOTUS) says otherwise."
The legislative process needs to be made more deliberate. There need to be teams of lawyers charged with reviewing laws and drafting up use cases. Unfortunately, you won't have that until something can be done to make politicians do their jobs, and not spend all of their time pandering and promoting themselves.
Bills should be accessible in a form similar to patches created by diff. There should be a web service that allows you to retrieve the affected USC titles, merge them, and then apply the new bill as a patch to the federal law so that you can quickly assemble a coherent view of how the law will change.
Well, for one, you cannot use Google Apps on any classified network (that would cover most federal employees, as most of the federal government is DoD) unless Google is willing to sell a permanent, certified copy of Google Apps to be loaded onto each network and isolated from the rest of the world. For another, the federal government is already starting to look at using open source software to replace existing components like Oracle that cost way too much for what they are commonly used. Just switching to PostgreSQL for all of the federal databases that are just large bit buckets would probably save a few billion dollars.
Because liberals are much more willing to sue for discrimination, I have worked with some very, very left-wing people. However, conservatives and libertarians often have to be very careful because it is easy for a corporation to follow through on accusations that the mere acceptance of conservative or libertarian beliefs is prima facie evidence of bigotry and other corporate no-nos. I know I would be marginalized or fired for the stuff that I write on my blog, which is why I put my real name only on the Movable Type plugins that I write (which are also not indexed by Google).
In times of abundance, companies can justify spending on open source positions for a variety of reasons, but in times like these, it comes down to numbers: screw the public, what does it do for the company and its shareholders? If you can bring substantial value to those two, then it's business as usual. If not, then you're out of luck.
One thing is for sure, though, and that's that you cannot afford to let your involvement with an OSS project or community affect your job in this economy. If it is getting in the way by becoming a real factor in your work-life balance, then you need to drop it so that you can do the work you need to do and have a decent home life that won't impact your day job.
Those of us who would like to do iPhone development have to buy an iPod Touch if we want to use a "developer device" that isn't our main phone. That so-called "developer device" doesn't even have the full hardware capabilities. Considering the fact that the iPhone is still a fairly buggy platform, you develop on your main phone at your own risk. I've owned my iPhone for 3 months now, and even after reboots and firmware reinstallation, I still cannot get the speakerphone to work anymore.
So please, stop complaining. $399 is not a hefty price tag if you are serious about developing on it. Sure, it would be nice if you had no restrictions, but you do have more freedom than your biggest rival platform.
We know exactly where that will lead: social instability. More crime as the supply of wives and girlfriends dwindles, more marriages between older men and younger women, and possibly the government becoming more aggressive by putting more of these men in its military to utilize their aggression for public purposes.
Have a genuine passion for technology.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of women will naturally fail at that key point. No need to write a book that goes beyond that one requirement.
People would trust their government a lot more in general if government officials were held accountable for everything like the general public. God knows we'd have very few lawsuits against police departments in the U.S. if police departments were the first ones on the case to reprimand employees for breaking the law. The main reason why China's government needs so much secrecy is the rampant corruption, brutality and criminality in its ranks.
I have written a number of articles explaining why data retention policies are terrible in words that the average user can understand. The biggest one, IMO, for the average person, is the amount of personal information that their ISP would have to keep on them, and how that would make their ISP an identity theft goldmine for criminals.
The federal government could help the states by setting up an official repository of rates and an official reporting system standard for all 50 states. Just get the states to report their rates to the IRS, and have the IRS mandate a single, unified standard method of reporting sales taxes to all state governments on an "either you implement this, or you don't collect it" basis.
In places where the best of the haves hide behind gated communities, you know what happens? That's where the really enterprising criminals go. All of that faux security hasn't done a damn thing in countries like Mexico for the richest, who still have to worry about things like their kids getting kidnapped. The military still faces attacks on its secure networks. The fact is, no one and no institution is an island. If you don't participating in purging the world of ne'erdowellers and their ilk, you are just deluding yourself into thinking that your investment into your own safety is helping to get rid of the problem. That's why I advise friends and family to invest in a dog or two and a gun for defending their home, not a security system that can usually be defeated by a serious criminal.
If there is truth to this, then the IP trade groups will go after TPB harder and faster now.
Let's make vaccine manufacturers as civilly liable for their products as every other manufacturer. Clearly, their products are proven safe now, and there is no possible scientific link between some of these products and serious harm in children, therefore they don't need any extra legal protection.
Funny thing is, I have met people who are very allergic to most vaccines, and my wife knows a woman who lost one or two of her siblings (he was a healthy kid) because of a fatal reaction to one.
This is why I hesitate to let "experts" force major social projects on us. What happens if and when 20 years from now there is serious evidence of a link between autism and some vaccines. The people who mandated them will say "sorry we didn't know," but the parents should be able to say to them "fuck you, you will pay horrifically for what you did to our kids, you miserable social engineers."
They had their chance when they bought all of the rights to BeOS. They could have taken the kernel and a few components and built a new OS on top of that, back before Blackberry and Apple were huge players in this market. Now, this comes along as a me-too product that will probably have very poor performance (a web-based approach on hardware too slow to run something like a V8 or Gecko-style JS engine?!)
Worst of all for Palm, they could have released most of the code to BeOS under the GPL, let others develop it, and that would have had the effect of crushing a lot of their competition from Microsoft.
Unless the voice is recorded, how could it be infringing? Its potential, normal uses are entirely the same use cases that one would get with a book owner choosing to read the public out loud. Some of those are infringing (reading out loud to a public audience), some of them are not (reading at home to your kids). There is no functional difference here between the two unless the Kindle also records the audio for posterity and sharing.
You Are Not a Technologist for lawyers. That would be especially educational on intellectual property where lawyers are often absolutely clueless as to what a "technology" or "invention" actually looks like and how easy it is to make something that they thing is super cool, which we actually know is pretty mundane.
A few years ago, I went into put-up-or-shut-up mode with a lawyer over DRM. She kept saying that we needed the DMCA because it would protect a growing market for "interchangeable, competitive, open DRM" or something to that effect. It basically boiled down to a pipe dream about DRM that is open to competition, not locked down to one vendor and that doesn't balkanize the marketplace. Yeah, I know. I should have asked her if she wanted a cherry on top and for me to add a pony to her list while she was at it.
When I asked her **how** that would happen, when so far, no one has accomplished that, she had no clue. None. I pointed out that it is absolutely ridiculous to think that you can just weave DRM into an OS, and that if you leave it in application space a la iTunes, no one else is forced to use it. Again, no clue.
Hopefully she and her colleagues got that pony...
You may not agree with their economic policies, but they have a point here. There has been a lot of fraud, waste and abuse in the use of the funds from the universal service fund that was set up to subsidize rural communications. Chances are, this $10B would just go into the money pit and end up padding the pockets of the major telecoms rather than being pumped directly into infrastructure development.
If you want to see a real change, then get rid of the franchising laws. If the federal government could help the railroads deal with local and state laws in the 19th century, it can do so today with franchising laws that restrict access to these markets.
There, I'll bet you never thought a conservative-libertarian would champion federal intervention.
If Mozilla were to end up with 95% of the market like IE once had, Opera would no doubt accuse them of price dumping. Not to mention going after them as a non-profit saying that they are a sneaky business masquerading as a non-profit a la the "Church" of Scientology!
I used to like Opera, but they just strike me as a pack of whiny bitches complaining about how it is unfair that Microsoft is so successful. It should be disconcerting to the regulators in the EU that Firefox is also better off, Safari is probably there too and Chrome is also in a position to move past Opera in marketshare. The reason, I think is simply that Gecko and WebKit have become incredibly powerful and between them and IE's rendering engine for desktop Windows developers, who needs a fourth?
Take a wild guess why an IE user, still the largest browser group on Windows, might have half a dozen or more windows open at once. "Rebuttals" like this do nothing but spread misinformation. Yes, this is stupid on Microsoft's part, but comments like this just make the opposition look stupid.
Either really well or really badly. My hunch is that it won't be in between.
On my old PC laptop, Ubuntu gets very unresponsive, even with every combination of ATI drivers I use. Both Windows XP and Windows Vista boot as fast, if not faster, on it than Ubuntu did. In fact, Windows Vista was generally more responsive during normal use. There were plenty of times where Vista could easily handle stuff like Firefox with Flash and some other stuff open, but Ubuntu would slow down to a crawl.
Mod me down if you want, but I've found Windows to be faster and more responsive out of the box, especially against modern Linux distributions.
For Obama's sake, this guy better be squeaky clean. God help Obama if Kundra has tax issues with the IRS. Obama has already had 3 appointees shot down over this, and Geithner is under attack by critics for the same issues. The last thing he needs is a fourth confirmed kill (technically a fifth confirmed kill if you consider his decision to drop his original candidate for the CIA chief over some comments vaguely in favor of torture in limited circumstances).
Movable Type Enterprise Edition is probably your best bet. Even Movable Type Open Source is "good enough" for most users, but if you want a CMS that can be integrated into a mostly LAMP stack with the possibility of integrating into a corporate LDAP and Oracle or MS SQL Server, it's the way to go. If you take the time to read over all of the new capabilities for optimizing performance, it can produce some very fast websites and the plugin API is very robust and object-oriented.
In all fairness, I've heard mostly good things about Joomla, so upgrading to the latest version is probably a good move too. I admit that I'm a big fan of Movable Type, but I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't first investigate whether or not the newest version of Joomla makes more sense before you upgrade something as important as your company website.
Still smaller than mine!