On the contrary, it's downstream distributors who rely on changelog information in order to decide when to patch the kernels of their distributions, in order to keep their users safe."
As long as the information is in there, isn't it part of their job to read through the changelog, read between the lines, and update appropriately? I have no mercy for the commercial groups that do their own distributions, and quite frankly, if they're going to play with the big boys, anyone who is rolling their own distribution should be put the effort into it to read the changelog for the kernel. It's not like some security hole in a fairly obscure or minor piece of software that they're having to look out for.
Increasingly, ISPs are getting weasely with their terms of service. "Unlimited access" that's not unlimited, shafting entire protocols, etc. How about changing fair advertising laws and such to make it so that you cannot hide behind the fine print, but that you must give your customer either a print out or a web page the describes, bluntly, in itemized terms, what all of that legal gobbledeegook really means?
Of course, if you had to publish a list that most high school graduates could grok in 10 minutes or less of reading, you'd undermine the position of the lawyer-as-secular-priest, and that's just unacceptable.
You want proof that societies don't evolve? Just look at the fact that the role priests used to play has been taken over by lawyers. Where people used to take every question to the priest for divination, now it's taken to lawyers.
Instead of making a service that relies primarily on advertisement, make "Web 2.0 applications" that customers want to buy access to. You know, actually sell something rather than rely on collecting eyeballs and information.
Once again a business method patent has stymied the development of a market. A bad idea that was obvious to everyone but lawyers and the courts for its ability to damage competition.
Because President Bush is unwilling to sign FISA reform without immunity, and because Blue Dog Democrats fear for their reelection unless FISA reform as a whole passes, most compromise positions are already off the table.
This is why we need to limit Congress to one term in each office. Nothing gets in the way of principle like rational self-interest.
Funny how kids used to do a lot better when schools didn't really care about kids' self-esteem and made them work diligently on paper. The focus on using computers to make things better is just a distraction from the fact that the average public school is literally just a tax-supported daycare center that provides some education.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't want to face up to the fact that a great many paper elections were rigged as well. Some of the bigger cities with their "political machines" are a good example of that. One of the things that doesn't help is that we have a whole faction that wants to eliminate all security from elections in the name of "not disenfranchising the poor and elderly." There are obvious flaws to the use of a driver's license as an ID, but that ID is far more useful than it is not for identifying potential voters and verifying their identities.
The solution?
Execute people who rig elections. Why? Rigging an election is a coup in a democratic state. It is an attempt to overthrow the lawfully established government of body politic. Maybe if people who rig e-voting machines and ensure that every dead person gets their right to vote recognized ended up before a firing squad it would be less palpable.
Some people may think I'm joking, but I'm absolutely serious. Bribing elected officials and rigging elections should get you a one-way ticket to the gallows because of the damage that those behaviors have done to the lives, liberty and property of many private citizens.
Verizon DSL is widely available in the South, a region where a lot of people could, on the surface, make the argument that they don't have the money for it. Well, problem is, basic DSL service costs not a whole lot more than dialup if you go through Verizon. We pay about $30 a month for it. From a cost/benefit perspective, it would be incredibly stupid for my wife and I to save maybe $10/month by sacrificing about 175kb/sec of bandwidth.
The first time someone launches a mass shutdown order in a metropolitan area during rush hour, will be all it takes to turn the public wildly against this.
Privatize the power to conduct a legal prosecution. Imagine the possibilities.
-Lying government witnesses could be targeted for prosecution by defense attorneys.
-Police who break the law could be targeted for prosecution by civil liberties organizations.
-Politicians who take bribes could be prosecuted by rich constituents.
-Prosecutors who pull a stunt like Nifong did in the duke rape case could prosecuted for unlawful prosecution and other charges by the victim's family.
The fact is that until the government loses its monopoly on trying criminal cases, the key parts of the government like prosecutors' offices, police departments and bodies politic will be largely immune from the consequences of their actions.
Just wait until they get interviewed for a position where they can't do this. Pretty soon, they'll either have to learn to do it themselves or get fired.
Oh, and if they do continue this sort of thing without the company's approval, there are all sorts of wonderful civil actions that can be taken against them by their employer. Like... exposing trade secrets to unauthorized personnel, distributing company intellectual property to those without authorization...
God help them if they go to work as an engineer for a government contractor. They'll have the Inspector General or the FBI busting down their door with an arrest warrant if they're not very, very careful.
They made certain allegations about Google's conduct. If half of those allegations prove true, then it is perfectly reasonable to call Google a sleazy company to work with. It is perfectly reasonable to say "if half of these allegations prove true, then Google is sleazy" irrespective of whether or not the original charges came from a press release or an article.
Just finish open sourcing Java, and then bring JRuby and Jython up to par with the latest versions of the C-based versions. Oh and throw in there a spec to allow easy integration of those languages into JSP and some other areas to make them peers to Java itself in the enterprise world.
I know they never had boat loads of cash, but during their heyday, the big independent ISPs should have invested a lot of money into buying their own lines. Hindsight is 20/20, but if they had spent their money wisely, they could have bought up a lot of cheap dark fiber the way that Google did a little while back. Then, they'd have had a lot of their own infrastructure to play with.
Know when to cut your losses if you can. I used to work for a team that managed a component used by several projects at a large client, and one of those projects was run by a real textbook case of a nearly psychotic bully. After a while, my management decided that the pay wasn't worth the damage he was doing, and pulled our people off the contract.
Our management was smart because they actually gauged the cost-benefit ratio of keeping our people on that contract and realized that yes, numbers might go up for a quarter or two, but employees would start leaving, and that would be worse for business than dropping the contract.
Anyone who remembers that era knows that Microsoft's competitors got into marketplace trouble by sucking even worse than Microsoft. Netscape gave Microsoft the browser market because Communicator was a steaming pile of dog shit compared to IE4 and IE5. Java didn't take off because Sun didn't focus anywhere near enough effort early on into getting a fast interpreter (JIT should have been in version 1.0) and Sun didn't help things by treating Swing like a curiosity for the first few years of its existence. Need I go on?
With Windows Vista, the DOJ should have laid off. It was a total debacle for Microsoft and signaled that they are in decline. If there is anyone who merits a look for anti-competitive, restrictive behavior it's Apple. I say this as someone who still happens to enjoy a nearly 100% Apple ecosystem in his house (iPod, MacBook Pro, AppleTV...)
Their hypocrisy allowed my wife and I to download a lot of TV shows from Youtube that we couldn't get elsewhere. Can't say that I have too much to complain about there.
It's a well-established fact that women have much weaker upper bodies. Hollywood has done a great job of propogating the myth of the ass kicking woman who can take on a bunch of athletic men in combat, but the reality is that even if most athletic women went up against a normal, decently in shape man, they would get badly hurt in one-on-one fighting.
Until you work for a boss who uses it to deliver every missive, task and piece of brain barf that he wants to spew upon his or her workers. My wife works for such a boss. The man IMs her and her team so many times each day that you would think he's an IRC bot that went insane and took over their IM system!
Where email is passive, and more formal, IM allows a boss to act like he or she can just sit there and chat at you all day telling you what to do. It's perfect for micro-managers. Where they used to be expected to write out an email with tasking, send it out and then expect a reply later, they can expect results right here, right now. The result is obvious: stress. Lots and lots of stress for the employees of a micro-manager with IM.
In my opinion, IM should be discouraged in the work place. If you want to send tasking, doing it by email or something formal like that. If you need to talk to someone in the same office, for the love of God, just go to their office and do it. If you're too busy to get up from your desk to do it, you're probably too busy to take time off to chat over IM. Yes, yes, there are exceptions, but generally speaking, that's true.
Only a lawyer could follow the logic that was used to uphold them. The judges, aka lawyers with power to determine the law's enforcement, ruled that since YOU aren't the one being accused (your property is) YOU have no due process right except to claim your property IFF you can prove that the property really wasn't used in the crime that the government is alleging. Doesn't matter if someone else hijacked your property to do it!
Any normal human being can look at the logic of civil asset forfeiture laws and realize that it is literally a legitimization of armed robbery by the government.
Civil asset forfeiture laws are the antithesis of capitalism. They are a means by which the state can seize any property it wants simply by finding some nebulous connection to a crime. Did you know that YOU don't even have to be the one accused of the crime? They can do all sorts of fun things like seize your car if your friend borrowed it, while you thought he was going to the store to buy a case of beer, and he really used to it to drive to a drug user's house to sell drugs. This sort of thing is entirely Fascist in its economics (you did know that Fascism is a collectivist economic system as well as a political one, right?)
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As long as the information is in there, isn't it part of their job to read through the changelog, read between the lines, and update appropriately? I have no mercy for the commercial groups that do their own distributions, and quite frankly, if they're going to play with the big boys, anyone who is rolling their own distribution should be put the effort into it to read the changelog for the kernel. It's not like some security hole in a fairly obscure or minor piece of software that they're having to look out for.
Increasingly, ISPs are getting weasely with their terms of service. "Unlimited access" that's not unlimited, shafting entire protocols, etc. How about changing fair advertising laws and such to make it so that you cannot hide behind the fine print, but that you must give your customer either a print out or a web page the describes, bluntly, in itemized terms, what all of that legal gobbledeegook really means?
Of course, if you had to publish a list that most high school graduates could grok in 10 minutes or less of reading, you'd undermine the position of the lawyer-as-secular-priest, and that's just unacceptable.
You want proof that societies don't evolve? Just look at the fact that the role priests used to play has been taken over by lawyers. Where people used to take every question to the priest for divination, now it's taken to lawyers.
Instead of making a service that relies primarily on advertisement, make "Web 2.0 applications" that customers want to buy access to. You know, actually sell something rather than rely on collecting eyeballs and information.
Once again a business method patent has stymied the development of a market. A bad idea that was obvious to everyone but lawyers and the courts for its ability to damage competition.
One of the worst mistakes that people make when changing jobs is underestimating the need for a "plan B."
Was the sound of a single scratch wiping out years of corporate data...
This is why we need to limit Congress to one term in each office. Nothing gets in the way of principle like rational self-interest.
Funny how kids used to do a lot better when schools didn't really care about kids' self-esteem and made them work diligently on paper. The focus on using computers to make things better is just a distraction from the fact that the average public school is literally just a tax-supported daycare center that provides some education.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't want to face up to the fact that a great many paper elections were rigged as well. Some of the bigger cities with their "political machines" are a good example of that. One of the things that doesn't help is that we have a whole faction that wants to eliminate all security from elections in the name of "not disenfranchising the poor and elderly." There are obvious flaws to the use of a driver's license as an ID, but that ID is far more useful than it is not for identifying potential voters and verifying their identities.
The solution?
Execute people who rig elections. Why? Rigging an election is a coup in a democratic state. It is an attempt to overthrow the lawfully established government of body politic. Maybe if people who rig e-voting machines and ensure that every dead person gets their right to vote recognized ended up before a firing squad it would be less palpable.
Some people may think I'm joking, but I'm absolutely serious. Bribing elected officials and rigging elections should get you a one-way ticket to the gallows because of the damage that those behaviors have done to the lives, liberty and property of many private citizens.
Verizon DSL is widely available in the South, a region where a lot of people could, on the surface, make the argument that they don't have the money for it. Well, problem is, basic DSL service costs not a whole lot more than dialup if you go through Verizon. We pay about $30 a month for it. From a cost/benefit perspective, it would be incredibly stupid for my wife and I to save maybe $10/month by sacrificing about 175kb/sec of bandwidth.
The first time someone launches a mass shutdown order in a metropolitan area during rush hour, will be all it takes to turn the public wildly against this.
Privatize the power to conduct a legal prosecution. Imagine the possibilities.
-Lying government witnesses could be targeted for prosecution by defense attorneys.
-Police who break the law could be targeted for prosecution by civil liberties organizations.
-Politicians who take bribes could be prosecuted by rich constituents.
-Prosecutors who pull a stunt like Nifong did in the duke rape case could prosecuted for unlawful prosecution and other charges by the victim's family.
The fact is that until the government loses its monopoly on trying criminal cases, the key parts of the government like prosecutors' offices, police departments and bodies politic will be largely immune from the consequences of their actions.
Just wait until they get interviewed for a position where they can't do this. Pretty soon, they'll either have to learn to do it themselves or get fired.
Oh, and if they do continue this sort of thing without the company's approval, there are all sorts of wonderful civil actions that can be taken against them by their employer. Like... exposing trade secrets to unauthorized personnel, distributing company intellectual property to those without authorization...
God help them if they go to work as an engineer for a government contractor. They'll have the Inspector General or the FBI busting down their door with an arrest warrant if they're not very, very careful.
They made certain allegations about Google's conduct. If half of those allegations prove true, then it is perfectly reasonable to call Google a sleazy company to work with. It is perfectly reasonable to say "if half of these allegations prove true, then Google is sleazy" irrespective of whether or not the original charges came from a press release or an article.
Just finish open sourcing Java, and then bring JRuby and Jython up to par with the latest versions of the C-based versions. Oh and throw in there a spec to allow easy integration of those languages into JSP and some other areas to make them peers to Java itself in the enterprise world.
I know they never had boat loads of cash, but during their heyday, the big independent ISPs should have invested a lot of money into buying their own lines. Hindsight is 20/20, but if they had spent their money wisely, they could have bought up a lot of cheap dark fiber the way that Google did a little while back. Then, they'd have had a lot of their own infrastructure to play with.
Know when to cut your losses if you can. I used to work for a team that managed a component used by several projects at a large client, and one of those projects was run by a real textbook case of a nearly psychotic bully. After a while, my management decided that the pay wasn't worth the damage he was doing, and pulled our people off the contract.
Our management was smart because they actually gauged the cost-benefit ratio of keeping our people on that contract and realized that yes, numbers might go up for a quarter or two, but employees would start leaving, and that would be worse for business than dropping the contract.
Anyone who remembers that era knows that Microsoft's competitors got into marketplace trouble by sucking even worse than Microsoft. Netscape gave Microsoft the browser market because Communicator was a steaming pile of dog shit compared to IE4 and IE5. Java didn't take off because Sun didn't focus anywhere near enough effort early on into getting a fast interpreter (JIT should have been in version 1.0) and Sun didn't help things by treating Swing like a curiosity for the first few years of its existence. Need I go on?
With Windows Vista, the DOJ should have laid off. It was a total debacle for Microsoft and signaled that they are in decline. If there is anyone who merits a look for anti-competitive, restrictive behavior it's Apple. I say this as someone who still happens to enjoy a nearly 100% Apple ecosystem in his house (iPod, MacBook Pro, AppleTV...)
in the form of the dialog in Windows that allows you to select which users and groups have access to files and folders.
Their hypocrisy allowed my wife and I to download a lot of TV shows from Youtube that we couldn't get elsewhere. Can't say that I have too much to complain about there.
A currency with a 1:1 exchange rate.
It's a well-established fact that women have much weaker upper bodies. Hollywood has done a great job of propogating the myth of the ass kicking woman who can take on a bunch of athletic men in combat, but the reality is that even if most athletic women went up against a normal, decently in shape man, they would get badly hurt in one-on-one fighting.
Until you work for a boss who uses it to deliver every missive, task and piece of brain barf that he wants to spew upon his or her workers. My wife works for such a boss. The man IMs her and her team so many times each day that you would think he's an IRC bot that went insane and took over their IM system!
Where email is passive, and more formal, IM allows a boss to act like he or she can just sit there and chat at you all day telling you what to do. It's perfect for micro-managers. Where they used to be expected to write out an email with tasking, send it out and then expect a reply later, they can expect results right here, right now. The result is obvious: stress. Lots and lots of stress for the employees of a micro-manager with IM.
In my opinion, IM should be discouraged in the work place. If you want to send tasking, doing it by email or something formal like that. If you need to talk to someone in the same office, for the love of God, just go to their office and do it. If you're too busy to get up from your desk to do it, you're probably too busy to take time off to chat over IM. Yes, yes, there are exceptions, but generally speaking, that's true.
Only a lawyer could follow the logic that was used to uphold them. The judges, aka lawyers with power to determine the law's enforcement, ruled that since YOU aren't the one being accused (your property is) YOU have no due process right except to claim your property IFF you can prove that the property really wasn't used in the crime that the government is alleging. Doesn't matter if someone else hijacked your property to do it!
Any normal human being can look at the logic of civil asset forfeiture laws and realize that it is literally a legitimization of armed robbery by the government.
Civil asset forfeiture laws are the antithesis of capitalism. They are a means by which the state can seize any property it wants simply by finding some nebulous connection to a crime. Did you know that YOU don't even have to be the one accused of the crime? They can do all sorts of fun things like seize your car if your friend borrowed it, while you thought he was going to the store to buy a case of beer, and he really used to it to drive to a drug user's house to sell drugs. This sort of thing is entirely Fascist in its economics (you did know that Fascism is a collectivist economic system as well as a political one, right?)