If you're a near-bankrupt airline spending money you don't have on increased oil prices and 'security' measures which do nothing more than alienate your remaining customers, the terrorists have already won:)
I think I'll wait for the pirated version. It's more tweakable, doesn't randomly lock me out of system functions or media files, doesn't come preloaded with fifty gigs of crap, doesn't push third-party advertising at me, and I can get it over the internet.
Agreed. Where's the USA which led the world in scientific, theoretical and engineering breakthroughs? Where's the America where refugees and immigrants are welcomed with open arms to the land of opportunity? Where's the country that planted the first footstep on the moon, that prided itself on its freedoms instead of gutting their carcasses?
Where is that nation now?
One day, I hope to visit America for more than the few weeks I've been able to manage so far. But I want to visit the country I grew up believing in. America the confident, the strong, one of the major engines driving the world. Not this - this wreck of a nation, this diseased parody.
America has such strength, such potential - it's just heartbreaking to see it wasted like this.
As an example, in a team I was transferred to in the federal service, about my most strenuous duty was photocopying the daily newspaper's crossword for the other team members to fill out.
Although to be honest, that team was a joke, and should never have been created in the first place. Fortunately it self-destructed about two years later.
The problem with that is that (especially in very large organisations) people often can't be trusted to do the right thing.
Case in point - the organisation I worked for. National scope, 25000 staff. When internet access came in, it started out being freely accessible to all. Then the pipe jammed, and the logs revealed the usual culprits - streaming media, downloading videos, constant checking and rechecking of sites. So these were cut off. So were HTTP requests for certain types of media (video and binaries, mainly), most ports, and certain categories of site - porn, Ebay and sports, mainly.
Eventually, access came down to four levels. As well as completely unrestricted and completely restricted (which were bound to job positions rather than people, and had to be approved by the national security team), there was "filtered" (what the techs and some managers had), and whitelist-only, which was the majority of staff.
However, anyone could request that a site be added to the whitelist, or the filter modified to allow/disallow certain content, and the security team would check it out and (quite a lot of the time) OK it if it didn't clash with the rather broad policy brushstrokes. Offices could also request an internet workstation be supplied and set up, and they would get it, as long as it was not connected to the office LAN and had a screen which could be seen by everyone else while in use. That way, staff could check their MySpace, Hotmail, or look up their team scores if they were desperate, but would be much less likely to spend all day standing in front of the screen or pulling up porn sites.
The most controversial decision was when Security put Google into the blacklist because it could partially cache blacklisted sites. Personally I thought that was stupid - just blocking the cache URLs would have been a much more elegant solution. Apart from that one little policy glitch, however, I never really had a major problem with most of their filters. I could still access 99% of the web and, after I turned off images, I wasn't even the #1 bandwidth consumer in the office.
And really, if there was something I absolutely HAD to access that was filtered, I could flippin' well wait until I got home, yes?
When I was working in the public service, I carried my pens with me, because you literally could not put one down on any desk (including your own) and expect it to be there ten seconds later.
When it came to the break room, I simply refused to use the supplied tools. The fridge, the microwave, the sandwich griller - no. It also meant that when the regular cleaning staff refused to touch our manky equipment, and we were drafted into cleaning it ourselves, I could tell the self-appointed drill sergeant very politely to go to hell, as I had never touched those festing mechanical fungus incubators and wasn't about to start now.
Although I did offer to open the break room window and toss them three stories into the dumpster. I mean, it wasn't as though I was going to miss them. Oddly enough, I was never approached for cleaning duty after that.
Of course, it probably didn't hurt that I'd also offered to send the more irritating managers by the same route if they kept whining to me about it.
Screw 'em. I was hired to be a tech, not a janitor. Cleaning up my own messes is good manners, but unless the problem could be fixed over the phone or by remote login, other people's messes were Not My Problem. Especially as other departments in the building didn't have their own break room and used to use ours instead. I didn't see any of *them* being approached for cleaning duty.
That's weird. I'm not rich, but have vague plans to move in that direction. I figure that the whole *point* of being rich is that you don't have to quibble over the small stuff. Heck, if I was rich I wouldn't even care if I was charged twice what everyone else was (for the small stuff), because I could afford it. Ten bucks for a five-buck sandwich is not going to ruin me, and whoever's selling the sandwich could probably use it more than I could.
That might be able to be broken up a little by having people join interest groups a la Usenet, or subscribe to feed a la RSS. Then you'd be able to get ads on certain topics, or ads that were deemed interesting by sources you trust, or even just that freaky weird hilarious stuff that your buddy Earl keeps finding.
Yeah, it'll be fairly insular, but hopefully it won't degenerate into individually personalised ads, where a company feeds you a stream of ad data tweaked to your personal choices in order to increase the chances that you can be convinced to buy something of theirs.
It'd be damn weird watching TV at someone else's place, though. All their ads would probably give you a really good idea of what their mindset was like.
"Hey Bob, why all the ads for KKK membership benefits?"
It's an interesting approach. Instead of trying to take on Word using the billion-dollar approach, or the free software approach, it's starting from the "free and easy / casual user" end of the spectrum. Presumably it wants to get the demographic who would normally use Notepad instead of MS Office, and then translate that into installations in small workplaces and teams. It's a long-term, slow-growth approach that may well force Microsoft to make extensive changes to its word processing options in order to counter it. This won't necessarily mean adding yet more features to Word, but it might involve beefing up the Notepad and Wordpad-equivalents in Vista to add internet integration.
You forgot "Having agents doing maintenance on an airline's planes for a couple of years, and adding some 'extra' parts to its innards. Or even better, getting a gig in a factory which *makes* parts for airplanes - why not have the airlines install your bombs for you?
Then, a week after the agents've quit (and *not* all at once, duh), you press a button and half the nation's commercial carrier fleet goes boom. Or simply falls out of the sky, if you prefer electronic sabotage/failure to installing gum-packs or panels of whatever the current equivalent to plastique is.
And you know? The airlines, security companies and government goons could have scanned, frisked, probed and pre-quarantined every single passenger and crew member, checked every bit of cargo and luggage for every known terrorism device, and even random-checked all the stuff like the food and other standard replaceable items which get loaded on, have cordons of police or army surrounding every airport in a five-mile-deep barrier - and it wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference if the airplanes themselves came pre-rigged.
Seriously, people. Is anyone going to be able to check the entire current and past history of every single neighbour, relative, friend or known acquaintance of every person who is unable to categorically deny (with evidence) that they've ever been within five miles of *anything* that's eventually ended up loaded on or part of a plane?
"Well, I once drove through a neighbourhood where there lived this guy who used to date this girl whose Mom once attended an AA meeting with a dude who caught a bus which passed four miles from a steel factory which made rivets which got bought by a company which made a bunch of stuff, including drinks trolleys for planes."
You forgot "Having agents doing maintenance on an airline's planes for a couple of years, and adding some 'extra' parts to its innards. Or even better, getting a gig in a factory which *makes* parts for airplanes - why not have the airlines install your bombs for you?
Then, a week after the agents've quit (and *not* all at once, duh), you press a button and half the nation's commercial carrier fleet goes boom. Or simply falls out of the sky, if you prefer electronic sabotage/failure to installing gum-packs or panels of whatever the current equivalent to plastique is.
And you know? The airlines, security companies and government goons could have scanned, frisked, probed and pre-quarantined every single passenger and crew member, checked every bit of cargo and luggage for every known terrorism device, and even random-checked all the stuff like the food and other standard replaceable items which get loaded on, have cordons of police or army surrounding every airport in a five-mile-deep barrier - and it wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference if the airplanes themselves came pre-rigged.
Seriously, people. Is anyone going to be able to check the entire current and past history of every single neighbour, relative, friend or known acquaintance of every person who is unable to categorically deny (with evidence) that they've ever been within five miles of *anything* that's eventually ended up loaded on or part of a plane?
"Well, I once drove through a neighbourhood where there lived this guy who used to date this girl whose Mom once attended an AA meeting with a dude who caught a bus which passed four miles from a steel factory which made rivets which got bought by a company which made a bunch of stuff, including drinks trolleys for planes."
"It's GITMO FER YOU JIMMY!"
when they sit down to do their taxes, balance the check book or write an email they do not want to be hindered with ads about the latest tax, accounting software or email client that is available.
Yeah. Good thing no-one ever tolerated that crap in cinemas, DVDs, phone queues, TV, radio, websites, 'free' internet access schemes, phone banking, or waiting rooms.
Agreed. As someone who actually is a public servant (although not with one of the police departments), I am A-OK with being filmed while on the clock.
Which is probably just as well, because all the buildings I've worked in have security cameras dotted all over the ceiling, the same type you get in supermarkets. I don't have a _choice_ about being filmed continually while I'm on the job. And that includes when dealing directly with the public.
If it's so goddamned hard for a public servant to behave themselves and (unless a trainee) demonstrate relevant job knowledge of the legislation pertaining to their position (you can tell I'm a bureaucrat, can't you?), then maybe that person should not be in the service.
I've worked with far too many puffed-up, self-important assholes to say that camera-wielding members of the public are a problem. I could easily submit names of several people who could use a work-hours camera team on them, and who would probably be fired in a week if the public knew how they acted behind closed doors.
You know what would be great? Being able to submit someone's name for public (not in-house) camera-team surveillance and investigation, as long as you were willing to undergo it yourself. Heck, using that method I could have removed half my managers years ago. Anyone viewing tapes of _me_, on the other hand, would probably fall asleep from sheer boredom.
Maybe it could be a reality TV show... although they'd probably only accept submissions from Jerry Springer contestants.
What's that, mr. president? you're addressing 50 audiences at once on live television, saying contradictory things to each?
So... no real change there, then. Except that somewhere in California, a giggling student hits [Enter] and the President's suddenly naked and doing the can-can from the neck down.
Slashdot Mirror
Zeitgeist today decided that it was a perfectly cromulant product.
- who's been using stone tablets. That unco-operative bastard.
If you're a near-bankrupt airline spending money you don't have on increased oil prices and 'security' measures which do nothing more than alienate your remaining customers, the terrorists have already won :)
I think I'll wait for the pirated version. It's more tweakable, doesn't randomly lock me out of system functions or media files, doesn't come preloaded with fifty gigs of crap, doesn't push third-party advertising at me, and I can get it over the internet.
:)
Oh, and it's cheaper
Agreed. Where's the USA which led the world in scientific, theoretical and engineering breakthroughs? Where's the America where refugees and immigrants are welcomed with open arms to the land of opportunity? Where's the country that planted the first footstep on the moon, that prided itself on its freedoms instead of gutting their carcasses?
Where is that nation now?
One day, I hope to visit America for more than the few weeks I've been able to manage so far. But I want to visit the country I grew up believing in. America the confident, the strong, one of the major engines driving the world. Not this - this wreck of a nation, this diseased parody.
America has such strength, such potential - it's just heartbreaking to see it wasted like this.
So why not make a virus which asks "Permanently kill your internet connection? [Yes] [No]" and let the problem take care of itself?
As an example, in a team I was transferred to in the federal service, about my most strenuous duty was photocopying the daily newspaper's crossword for the other team members to fill out. Although to be honest, that team was a joke, and should never have been created in the first place. Fortunately it self-destructed about two years later.
The problem with that is that (especially in very large organisations) people often can't be trusted to do the right thing.
Case in point - the organisation I worked for. National scope, 25000 staff. When internet access came in, it started out being freely accessible to all. Then the pipe jammed, and the logs revealed the usual culprits - streaming media, downloading videos, constant checking and rechecking of sites. So these were cut off. So were HTTP requests for certain types of media (video and binaries, mainly), most ports, and certain categories of site - porn, Ebay and sports, mainly.
Eventually, access came down to four levels. As well as completely unrestricted and completely restricted (which were bound to job positions rather than people, and had to be approved by the national security team), there was "filtered" (what the techs and some managers had), and whitelist-only, which was the majority of staff.
However, anyone could request that a site be added to the whitelist, or the filter modified to allow/disallow certain content, and the security team would check it out and (quite a lot of the time) OK it if it didn't clash with the rather broad policy brushstrokes. Offices could also request an internet workstation be supplied and set up, and they would get it, as long as it was not connected to the office LAN and had a screen which could be seen by everyone else while in use. That way, staff could check their MySpace, Hotmail, or look up their team scores if they were desperate, but would be much less likely to spend all day standing in front of the screen or pulling up porn sites.
The most controversial decision was when Security put Google into the blacklist because it could partially cache blacklisted sites. Personally I thought that was stupid - just blocking the cache URLs would have been a much more elegant solution. Apart from that one little policy glitch, however, I never really had a major problem with most of their filters. I could still access 99% of the web and, after I turned off images, I wasn't even the #1 bandwidth consumer in the office.
And really, if there was something I absolutely HAD to access that was filtered, I could flippin' well wait until I got home, yes?
When I was working in the public service, I carried my pens with me, because you literally could not put one down on any desk (including your own) and expect it to be there ten seconds later.
When it came to the break room, I simply refused to use the supplied tools. The fridge, the microwave, the sandwich griller - no. It also meant that when the regular cleaning staff refused to touch our manky equipment, and we were drafted into cleaning it ourselves, I could tell the self-appointed drill sergeant very politely to go to hell, as I had never touched those festing mechanical fungus incubators and wasn't about to start now.
Although I did offer to open the break room window and toss them three stories into the dumpster. I mean, it wasn't as though I was going to miss them. Oddly enough, I was never approached for cleaning duty after that.
Of course, it probably didn't hurt that I'd also offered to send the more irritating managers by the same route if they kept whining to me about it.
Screw 'em. I was hired to be a tech, not a janitor. Cleaning up my own messes is good manners, but unless the problem could be fixed over the phone or by remote login, other people's messes were Not My Problem. Especially as other departments in the building didn't have their own break room and used to use ours instead. I didn't see any of *them* being approached for cleaning duty.
That's weird. I'm not rich, but have vague plans to move in that direction. I figure that the whole *point* of being rich is that you don't have to quibble over the small stuff. Heck, if I was rich I wouldn't even care if I was charged twice what everyone else was (for the small stuff), because I could afford it. Ten bucks for a five-buck sandwich is not going to ruin me, and whoever's selling the sandwich could probably use it more than I could.
How soon would it be before you could get the boxes patched to replace those insertions with images or video from your own server or sources?
Or how about replacing the billboards with digitally generated images of what the view would look like with no billboards?
That might be able to be broken up a little by having people join interest groups a la Usenet, or subscribe to feed a la RSS. Then you'd be able to get ads on certain topics, or ads that were deemed interesting by sources you trust, or even just that freaky weird hilarious stuff that your buddy Earl keeps finding.
Yeah, it'll be fairly insular, but hopefully it won't degenerate into individually personalised ads, where a company feeds you a stream of ad data tweaked to your personal choices in order to increase the chances that you can be convinced to buy something of theirs.
It'd be damn weird watching TV at someone else's place, though. All their ads would probably give you a really good idea of what their mindset was like.
"Hey Bob, why all the ads for KKK membership benefits?"
It's an interesting approach. Instead of trying to take on Word using the billion-dollar approach, or the free software approach, it's starting from the "free and easy / casual user" end of the spectrum. Presumably it wants to get the demographic who would normally use Notepad instead of MS Office, and then translate that into installations in small workplaces and teams. It's a long-term, slow-growth approach that may well force Microsoft to make extensive changes to its word processing options in order to counter it. This won't necessarily mean adding yet more features to Word, but it might involve beefing up the Notepad and Wordpad-equivalents in Vista to add internet integration.
Well there go your chances of re-election.
(Better formatted version, ach)
You forgot "Having agents doing maintenance on an airline's planes for a couple of years, and adding some 'extra' parts to its innards. Or even better, getting a gig in a factory which *makes* parts for airplanes - why not have the airlines install your bombs for you?
Then, a week after the agents've quit (and *not* all at once, duh), you press a button and half the nation's commercial carrier fleet goes boom. Or simply falls out of the sky, if you prefer electronic sabotage/failure to installing gum-packs or panels of whatever the current equivalent to plastique is.
And you know? The airlines, security companies and government goons could have scanned, frisked, probed and pre-quarantined every single passenger and crew member, checked every bit of cargo and luggage for every known terrorism device, and even random-checked all the stuff like the food and other standard replaceable items which get loaded on, have cordons of police or army surrounding every airport in a five-mile-deep barrier - and it wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference if the airplanes themselves came pre-rigged.
Seriously, people. Is anyone going to be able to check the entire current and past history of every single neighbour, relative, friend or known acquaintance of every person who is unable to categorically deny (with evidence) that they've ever been within five miles of *anything* that's eventually ended up loaded on or part of a plane?
"Well, I once drove through a neighbourhood where there lived this guy who used to date this girl whose Mom once attended an AA meeting with a dude who caught a bus which passed four miles from a steel factory which made rivets which got bought by a company which made a bunch of stuff, including drinks trolleys for planes."
"It's GITMO FER YOU JIMMY!"
You forgot "Having agents doing maintenance on an airline's planes for a couple of years, and adding some 'extra' parts to its innards. Or even better, getting a gig in a factory which *makes* parts for airplanes - why not have the airlines install your bombs for you? Then, a week after the agents've quit (and *not* all at once, duh), you press a button and half the nation's commercial carrier fleet goes boom. Or simply falls out of the sky, if you prefer electronic sabotage/failure to installing gum-packs or panels of whatever the current equivalent to plastique is. And you know? The airlines, security companies and government goons could have scanned, frisked, probed and pre-quarantined every single passenger and crew member, checked every bit of cargo and luggage for every known terrorism device, and even random-checked all the stuff like the food and other standard replaceable items which get loaded on, have cordons of police or army surrounding every airport in a five-mile-deep barrier - and it wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference if the airplanes themselves came pre-rigged. Seriously, people. Is anyone going to be able to check the entire current and past history of every single neighbour, relative, friend or known acquaintance of every person who is unable to categorically deny (with evidence) that they've ever been within five miles of *anything* that's eventually ended up loaded on or part of a plane? "Well, I once drove through a neighbourhood where there lived this guy who used to date this girl whose Mom once attended an AA meeting with a dude who caught a bus which passed four miles from a steel factory which made rivets which got bought by a company which made a bunch of stuff, including drinks trolleys for planes." "It's GITMO FER YOU JIMMY!"
Finally, I can saw naked!
As if 99 million internet users suddenly became fed up with advertising and blocked Adsense altogether.
when they sit down to do their taxes, balance the check book or write an email they do not want to be hindered with ads about the latest tax, accounting software or email client that is available. Yeah. Good thing no-one ever tolerated that crap in cinemas, DVDs, phone queues, TV, radio, websites, 'free' internet access schemes, phone banking, or waiting rooms.
"Bill, I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go..."
More like "The new name for Vista is Windows Goatse."
Agreed. As someone who actually is a public servant (although not with one of the police departments), I am A-OK with being filmed while on the clock. Which is probably just as well, because all the buildings I've worked in have security cameras dotted all over the ceiling, the same type you get in supermarkets. I don't have a _choice_ about being filmed continually while I'm on the job. And that includes when dealing directly with the public. If it's so goddamned hard for a public servant to behave themselves and (unless a trainee) demonstrate relevant job knowledge of the legislation pertaining to their position (you can tell I'm a bureaucrat, can't you?), then maybe that person should not be in the service. I've worked with far too many puffed-up, self-important assholes to say that camera-wielding members of the public are a problem. I could easily submit names of several people who could use a work-hours camera team on them, and who would probably be fired in a week if the public knew how they acted behind closed doors. You know what would be great? Being able to submit someone's name for public (not in-house) camera-team surveillance and investigation, as long as you were willing to undergo it yourself. Heck, using that method I could have removed half my managers years ago. Anyone viewing tapes of _me_, on the other hand, would probably fall asleep from sheer boredom. Maybe it could be a reality TV show... although they'd probably only accept submissions from Jerry Springer contestants.
Is this the first time that humans have managed to deliberately affect nuclear decay rates?
And does it mean that decay rates could be boosted by hosing something down with an electron beam?
What's that, mr. president? you're addressing 50 audiences at once on live television, saying contradictory things to each? So... no real change there, then. Except that somewhere in California, a giggling student hits [Enter] and the President's suddenly naked and doing the can-can from the neck down.
"...this comment (c) 1952."