A republic is the rule of law, specifically, written law. A constitutional republic writes down what the limited extent of government powers is. While it is true that a few elite men designed our constitutional republic, they designed it explicitly to limit the power of any governors -- themselves and any subsequent politicians.
In in oligarchy there may be written laws, but in effect, you have the rule of a few men, because there may not be sufficient boundaries in the existing written law, or the few may circumvent written law as often as they like. Or, it may be that the written law really only applies to subjects, not to oligarchs themselves.
The cheif difference between written laws and limited government power, vs. any arrangement where there the boundaries of government power are not clearly defined, is that in the former, people can PLAN their lives and behaviors, and make long term plans and execute on them. In the latter situation, the actions and dreams of man are perpetually subject to the boundless whims of the oligarchs and their appointees.
One defect of the modern US government is that much of our law is unwritten -- we have review and regulation boards, committees, and agencies that decide on matters according to the whims of the men serving on those boards. The rules are not written down. So while we technically have a constitutional republic, we have many de-facto oligarchies in specific sectors of governance.
A specific example of this might be the FDA. Is it legal to to sell a certain drug in the US? That depends on what the FDA says. The law says "the FDA decides". The FDA provides information and guidance about its decision making process, but ultimatley, its still a decision making process. I have no specific experience with the FDA drug approval process, so it might be an especially vague or especially well defined process, and so might be a great or poor illustration of the point.
Another aspect to consider regarding the founding elite that drafted the constitution was that it was _imposed_ on nobody in particular - the "Federal" government is federated in the sense that there is a clear deliniation of powers delegated to the "national" government, and powers not otherwise specified remain with the states, localities, or individuals. States had to buy-in to the constitution, and it was on a voluntary basis, state by state, that this was done.
It wasn't until the Civil war that the US national government egregiously asserted its superiority to the states by raising an army to prevent certain states from "opting out" of the Union. The civil war, despite how it is frequently taught, was fought politically over the "legality" of state secession from the United States national government. Abraham Lincoln himself said that the issue of slavery was second to the issue of secession. While slavery was the pivotal issue that motivated the southern states to secede, Lincoln prosecuted the war on the grounds that the south had no right to secede, and there is a quote from him on the matter that says, in essence, his slavery policy would be whatever forced the union to remain a whole.
It wasn't until some time into the war that he wrapped up the moral aspects of combating slavery as a post-facto justification for war. The Civil War, as originally executed, was a political boondoggle. Only with the hindsight of what it accomplished in terms of human rights and freedoms can it be said to be a net positive. But critics of Lincoln suggest that any time prior to beginning the Civil War, the federal government and the northern states could have simply overturned or refused to enforce fugitive slave laws. Had that happened, the moral slavery issue would have sorted itself out via the mass exodous of escaping slaves to northern states. Northern states were legally bound to return escaped slaves to their southern masters; overtuning the laws that required this may have prevented the war and ended slavery just the same.
Luckily, this nation was founded as a republic of laws, and not as a democracy of the populst mob, pandered to by a ruling class. To the extent that it feels more like the latter than the former, it has ceased being the America that our ancestors helped forge, and the Americans raised in this new world of positive rights and majority rule are Americans in name, but not in ideology.
This is an assertion i hear made from time to time which really doesn't seem to hold water. Government work tends to be exactly $(election_cycle) long in terms of scope and outlook.
It's hard to say something about "corporations" on the whole. Some of them are run differently than how I'd run mine, and some of them are run very well, and take a very long outlook. If you are developing new oil, gas, or ore resources, you have an _extremely_ long outlook. If you are Microsoft, sinking billions into businesses that may or may not pan out, you have a long outlook. If you are an institutional investor, you have an outlook that is at least 20 years long.
There are only a few examples of unabashed success in government. The Apollo program and the Manhattan project come to mind. Both took less time than one might think, and both featured political support that transcended "normal" conditions.
But all of this is really a side argument.
The constitution neither says nor implies that things become the job of the federal government because companies aren't doing a "good enough" job at it. So again, by what authority or reasoning is this the job of the federal government?
All you have is your pseudo-Ayn Randian Libertarian bullshit. We all went through that phase, and once we realized that it had serious flaws, we relegated it to "interesting, but not viable".
The "serious flaw" was that the future doesn't include you getting to force your will on other people?
Ayn Rand simply says this: you depend on the people you despise and want so desperately to control. They don't need you. Cut them loose. Let them rot without your glorious patronage. Fewer mouths for you to feed, right? What's the downside?
Weather forecasting has its roots in military strategy. To the extent that climate forecasting might keep the country safe -- safe from real threats -- I'd support it being a job of the federal government.
I wish people would give up the idea that there is some dispassionate public interest that should be accorded to "scientists", while people holding the same education doing the same work that _dont_ milk from the public teat are shills, etc.
I'll be plain: nobody in the federal government serves _me_. You could fire the entire lot of them and it would be at least 6 months before I noticed. Well, i'd notice all the extra money that is no longer being extorted from me pretty much immediatley. Other than that? Not sure I'd miss em.
Anyway, I'm _shocked_ that a bunch of publicly funded climate activists are pandering for more money and power for climate activism.
I look forward to paying the salaries of a bunch of guys that will argue with each other over how important each of them is. James Hansen really needs some new competition, let's create a new three letter agency!
If you have a peice of endpoint equipment that you don't need to move, and you have the ability to run a wire to it, run the wire.
It will be cheaper, it will be faster, and it won't have strange failures. It will require no configuration.
I have had home wifi for a long time, but it has only ever powered laptops. If something doesn't move, it gets a wire.
I run gig-E at home, with one machine running a bt client constantly. I burn DVDs over the network. I am trying to figure out how wireless-only wouldn't be a huge step backwards at my house.
Mother in law has the apple wireless desktop, which includes a BT (afaik) mouse.
I started transferring pictures off of a BT phone onto the mac. The mouse became unusable. It was like using windows 3.0 while formatting a floppy disk. You'd move the mouse all the way across the desk; it would move about 1" on the screen.
If you ever do anything else with bluetooth, i'd avoid a BT mouse.
I've got a MS wireless mouse and a logitech wireless mouse. The logitech doesn't work at long distances very well (its setup in my HTPC room and from the couch its performance is spotty). Every few months it will forget that it knows about the PC it's attached to and you have to re-sync it.
A university degree says nothing about the attitude towards learning of the person, nothing about the fitness of that person for some specific role, and nothing about that person's capabilities or interests.
What it primarily says in this country is one of two things: - a person or their legal guardians understand exactly how to game the job market in the US, and have done so - a person, with the support of their legal guardians, never plans on actually working a day in their life and "studies" the most pompous, contemptuosly useless drivel possible, such that there can be no plausible contribution to society and no objective standard of quality. This is in preparation for a life of pseudo-intellectual socializing, primarily in measured instances of attempting to lord ones faux-status over people who secretly detest each other's company
Yeah, I'm a US university graduate. On the rare occasions that I let myself feel some sense of accomplishment or acheivement about the peice of paper I have in a box somewhere, I think of all of the other people in my graduating class with the same sheet of paper.
[and lest you suggest that if only I had gone to the "correct" institution, I'd have a different opinion: I direct you to the 'academic' histories of our recent crop of politicians. They are the result of "the best" our nation has to offer]
I was an intern at McDonnel Douglas [which had recently become Boeing Aircraft and Missile Systems] about 10 years ago. I was doing IT work and was in a server room working on stuff when i noticed an entire _wall_ of full-height SGI gear. I asked my boss about it. "That's our data server for our peices of the JSF project. It's about 2 terabytes of disks".
So there you have it. I had _physical_ access to the JSF projects servers almost 10 years ago. I had no security clearance, etc. I took the standard company urine test and filled out some forms, but that was that. I had no login/project access to the JSF gear, but i could unplug the whole thing if I wanted to:) I also have no idea what network(s) internally that JSF project server was attached to. There were probably cameras watching the room, but who knows? I don't remember..
Every computer at Boeing AMS was nominally related to the tasks of engineering and producing military aircraft. None of them were on the "public" internet, but 99% of them could "get" to the internet. Who knows how many back channel attack vectors that allowed? I have no idea what is different now.
In any case, there are a lot of entities involved in building something like the JSF. That JSF server was one of the first peices of McDonnel/Boeing owned IT equipment; a few years prior they had sold all of their IT assets to IBM and leased them back; this was the birth of IBM Global Services. So now you have IBM owning/operating aircraft engineering/production data, on behalf of McDonnel/Boeing. Lot's of moving parts. And McDonnel/Boeing was just one of the contractors involved; Lockheed was also doing JSF work as were hundreds of subcontractors for specific systems or parts.
This report seems to be light on details, so who knows what was really attacked and really disclosed?
an internal Microsoft job posting for a malware/security research position was done this way.
Hiring manager sends out an email, with an ip address, says there is a chat server listening on a port with a buffer overrun vuln in it. In n days he'll start reading over the resumes left in c:\ on the machine.
Are you trying to claim that no new track has been laid since the government entities involved collapsed?
Japan has the most advanced highly privatized rail system I am familiar with. I thought it was worth pointing out to the OP that the model of fantastic advanced railroads he chose to use -- Japan -- had much of its development done entirely by the private sector. I don't think that is a statement you can reasonably disagree with.
This is correct. You can use the highway fatality data before, during, and after the no-daytime-speedlimit years in Montana if you want to put some observational data to it.
Highway fatalities went way down, then way back up after the limits came back.
Generally, people driving on the highways during the no-limit conditions weren't going _that_ much faster, but were wearing seatbelts more often and paying better attention.
I've driven on destricted sections of autobahn. It is both exhilarating and taxing. But at no point did I ever lose focus on what I was doing. I also had the benefit of a lot of race track experience here in the US before I went to Germany. I find that 1 hour of continued driving at elevated speeds has me wanting to take a short break. 2 hours of US-speed driving has me wanting to take a long nap.
As a resident of North Dakota who favors leaving the union (and ideally forming a new entity with a recently-freed Montana), I'd be just fine not accepting any more federal money if it also meant not dealing with federal law, Californians, and the entire Boston->DC corridor.:)
As far as why federal money might be flowing into ND, consider:
ND has less than 1/3rd of 1 percent of the US population, but
ND is responsible for between 15 and 20% of US wheat production ND is responsible for a significant portion of the US nuclear deterrant capability [I couldn't say how much, but I'd guess a double-digit percentage] ND has the largest wind-energy capacity of any state in the US. We have the capacity to provide 25% of the US domestic electricity supply from wind power alone.
[insert Borat's National Anthem of Kazakhstan here]
PS: I'm a former Redmond resident. MSFT pumps a ridiculous amount of money into that economy. I can tell you there's no way in hell I'd have been paying $200k [and the associated property taxes] for a 1300 sq ft 1955 rambler without Microsoft employees having saturated the housing market in every direction for 30 minutes. The revenue source data for King County and Redmond is available online. People employed "in the softwware industry" inject something like 95% of the money into the economy, iirc.
What's the appeal of an android phone over an openMoko device?
The latter is designed to be completely open to you, top to bottom, for the purposes of being completely open.
Android is "more open" perhaps than some previous phone offerings, but its clear that your free-as-in-speech rights are not part of the equation.
When I have some reason to ditch my $75 ebay unlocked GSM phone, I'll probably grab an openmoko. I was impressed enough with all of the knobs you get with the P2ktools on a motorola phone, but it's always clear that these are hacker tools designed to work around corporate issues.
I'd rather just spend my money on a phone (and with an organization) that thinks "you get uid 0" is a selling point.
Actually microsoft is _Extremely_ anti-gun. Company policy is that if you have a gun in the trunk of your car in an MS parking lot, it is a firing offense. How many people have been fired for it? Not sure. People that ask HR about this policy are always given the same answer: "if you don't feel safe at work we encourage you to look for employment elsewhere". Exact quote.
IIRC, the reason gcmsweb.org was started was because HR shut down an internal forum for Gun enthusiasts at MS.
Microsoft internally is dominated by leftist/progressive thinking. There are libertarians and conservatives here and there, but there is a huge technocrat population within MS.
MS also has a large openly-gay employee base. If anything, homosexuality is over-represented within the ranks of MS. I would say it is culturally easier to be openly gay here than openly republican or openly pro-gun... at least at the Puget Sound campus.
6 or 7 years ago, when I was a low[er] level QA person at MSFT, I had a recurring meeting with someone from MSR because my division was using the new binary analysis and instrumentation tools that they had cooked up. I was one of the people implementing that toolchain in our production and testing process.
Now every product and every team at Microsoft uses that toolset.
Every year, MSR holds "Techfest", which is kind of like the science fair, except all of the experiments are awesome. MSR folks setup boothes/demos etc to show off what they've been up to. Normal MS employees attend this thing to allow for exactly the sort of informal, node-to-node idea exchange that ends up building the bridges from academia to engineering that you posit must not exist. And that is just one mechanism -- one that is accessible to low-level people in product groups for them to learn _what_ interesting things are happening, and who is doing them, and how to stay abreast of what's going on there.
I had an email conversation last month with someone at MSR who does visualization reseach about the publicly-downloadable visualization controls. I'm using them in one of my internal reporting tools and have some feature asks and was explaining some of the problems I'm having with the currently released bits. They've got new stuff they've been working on that will probably help me out when it's ready, and now they're aware of one more "real-world" use case for visualuzations of the type they're working on.
I'm a nobody, leaf-node QA engineer. And I've had interactions with MSR that have made my job better and easier, and the products I've worked on better.
As a [remaining -- for now] Microsoft employee, I can tell you that there is lots of stuff going on here that gets cancelled. Things do not always pan out.
There are probably projects and people that could be cut. MS could probably be more efficient.
Generally, I've seen good technology and near-finished products get killed for political reasons. That work tends not to be completely lost, however. Near-produts tend to have their interesting technologies teased apart, refactored, and re-incorporated into future MS offerings.
However, much as I malign them, I trust the various managers within MSFT to make R&D and strategy decisions over some dipshit that owns 200 shares of MSFT and is irate that he's not seeing '95->'99 era stock price appreciation.
The MSFT stock has been garbage for a long time -- and I am sure I own more of it than the average complainer. Microsoft has always spent money all over the place because real progress takes investment. The company continues to be highly profitable and doesn't appear to need micromanagement from people looking to get rich via stock speculation.
I haven't carefully analyzed the ramifications, but I am at least emotionally drawn towards the idea of MSFT rebuying _all_ of its public stock and telling the market to FOAD.
Last I checked our market cap was down in the $200B range, so I don't think that's a plausible option, given our cash position.
I remember when i was in highschool, using a PC.mod editor, with samples i had gleaned from other.MODs i had downloaded. IIRC it was XM Mod or something like.. whatever the guy who did Crystal Dreams 2 allegedly used.
I remember using distorted guitar samples to create guitar solos that I couldn't actually play on my real guitar yet. I could play a lot of stuff, but what I had in my head never quite came out of my fingers. Spending hours on 1 pattern in the MOD editor until it sounded like the idea in my head made it possible for me to hear what I was thinking.
At the end, I had a song that I liked, that featured drums I couldn't play and guitar solos I couldn't play.
There is a guitarist named Jason Becker who put out an album or two at a very young age. He was an absolute wizard of a musician, and just a few years into his career he came down with Lou Gehrig's disease. He was able to create at least one more album entirely via computer and MIDI. He got some friends to guest-play some of the parts he had written in the studio.
The mind of that man can now outplay his fingers (which wouldn't have seemed possible if you'd heard him shred pre-disease!), but he can still create music that we can listen to. The world is better for it.
Imagine something like pandora, which can analyze what you like, coupled with a synthesis component, which can create entirely new peices of music.
I'd be happy to let others debate the merits of "artificial" music catering solely to my tastes, while enjoying something I cannot find today: album after album of music that pushes my buttons the way my favorite songs do.
anyone can fire anyone's ass for any reason and have better lawsuit immunity than they do today
See what I wrote in the post you responded to?
I don't think the _government_ should force people to do anything. I think if you work for a place you ought to be able to tell your boss you're not going to do something... and it should be between you and your boss. The state shouldn't get involved.
Of course, going hand in hand with this is that your boss ought to be able to tell you to sod off for not doing your job. You don't get to claim some special protection because of your religion -- if your boss wants to fire you, they get to.
I'm in favor of both. Either one by itself would suck.
Yes, and the youtube TOS prohibits you from mirroring the videos or viewing them offline.
It's important for the government communications to be format/time shiftable so that we can pretend that we can hold them accountable to what they said in the past.
So if someone has a religious belief that they must not serve a customer who is black, or customers who are an interracial couple, you don't think they should be fired from their waiter job for that? Because the "religious belief" excuse won't save them on that.
Correct. That is an example of what I meant by _all_ anti-discrimination laws. Legally, I think people should be allowed to be bigots. No matter what the law says, you won't change their hearts or their minds with coercion. You'll create lasting bitterness, however.
The key is to ensure that bigots do not have a monopoly on _power_. Government often grants power to some and restricts it from others. Government tends to protect encumbents and encumbents tend to protect government. This cycle has to be fought at every turn so that when an entrenched business has a backwards racist policy, new competing businesses are not hampered from entering the market and blacks have a valid way of entering the workforce in that industry.
What has made headlines is pharmacists being required to provide contraception to customers, against their religious beliefs. Again, that's too fucking bad: providing medications is what the job requires, and your religious beliefs don't mean you can tell customers what things they can and can't buy.
The _government_ requiring someone to act against their beleifs is generally best avoided.
Would you support allowing Scientologist pharmacists to refuse to dispense anti-depressants to customers, and instead give them pamphlets encouraging them to join Scientology?
Yes.
This situation is easily solved, though: give employers the power to hire and fire whoever they want. If an employee (pharmacist) refuses to do his job properly, causing customers to complain or take their business across the street, Walgreens/CVS should be allowed to fire his ass, and should be immune from a lawsuit from him alleging religious discrimination.
Exactly. Because I beleive this (anyone can fire anyone's ass for any reason and have better lawsuit immunity than they do today), I can also support the above points of view: pharmacists ought to be allowed to not sell drugs they are morally against. Doctors should be free to not perform procedures they are morally against. Bigots ought to be free to not serve people they do not like.
Maximum freedom for all people. The government stays out of the business of picking winners and losers, and of forcing ideologies on resistant people.
Slashdot Mirror
A republic is the rule of law, specifically, written law. A constitutional republic writes down what the limited extent of government powers is. While it is true that a few elite men designed our constitutional republic, they designed it explicitly to limit the power of any governors -- themselves and any subsequent politicians.
In in oligarchy there may be written laws, but in effect, you have the rule of a few men, because there may not be sufficient boundaries in the existing written law, or the few may circumvent written law as often as they like. Or, it may be that the written law really only applies to subjects, not to oligarchs themselves.
The cheif difference between written laws and limited government power, vs. any arrangement where there the boundaries of government power are not clearly defined, is that in the former, people can PLAN their lives and behaviors, and make long term plans and execute on them. In the latter situation, the actions and dreams of man are perpetually subject to the boundless whims of the oligarchs and their appointees.
One defect of the modern US government is that much of our law is unwritten -- we have review and regulation boards, committees, and agencies that decide on matters according to the whims of the men serving on those boards. The rules are not written down. So while we technically have a constitutional republic, we have many de-facto oligarchies in specific sectors of governance.
A specific example of this might be the FDA. Is it legal to to sell a certain drug in the US? That depends on what the FDA says. The law says "the FDA decides". The FDA provides information and guidance about its decision making process, but ultimatley, its still a decision making process. I have no specific experience with the FDA drug approval process, so it might be an especially vague or especially well defined process, and so might be a great or poor illustration of the point.
Another aspect to consider regarding the founding elite that drafted the constitution was that it was _imposed_ on nobody in particular - the "Federal" government is federated in the sense that there is a clear deliniation of powers delegated to the "national" government, and powers not otherwise specified remain with the states, localities, or individuals. States had to buy-in to the constitution, and it was on a voluntary basis, state by state, that this was done.
It wasn't until the Civil war that the US national government egregiously asserted its superiority to the states by raising an army to prevent certain states from "opting out" of the Union. The civil war, despite how it is frequently taught, was fought politically over the "legality" of state secession from the United States national government. Abraham Lincoln himself said that the issue of slavery was second to the issue of secession. While slavery was the pivotal issue that motivated the southern states to secede, Lincoln prosecuted the war on the grounds that the south had no right to secede, and there is a quote from him on the matter that says, in essence, his slavery policy would be whatever forced the union to remain a whole.
It wasn't until some time into the war that he wrapped up the moral aspects of combating slavery as a post-facto justification for war. The Civil War, as originally executed, was a political boondoggle. Only with the hindsight of what it accomplished in terms of human rights and freedoms can it be said to be a net positive. But critics of Lincoln suggest that any time prior to beginning the Civil War, the federal government and the northern states could have simply overturned or refused to enforce fugitive slave laws. Had that happened, the moral slavery issue would have sorted itself out via the mass exodous of escaping slaves to northern states. Northern states were legally bound to return escaped slaves to their southern masters; overtuning the laws that required this may have prevented the war and ended slavery just the same.
You're exactly right.
Luckily, this nation was founded as a republic of laws, and not as a democracy of the populst mob, pandered to by a ruling class. To the extent that it feels more like the latter than the former, it has ceased being the America that our ancestors helped forge, and the Americans raised in this new world of positive rights and majority rule are Americans in name, but not in ideology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DioQooFIcgE
This is an assertion i hear made from time to time which really doesn't seem to hold water. Government work tends to be exactly $(election_cycle) long in terms of scope and outlook.
It's hard to say something about "corporations" on the whole. Some of them are run differently than how I'd run mine, and some of them are run very well, and take a very long outlook. If you are developing new oil, gas, or ore resources, you have an _extremely_ long outlook. If you are Microsoft, sinking billions into businesses that may or may not pan out, you have a long outlook. If you are an institutional investor, you have an outlook that is at least 20 years long.
There are only a few examples of unabashed success in government. The Apollo program and the Manhattan project come to mind. Both took less time than one might think, and both featured political support that transcended "normal" conditions.
But all of this is really a side argument.
The constitution neither says nor implies that things become the job of the federal government because companies aren't doing a "good enough" job at it. So again, by what authority or reasoning is this the job of the federal government?
The "serious flaw" was that the future doesn't include you getting to force your will on other people?
Ayn Rand simply says this: you depend on the people you despise and want so desperately to control. They don't need you. Cut them loose. Let them rot without your glorious patronage. Fewer mouths for you to feed, right? What's the downside?
Is it necessary to defend the united states? No?
Then why is it the federal government's job?
Weather forecasting has its roots in military strategy. To the extent that climate forecasting might keep the country safe -- safe from real threats -- I'd support it being a job of the federal government.
I wish people would give up the idea that there is some dispassionate public interest that should be accorded to "scientists", while people holding the same education doing the same work that _dont_ milk from the public teat are shills, etc.
I'll be plain: nobody in the federal government serves _me_. You could fire the entire lot of them and it would be at least 6 months before I noticed. Well, i'd notice all the extra money that is no longer being extorted from me pretty much immediatley. Other than that? Not sure I'd miss em.
Anyway, I'm _shocked_ that a bunch of publicly funded climate activists are pandering for more money and power for climate activism.
I look forward to paying the salaries of a bunch of guys that will argue with each other over how important each of them is. James Hansen really needs some new competition, let's create a new three letter agency!
If you have a peice of endpoint equipment that you don't need to move, and you have the ability to run a wire to it, run the wire.
It will be cheaper, it will be faster, and it won't have strange failures. It will require no configuration.
I have had home wifi for a long time, but it has only ever powered laptops. If something doesn't move, it gets a wire.
I run gig-E at home, with one machine running a bt client constantly. I burn DVDs over the network. I am trying to figure out how wireless-only wouldn't be a huge step backwards at my house.
Mother in law has the apple wireless desktop, which includes a BT (afaik) mouse.
I started transferring pictures off of a BT phone onto the mac. The mouse became unusable. It was like using windows 3.0 while formatting a floppy disk. You'd move the mouse all the way across the desk; it would move about 1" on the screen.
If you ever do anything else with bluetooth, i'd avoid a BT mouse.
I've got a MS wireless mouse and a logitech wireless mouse. The logitech doesn't work at long distances very well (its setup in my HTPC room and from the couch its performance is spotty). Every few months it will forget that it knows about the PC it's attached to and you have to re-sync it.
A university degree says nothing about the attitude towards learning of the person, nothing about the fitness of that person for some specific role, and nothing about that person's capabilities or interests.
What it primarily says in this country is one of two things:
- a person or their legal guardians understand exactly how to game the job market in the US, and have done so
- a person, with the support of their legal guardians, never plans on actually working a day in their life and "studies" the most pompous, contemptuosly useless drivel possible, such that there can be no plausible contribution to society and no objective standard of quality. This is in preparation for a life of pseudo-intellectual socializing, primarily in measured instances of attempting to lord ones faux-status over people who secretly detest each other's company
Yeah, I'm a US university graduate. On the rare occasions that I let myself feel some sense of accomplishment or acheivement about the peice of paper I have in a box somewhere, I think of all of the other people in my graduating class with the same sheet of paper.
[and lest you suggest that if only I had gone to the "correct" institution, I'd have a different opinion: I direct you to the 'academic' histories of our recent crop of politicians. They are the result of "the best" our nation has to offer]
I was an intern at McDonnel Douglas [which had recently become Boeing Aircraft and Missile Systems] about 10 years ago. I was doing IT work and was in a server room working on stuff when i noticed an entire _wall_ of full-height SGI gear. I asked my boss about it. "That's our data server for our peices of the JSF project. It's about 2 terabytes of disks".
So there you have it. I had _physical_ access to the JSF projects servers almost 10 years ago. I had no security clearance, etc. I took the standard company urine test and filled out some forms, but that was that. I had no login/project access to the JSF gear, but i could unplug the whole thing if I wanted to :) I also have no idea what network(s) internally that JSF project server was attached to. There were probably cameras watching the room, but who knows? I don't remember..
Every computer at Boeing AMS was nominally related to the tasks of engineering and producing military aircraft. None of them were on the "public" internet, but 99% of them could "get" to the internet. Who knows how many back channel attack vectors that allowed? I have no idea what is different now.
In any case, there are a lot of entities involved in building something like the JSF. That JSF server was one of the first peices of McDonnel/Boeing owned IT equipment; a few years prior they had sold all of their IT assets to IBM and leased them back; this was the birth of IBM Global Services. So now you have IBM owning/operating aircraft engineering/production data, on behalf of McDonnel/Boeing. Lot's of moving parts. And McDonnel/Boeing was just one of the contractors involved; Lockheed was also doing JSF work as were hundreds of subcontractors for specific systems or parts.
This report seems to be light on details, so who knows what was really attacked and really disclosed?
an internal Microsoft job posting for a malware/security research position was done this way.
Hiring manager sends out an email, with an ip address, says there is a chat server listening on a port with a buffer overrun vuln in it. In n days he'll start reading over the resumes left in c:\ on the machine.
Are you trying to claim that no new track has been laid since the government entities involved collapsed?
Japan has the most advanced highly privatized rail system I am familiar with. I thought it was worth pointing out to the OP that the model of fantastic advanced railroads he chose to use -- Japan -- had much of its development done entirely by the private sector. I don't think that is a statement you can reasonably disagree with.
I have some exciting news for you.
Most of the railways in japan are privately owned and operated. And were privately built.
The above 5 sentence conversation is a fantastic compression of Atlas Shrugged.
You two have just saved slashdot readers 1200 pages.
Yes.
Freedom means I get to disagree with you. Even if you're "right".
I won't address any of the ways that actualy you're wrong, because that's not the issue.
The issue is that neither you, nor the government, are supposed to own my every thought and my every action.
This is correct. You can use the highway fatality data before, during, and after the no-daytime-speedlimit years in Montana if you want to put some observational data to it.
Highway fatalities went way down, then way back up after the limits came back.
Generally, people driving on the highways during the no-limit conditions weren't going _that_ much faster, but were wearing seatbelts more often and paying better attention.
I've driven on destricted sections of autobahn. It is both exhilarating and taxing. But at no point did I ever lose focus on what I was doing. I also had the benefit of a lot of race track experience here in the US before I went to Germany. I find that 1 hour of continued driving at elevated speeds has me wanting to take a short break. 2 hours of US-speed driving has me wanting to take a long nap.
As a resident of North Dakota who favors leaving the union (and ideally forming a new entity with a recently-freed Montana), I'd be just fine not accepting any more federal money if it also meant not dealing with federal law, Californians, and the entire Boston->DC corridor. :)
As far as why federal money might be flowing into ND, consider:
ND has less than 1/3rd of 1 percent of the US population, but
ND is responsible for between 15 and 20% of US wheat production
ND is responsible for a significant portion of the US nuclear deterrant capability [I couldn't say how much, but I'd guess a double-digit percentage]
ND has the largest wind-energy capacity of any state in the US. We have the capacity to provide 25% of the US domestic electricity supply from wind power alone.
[insert Borat's National Anthem of Kazakhstan here]
PS: I'm a former Redmond resident. MSFT pumps a ridiculous amount of money into that economy. I can tell you there's no way in hell I'd have been paying $200k [and the associated property taxes] for a 1300 sq ft 1955 rambler without Microsoft employees having saturated the housing market in every direction for 30 minutes. The revenue source data for King County and Redmond is available online. People employed "in the softwware industry" inject something like 95% of the money into the economy, iirc.
What's the appeal of an android phone over an openMoko device?
The latter is designed to be completely open to you, top to bottom, for the purposes of being completely open.
Android is "more open" perhaps than some previous phone offerings, but its clear that your free-as-in-speech rights are not part of the equation.
When I have some reason to ditch my $75 ebay unlocked GSM phone, I'll probably grab an openmoko. I was impressed enough with all of the knobs you get with the P2ktools on a motorola phone, but it's always clear that these are hacker tools designed to work around corporate issues.
I'd rather just spend my money on a phone (and with an organization) that thinks "you get uid 0" is a selling point.
Actually microsoft is _Extremely_ anti-gun. Company policy is that if you have a gun in the trunk of your car in an MS parking lot, it is a firing offense. How many people have been fired for it? Not sure. People that ask HR about this policy are always given the same answer: "if you don't feel safe at work we encourage you to look for employment elsewhere". Exact quote.
IIRC, the reason gcmsweb.org was started was because HR shut down an internal forum for Gun enthusiasts at MS.
Microsoft internally is dominated by leftist/progressive thinking. There are libertarians and conservatives here and there, but there is a huge technocrat population within MS.
MS also has a large openly-gay employee base. If anything, homosexuality is over-represented within the ranks of MS. I would say it is culturally easier to be openly gay here than openly republican or openly pro-gun... at least at the Puget Sound campus.
When schools are run like jails, what schools produce are criminals.
Have you looked into making sure that homeschooling stays legal in your area? You should.
Well, here's an anecdote.
6 or 7 years ago, when I was a low[er] level QA person at MSFT, I had a recurring meeting with someone from MSR because my division was using the new binary analysis and instrumentation tools that they had cooked up. I was one of the people implementing that toolchain in our production and testing process.
Now every product and every team at Microsoft uses that toolset.
Every year, MSR holds "Techfest", which is kind of like the science fair, except all of the experiments are awesome. MSR folks setup boothes/demos etc to show off what they've been up to. Normal MS employees attend this thing to allow for exactly the sort of informal, node-to-node idea exchange that ends up building the bridges from academia to engineering that you posit must not exist. And that is just one mechanism -- one that is accessible to low-level people in product groups for them to learn _what_ interesting things are happening, and who is doing them, and how to stay abreast of what's going on there.
I had an email conversation last month with someone at MSR who does visualization reseach about the publicly-downloadable visualization controls. I'm using them in one of my internal reporting tools and have some feature asks and was explaining some of the problems I'm having with the currently released bits. They've got new stuff they've been working on that will probably help me out when it's ready, and now they're aware of one more "real-world" use case for visualuzations of the type they're working on.
I'm a nobody, leaf-node QA engineer. And I've had interactions with MSR that have made my job better and easier, and the products I've worked on better.
As a [remaining -- for now] Microsoft employee, I can tell you that there is lots of stuff going on here that gets cancelled. Things do not always pan out.
There are probably projects and people that could be cut. MS could probably be more efficient.
Generally, I've seen good technology and near-finished products get killed for political reasons. That work tends not to be completely lost, however. Near-produts tend to have their interesting technologies teased apart, refactored, and re-incorporated into future MS offerings.
However, much as I malign them, I trust the various managers within MSFT to make R&D and strategy decisions over some dipshit that owns 200 shares of MSFT and is irate that he's not seeing '95->'99 era stock price appreciation.
The MSFT stock has been garbage for a long time -- and I am sure I own more of it than the average complainer. Microsoft has always spent money all over the place because real progress takes investment. The company continues to be highly profitable and doesn't appear to need micromanagement from people looking to get rich via stock speculation.
I haven't carefully analyzed the ramifications, but I am at least emotionally drawn towards the idea of MSFT rebuying _all_ of its public stock and telling the market to FOAD.
Last I checked our market cap was down in the $200B range, so I don't think that's a plausible option, given our cash position.
(google the reference if you don't get it)
I remember when i was in highschool, using a PC .mod editor, with samples i had gleaned from other .MODs i had downloaded. IIRC it was XM Mod or something like.. whatever the guy who did Crystal Dreams 2 allegedly used.
I remember using distorted guitar samples to create guitar solos that I couldn't actually play on my real guitar yet. I could play a lot of stuff, but what I had in my head never quite came out of my fingers. Spending hours on 1 pattern in the MOD editor until it sounded like the idea in my head made it possible for me to hear what I was thinking.
At the end, I had a song that I liked, that featured drums I couldn't play and guitar solos I couldn't play.
There is a guitarist named Jason Becker who put out an album or two at a very young age. He was an absolute wizard of a musician, and just a few years into his career he came down with Lou Gehrig's disease. He was able to create at least one more album entirely via computer and MIDI. He got some friends to guest-play some of the parts he had written in the studio.
The mind of that man can now outplay his fingers (which wouldn't have seemed possible if you'd heard him shred pre-disease!), but he can still create music that we can listen to. The world is better for it.
Even the creative elements of music are being synthesized by machines to some degree of success.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku#Hatsune_Miku
Imagine something like pandora, which can analyze what you like, coupled with a synthesis component, which can create entirely new peices of music.
I'd be happy to let others debate the merits of "artificial" music catering solely to my tastes, while enjoying something I cannot find today: album after album of music that pushes my buttons the way my favorite songs do.
Reading Comprehension FAIL
See what I wrote in the post you responded to?
I don't think the _government_ should force people to do anything. I think if you work for a place you ought to be able to tell your boss you're not going to do something... and it should be between you and your boss. The state shouldn't get involved.
Of course, going hand in hand with this is that your boss ought to be able to tell you to sod off for not doing your job. You don't get to claim some special protection because of your religion -- if your boss wants to fire you, they get to.
I'm in favor of both. Either one by itself would suck.
Yes, and the youtube TOS prohibits you from mirroring the videos or viewing them offline.
It's important for the government communications to be format/time shiftable so that we can pretend that we can hold them accountable to what they said in the past.
Correct. That is an example of what I meant by _all_ anti-discrimination laws. Legally, I think people should be allowed to be bigots. No matter what the law says, you won't change their hearts or their minds with coercion. You'll create lasting bitterness, however.
The key is to ensure that bigots do not have a monopoly on _power_. Government often grants power to some and restricts it from others. Government tends to protect encumbents and encumbents tend to protect government. This cycle has to be fought at every turn so that when an entrenched business has a backwards racist policy, new competing businesses are not hampered from entering the market and blacks have a valid way of entering the workforce in that industry.
The _government_ requiring someone to act against their beleifs is generally best avoided.
Yes.
Exactly. Because I beleive this (anyone can fire anyone's ass for any reason and have better lawsuit immunity than they do today), I can also support the above points of view: pharmacists ought to be allowed to not sell drugs they are morally against. Doctors should be free to not perform procedures they are morally against. Bigots ought to be free to not serve people they do not like.
Maximum freedom for all people. The government stays out of the business of picking winners and losers, and of forcing ideologies on resistant people.