It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend about Final Fantasy (the series, not just the original game).
It has been alot of what the author of this game doesn't want. Alot of free time just walking around getting into random encounters with no real point. Why did you walk around till you had killed 100 ogres before going after garland? Talk about slow polot advancement.
Then you get into the more recent ones and... I like the more narration and story and overall better writting.... but.. the games have become more of a movie. They arn't really hard or anything. The action seems to have just become kind of something to do between plot developments, and they rush along. Sheesh you don't even get to effect the story line until you have been playing for 10 hours anymore.
Anyway... there is a definite balance. What really gets me is that FF has such a linear story line that its barely role playing, its more like role watching, and you get to take control for the fight scenes...basically... your the plays stunt double for the most part.
One thing this does remind me of is Way of the Samurai. Very simple game at heart but so rich! Sure the game was small, but each character went about his day in his own way...since the game took place over the same 2 days... that meant that the path you took through the game effected who you met or when you met them, and under what circumstances.
Sure you could play through it in an hour or two, but... there were so many ways to do it, so many little story lines and different endings... that was way cool. One of the few true role playing games where you could really choose who you wanted to be.
In any case... this game sounds cool, I may have to check it out.
Actually... methanol is not (in any quantity) produced by the waste of microbes here on earth, at least not usefully. It is made that way... but thats not where any methanol we use for anything comes from.
Methanol or wood alcohol is, as far as I know, usually produced as a byproduct of heating cellulous (sp?) in an oxygen depleted environment. This causes it to break down into producer gas (wood gas, hydrogen, whatever you wanna call it), various tars, and methanol. Or at least, traditionally thats how it was made. This is refered to in wikipedia as "the destructive distillation of wood".
These days it is actually made from an industrial process using natural gas.
Whats worst... I worked in an almost exclusivly Unix shop for years. When someone sent out an Excell spreadhseet or whatnot, we used to actually ask one of the admin assistants in IT to print it out for us and send it to us in interdepartment mail, because... we had NO windows boxes at all between any of us. (partially because we were stubborn and snobby about it)
Of course, that got to be less important once openoffice started to work well and whatnot but I digress...
Its annoying having to explain to people "Yes I know alot about computers, and back when Windows 95 was new, I knew alot about windows too but, no I probably can't actually help you much, its not really the same".
I mean, yah I can run scandisk and defrag with the best of them, but its been a while since I could call myself anything close to an expert, I have forgotten more about Windows than I currently know.
Ya know, I still dislike it. I mean QoS is one thing, and a good thing when done properly. I however am agast that they would want to impliment it in such an extortionist way as has been proposed.
Its one thing to adjust queuing so that different protocols get the latencies they need to work properly. You know the old standards, who cares about ftp and other file sharing latencies? But you know ssh packets really benefit from lower latencies cuz nobody likes to feel like they are typing at a 2400 bps terminal.
However, offering specific websites "premium access" to jump past the queues? Well thats just going to degrade service for everyone who doesn't pay for it... which means... degrading the service of their paying subscribers....
basically the message is... you pay us, or we make our paying subscribers connection to you suck ass. Huh, what? I pay them... and they are going to degrade the service that I get to the websites that I use... the very reason that I pay them for access?
Wtf! QoS is one thing, this is just extortion, and at the expense of their own paying customers.
And I would say the same thing... if slashdot puts up malicous code, then they have broken the trust of the entire community. 10 years of built trust of doing the right thing, violated. It would be horrible, it would effect many of us.
Should we think more about trust relationships like this, probably. I think its something that people, in general, should be more midnful of. As introversion software pointed out in the subtitle of their game uplink: Trust is a Weakness.
Does the company have a legitimate complaint... yah in some light. However, I do think there is some value in forgiveness. Or as the dude put it
Walter: Am I wrong? Dude: No Walter, your not wrong, your just an ASSHOLE
Remember, one of a companies biggests costs is turnover. A recent study showed that the average cost of replacing an employee to the company is 150% of their positions yearly salary.
When a person causes harm through what is otherwise completly understandable and normal actions, I think it behooves us to forgive them their trespasses. There is no real need to make a case for being an asshole.
I mean seriously so fucking what. If she can do her job while listening to music, why not let her use the PC to do it? Its a perfectly reasonable thing to do with the PC. Its something that 99.999% of the time, in fact, every time UP TO THE RELEASE OF THIS CD, has never caused an issue. Its something people have, and rightfully so, become used to being able to do.
Punishing her for something that she had no way and couldn't have known there was an issue, is asinine. It is sony that broke everyones trust, and deserves to be punished. Seriously, if _I_ released a CD like this, I would likely be looking at jail time. Sony, on the other hand, is getting a minor tap on the wrist (barely a slap).
though you know, there is something encouraging that came out of this... we were wrong! The NSA has finnaly tipped their hand and inadvertently admitted that they don't have the capabilities that many of us thought they already did.
What am I talking about? Simple...
It has been speculated for years that the NSA, with is vast computing power, and secret fingers in every pie, was already using their secret advanced techniques and high powered computers to, indeed, "monitor" every call in the US.
Not monitor as in really listen to but, you know, scan and flag with AI, look for words in various languages that would record and flag for review.
This was speculative at best, and nobody had any proof, but I know I have heard the conspiracy theory many times.
Now, with the recent revealations, we know for a fact that its not true. If they had that ability, then surely there would be no need to pressure phone companies for these records, they would already have the ability to have them.
that, or the nsa got tired of us thinking that, and this whole fiasco is counter intelligence....
Exactly.... and maybe its just me working at a non-profit healthcare company but... we have an entire "compliance" department whose job is ethics.
The message from them is clear "if you are unsure, ask". In ethics you always want to err on the side of caution. Or as they like to say "avoid even the appearance of inpropriety"
Its not just about feeling good because you knew you were ethical, its about deserving to be trusted AND building trust.
It reminds me of a memorial article that I read recently called "the man who fired me was right" by a reporter remembering being fired for a prank... he put a tiny little edit... a fake award and recipient into an article about high school graduation. Not a big deal in the aggregate... just a tiny prank.
His editor found out later and said "people should be able to believe what they read in the news". Not that there are never erros, but a factual error is an error, an intentional lie is another story, even a small one.
This whole phone number listing thing. I read the article. The part that seems TOTALLY IGNORED in the media is the conversations with QWEST. When QWEST execs asked why they didn't go to the FISA court or the AG, they said they were afraid they wouldn't agree....
Thats totally damning. I don't care if its legal or not... going forward with a program and avoiding oversight because your afraid its illegal is unethical whether it turns out to be defacto legal or not.
I think regardless of the legality, whoever was involved should be fired for ethical violations on that alone.
Oh, I misread, I thought they actually did this for a time then killed the project. Mea Culpa.
In any case, my point remains, once they have the ability to do wholesale surveillance, they have the ability. I mean, how do they obtain the encrypted form? Don't they first have to aquire the unencrypted form to encrypt it?
Once they have the ability to obtain the information at all without oversight FIRST, they have the ability to skirt their own system and abuse it.
So the point remains.... and the people ivolved in the prorgam that is happening should certainly be indicted.
The problem here is and always has been the potential for abuse.
The FISA court exists for a reason you know. Why? Not because of some theoretical use of wiretaps to infringe on privacy.... because they were activly tapping the phone calls of people like Dr Martin Luther King in every hotel that he visited trying to dig up dirt on him.
This isn't conspiracy theory, its conspiracy fact. It is a matter of congressional record that wiretaps were indeed used to follow innocent people for political reasons.
Besides, sure, today its just intelligence on terrorists. However, once the system to do it is there, the ability to abuse it is there. All it takes is one unscrupulous operator, or a little pressure from a director, or dare I say, a secret presidential memo, to cause the system to be abused to any number of ends.
This is why we need oversight, and we need to hold these people responsible for what they do. If they can wiretap with impunity, then why not wiretap with impunity? If there is no punishment, then there is a lower bar to doing it.
Frankly, I think these programs should be outed, and every signle person involved, all the way up, should be indicted.
That goes for this program (if it was indeed illegal, if not they should fix the law), and the presidents wiretapping program thats been in the news. Intictments and impeachments are what should be going on right now.
yup. Honestly, from one point of view, I totally understand the anti-union anti-regulation "the company pays you, its their money" attitude. I really do. It makes sense. From the whole "its my property, I do what I want, freedom is great" perspective, it makes total sense. However, I just think that its too simplistic.
Lets take the example of a company near me that a friend works for. It was started by a nice "hippy liberal" guy. They ended up unionizing but on the whole, the union and the company had few major issues. They negotiated a good contract and got the workers very fair wages. The company made money, the workers like their jobs. It was great for everyone.
Well, after many years, the owner decided that it was time to get out of the buisness. He sold the company to a very large company. Well, they cut their pay greatly. I know it sounds weird with a union contract, but the contract was actually not a flat compensation, it was based on a base rate + productivity bonus. They cut the bonus back to the bare minimum allowed in the contract, they started trying to change all the working conditions.
Now their best workers make nearly half what they used to make.
So what happened? The company was not built by one man, he started it, but it was built on the hard work of hundreds of workers. However, since the capitalist owned the means of production, he sold it, and the very livelyhoods of hundreds of people off to some other capitalist, who then decided to just start changing everything.
Honestly, I think the whole model is broken. I think that once you start involving other people in your enterprise, they are part of the enterprise. They should get a stake. I think its wrong for peoples livelyhoods to be bought and sold like that.
Honestly, I think unions arn't the best solution, but they are a damned site better than having nobody in your court at all. What I would rather see is all companies be incorperated so that once they start having more than just a few employees that those employees should have a stake in the company, and that corperate officers and managers should be elected.
Give people a stake so they have a reason to care if the company is profitable. Let them see the fruits of their labor.
growing up watching the old 50s sit coms I always thought it was funny the way they had dual twin beds in the bedrooms of married couples.
Someone even told me once that people really did that, I still thought it was absurd. I mean, married people? People who have sex with eachother.... don't sleep in the same bed? How odd.
Then I grew up and had a girlfriend, and moved in with her, and lived with her for a couple of years.
Fuck that... I don't care if I get married, I want my own room. Sleeping next to someone is nice sometimes, but... having your own bed and personal space is just priceless.
Lets not forget Milgrim's experiment... which I was typing up and explaining here when I realised wikipedia probably knows better than me, and in fact, has much more on it than I remember... so I will defer to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_phenomeno n
Its funny seeing how different groups act. I rememer being on an admin team doing real production support for critical applications, if something broke, your first priority was to make sure service stayed up, and your second was making sure that it didn't happen again.
If that meant sending a core file or even a crash dump to the vendor and making them tell you why it broke and when the patch was comming out, then thats what you did.
Generally, it got things fixed, eventually. Now I have more exposure to other systems and I notice, thats not the attitude. People work with broken stuff all the time, just keep on chugging.
Fact is, you can get used to antything. Getting used to things is kind of what our brains are meant to do. Honestly, I would imagine that most honest to god bugs in end user software are easier to just get used to than say... swithcing from vi to notepad or vice versa.
Hell how about the games that came on a bootable disk with custom boot sectors and all sorts of nastiness to prevent them from being easily copied.
Of course, now they have the ultimate solution to that, good luck even finding a drive to read them:)
I shudder to think how many games are all but gone just for having been stored on old floppies that were hard to copy and have since degraded.
I actually talked with an old apple 2 game developer once. He described how he used the ability to control the stepper motors in the drive to cause it to write data to the disk such that instead of being concentric rings of data, the data track spiraled down the disk.
ya know... perl is a perfectly acceptable language.
Honestly, I doubt it matters much, most all programming languages differ mostly in syntax. I mean sure, theres some real differences, but nothing that you need to care about.
Shit I started with applesoft basic, talk about a good way to pick up bad habbits. However, aside from lisp, I think it was the most unique language that I played with.
Perl just uses a rather extended and idiosyncratic C syntax. no seprate compilations, makes it nice to learn with, and quick to get into.
I mean yah, C and lisp will be helpful to do something in at some point. Maybe read someone elses code and change it, that way you get an eye for differing styles, and what really boils your blood that other programmers do.:)
Though, it takes years to learn to right good code, in any language, and I have found that perl has been more than adequet for about 80% of the code that I have ever written... then maybe 18% bourne shell.
Thats my $0.02.... but I wouldn't worry about first languages, pick up two and then you can just sit down and start learning most anything else... though, I never did get the hang of lisp....
However, you are wrong to think that thats all there is. Its a matter of what your interest is in looking at it.
1000 witnesses all saying the same thing is great, because it establishes a consensus of fact. We can be pretty sure he really did shoot the guy.
However, his reasons for wanting him dead, for not wanting him to live, thats another issue entirely. Does it matter in terms of doing justice? No maybe not. However it may inform us as a society as to what brings a person to the point that they are willing to forgo social norms and kill another human being.
Its important, but its important for different reasons. If you don't care, well, then I guess it isn't important to you.
Think of it as root cause analsys. Sure on some level you just need to get your server back up. However, without knowing the real reason why it went down, how can you be sure you can stop it from happening again, or at least decrease the probability.
People are a product of their society. Yes its absolutly right to bring down the coercive forces of police upon those who harm others by their actions... but... like any product... it makes good sense to look at why failed products are produced and if its worth the effort to try and reduce the failure rates of the process. Or for people... the society.
Hmmmm actually I havn't compiled any kernels or kernel modules in a while. Frankly, I gave up on it long ago... though perhaps you have some less well supported hardware or something?
Actually as I remember, madwifi did give me some major headaches when I realised that I needed it on my last laptop and the debian stuff just wasn't quite there.
Tho on the current laptop, I just installed ubuntu and have had no issues... and frankly... kernel updates are only so so important (usually). I mean sure every now and again a really important one comes out but as often as not, I find even the security ones are for situations that don't affect me.
Then when one does come out... eh I upgrade... from the standard package. Though, I also grew out of bragging about uptime a long time ago.
Course now it takes me so long to hit a record uptime that I just stopped looking on any of my systems that are always up. Maybe thats what really killed it. Once you hit the better part of a year once... you start forgetting to check.
(my best current uptime on a system I manage is 125 days though)
However I think this says alot more about the interests and predilictions of the writters and producers than that of the audience. Sure, on some level the audience wants a plot, and the plot is generally designed to cause those reactions in the audiance.
However, I would submit that many of those elements could be dropped from the plot, and people would still go see the shitty movies.
In the past, and still, I have been a huge microsoft critic. I hate their buisness tactics, I dislike their software. Windows just annoys the hell out of me. I far prefer X.
This however is a very sensible move.
Honestly, I have the knowledge to deal with my own firewall rules, hell, I just the other day had to wrestle iptables and the nfs deamons to play nice so my kickstart server would work right.
I still think outbound filtering is a royal pain in my ass. I mean sure its pretty easy to remember to open incomming ports but... outgoing? Now every time I use a new peice of software, I have to figure out what ports it wants to connect out to?
Ugh. Thats fine for a server, and... in fact, I use it on my colo box. However... on a desktop, where a user expects to pick up a new peice of software and play with it on a fairly regular basis?
No fucking way.
Good job microsoft. You made a very sensible decision. Now if they would just come over to the free software movement and GPL windows, that would be awesome.
I think everyone is reading way too much into these crappy films. Lets try a simpler explanation. Ever heard of the Roman colleseium? How about people like to watch violence. They will cheer for the violence itself.
I don't think the audience members really care who it is thats being hacked to bits... is it the bad boy or the naughty girl. Whatever, its somebody being hacked up. Its sensational, it stirs up all sorts of things, I think people often identify with the killer at first because well, the alternative is to identify with the person being hacked up, and its much safer to identify with the winner. You get to feel the perverse thrill of the kill, which is much better than the fear of being the prey.
Of course, who the audience identifies with is going to also be a function of the camera angle.
Honestly, I think the "final girl theory" more explains the formula of the writters than the actual responses of the audience.
Yah it was certainly no FFI...now there was a game with a deep story line and amazing character development.
Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of the Final Fantasy series, and have played most of them to the end. However, they have always been kind of cheesy in alot of departments.
Actually, my main problem is that they seem to have become alot more movie-like since around VII. The first several hours of some of them is just like watching a movie with very little actual interaction beyond running the battles.
I long for them to bring back the feel of the old games, like I, II, and III (US release numbers, never went back for the japanese release versions).
So your going to completly ignore the nagitive impact on moral? Or how about the fact that now employees will need to actually take time off to do minor things that they otherwise could have taken just a few minutes out of their day to work on.
For example, I recently had to pay parking tickets in a few cities around here to reregister my car. I managed it by taking a few minutes here and there over the day to contact the towns via phone and then use their websites to pay electronically (sad that both were needed).
If port 80 traffic to non related sites was blocked (and good luck identifing all those sites, and hope you don't have anyone who actually needs the web for their job, like the technicians who fix PCs or pretty much anyone who might need to look up information or do research to put together some form of documentation), then I would have had to take an entire day off to run around and do all that.
Lets see... maybe an hour of lost productivity... compared with... an entire day of lost productivity. Yup, sounds like blocking port 80 "wins"
Slashdot Mirror
It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend about Final Fantasy (the series, not just the original game).
It has been alot of what the author of this game doesn't want. Alot of free time just walking around getting into random encounters with no real point. Why did you walk around till you had killed 100 ogres before going after garland? Talk about slow polot advancement.
Then you get into the more recent ones and... I like the more narration and story and overall better writting.... but.. the games have become more of a movie. They arn't really hard or anything. The action seems to have just become kind of something to do between plot developments, and they rush along. Sheesh you don't even get to effect the story line until you have been playing for 10 hours anymore.
Anyway... there is a definite balance. What really gets me is that FF has such a linear story line that its barely role playing, its more like role watching, and you get to take control for the fight scenes...basically... your the plays stunt double for the most part.
One thing this does remind me of is Way of the Samurai. Very simple game at heart but so rich! Sure the game was small, but each character went about his day in his own way...since the game took place over the same 2 days... that meant that the path you took through the game effected who you met or when you met them, and under what circumstances.
Sure you could play through it in an hour or two, but... there were so many ways to do it, so many little story lines and different endings... that was way cool. One of the few true role playing games where you could really choose who you wanted to be.
In any case... this game sounds cool, I may have to check it out.
-Steve
Actually... methanol is not (in any quantity) produced by the waste of microbes here on earth, at least not usefully. It is made that way... but thats not where any methanol we use for anything comes from.
Methanol or wood alcohol is, as far as I know, usually produced as a byproduct of heating cellulous (sp?) in an oxygen depleted environment. This causes it to break down into producer gas (wood gas, hydrogen, whatever you wanna call it), various tars, and methanol. Or at least, traditionally thats how it was made. This is refered to in wikipedia as "the destructive distillation of wood".
These days it is actually made from an industrial process using natural gas.
-Steve
Yah man I hear ya on #1...
Whats worst... I worked in an almost exclusivly Unix shop for years. When someone sent out an Excell spreadhseet or whatnot, we used to actually ask one of the admin assistants in IT to print it out for us and send it to us in interdepartment mail, because... we had NO windows boxes at all between any of us. (partially because we were stubborn and snobby about it)
Of course, that got to be less important once openoffice started to work well and whatnot but I digress...
Its annoying having to explain to people "Yes I know alot about computers, and back when Windows 95 was new, I knew alot about windows too but, no I probably can't actually help you much, its not really the same".
I mean, yah I can run scandisk and defrag with the best of them, but its been a while since I could call myself anything close to an expert, I have forgotten more about Windows than I currently know.
-Steve
Ya know, I still dislike it. I mean QoS is one thing, and a good thing when done properly. I however am agast that they would want to impliment it in such an extortionist way as has been proposed.
Its one thing to adjust queuing so that different protocols get the latencies they need to work properly. You know the old standards, who cares about ftp and other file sharing latencies? But you know ssh packets really benefit from lower latencies cuz nobody likes to feel like they are typing at a 2400 bps terminal.
However, offering specific websites "premium access" to jump past the queues? Well thats just going to degrade service for everyone who doesn't pay for it... which means... degrading the service of their paying subscribers....
basically the message is... you pay us, or we make our paying subscribers connection to you suck ass. Huh, what? I pay them... and they are going to degrade the service that I get to the websites that I use... the very reason that I pay them for access?
Wtf! QoS is one thing, this is just extortion, and at the expense of their own paying customers.
Its bullshit.
-Steve
And I would say the same thing... if slashdot puts up malicous code, then they have broken the trust of the entire community. 10 years of built trust of doing the right thing, violated. It would be horrible, it would effect many of us.
Should we think more about trust relationships like this, probably. I think its something that people, in general, should be more midnful of. As introversion software pointed out in the subtitle of their game uplink: Trust is a Weakness.
Does the company have a legitimate complaint... yah in some light. However, I do think there is some value in forgiveness. Or as the dude put it
Walter: Am I wrong?
Dude: No Walter, your not wrong, your just an ASSHOLE
Remember, one of a companies biggests costs is turnover. A recent study showed that the average cost of replacing an employee to the company is 150% of their positions yearly salary.
When a person causes harm through what is otherwise completly understandable and normal actions, I think it behooves us to forgive them their trespasses. There is no real need to make a case for being an asshole.
-Steve
So?
I mean seriously so fucking what. If she can do her job while listening to music, why not let her use the PC to do it? Its a perfectly reasonable thing to do with the PC. Its something that 99.999% of the time, in fact, every time UP TO THE RELEASE OF THIS CD, has never caused an issue. Its something people have, and rightfully so, become used to being able to do.
Punishing her for something that she had no way and couldn't have known there was an issue, is asinine. It is sony that broke everyones trust, and deserves to be punished. Seriously, if _I_ released a CD like this, I would likely be looking at jail time. Sony, on the other hand, is getting a minor tap on the wrist (barely a slap).
-Steve
yup...
though you know, there is something encouraging that came out of this... we were wrong! The NSA has finnaly tipped their hand and inadvertently admitted that they don't have the capabilities that many of us thought they already did.
What am I talking about? Simple...
It has been speculated for years that the NSA, with is vast computing power, and secret fingers in every pie, was already using their secret advanced techniques and high powered computers to, indeed, "monitor" every call in the US.
Not monitor as in really listen to but, you know, scan and flag with AI, look for words in various languages that would record and flag for review.
This was speculative at best, and nobody had any proof, but I know I have heard the conspiracy theory many times.
Now, with the recent revealations, we know for a fact that its not true. If they had that ability, then surely there would be no need to pressure phone companies for these records, they would already have the ability to have them.
that, or the nsa got tired of us thinking that, and this whole fiasco is counter intelligence....
-Steve
Exactly.... and maybe its just me working at a non-profit healthcare company but... we have an entire "compliance" department whose job is ethics.
The message from them is clear "if you are unsure, ask". In ethics you always want to err on the side of caution. Or as they like to say "avoid even the appearance of inpropriety"
Its not just about feeling good because you knew you were ethical, its about deserving to be trusted AND building trust.
It reminds me of a memorial article that I read recently called "the man who fired me was right" by a reporter remembering being fired for a prank... he put a tiny little edit... a fake award and recipient into an article about high school graduation. Not a big deal in the aggregate... just a tiny prank.
His editor found out later and said "people should be able to believe what they read in the news". Not that there are never erros, but a factual error is an error, an intentional lie is another story, even a small one.
-Steve
What botheres me too....
This whole phone number listing thing. I read the article. The part that seems TOTALLY IGNORED in the media is the conversations with QWEST. When QWEST execs asked why they didn't go to the FISA court or the AG, they said they were afraid they wouldn't agree....
Thats totally damning. I don't care if its legal or not... going forward with a program and avoiding oversight because your afraid its illegal is unethical whether it turns out to be defacto legal or not.
I think regardless of the legality, whoever was involved should be fired for ethical violations on that alone.
-Steve
Oh, I misread, I thought they actually did this for a time then killed the project. Mea Culpa.
In any case, my point remains, once they have the ability to do wholesale surveillance, they have the ability. I mean, how do they obtain the encrypted form? Don't they first have to aquire the unencrypted form to encrypt it?
Once they have the ability to obtain the information at all without oversight FIRST, they have the ability to skirt their own system and abuse it.
So the point remains.... and the people ivolved in the prorgam that is happening should certainly be indicted.
-Steve
I don't care.
The problem here is and always has been the potential for abuse.
The FISA court exists for a reason you know. Why? Not because of some theoretical use of wiretaps to infringe on privacy.... because they were activly tapping the phone calls of people like Dr Martin Luther King in every hotel that he visited trying to dig up dirt on him.
This isn't conspiracy theory, its conspiracy fact. It is a matter of congressional record that wiretaps were indeed used to follow innocent people for political reasons.
Besides, sure, today its just intelligence on terrorists. However, once the system to do it is there, the ability to abuse it is there. All it takes is one unscrupulous operator, or a little pressure from a director, or dare I say, a secret presidential memo, to cause the system to be abused to any number of ends.
This is why we need oversight, and we need to hold these people responsible for what they do. If they can wiretap with impunity, then why not wiretap with impunity? If there is no punishment, then there is a lower bar to doing it.
Frankly, I think these programs should be outed, and every signle person involved, all the way up, should be indicted.
That goes for this program (if it was indeed illegal, if not they should fix the law), and the presidents wiretapping program thats been in the news. Intictments and impeachments are what should be going on right now.
-Steve
yup. Honestly, from one point of view, I totally understand the anti-union anti-regulation "the company pays you, its their money" attitude. I really do. It makes sense. From the whole "its my property, I do what I want, freedom is great" perspective, it makes total sense. However, I just think that its too simplistic.
Lets take the example of a company near me that a friend works for. It was started by a nice "hippy liberal" guy. They ended up unionizing but on the whole, the union and the company had few major issues. They negotiated a good contract and got the workers very fair wages. The company made money, the workers like their jobs. It was great for everyone.
Well, after many years, the owner decided that it was time to get out of the buisness. He sold the company to a very large company. Well, they cut their pay greatly. I know it sounds weird with a union contract, but the contract was actually not a flat compensation, it was based on a base rate + productivity bonus. They cut the bonus back to the bare minimum allowed in the contract, they started trying to change all the working conditions.
Now their best workers make nearly half what they used to make.
So what happened? The company was not built by one man, he started it, but it was built on the hard work of hundreds of workers. However, since the capitalist owned the means of production, he sold it, and the very livelyhoods of hundreds of people off to some other capitalist, who then decided to just start changing everything.
Honestly, I think the whole model is broken. I think that once you start involving other people in your enterprise, they are part of the enterprise. They should get a stake. I think its wrong for peoples livelyhoods to be bought and sold like that.
Honestly, I think unions arn't the best solution, but they are a damned site better than having nobody in your court at all. What I would rather see is all companies be incorperated so that once they start having more than just a few employees that those employees should have a stake in the company, and that corperate officers and managers should be elected.
Give people a stake so they have a reason to care if the company is profitable. Let them see the fruits of their labor.
-Steve
You know, this reminds me...
growing up watching the old 50s sit coms I always thought it was funny the way they had dual twin beds in the bedrooms of married couples.
Someone even told me once that people really did that, I still thought it was absurd. I mean, married people? People who have sex with eachother.... don't sleep in the same bed? How odd.
Then I grew up and had a girlfriend, and moved in with her, and lived with her for a couple of years.
Fuck that... I don't care if I get married, I want my own room. Sleeping next to someone is nice sometimes, but... having your own bed and personal space is just priceless.
-Steve
Lets not forget Milgrim's experiment... which I was typing up and explaining here when I realised wikipedia probably knows better than me, and in fact, has much more on it than I remember... so I will defer to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_phenomeno n
-Steve
So very true.
Its funny seeing how different groups act. I rememer being on an admin team doing real production support for critical applications, if something broke, your first priority was to make sure service stayed up, and your second was making sure that it didn't happen again.
If that meant sending a core file or even a crash dump to the vendor and making them tell you why it broke and when the patch was comming out, then thats what you did.
Generally, it got things fixed, eventually. Now I have more exposure to other systems and I notice, thats not the attitude. People work with broken stuff all the time, just keep on chugging.
Fact is, you can get used to antything. Getting used to things is kind of what our brains are meant to do. Honestly, I would imagine that most honest to god bugs in end user software are easier to just get used to than say... swithcing from vi to notepad or vice versa.
-Steve
Hell how about the games that came on a bootable disk with custom boot sectors and all sorts of nastiness to prevent them from being easily copied.
:)
:)
Of course, now they have the ultimate solution to that, good luck even finding a drive to read them
I shudder to think how many games are all but gone just for having been stored on old floppies that were hard to copy and have since degraded.
I actually talked with an old apple 2 game developer once. He described how he used the ability to control the stepper motors in the drive to cause it to write data to the disk such that instead of being concentric rings of data, the data track spiraled down the disk.
The things people did
-Steve
ya know... perl is a perfectly acceptable language.
:)
Honestly, I doubt it matters much, most all programming languages differ mostly in syntax. I mean sure, theres some real differences, but nothing that you need to care about.
Shit I started with applesoft basic, talk about a good way to pick up bad habbits. However, aside from lisp, I think it was the most unique language that I played with.
Perl just uses a rather extended and idiosyncratic C syntax. no seprate compilations, makes it nice to learn with, and quick to get into.
I mean yah, C and lisp will be helpful to do something in at some point. Maybe read someone elses code and change it, that way you get an eye for differing styles, and what really boils your blood that other programmers do.
Though, it takes years to learn to right good code, in any language, and I have found that perl has been more than adequet for about 80% of the code that I have ever written... then maybe 18% bourne shell.
Thats my $0.02.... but I wouldn't worry about first languages, pick up two and then you can just sit down and start learning most anything else... though, I never did get the hang of lisp....
-Steve
You are right of course.
However, you are wrong to think that thats all there is. Its a matter of what your interest is in looking at it.
1000 witnesses all saying the same thing is great, because it establishes a consensus of fact. We can be pretty sure he really did shoot the guy.
However, his reasons for wanting him dead, for not wanting him to live, thats another issue entirely. Does it matter in terms of doing justice? No maybe not. However it may inform us as a society as to what brings a person to the point that they are willing to forgo social norms and kill another human being.
Its important, but its important for different reasons. If you don't care, well, then I guess it isn't important to you.
Think of it as root cause analsys. Sure on some level you just need to get your server back up. However, without knowing the real reason why it went down, how can you be sure you can stop it from happening again, or at least decrease the probability.
People are a product of their society. Yes its absolutly right to bring down the coercive forces of police upon those who harm others by their actions... but... like any product... it makes good sense to look at why failed products are produced and if its worth the effort to try and reduce the failure rates of the process. Or for people... the society.
-Steve
Hmmmm actually I havn't compiled any kernels or kernel modules in a while. Frankly, I gave up on it long ago... though perhaps you have some less well supported hardware or something?
Actually as I remember, madwifi did give me some major headaches when I realised that I needed it on my last laptop and the debian stuff just wasn't quite there.
Tho on the current laptop, I just installed ubuntu and have had no issues... and frankly... kernel updates are only so so important (usually). I mean sure every now and again a really important one comes out but as often as not, I find even the security ones are for situations that don't affect me.
Then when one does come out... eh I upgrade... from the standard package. Though, I also grew out of bragging about uptime a long time ago.
Course now it takes me so long to hit a record uptime that I just stopped looking on any of my systems that are always up. Maybe thats what really killed it. Once you hit the better part of a year once... you start forgetting to check.
(my best current uptime on a system I manage is 125 days though)
-Steve
Maybe I don't spend alot of time around mac users, but when refering to WIMP environments, simply "X" has meant X11 variants for a long time now.
I asssume, when on slashdot, that this is pretty well understood.
-Steve
Right, it describes more than explains....
However I think this says alot more about the interests and predilictions of the writters and producers than that of the audience. Sure, on some level the audience wants a plot, and the plot is generally designed to cause those reactions in the audiance.
However, I would submit that many of those elements could be dropped from the plot, and people would still go see the shitty movies.
-Steve
In the past, and still, I have been a huge microsoft critic. I hate their buisness tactics, I dislike their software. Windows just annoys the hell out of me. I far prefer X.
This however is a very sensible move.
Honestly, I have the knowledge to deal with my own firewall rules, hell, I just the other day had to wrestle iptables and the nfs deamons to play nice so my kickstart server would work right.
I still think outbound filtering is a royal pain in my ass. I mean sure its pretty easy to remember to open incomming ports but... outgoing? Now every time I use a new peice of software, I have to figure out what ports it wants to connect out to?
Ugh. Thats fine for a server, and... in fact, I use it on my colo box. However... on a desktop, where a user expects to pick up a new peice of software and play with it on a fairly regular basis?
No fucking way.
Good job microsoft. You made a very sensible decision. Now if they would just come over to the free software movement and GPL windows, that would be awesome.
-Steve
I think everyone is reading way too much into these crappy films. Lets try a simpler explanation. Ever heard of the Roman colleseium? How about people like to watch violence. They will cheer for the violence itself.
I don't think the audience members really care who it is thats being hacked to bits... is it the bad boy or the naughty girl. Whatever, its somebody being hacked up. Its sensational, it stirs up all sorts of things, I think people often identify with the killer at first because well, the alternative is to identify with the person being hacked up, and its much safer to identify with the winner. You get to feel the perverse thrill of the kill, which is much better than the fear of being the prey.
Of course, who the audience identifies with is going to also be a function of the camera angle.
Honestly, I think the "final girl theory" more explains the formula of the writters than the actual responses of the audience.
-Steve
Yah it was certainly no FFI...now there was a game with a deep story line and amazing character development.
Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of the Final Fantasy series, and have played most of them to the end. However, they have always been kind of cheesy in alot of departments.
Actually, my main problem is that they seem to have become alot more movie-like since around VII. The first several hours of some of them is just like watching a movie with very little actual interaction beyond running the battles.
I long for them to bring back the feel of the old games, like I, II, and III (US release numbers, never went back for the japanese release versions).
-Steve
So your going to completly ignore the nagitive impact on moral? Or how about the fact that now employees will need to actually take time off to do minor things that they otherwise could have taken just a few minutes out of their day to work on.
For example, I recently had to pay parking tickets in a few cities around here to reregister my car. I managed it by taking a few minutes here and there over the day to contact the towns via phone and then use their websites to pay electronically (sad that both were needed).
If port 80 traffic to non related sites was blocked (and good luck identifing all those sites, and hope you don't have anyone who actually needs the web for their job, like the technicians who fix PCs or pretty much anyone who might need to look up information or do research to put together some form of documentation), then I would have had to take an entire day off to run around and do all that.
Lets see... maybe an hour of lost productivity... compared with... an entire day of lost productivity. Yup, sounds like blocking port 80 "wins"
-Steve