"It's unfair to expect the individual to pay for it -- they did nothing wrong, they shouldn't be punished."
I hate that arguement because it is usually used to argue for a socialistic system. Well guess what I did nothing wrong, so why should I be punished (either through higher premiems for my insurance because the company was not allowed to legally tell someone no when they know they are a higher risk customer or through taxes if you want to talk about socialized medicine) for someone else's medical condition.
Maybe I'm just cold and cynical, but I expect the world to look at me and say "deal with it" when I have a problem, so why am i constantly expected to subsidize things for other people?
"We as a society either need to decide that we don't care to help these people, tough luck for them" Sounds good to me, even if I come up on the short end of the stick at times.
Actually there are several applications I can think of dealing with fiber optics. Currently if you can get access to the fiber, you can monitor signals going through it without having to actually splice the line, so noone knows the line has been tampered with. This would prevent such an attack on a fiber optic network, great for improving security on a network.
Also if it cannot be seen from any side, it means it loses no light during transmission, like current fiber does, removeing the need for repeaters over long distances of fiber.
These are just the two things I thought of immediately. This does not mean that it is work with cost of actually building, but they are possible applications.
No, but a lot of people do unfortunately. Most people have been trained to follow "their team" and oppose anything from what they view as the opposition regardless of how much sense it makes.
I try to judge issues on their own merits on a case by case basis. This also means any time I discuss politics with people I get liberals calling me a rightwing nut jog and conservatives calling me a dirty hippie at times.
Actually I used this specific example because it is an example used in OPSEC training for military employees. It is an extreme example in some ways, but at the same time very feasible for someone to carry out. There have still been numerous arrests tied to terrorist organization in the last several years (some mistakenly so) and you would have to be foolish to believe that all of our enemies are outside of our borders. And depending on who's family it is an attack like that can be devastating.
In a situation like that you would not target the family of any grunt (well you might). The targets would be families of cammanders in the region. If you can severely affect the emotional and mental stability of teh cammanders then thier decisions in the field will be affected.
The more common thing they worry about is mentioning streets or times of patrols so that an enemy knows where and when to be waiting for an ambush or to plant explosives to take out a patrol.
"...though many of the people affected by these new regulations can't even access them because they are being kept on the military's restricted Army Knowledge Online intranet."
BS. Every soldier, family member, or Army civilian has access to AKO. If a member of a soldier's family does not then all the have to do is put in the request and it doesn't take very long at all.
Secondly Army regulations can only apply to people directly working for the Army. This means soldiers and Army civilians. The families are not held by these same regs, although a family member blogging something stupid could threaten a security clearance for someone. If you want something to apply to the general civilian population other than government employees then you have to get Congress to pass a law to cover it.
I just figured someone who actually knew what the hell they were talking about should chime in here. And the reason for the regs changing is that soldiers were putting SBU (sensitive but unclassified) information on blogs so that family back home could see it and not thinking about the fact that so could the rest of the world (including hostiles in the area). The Army fully understand soldiers wanting a connection to home, but they also realize the dangers in not controlling information.
Example: A soldier posts something about a family member back home in whatever town they came from. Maybe they were even thoughtless enough to mention where this person works, goes to school, whatever. Now any terrorist that wants to doesn't have to target the soldier, they go to the family's house back home where most people assume it is safe and kill them in the middle of the night. You can imagine what even one or two incidents like this do to moral in the field.
Actually I agreed with him from the start, but I saw how a lot of people would have innitially thought he wasn't. I agree people (especially Americans) tend to be way to stuck up about things like sex.
Just look at politicians, they are proof that being able to sweet talk people into blindly following you gets you much further than math, intelligence, or logic ever will.
I know this will probably kill karma, but here goes.
"IP Innovation is requesting damages in excess of $20 million and an injunction against future sales and distribution of Mac OS X 10.4. Software patent reform can't come soon enough!"
I really have to wonder if the article summary would have just cheered wildly and forgotten about patent reform for a few minutes if it had been MS they were suing, or if all the fans of Apple and MS bashers would have taken a break to still support the bigger issue on this one.
TFA states that they found a CD with child porn on it in his room and that was the only room searched. Even if he got off the hook on the image sent across Yhaoo IM he was toast. I'm just suprised the DA didn't try to use the guy's attempted defense of a roommate and an open WAP to get a warrant to search the roommate's room as well in an attempt to get them both. Even if the images sent across the network were tied back to the roommate (or somebody nextdoor, whatever) this guy was still toast over the CD they found. Accepting the plea bargain was probably this guy's only chance of avoiding a much longer sentence.
I have no problem if they want to go to a first to file. It does at least simplify the system a lot. Maybe in the process Congress will also realize we are the "only country" (or at least one of a shrinking number) that supports software patents as well. Maybe if we reduce the number of things that can be patented then this will be a good thing over all and people can go back to just using trade secrets.
At least the bill does seem to give the patent office additional resources to get thier job done.
I think that 98.3 is on thehigh side. After all shouldn't grades be based on what the words say, not how many of them there are. Still I think I could give you a 90. Probably a 95 if the purpose of the assignment was writing humor.
I agree that our education system is messed up. I agree to a point on your comment that "the educational system is the core of the indoctrination system of oppression in the modern world", but I think you are going to far with it. Personally I have only taught college level. Although some colleges tend to indoctrinate students as well, most ofthe problem you are referring to I see in the K-12 range. I personally try to avoid preaching at my students about any social issues.
I was a computer science professor; to me this means my job was to give my students the technical skills they needed to build a career with. Because one of my two main areas of expertise is security (specifically computer forensics) I also taught criminal justice majors at times. Even when covering topics that can get rather political (such as illegal file sharing and copyright infringement) I tried to keep personal opinions out of my classroom. I would teach the technical details of how to track down the origin of an electronic communication (as well as ways to avoid being effectively tracked) so that my students could attempt to track network traffic if needed. In the case of criminal justice classes I taught enough of the technical so that they knew what was feasible to do and if an investigator or an "expert" witness really knew what they were talking about or just blowing smoke and taught what the laws where without much comment on whether or not I agreed with them.
As far as you talking about modern oppression, unless you would like to explain further, I don't know exactly what you are referring to and will refrain from further comment.
"Those who can't do, teach." Well some of us do both. I went back to working industry doing a "real job" after my son was born for the better pay and benefits, but I still miss teaching and hope to go back to it at some point, even if only finding a local college looking for a night instructor a couple nights a week.
That attitude of those who can't do teach is one of the reasons this country has a problems getting good teachers. Th epay is also part of it, but that is caused at least partially by the same attitude as well.
You bring up a good point whether you meant to or not. The US can easily recover a lot of the lost money and do wonders to even out the trade deficit by just putting a tarriff on all goods coming in from China. Of course I'm sure that the major retailers like Walmart would pull in every favor they had to stop such a thing.
Except that half the people looking for it are high school and college students and this would allow schools to filter sites a lot easier. If you've ever had the "fun" of running a college computer lab you know that you have to watch some of the computers in the back sorners even in the middle of the day at times.
A lot of states have what's called "at will employment". Basically this means other than discrimination on age, sex, raec, etc. a company can fire anyone it wants without needing a reason just like you can quit anytime you feel like it without reason. Not retail, but when I used to do tech support for a living (or at least the several years I did call center support) I saw this happen a lot to people who had been around too long. As long as you made at least certain numbers you were gauranteed a raise every 3 months (and then reduced to once per 6 months and then to once a year). Basically once you started making above a certain point they would not give you ANY over-time no matter how many calls were coming in, and then after a while if you had not moved into management they would fire you and tell you that they would gladly rehire you in 6 months once company policy said they could bring you back at starting pay (which kept getting lower and lower to compete with people outsourcing to India). So yes it is legal, but it still sucks.
Usually you get 2 calls for free and after that you have to pay. I don't remember the rate, but it is a fixed fee per issue and I know it was less than $50, I think around $30-35 but I don't remember. Now this is per issue, not per call, so if you have an issues that you have already paid for and the same issue happens again in a month, it's free. If the issue takes 5 calls; you only pay for it once.
With the launch of new products (SP2 counted because it was such a large change) they don't charge for the first 6 months a product is out, usually not for the first year a new product is on the market. They realize that there will be some issues that beta testers did not catch and figure that the issues being found so patches can be done as needed is worth giving 6-12 months of free support. They also realize that it takes users a little while to adjust to a new product when it first hits market.
Specifically I was working for the support group for XP SP2 when it first came out. MS basically has each group supporting more or less a specific application. In my case thier attitude was they they did not know exactly what issues to expect out of the gate, but that the sole priority was making the customer happy. Now admittedly that is slightly different than fixing the problem. You can fix the problem, but treat the customer poorly or have a bad attitude and still piss them off, or you can be very helpful and polite and make the customer happy most of the time, even if you cannot find an immediate solution to the technical problem.
I do know that with MS, the only metric they held us to was that when they did the random call backs to survey customer satisfaction we better have at least a 90% rating of making the customer happy, no call time, no minimum number of calls per day, no pushing for sales, none of the other BS that Dell and ESPECIALLY Gateway put on thier techs. Dell was reasonable, Gateway wanted sales people that could read a checklist more than they wanted real techs and ran a lot of good techs off that way.
Having worked for both Gateway and Dell support working my way through school, I can tell you that thier policies specifically would support your warranty on hardware regardless of the OS installed, but most of thier techs would have no clue what to do in any OS other than windows.
Having done full time tech support as my primary job through my undergrad and as part time during grad school, I can tell you this is true in call center tech support. I've worked for shops having the onsite service contract for an area with HP, but this basically is just go install replacement parts for customers to afraid to open the case. I have worked phone support for Gateway, Dell, and MS.
From my experience I would say that a Gateway tech would probably tell you the same line since the are under a strict time deadline at most of thier centers unless its changed a lot since I worked for them. Dell's environment for the techs isn't nearly as bad, so you would probably not get it nearly as often there, and to MS's credit they had no time limits; all they cared about was getting the customer's issue fixed even if you were on one call all day. MS also mandated much better training for the techs than Gateway and Dell did, although Dell was a better than Gateway on this by a little bit.
Technically the policies for any of the com panies I did phone support for would not support this BS. All the tech has to do to bypass any driver issues, OS issues, or other nonsense would be to test the keyboard in the BIOS, or boot from the Windows CD that came with the system and get to a command prompt that was to test it. Worst case should be that they require the customer to reinstall windows and then test it, and replace the keyboard as needed at that point.
Again I only worked onsite for HP, and it has been years since I did tech support for a living, but this is at least speaking from someone who has a lot of experience in the area.
That 90% is a lot, especially depending on the environment it is used in. I know the Navy has been funding a lot of research for a long time in reducing waste at sea on its ships. This would help that goal and provide usable energy. On a sub or an aircraft carrier, this might be a really worthy investment. It reduces the ammount of waste needing to be disposed of while out at sea for extended periods and helps provide additional power. Sounds like a win - win.
The difference is that if private cargo companies get too expensive then the government can fall back on Navy vessels to transport everything if we need to. If we scrap the shuttle and don't have a replacement yet then we have no fall back if private space launches get more expensive than the shuttle was. I think a good solution would be to keep at least one shuttle in operational status and then do bids for the launches. If a company proves they can get the job done and offers a decent bid price, use them. If no one offers a bid signifigantly cheaper than NASA just launching the payload themselves with the shuttle, then use the shuttle.
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"It's unfair to expect the individual to pay for it -- they did nothing wrong, they shouldn't be punished."
I hate that arguement because it is usually used to argue for a socialistic system. Well guess what I did nothing wrong, so why should I be punished (either through higher premiems for my insurance because the company was not allowed to legally tell someone no when they know they are a higher risk customer or through taxes if you want to talk about socialized medicine) for someone else's medical condition.
Maybe I'm just cold and cynical, but I expect the world to look at me and say "deal with it" when I have a problem, so why am i constantly expected to subsidize things for other people?
"We as a society either need to decide that we don't care to help these people, tough luck for them" Sounds good to me, even if I come up on the short end of the stick at times.
Actually there are several applications I can think of dealing with fiber optics. Currently if you can get access to the fiber, you can monitor signals going through it without having to actually splice the line, so noone knows the line has been tampered with. This would prevent such an attack on a fiber optic network, great for improving security on a network.
Also if it cannot be seen from any side, it means it loses no light during transmission, like current fiber does, removeing the need for repeaters over long distances of fiber.
These are just the two things I thought of immediately. This does not mean that it is work with cost of actually building, but they are possible applications.
No, but a lot of people do unfortunately. Most people have been trained to follow "their team" and oppose anything from what they view as the opposition regardless of how much sense it makes.
I try to judge issues on their own merits on a case by case basis. This also means any time I discuss politics with people I get liberals calling me a rightwing nut jog and conservatives calling me a dirty hippie at times.
This is definately something I can stand behind regardless of which party it comes from.
Actually I used this specific example because it is an example used in OPSEC training for military employees. It is an extreme example in some ways, but at the same time very feasible for someone to carry out. There have still been numerous arrests tied to terrorist organization in the last several years (some mistakenly so) and you would have to be foolish to believe that all of our enemies are outside of our borders. And depending on who's family it is an attack like that can be devastating.
In a situation like that you would not target the family of any grunt (well you might). The targets would be families of cammanders in the region. If you can severely affect the emotional and mental stability of teh cammanders then thier decisions in the field will be affected.
The more common thing they worry about is mentioning streets or times of patrols so that an enemy knows where and when to be waiting for an ambush or to plant explosives to take out a patrol.
"...though many of the people affected by these new regulations can't even access them because they are being kept on the military's restricted Army Knowledge Online intranet."
BS. Every soldier, family member, or Army civilian has access to AKO. If a member of a soldier's family does not then all the have to do is put in the request and it doesn't take very long at all.
Secondly Army regulations can only apply to people directly working for the Army. This means soldiers and Army civilians. The families are not held by these same regs, although a family member blogging something stupid could threaten a security clearance for someone. If you want something to apply to the general civilian population other than government employees then you have to get Congress to pass a law to cover it.
I just figured someone who actually knew what the hell they were talking about should chime in here. And the reason for the regs changing is that soldiers were putting SBU (sensitive but unclassified) information on blogs so that family back home could see it and not thinking about the fact that so could the rest of the world (including hostiles in the area). The Army fully understand soldiers wanting a connection to home, but they also realize the dangers in not controlling information.
Example: A soldier posts something about a family member back home in whatever town they came from. Maybe they were even thoughtless enough to mention where this person works, goes to school, whatever. Now any terrorist that wants to doesn't have to target the soldier, they go to the family's house back home where most people assume it is safe and kill them in the middle of the night. You can imagine what even one or two incidents like this do to moral in the field.
Actually I agreed with him from the start, but I saw how a lot of people would have innitially thought he wasn't. I agree people (especially Americans) tend to be way to stuck up about things like sex.
Yes it seems joking at first, but he is correct in many ways.
Just look at politicians, they are proof that being able to sweet talk people into blindly following you gets you much further than math, intelligence, or logic ever will.
Heck it assumes the US has a culture. //takes toungue out of cheek
I know this will probably kill karma, but here goes.
"IP Innovation is requesting damages in excess of $20 million and an injunction against future sales and distribution of Mac OS X 10.4. Software patent reform can't come soon enough!"
I really have to wonder if the article summary would have just cheered wildly and forgotten about patent reform for a few minutes if it had been MS they were suing, or if all the fans of Apple and MS bashers would have taken a break to still support the bigger issue on this one.
TFA states that they found a CD with child porn on it in his room and that was the only room searched. Even if he got off the hook on the image sent across Yhaoo IM he was toast. I'm just suprised the DA didn't try to use the guy's attempted defense of a roommate and an open WAP to get a warrant to search the roommate's room as well in an attempt to get them both. Even if the images sent across the network were tied back to the roommate (or somebody nextdoor, whatever) this guy was still toast over the CD they found. Accepting the plea bargain was probably this guy's only chance of avoiding a much longer sentence.
I have no problem if they want to go to a first to file. It does at least simplify the system a lot. Maybe in the process Congress will also realize we are the "only country" (or at least one of a shrinking number) that supports software patents as well. Maybe if we reduce the number of things that can be patented then this will be a good thing over all and people can go back to just using trade secrets.
At least the bill does seem to give the patent office additional resources to get thier job done.
I think that 98.3 is on thehigh side. After all shouldn't grades be based on what the words say, not how many of them there are. Still I think I could give you a 90. Probably a 95 if the purpose of the assignment was writing humor.
I agree that our education system is messed up. I agree to a point on your comment that "the educational system is the core of the indoctrination system of oppression in the modern world", but I think you are going to far with it. Personally I have only taught college level. Although some colleges tend to indoctrinate students as well, most ofthe problem you are referring to I see in the K-12 range. I personally try to avoid preaching at my students about any social issues.
I was a computer science professor; to me this means my job was to give my students the technical skills they needed to build a career with. Because one of my two main areas of expertise is security (specifically computer forensics) I also taught criminal justice majors at times. Even when covering topics that can get rather political (such as illegal file sharing and copyright infringement) I tried to keep personal opinions out of my classroom. I would teach the technical details of how to track down the origin of an electronic communication (as well as ways to avoid being effectively tracked) so that my students could attempt to track network traffic if needed. In the case of criminal justice classes I taught enough of the technical so that they knew what was feasible to do and if an investigator or an "expert" witness really knew what they were talking about or just blowing smoke and taught what the laws where without much comment on whether or not I agreed with them.
As far as you talking about modern oppression, unless you would like to explain further, I don't know exactly what you are referring to and will refrain from further comment.
Your post was funny up until that last line.
"Those who can't do, teach."
Well some of us do both. I went back to working industry doing a "real job" after my son was born for the better pay and benefits, but I still miss teaching and hope to go back to it at some point, even if only finding a local college looking for a night instructor a couple nights a week.
That attitude of those who can't do teach is one of the reasons this country has a problems getting good teachers. Th epay is also part of it, but that is caused at least partially by the same attitude as well.
Maybe he is trying to compensate for other "little problems"
You bring up a good point whether you meant to or not. The US can easily recover a lot of the lost money and do wonders to even out the trade deficit by just putting a tarriff on all goods coming in from China. Of course I'm sure that the major retailers like Walmart would pull in every favor they had to stop such a thing.
Except that half the people looking for it are high school and college students and this would allow schools to filter sites a lot easier. If you've ever had the "fun" of running a college computer lab you know that you have to watch some of the computers in the back sorners even in the middle of the day at times.
A lot of states have what's called "at will employment". Basically this means other than discrimination on age, sex, raec, etc. a company can fire anyone it wants without needing a reason just like you can quit anytime you feel like it without reason. Not retail, but when I used to do tech support for a living (or at least the several years I did call center support) I saw this happen a lot to people who had been around too long. As long as you made at least certain numbers you were gauranteed a raise every 3 months (and then reduced to once per 6 months and then to once a year). Basically once you started making above a certain point they would not give you ANY over-time no matter how many calls were coming in, and then after a while if you had not moved into management they would fire you and tell you that they would gladly rehire you in 6 months once company policy said they could bring you back at starting pay (which kept getting lower and lower to compete with people outsourcing to India). So yes it is legal, but it still sucks.
Usually you get 2 calls for free and after that you have to pay. I don't remember the rate, but it is a fixed fee per issue and I know it was less than $50, I think around $30-35 but I don't remember. Now this is per issue, not per call, so if you have an issues that you have already paid for and the same issue happens again in a month, it's free. If the issue takes 5 calls; you only pay for it once.
With the launch of new products (SP2 counted because it was such a large change) they don't charge for the first 6 months a product is out, usually not for the first year a new product is on the market. They realize that there will be some issues that beta testers did not catch and figure that the issues being found so patches can be done as needed is worth giving 6-12 months of free support. They also realize that it takes users a little while to adjust to a new product when it first hits market.
Specifically I was working for the support group for XP SP2 when it first came out. MS basically has each group supporting more or less a specific application. In my case thier attitude was they they did not know exactly what issues to expect out of the gate, but that the sole priority was making the customer happy. Now admittedly that is slightly different than fixing the problem. You can fix the problem, but treat the customer poorly or have a bad attitude and still piss them off, or you can be very helpful and polite and make the customer happy most of the time, even if you cannot find an immediate solution to the technical problem.
I do know that with MS, the only metric they held us to was that when they did the random call backs to survey customer satisfaction we better have at least a 90% rating of making the customer happy, no call time, no minimum number of calls per day, no pushing for sales, none of the other BS that Dell and ESPECIALLY Gateway put on thier techs. Dell was reasonable, Gateway wanted sales people that could read a checklist more than they wanted real techs and ran a lot of good techs off that way.
Having worked for both Gateway and Dell support working my way through school, I can tell you that thier policies specifically would support your warranty on hardware regardless of the OS installed, but most of thier techs would have no clue what to do in any OS other than windows.
Having done full time tech support as my primary job through my undergrad and as part time during grad school, I can tell you this is true in call center tech support. I've worked for shops having the onsite service contract for an area with HP, but this basically is just go install replacement parts for customers to afraid to open the case. I have worked phone support for Gateway, Dell, and MS.
From my experience I would say that a Gateway tech would probably tell you the same line since the are under a strict time deadline at most of thier centers unless its changed a lot since I worked for them. Dell's environment for the techs isn't nearly as bad, so you would probably not get it nearly as often there, and to MS's credit they had no time limits; all they cared about was getting the customer's issue fixed even if you were on one call all day. MS also mandated much better training for the techs than Gateway and Dell did, although Dell was a better than Gateway on this by a little bit.
Technically the policies for any of the com panies I did phone support for would not support this BS. All the tech has to do to bypass any driver issues, OS issues, or other nonsense would be to test the keyboard in the BIOS, or boot from the Windows CD that came with the system and get to a command prompt that was to test it. Worst case should be that they require the customer to reinstall windows and then test it, and replace the keyboard as needed at that point.
Again I only worked onsite for HP, and it has been years since I did tech support for a living, but this is at least speaking from someone who has a lot of experience in the area.
That 90% is a lot, especially depending on the environment it is used in. I know the Navy has been funding a lot of research for a long time in reducing waste at sea on its ships. This would help that goal and provide usable energy. On a sub or an aircraft carrier, this might be a really worthy investment. It reduces the ammount of waste needing to be disposed of while out at sea for extended periods and helps provide additional power. Sounds like a win - win.
The difference is that if private cargo companies get too expensive then the government can fall back on Navy vessels to transport everything if we need to. If we scrap the shuttle and don't have a replacement yet then we have no fall back if private space launches get more expensive than the shuttle was. I think a good solution would be to keep at least one shuttle in operational status and then do bids for the launches. If a company proves they can get the job done and offers a decent bid price, use them. If no one offers a bid signifigantly cheaper than NASA just launching the payload themselves with the shuttle, then use the shuttle.