Instead of a civil suit, I would have wanted this to be a criminal trial against the superintendent. He could have been charged with any number of felonies and that would have been a more meaningful deterrent against those that would seek to trample on individual rights.
To a greater or lesser degree, the Pope might have a point. If we take his broad argument and narrow it down to some information of the internet, he very well be on to something. One problem with information on the Internet is that it's accuracy can be dubious at best. A person could post a bald-faced lie and pass it off as truth. Technology can make it easier to use propaganda that is founded on a lie to gain popularity for a politican. On the other hand, the same can be done with printed material - technology only makes it more economic and faster.
To anyone who truely believed that the Volt would extend range to 230MPG: I have a bridge I want to sell you that is only slightly used. The entire purpose for Electric Vehicle research and exploration is to be carbon-free. Basically, the Volt is a hybrid and hybrids are largely the half-assed attempt towards being carbon-free. Really we should go all the way or not do it at all. It would seem to me that instead of hybridization, we should be promoting hydrogen fueling station and converting out internal combustion engines to hydrogen fuel not dicking around with hybrid drive systems. While continuing to use our internal combustion engines on hydrogen, we perfect fully electric vehicles. This will never happen because of King Oil, and to some extent, the inertia of the Big 3. I am looking to Tesla Motors for the next big thing.
This is a great idea worthy of world wide recognition! I can see this device as perfect for people engaged in occupations like fishing. If someone gets swept overboard in a storm, a life saving raft can be literally launched out to them. It gives the would-be rescuer another option when it may be too difficult or dangerous to reach the person right away - after all, you don't want a one many rescue situation turning into two.
You know, I was waiting for something like this to happen - a giant software patent circle jerk. The ultimate irony is that the major players are defeating their own goal of trying to render F/OSS moot. I'd wager the fear of patent wars might actually be helping the free, open source movement. For example, OpenBSD developed a router/firewall redundancy protocol called CARP which is patent un-encumbered, free, and arguably better than the Cisco VRRP. For one, CARP is simple to setup and troubleshoot, for another it is highly reliable. The University of Alberta uses several OpenBSD boxes CARP'd together and system admins have purposely pulled network cables during production hours to test and it works flawlessly.
This is scary. I am so dead set against the commoditization of water. Water is essential for all life and should not be commoditized. If this is the direction we are headed in, man-kind is doomed.
How do you think kids feel now. On one hand you have the government, parents and everyone saying that marijuana is not good for you. And on the other hand you have a Facebook founder telling them its ok and should be legal. I'm afraid that if the proposition isn't passed that it will just make it all the much harder for the people against it to gain ground.
Examples of mixed messages are repelete within our society. Just look at the schizophrenic attitudes we have towards individualism. If you are too much of an individual you are branded as crazy yet if you are too much of a group member you are branded as being not intelligent enough or ambitious enough.
Excellent points. I find it interesting how the Republican Party preaches more individual freedoms, smaller government, and fiscal responsibility. Yet, we have spent untold billions fighting a drug war we cannot win. The Democrats are equally responsible for this. If individual freedom is so important, why is the government regulating what we do in our own homes?
According to an extensive research article published in The Lancet (highest impact factor medical journal), cannabis is both less damaging AND less addictive than either tobacco or alcohol.
This is really older news. Cannabis, generally speaking, does not make people angry or violent. Police Officers have less to fear from a subject high on marijuana than one who is on amphetamines or alcohol.
People claim that legalizing pot will bring gazillions of dollars into the government coffers by taxing the product.
However they don't explain why we should believe that current dealers would be willing to start collecting and submitting taxes to the government. They already have a product that they are selling tax-free, what is the incentive for the dealers to start charging more for the same product?
I always wondered what will happen when marijuana becomes legalized and the likes of Altria née Phillip Morris and Monsanto eventually get into it - New Marlboro White Widow! Roundup-Ready PPP! What's keeping them from (albeit quietly and behind the scenes) promoting legalization and creating new markets for themselves?.
Phillip Morris and Monsanto stand to make billions of dollars annually from the legalization of marijuana. Marijuana is actually not that easy to grow and it can be dangerous using grow lamps. It is curious as to why these behemouth companies haven't "bought" this legislation yet. It would be especially good for their tarnished images.
If it makes you feel any better, pretty much every profession is suffering now. IT may have been excluded from past recessions. But with the increases in outsourcing, it was only a matter of time before it got hit too.
I respectfully disagree. IT (or at least infrastructure IT) has always been the first to go during a layoff situation. The dot com bomb hurt us very badly.
That is really the only way to get ahead outside of working for the Federal Government, keep changing jobs. If companies don't want to help you better yourself, by all means you should take the initiative. Loyalty and respect are a two way street, we are taught this by our parents from early childhood. Yet, somehow corporations believe they can treat you as an expendable commodity and demand your total respect and loyalty. The corporations have us so much in fear that they can be downright tyrants in a way we would never accept from our own government. If Senator Whomever were to pass a law threatening anyone who doesn't have an occupation with incarceration, we would be at his or her door with pitch forks and torches. We bow our heads and take it - the corporations successfully gamble on it.
You have a legitimate concern. The unfortunate reality of today's economy is investor greed. How much money is enough? I think this will happen in many companies. Ultimately this is a very self destructive practice that results in low morale and even reputation damage. Blogging and epinion websites will quickly rack up negative opinions of some employers. Prospective employees might read these opinions and chose to to turn down the employment offer. It happened to me - I had the opportunity to work for the Vanguard Group. I am so glad I read about the work environment prior to accepting the job as it kept me from making a huge mistake. I turned down the employment offer.
When moving to a new employer when you are already employed, you are in the driver's seat. You can accept or reject offers as you see fit. My own company will hire external people and pay them more than promoting from inside. This practice is just plain bad, bad for moral and a bad business decision. From the standpoint of a bad business decision, you have a new employee that must get up to speed and learn the particulars of the company. By promoting from within and giving the same salary raise, you get someone already up to speed that can beging contributing from the very begining. Also, moral improves overall because employees see that they can really better themselves.
Having had some time to think about it, having a union for infrastructure employees in IT is not really a bad idea. If you think about it, in the airline industry, line maintenance personnel are union. Line maintenance, much like IT infrastructure, are critical to the success or failure of an operation. No mechanics means the planes don't fly and no infrastructure gurus means that networks do not operate. I could see a case for IT infrastructure employees; especially because software engineers are given a disporportionate amount of project credit and funds. All of the best code in the world is meaningless if the infrastructure to support it does not exist.
On one hand, this is an interesting move. On the other, I am surprised that they would go with WordPress because it is a GPL product. The GPL is an anathema to Microsoft precisely because if they modify the source code, they must contribute changes back. Perhaps, it is possible to extend WordPress through closed source plugins; although even that is to navigate a minefield.
The trouble is, and this is not intended to be flamebait but a statement of relative fact, the desktop firewalls available are poor. I am no fan of the quality of products like Zone Alarm and Windows Firewall. I'd like to see something with the same kind of power and flexibility implemented that openbsd's pf uses.
The whole point of a firewall is blocking connections. I don't know about anyone else, but I make a point to not run services that I don't want people to connect to on my machine. How hard is that?
An outgoing firewall though is immensely valuable. I love seeing everything that every little shareware app or office suite tries to phone home with. When doing local web development, I've even been surprised to find a number of open source CMS/frameworks phoning home with more info than I care to share.
Firewalls also block intrusion attempts. Say you need SSH, I guess you could limit SSH to listen on an internal interface but that would be useless because SSH is used to remotely access a server over an untrusted network. I use OpenBSD's pf with a connection rate limiter so that if someone attempts to brute force through making multiple connections, their IP address is automatically blacklisted for a period of 48 hours.
I strongly disagree with Jon Honeyball. The best security researchers take the onion (layered) model. Relying solely on end point security is a very poor idea. Putting all of your eggs in one basket is never a good idea. Certainly, place some emphasis on having secure end-points but firewalls on everything is a good idea. Having desktop and server firewall software adds one additional layer of protection, should the end point become compromised. I have no idea why there is such a big push at end point security at the expense of a layered approach other than some academics pushed the idea and Symantec decided to market it. What happens if a piece of malware or an intruder gets through the end point and then obtains root access through a poorly-written web application? Had good extra security layers been in place, this might have been less likely to happen.
What about here at home in the U.S.? If Microsoft wants to protect NGO non-profit's from nefarious actions they should not be so hypocritical as to do it abroad only. There are plenty of dissident non-profit organizations in the U.S. that are subject to nefarious actions by law enforcement all of the time. There are pro-marijuana groups that may be doing nothing illegal in the limelight by producing leaflets and holding rallies that are subject to the scrutiny of law enforcement. In fact, it isn't a crime to dissent in the US. Ah, but once again, everything is profit and loss motivated. Microsoft would be concerned about losing its lucrative government contracts and some of its contracts with business that stands to lose money if certain dissident groups got their way.
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Instead of a civil suit, I would have wanted this to be a criminal trial against the superintendent. He could have been charged with any number of felonies and that would have been a more meaningful deterrent against those that would seek to trample on individual rights.
To a greater or lesser degree, the Pope might have a point. If we take his broad argument and narrow it down to some information of the internet, he very well be on to something. One problem with information on the Internet is that it's accuracy can be dubious at best. A person could post a bald-faced lie and pass it off as truth. Technology can make it easier to use propaganda that is founded on a lie to gain popularity for a politican. On the other hand, the same can be done with printed material - technology only makes it more economic and faster.
To anyone who truely believed that the Volt would extend range to 230MPG: I have a bridge I want to sell you that is only slightly used. The entire purpose for Electric Vehicle research and exploration is to be carbon-free. Basically, the Volt is a hybrid and hybrids are largely the half-assed attempt towards being carbon-free. Really we should go all the way or not do it at all. It would seem to me that instead of hybridization, we should be promoting hydrogen fueling station and converting out internal combustion engines to hydrogen fuel not dicking around with hybrid drive systems. While continuing to use our internal combustion engines on hydrogen, we perfect fully electric vehicles. This will never happen because of King Oil, and to some extent, the inertia of the Big 3. I am looking to Tesla Motors for the next big thing.
This is a great idea worthy of world wide recognition! I can see this device as perfect for people engaged in occupations like fishing. If someone gets swept overboard in a storm, a life saving raft can be literally launched out to them. It gives the would-be rescuer another option when it may be too difficult or dangerous to reach the person right away - after all, you don't want a one many rescue situation turning into two.
You know, I was waiting for something like this to happen - a giant software patent circle jerk. The ultimate irony is that the major players are defeating their own goal of trying to render F/OSS moot. I'd wager the fear of patent wars might actually be helping the free, open source movement. For example, OpenBSD developed a router/firewall redundancy protocol called CARP which is patent un-encumbered, free, and arguably better than the Cisco VRRP. For one, CARP is simple to setup and troubleshoot, for another it is highly reliable. The University of Alberta uses several OpenBSD boxes CARP'd together and system admins have purposely pulled network cables during production hours to test and it works flawlessly.
This is scary. I am so dead set against the commoditization of water. Water is essential for all life and should not be commoditized. If this is the direction we are headed in, man-kind is doomed.
Ask yourself why are Americans not good at self control. I think you'll find that the answer is that we are a very puritanical, judgemental society.
How do you think kids feel now. On one hand you have the government, parents and everyone saying that marijuana is not good for you. And on the other hand you have a Facebook founder telling them its ok and should be legal. I'm afraid that if the proposition isn't passed that it will just make it all the much harder for the people against it to gain ground.
Examples of mixed messages are repelete within our society. Just look at the schizophrenic attitudes we have towards individualism. If you are too much of an individual you are branded as crazy yet if you are too much of a group member you are branded as being not intelligent enough or ambitious enough.
Excellent points. I find it interesting how the Republican Party preaches more individual freedoms, smaller government, and fiscal responsibility. Yet, we have spent untold billions fighting a drug war we cannot win. The Democrats are equally responsible for this. If individual freedom is so important, why is the government regulating what we do in our own homes?
According to an extensive research article published in The Lancet (highest impact factor medical journal), cannabis is both less damaging AND less addictive than either tobacco or alcohol.
This is really older news. Cannabis, generally speaking, does not make people angry or violent. Police Officers have less to fear from a subject high on marijuana than one who is on amphetamines or alcohol.
Politics have no business interfering with education. Leave education decision making and policies to professional educators not political posturing!
People claim that legalizing pot will bring gazillions of dollars into the government coffers by taxing the product. However they don't explain why we should believe that current dealers would be willing to start collecting and submitting taxes to the government. They already have a product that they are selling tax-free, what is the incentive for the dealers to start charging more for the same product?
Well, you could rename the ATF to the ATMF. HA!
I always wondered what will happen when marijuana becomes legalized and the likes of Altria née Phillip Morris and Monsanto eventually get into it - New Marlboro White Widow! Roundup-Ready PPP! What's keeping them from (albeit quietly and behind the scenes) promoting legalization and creating new markets for themselves? .
Phillip Morris and Monsanto stand to make billions of dollars annually from the legalization of marijuana. Marijuana is actually not that easy to grow and it can be dangerous using grow lamps. It is curious as to why these behemouth companies haven't "bought" this legislation yet. It would be especially good for their tarnished images.
Despite what fanatical libertarians around here may say, this is exactly the sort of situations unions are for.
+1
+1
If it makes you feel any better, pretty much every profession is suffering now. IT may have been excluded from past recessions. But with the increases in outsourcing, it was only a matter of time before it got hit too.
I respectfully disagree. IT (or at least infrastructure IT) has always been the first to go during a layoff situation. The dot com bomb hurt us very badly.
That is really the only way to get ahead outside of working for the Federal Government, keep changing jobs. If companies don't want to help you better yourself, by all means you should take the initiative. Loyalty and respect are a two way street, we are taught this by our parents from early childhood. Yet, somehow corporations believe they can treat you as an expendable commodity and demand your total respect and loyalty. The corporations have us so much in fear that they can be downright tyrants in a way we would never accept from our own government. If Senator Whomever were to pass a law threatening anyone who doesn't have an occupation with incarceration, we would be at his or her door with pitch forks and torches. We bow our heads and take it - the corporations successfully gamble on it.
You have a legitimate concern. The unfortunate reality of today's economy is investor greed. How much money is enough? I think this will happen in many companies. Ultimately this is a very self destructive practice that results in low morale and even reputation damage. Blogging and epinion websites will quickly rack up negative opinions of some employers. Prospective employees might read these opinions and chose to to turn down the employment offer. It happened to me - I had the opportunity to work for the Vanguard Group. I am so glad I read about the work environment prior to accepting the job as it kept me from making a huge mistake. I turned down the employment offer.
When moving to a new employer when you are already employed, you are in the driver's seat. You can accept or reject offers as you see fit. My own company will hire external people and pay them more than promoting from inside. This practice is just plain bad, bad for moral and a bad business decision. From the standpoint of a bad business decision, you have a new employee that must get up to speed and learn the particulars of the company. By promoting from within and giving the same salary raise, you get someone already up to speed that can beging contributing from the very begining. Also, moral improves overall because employees see that they can really better themselves.
Having had some time to think about it, having a union for infrastructure employees in IT is not really a bad idea. If you think about it, in the airline industry, line maintenance personnel are union. Line maintenance, much like IT infrastructure, are critical to the success or failure of an operation. No mechanics means the planes don't fly and no infrastructure gurus means that networks do not operate. I could see a case for IT infrastructure employees; especially because software engineers are given a disporportionate amount of project credit and funds. All of the best code in the world is meaningless if the infrastructure to support it does not exist.
On one hand, this is an interesting move. On the other, I am surprised that they would go with WordPress because it is a GPL product. The GPL is an anathema to Microsoft precisely because if they modify the source code, they must contribute changes back. Perhaps, it is possible to extend WordPress through closed source plugins; although even that is to navigate a minefield.
The trouble is, and this is not intended to be flamebait but a statement of relative fact, the desktop firewalls available are poor. I am no fan of the quality of products like Zone Alarm and Windows Firewall. I'd like to see something with the same kind of power and flexibility implemented that openbsd's pf uses.
The whole point of a firewall is blocking connections. I don't know about anyone else, but I make a point to not run services that I don't want people to connect to on my machine. How hard is that?
An outgoing firewall though is immensely valuable. I love seeing everything that every little shareware app or office suite tries to phone home with. When doing local web development, I've even been surprised to find a number of open source CMS/frameworks phoning home with more info than I care to share.
Firewalls also block intrusion attempts. Say you need SSH, I guess you could limit SSH to listen on an internal interface but that would be useless because SSH is used to remotely access a server over an untrusted network. I use OpenBSD's pf with a connection rate limiter so that if someone attempts to brute force through making multiple connections, their IP address is automatically blacklisted for a period of 48 hours.
I strongly disagree with Jon Honeyball. The best security researchers take the onion (layered) model. Relying solely on end point security is a very poor idea. Putting all of your eggs in one basket is never a good idea. Certainly, place some emphasis on having secure end-points but firewalls on everything is a good idea. Having desktop and server firewall software adds one additional layer of protection, should the end point become compromised. I have no idea why there is such a big push at end point security at the expense of a layered approach other than some academics pushed the idea and Symantec decided to market it. What happens if a piece of malware or an intruder gets through the end point and then obtains root access through a poorly-written web application? Had good extra security layers been in place, this might have been less likely to happen.
What about here at home in the U.S.? If Microsoft wants to protect NGO non-profit's from nefarious actions they should not be so hypocritical as to do it abroad only. There are plenty of dissident non-profit organizations in the U.S. that are subject to nefarious actions by law enforcement all of the time. There are pro-marijuana groups that may be doing nothing illegal in the limelight by producing leaflets and holding rallies that are subject to the scrutiny of law enforcement. In fact, it isn't a crime to dissent in the US. Ah, but once again, everything is profit and loss motivated. Microsoft would be concerned about losing its lucrative government contracts and some of its contracts with business that stands to lose money if certain dissident groups got their way.