You dont need to "switch" per se I agree with you that "switch" was a bad choice of words.
But my point still remains. If agencies felt they could benefit from the adoption of IPv6 more than said adoption would cost, no mandate would be necessary. So who can blame agencies for doing the bare minimum to comply with this mandate?
What benefit does your average government agency get for switching to IPv6, and does it outweigh the costs?
Obviously not, because if the benefits outweighed the costs, no mandate would be necessary. Agencies would have long ago switched on their own.
And since costs outweigh the benefits, who can blame agencies for doing the bare minimum to achieve compliance? The writeup makes it sound like agency obstinance, but I view it is good budget stewardship. Agencies don't seem to want to flush good budget down the IPv6 toilet.
Until the price comes down to the price of a PS3, they're out of my league. I doubt that a PS3 is truly out of your league. They seem to be priced between $400-500 depending on specs.
At any rate, do you think it would really cost so much more to manufacture an aesthetically pleasing robot, as opposed to a fugly one? I'm sure at first the "top models" will be priced accordingly, but once commodity pricing sets in, I doubt you'll see a much higher cost for a Barbie doll you can actually fuck.
Regarding 2: I think you may like this post of mine. I'd say that post is pretty spot-on accurate.
I think that we agree that what they do NOT want, is for a man to spew out all kinds of emotional baggage. The more I think about it, "emotionally responsive" is probably pretty close to what women want, in the sense of responding to her emotions. For instance, when a woman is PMSsey, the typical male response is to start nailing her sister or best friend. Most women would prefer, I think, for a man to toss her a bottle of Motrin say they hope she feels better, and then just get out of the way. Nothing you say or do is going to make her quit bitching at you.
And as far as emoting more, I think women are using that as code for, "My boyfriend started sleeping with my sister and best friend. I didn't even know he didn't love me anymore. Or maybe at all. Why couldn't he have told me how he felt?"
As for the spice girls song, it looks like the line you meant to quote was If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends, which is not bad advice. If her friends don't like you, they will bug her incessantly until she dumps you. On the flip side, if they like you and she dumps you, she'll have to deal with, "He was perfect! Why'd you dump him?"
If you are able to decipher the lyrics of that song, you'll notice a few more insights, such as "Forget my past", "Don't wait around", "Don't bug me", etc. This is not bad advice, especially since I understand "bugging me" to mean, "being too much of a needy, emotional vagina".
They say that the ultimate male fantasy is a woman who is a true lady in every way shape and form in public, but in private, she's a sex-crazed porn star. I wonder if the female version of that is a man who is powerful and feared by all, but is always nice to her?
Now, if robots can be more emotionally responsive than men, will men do something drastic to compete with robots? My gut says no.
1. Our egos are too big to even recognize the competition. Men see the good-looking men in the magazines every bit as much as women see the good-looking women. But do we go to the same efforts to emulate? "I'm perfect the way I am. Any woman would be lucky to have me. My ego told me so." Most men have no clue how to dress or groom themselves, myself included.
2. Women tend to claim to want more "emotionally responsive" men, but my real-world observation tends to contradict that claim. Perhaps someone's done an actual scientific study, but I have not noticed men who are in touch with their feminine side having much luck in the meat-marketplace. Cliches such as "Nice guys finish last", and "Women prefer assholes" tend to support that theory.
My point here is that the necessity of competing with robots for "emotional responsiveness" is probably overstated (assuming a suitably emo robot could be designed), because what women claim to prefer, and what women actually prefer (based on their choices in men) tend to be vastly different.
3. I think many men would tend to be satisfied with a physical relationship with a robot, to the point of preferring that over the head-games provided by most women. This is especially true because there would be no such thing as a robot that is "out of your league". If you could be nailing a convincing, if robotic supermodel, would you prefer an average-looking emotionally-unstable human female over that smokin' hot robot?
You may choose to dismiss point #3, but look at the success of prostitutes. A quick perusal of craigslist.org confirms that there are a nontrivial supply of men out there who are happy to pay a few hundred bucks for a 1-hour tryst with a woman they know would never speak to them absent the donation to her college fund.
I think where I come out on this is that women will face more competition from robots than men will face from them. I am not in the field of robotics, but my software experience tells me that it is probably easier to engineer a convincing sex toy than a convincing "emotionally responsive" companion. And that's assuming that anyone has figured out what type of "emotional responsiveness" women truly desire (rather than claim to desire).
This is such a non-issue, I cannot believe it. If you can scale JAVA!!!... You know what I mean. This is actually a pretty severely ignorant statement. The year is no longer 1998, and modern JVMs perform very similarly to native code for most applications.
True story: a client had a perl script to slice and dice a lot of log file data. This is bread and butter for perl, exactly what it was meant to do. The problem was, the amount of data was growing, and the perl script was taking too long to complete.
I rewrote the perl script in Java using the exact same logic, regular expressions, everything. Just translated statement by statement from perl to Java. The Java program completed 10 times more quickly than the perl script, and that was with zero performance optimization.
Have you ever worked on a properly normalized database schema? I have, and it is a dream. I have also, and it was dog slow.
And that's even after asking the DBAs for help writing the queries. About a dozen query optimizer hints didn't yield acceptable performance, they eventually were forced to denormalize the schema.
Since it wasn't running in a Firefox plugin, the test really doesn't say anything at all about Firefox or its plugin system. Well, the fact that I am running firefox right now and I'm vulnerable to a remote code execution flaw, and I could close the flaw by running IE instead is really all that matters to me.
Maybe I should check out IE7. I hear they have tabs now, and I'll be more secure.
Secondly, one of the serious issues you have here is that some areas are clearly unenforcible but the goal may be to have a pretense to legally threaten your next employer. It's even worse if you're trying to market that new invention that your previous employer is claiming IP over.
Who is going to buy a product that is tied up in an IP dispute?
Plaintiff argues that firm acted on the agreement that defendant signed in bad faith (with knowledge that agreement would be invalidated). Plaintiff claims to have paid defendant extra compensation in exchange for the right to defendant's future inventions.
Defendant didn't complain when he was getting all that extra compensation over the years, but when it came time to uphold his end of the bargain, defendant went running to the courts for relief. What's to stop the judge from agreeing with plaintiff's position and ordering defendant to pay back to the firm a percentage of his compensation? Especially if plaintiff is able to convince the judge that employee acted in bad faith?
I'm pretty sure even California law would allow that.
In order for those paragraphs to become null and void, a judge has to make it so. For that to happen, you are going to spending a minimum of $10,000.00 in legal fees. Even then, you never know what a judge is going to do. Is he going to strike the offending language? Or modify the contract to conform with state law?
Don't sign something with your fingers crossed. If you don't agree to something, grow a pair and don't sign it. Unless you want to put some attorney's kids through college, that is.
Every time this issue comes up, you get hundreds of armchair lawyers saying, "Oh, just sign it, it isn't enforceable, anyway."
Well, the fact of the matter is you'll never know what is enforceable or not until you pay some lawyer $10,000.00 for the privilege of arguing it in front of a judge, and even then, you never know what will happen on any given day in court. The judge could enforce the agreement (you did, after all, sign it), he could modify it so it conforms with state law (well, you intended to agree to this, but it doesn't quite conform to state law, so here I'll modify it for you so it conforms... you're still on the hook for some, but not all, of what you agreed to), or he could toss it outright.
But you never know what is going to happen, and especially if you get some compensation in return for signing the agreement, you should NOT count on a judge simply tossing it. Judges hate to give a party something for nothing, and if the judge gets it in his head that you signed the agreement with your fingers crossed (under the impression that the judge will someday invalidate the agreement), the judge will not be amused.
So you did the right thing consulting a lawyer. Good luck with whatever you decide to do!
As others have pointed out the widespread use of English, perhaps the journalists began with an English message That doesn't make any sense.
The article says that the confusion was over the translation of the Hebrew words "ha'im" (if) to "hi'ima" (the mother). If the journalist wrote the original letter in English, he would not have made such an absurd substitution.
Also, there is no way anyone, even a computer, would confuse the Dutch words for "if" and "mother". They are not close.
I'm beginning to suspect that the whole story is a hoax.
First off, babelfish doesn't translate Hebrew, and with good reason. Hebrew is hard for a computer to translate. The three letters, Heh Aleph Mem could have just as easily been translated to "the nation" or "the nut" (as in nuts and bolts) as it was to "the mother". The only way to know the correct translation is to know the context of the word, which is not always easy.
Secondly, whomever wrote this hoax doesn't speak Hebrew very well. You don't have to go from "ha'im" to "ha'ima" to get from "if" to "the mother". In fact, the letters Heh Aleph Mem could be read as "ha'im" (if) or "ha'aim" (the mother) without having to add a letter to get all the way to "ha'ima".
Lastly, the Dutch are world-renowned for their extreme tolerance. There is no way a Dutch person would be deeply offended over something like this.
I can't find any Hebrew translation option on the babelfish website.
Furthermore, in the Jerusalem Post article, they point to a site babelfish.com, which appears to be a SEO site and doesn't do translations at all.
Compound that with the question of "Why would the Dutch Foreign Ministry care about an email from some random Israeli reporter?", and I'm guessing that this entire story is a hoax.
Yes, I realize that the Jerusalem Post is supposedly a high-quality paper, but the fact that they linked to a site (babelfish.com) that doesn't even do online translations makes me think that this wasn't their most well-researched and well-substantiated work. If this is really causing such a fuss in Holland, how come there is nothing in the Dutch press about this?
Beyond the cost of production (editing, reviewing, web serving, rainy day reserve, and limited printings), they have no business being "well heeled" on the public dollar. Most academic journal publishers are nonprofits. It's not like scientific journals are gouging the NIH to try to make Q3 earnings or something.
Anyhow, last I checked, NIH has a website. If they want their material published free of charge, nobody is stopping them from self-publishing. It is a free country, after all.
There must be more to it than that, otherwise, why would any authors publish in "closed" journals at all? Why would it take an act of congress to do what you would expect the free market to do?
If I was an author and I had the choice between paying to get my article published in a closed journal and not paying to have my article freely available, guess which I would choose?
As an academic and NIH scientist, I find it appalling that NIH funded research isn't openly accessible to the public Does NIH have a website? No one is stopping you from self-publishing, you know. It's a free country.
Looking around at some of PLOS's competitors, the fees for open access look about right. It doesn't look like PLOS is gouging by any stretch of the imagination.
You can't really expect publishers to publish for free because there are real costs associated with academic publishing. Most academic journal publishers are nonprofits. It's not like your $2-3k is to eek out 1 more cent per share to meet quarterly estimates or something.
Security is about way more than remote root holes. Sure there is no known remote root exploit in qmail, but I can abuse a qmail server to send out massive amounts of SPAM since qmail late-bounces instead of rejecting messages during the SMTP session.
10 years ago, generating bounces was OK, but that's not OK in 2007. Hasn't been OK for a few years now.
Slashdot Mirror
But my point still remains. If agencies felt they could benefit from the adoption of IPv6 more than said adoption would cost, no mandate would be necessary. So who can blame agencies for doing the bare minimum to comply with this mandate?
What benefit does your average government agency get for switching to IPv6, and does it outweigh the costs?
Obviously not, because if the benefits outweighed the costs, no mandate would be necessary. Agencies would have long ago switched on their own.
And since costs outweigh the benefits, who can blame agencies for doing the bare minimum to achieve compliance? The writeup makes it sound like agency obstinance, but I view it is good budget stewardship. Agencies don't seem to want to flush good budget down the IPv6 toilet.
If the government has knowledge that the passphrase is in the safe, the government can crack open the safe and obtain the passphrase.
What the government cannot do is crack open your mind (read: torture) to obtain the passphrase.
Wise move.
At any rate, do you think it would really cost so much more to manufacture an aesthetically pleasing robot, as opposed to a fugly one? I'm sure at first the "top models" will be priced accordingly, but once commodity pricing sets in, I doubt you'll see a much higher cost for a Barbie doll you can actually fuck.
I think that we agree that what they do NOT want, is for a man to spew out all kinds of emotional baggage. The more I think about it, "emotionally responsive" is probably pretty close to what women want, in the sense of responding to her emotions. For instance, when a woman is PMSsey, the typical male response is to start nailing her sister or best friend. Most women would prefer, I think, for a man to toss her a bottle of Motrin say they hope she feels better, and then just get out of the way. Nothing you say or do is going to make her quit bitching at you.
And as far as emoting more, I think women are using that as code for, "My boyfriend started sleeping with my sister and best friend. I didn't even know he didn't love me anymore. Or maybe at all. Why couldn't he have told me how he felt?"
As for the spice girls song, it looks like the line you meant to quote was If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends , which is not bad advice. If her friends don't like you, they will bug her incessantly until she dumps you. On the flip side, if they like you and she dumps you, she'll have to deal with, "He was perfect! Why'd you dump him?"
If you are able to decipher the lyrics of that song, you'll notice a few more insights, such as "Forget my past", "Don't wait around", "Don't bug me", etc. This is not bad advice, especially since I understand "bugging me" to mean, "being too much of a needy, emotional vagina".
They say that the ultimate male fantasy is a woman who is a true lady in every way shape and form in public, but in private, she's a sex-crazed porn star. I wonder if the female version of that is a man who is powerful and feared by all, but is always nice to her?
1. Our egos are too big to even recognize the competition. Men see the good-looking men in the magazines every bit as much as women see the good-looking women. But do we go to the same efforts to emulate? "I'm perfect the way I am. Any woman would be lucky to have me. My ego told me so." Most men have no clue how to dress or groom themselves, myself included.
2. Women tend to claim to want more "emotionally responsive" men, but my real-world observation tends to contradict that claim. Perhaps someone's done an actual scientific study, but I have not noticed men who are in touch with their feminine side having much luck in the meat-marketplace. Cliches such as "Nice guys finish last", and "Women prefer assholes" tend to support that theory.
My point here is that the necessity of competing with robots for "emotional responsiveness" is probably overstated (assuming a suitably emo robot could be designed), because what women claim to prefer, and what women actually prefer (based on their choices in men) tend to be vastly different.
3. I think many men would tend to be satisfied with a physical relationship with a robot, to the point of preferring that over the head-games provided by most women. This is especially true because there would be no such thing as a robot that is "out of your league". If you could be nailing a convincing, if robotic supermodel, would you prefer an average-looking emotionally-unstable human female over that smokin' hot robot?
You may choose to dismiss point #3, but look at the success of prostitutes. A quick perusal of craigslist.org confirms that there are a nontrivial supply of men out there who are happy to pay a few hundred bucks for a 1-hour tryst with a woman they know would never speak to them absent the donation to her college fund.
I think where I come out on this is that women will face more competition from robots than men will face from them. I am not in the field of robotics, but my software experience tells me that it is probably easier to engineer a convincing sex toy than a convincing "emotionally responsive" companion. And that's assuming that anyone has figured out what type of "emotional responsiveness" women truly desire (rather than claim to desire).
True story: a client had a perl script to slice and dice a lot of log file data. This is bread and butter for perl, exactly what it was meant to do. The problem was, the amount of data was growing, and the perl script was taking too long to complete.
I rewrote the perl script in Java using the exact same logic, regular expressions, everything. Just translated statement by statement from perl to Java. The Java program completed 10 times more quickly than the perl script, and that was with zero performance optimization.
Welcome to 2007.
And that's even after asking the DBAs for help writing the queries. About a dozen query optimizer hints didn't yield acceptable performance, they eventually were forced to denormalize the schema.
Thank god.
Uhhh... yeah, it was for his wife... it became for her after she found out about it...
Maybe I should check out IE7. I hear they have tabs now, and I'll be more secure.
I dunno. IE users are not vulnerable. Firefox users are.
Explain to me why the term "firefox" doesn't belong in the vulnerability writeup when only firefox users are exposed?
Who is going to buy a product that is tied up in an IP dispute?
Or how about this?
Plaintiff argues that firm acted on the agreement that defendant signed in bad faith (with knowledge that agreement would be invalidated). Plaintiff claims to have paid defendant extra compensation in exchange for the right to defendant's future inventions.
Defendant didn't complain when he was getting all that extra compensation over the years, but when it came time to uphold his end of the bargain, defendant went running to the courts for relief. What's to stop the judge from agreeing with plaintiff's position and ordering defendant to pay back to the firm a percentage of his compensation? Especially if plaintiff is able to convince the judge that employee acted in bad faith?
I'm pretty sure even California law would allow that.
That's not quite the whole story.
In order for those paragraphs to become null and void, a judge has to make it so. For that to happen, you are going to spending a minimum of $10,000.00 in legal fees. Even then, you never know what a judge is going to do. Is he going to strike the offending language? Or modify the contract to conform with state law?
Don't sign something with your fingers crossed. If you don't agree to something, grow a pair and don't sign it. Unless you want to put some attorney's kids through college, that is.
Every time this issue comes up, you get hundreds of armchair lawyers saying, "Oh, just sign it, it isn't enforceable, anyway."
Well, the fact of the matter is you'll never know what is enforceable or not until you pay some lawyer $10,000.00 for the privilege of arguing it in front of a judge, and even then, you never know what will happen on any given day in court. The judge could enforce the agreement (you did, after all, sign it), he could modify it so it conforms with state law (well, you intended to agree to this, but it doesn't quite conform to state law, so here I'll modify it for you so it conforms... you're still on the hook for some, but not all, of what you agreed to), or he could toss it outright.
But you never know what is going to happen, and especially if you get some compensation in return for signing the agreement, you should NOT count on a judge simply tossing it. Judges hate to give a party something for nothing, and if the judge gets it in his head that you signed the agreement with your fingers crossed (under the impression that the judge will someday invalidate the agreement), the judge will not be amused.
So you did the right thing consulting a lawyer. Good luck with whatever you decide to do!
The article says that the confusion was over the translation of the Hebrew words "ha'im" (if) to "hi'ima" (the mother). If the journalist wrote the original letter in English, he would not have made such an absurd substitution.
Also, there is no way anyone, even a computer, would confuse the Dutch words for "if" and "mother". They are not close.
I'm beginning to suspect that the whole story is a hoax.
First off, babelfish doesn't translate Hebrew, and with good reason. Hebrew is hard for a computer to translate. The three letters, Heh Aleph Mem could have just as easily been translated to "the nation" or "the nut" (as in nuts and bolts) as it was to "the mother". The only way to know the correct translation is to know the context of the word, which is not always easy.
Secondly, whomever wrote this hoax doesn't speak Hebrew very well. You don't have to go from "ha'im" to "ha'ima" to get from "if" to "the mother". In fact, the letters Heh Aleph Mem could be read as "ha'im" (if) or "ha'aim" (the mother) without having to add a letter to get all the way to "ha'ima".
Lastly, the Dutch are world-renowned for their extreme tolerance. There is no way a Dutch person would be deeply offended over something like this.
I can't find any Hebrew translation option on the babelfish website.
Furthermore, in the Jerusalem Post article, they point to a site babelfish.com, which appears to be a SEO site and doesn't do translations at all.
Compound that with the question of "Why would the Dutch Foreign Ministry care about an email from some random Israeli reporter?", and I'm guessing that this entire story is a hoax.
Yes, I realize that the Jerusalem Post is supposedly a high-quality paper, but the fact that they linked to a site (babelfish.com) that doesn't even do online translations makes me think that this wasn't their most well-researched and well-substantiated work. If this is really causing such a fuss in Holland, how come there is nothing in the Dutch press about this?
Anyhow, last I checked, NIH has a website. If they want their material published free of charge, nobody is stopping them from self-publishing. It is a free country, after all.
There must be more to it than that, otherwise, why would any authors publish in "closed" journals at all? Why would it take an act of congress to do what you would expect the free market to do?
If I was an author and I had the choice between paying to get my article published in a closed journal and not paying to have my article freely available, guess which I would choose?
Looking around at some of PLOS's competitors, the fees for open access look about right. It doesn't look like PLOS is gouging by any stretch of the imagination.
You can't really expect publishers to publish for free because there are real costs associated with academic publishing. Most academic journal publishers are nonprofits. It's not like your $2-3k is to eek out 1 more cent per share to meet quarterly estimates or something.
I always thought DRM meant Digital Restrictions Management.
Security is about way more than remote root holes. Sure there is no known remote root exploit in qmail, but I can abuse a qmail server to send out massive amounts of SPAM since qmail late-bounces instead of rejecting messages during the SMTP session.
10 years ago, generating bounces was OK, but that's not OK in 2007. Hasn't been OK for a few years now.