Posts by Tom 13 7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I'm a hard right law and order advocate. I have no problems with police lying to catch bad guys. I even support waterboarding in the context of international terrorism.
I would categorically and without hesitation void any and all convictions and suspensions based on polygraph exams. It's no better than putting radium and a detector in a poison gas device and distributing them at random public intersections claiming they are mind readers and will kill those engaging in seditious thinking.
Actually, that statement is almost completely meaningless. They don't define the meaning of "uncovered," they don't define the process, and they don't list the raw data. So you can't even reliably claim a 1% success rate. And as you correctly note, it doesn't even seem to acknowledge the problem of false positives.
You should note the plural in your statement. It does work to some extent, but has limits. The limits are that it works mostly on honest people who are trying to do the right thing and not so much on pathological liars. Which makes it misleading as a tool for securing agencies and businesses. On the other hand, if you are looking for people who will be able to convincing lie without other tells, it could be a useful tool.
In short, the guy this article is about is probably a louse, but I don't think he should have been put in jail for the charges on which he was tried.
I wouldn't see them dropping it completely, but changing the mix of systems and reducing the quantities they build. At the same time they'll shift even more to network gear and try to build full integration teams. I expect a rocky road.
I've never had a serious problem on a Dell computer and the gear I've looked at has seemed reasonably priced. In the past I've always rolled my own so I haven't bought from them, but all the PCs I've supported at work for the last 7 years have been Dell. We have had very few manufacturing defect issues with them. The repair cases I've had trouble with them on were all systems that were at least a year past warranty (most memorable was when we had to replace the video card and mb on a laptop 3 times before it started working right again).
Cook has a bigger problem. All that cash sitting in the company in offshore accounts DOES mean the shareholders aren't getting the return on their investment that they deserve. Which means much as Crazy Carl is moonbat loopy, the start of his argument at Apple is valid. It wasn't at Dell which made Mike's job easier there.
It's the 20 minutes on hold at $1.50 before I start talking to a person. Just disallow charging while on hold. And no, switching me into the call tree before putting me on hold doesn't stop the "can't charge while on hold" bit. So if your call tree can't sort those bits out, you can't charge me for it. I only want to pay for the time I'm talking to a person and they are working on resolving MY problem.
Maybe the first ones. My experience was quite different. Batteries tended to last at least a year. Granted at that point it was a PITA because I needed a jeweler to change it, but the battery life itself was quite good.
Of course, now that I almost always have a cell phone on me I've stopped wearing a watch.
Now, now.
I would think someone as world-wise as you would know better than to get in front of a two minute hate.
Did you also notice the weasel phrase "circumvented or cracked" which is quickly shortened to just plain "cracked" and on which the rest of the article focuses? Given national laws, I expect it would be quite simple to circumvent banking encryption by just issuing a National Security Letter.
Regardless of frequency of use, practices which have the ultimate affect of compromising users should be avoided.
Yes, this one still mostly belongs in the MS court for bad, bad, bad choices on default settings. Given that MS have decided to try to ape Apple's forked file structure using three dot extensions on their file format, they do need to implement something to check the file when it has a double dot. If the OS can always determine whether or not the file is executable, the icon for the file should always default to one that shows the user the file is an executable. Better still, get rid of the thrice-damned obfuscation.
You would think that but you would be wrong.
I once sat on a case where one particular person should clearly have been excluded from the jury pool, but it wasn't until his number was actually pulled and they were about to seat the jury that he was eventually excluded when one side used a freebie to remove him. If all their freebies had been exhausted he would have sat on the trial.
Frankly I suspect he would have rendered a fair decision. He was friends with lawyers on both teams, knew the police well, and had friend in the real estate business. The case had to do with terms of a contract for an apartment complex that was sold to a different management company. But given that he was a doctor at the local hospital and the trial was expected to take 3 to 4 weeks or longer before deliberations started, I thought he should have been dismissed at the end of the first round of questions.
The USA is a republic of largely nominally self-governing states with widely divergent potentially diverse cultures and parochial self-interests. In the US, local and state interests will almost always are likely to trump national interests.
Yes, I think this case falls within those boundaries. Frankly the diversity/divergence of the cultures is much more along the lines of Emo Philips Ed/religion skit than any real diversity. (Starts with a guy named Ed who looks like a horse and is about to jump off a bridge). At work so I can't confirm a Google search for a link.
Some of the ones who do have actually suggested hanging such cables in orbit as a power generating method.
Frankly, if we can't deal with the NIMBYs over the practicality of earth side production, I don't see any way to deal with it in space. Because it's fundamentally the same issue even if you do change the color of the clothing the "bad" guy is wearing.
The will disappeared long before the cash did. Now the cash flows as works projects to buy votes for Congress critters. Hence why it seems to be in disarray. If understood as a different version of a welfare project, it makes perfect sense. Assuming of course one approves of welfare projects.
The only one I can see is that the environuts can't claim we'll kill any snail darters or the like when we construct the facilities on the moon.
What I don't see is a good solution for getting the energy to the surface of the Earth after it is created on the Moon. I can see using the power on the Moon for other manufacturing, but that begs the question of what are we manufacturing there. Sure I can come up with what I would consider a practical use for it, but most people wouldn't like that option. In fact they'd be rather terrified of it, so that one is off the table.
You can have an appreciation of the business and underpinning technology and still have these kinds of screwups. In particular I recall my first day as an actual wet behind the ears IT worker. Rode with the big boss who took an important call from the manager of a bank first thing in the morning. Seems the hard drive on their Fed Funds computer died the previous day and he needed a new one. Big boss moved heaven and earth, got a new drive and us to the site. Went to repair it, the drive was MFM and we had an IDE. I'm quite sure the manager knew how critical the system was. But the card for the Fed Funds transfers was so damned expensive and the system just always worked so they never upgraded it.
We did actually manage to save his ass with an FDisk and a whole lot of jury rigging to get data off the drive before we put it back on (thank God it was DOS). But we told him to replace the system because we couldn't guarantee another miracle.
He doesn't give a specific date, but sure that's entirely believable. Of course I'm old enough to remember when motherboards were REAL motherboards and not a damn thing useful was pre-wired to it. Depending on what you were doing, ISA NICs ran about $30. Fire ignites the plastic sheath on the ethernet cable, burns up to the card, fries the card but nothing else in the server. Turns out the server was old and all the spares were PCI. So no NIC to replace it.
What I don't get is nobody being able to run to the local computer shop to buy one.
The design probably did have those elements. But it probably wasn't tested, so they didn't find the plan wasn't properly implemented so the alternate site couldn't be turned on.
I worked for a company that spent a fair chunk of change to have an onsite backup generator with a 24 hour fuel supply installed. If the power in the building failed it was rigged to take over for the servers. Servers were on 30 minute UPS units so it looked reasonably solid. Came into work one day and there was a leak in the kitchen on an upper floor. As a result water was flowing down a pipe in primary physical services core - right over the breaker box. Eventually the breakers shorted and all the magic smoke got out. We evacuated the building. It took management almost two hours to determine we would not be re-entering the building that day. Nobody on the network team was worried because the backups were all in place. Sr. Network Engineer drove home connected up his work laptop and dialed in to perform a controlled shutdown of the facilities. Only he couldn't reach anything. It turned out the facilities management people who thought nothing of the water running over the circuit box in the morning decided that when the alternate power supply kicked in they needed to manually turn it off. So when the UPS units were drained everything went down hard. Sr. Engineer commented that if he had known they were going to cut the power he would have taken the laptop to the local Starbucks and used their WiFi to shut everything down before the UPS units were drained.
Short description - the plan worked fine right up to the point where a meatsack did something unexpected.
So by your reckoning, because someone works at Vodaphone and pays their taxes, they aren't entitled to police protection?
See this is the bit I don't like about greedy, envious gits like you: People pay taxes, not corporations. So long as they pay their taxes they deserve the protection they pay for. What I have a problem with are people who don't pay taxes. Gits who are probably even more obnoxious than you living completely off the work of others, but whom you'll defend because they don't have a job.
I only sat on a technical review committee for one position. It was an interesting experience.
We had three candidates for the Help Desk Manager position. The first candidate nearly put me to sleep. The second candidate was energetic and came from a work environment with established processes and procedures. The third candidate talked about the work he'd done establishing processes and procedures at his current workplace.
Given where the company I worked for was at on their processes and procedures, I thought the last candidate was the perfect fit, the second might be able to cope and at least knew what the end product should look like. Turned out the big boss liked the guy who put me to sleep. So I quickly changed my tune rather than fighting him over it.
New guy started. It turned out, he could change his tune on dime about any given issue which is something I've always hated. I got riffed about 6 months later. I heard later that a month or so after that he broke his leg skiing. So he was out for a couple of months, and by the time he came back, he'd taken a position at a new company.
That's the rub though isn't it?
How do you determine ability based on a 1 or 2 page resume when confronted with 2000 applicants for a job opening? It was fairly easy back in the day when ditches were dug by hand: you looked for the callus on the applicants hands. Or you talked to your friends in other places who might know the applicant.
These days not so much. So instead you turn to testing agencies and pieces of paper. Then you force the applicant to come from a temp agency so you can have a 90 trial run before you transfer them to your company for their 90 day probationary period. And the further away you are from the people doing the actual work, the more dependent they are on certs and pieces of papers for sorting, because they don't actually have a clue about the work you are doing. They only know how to shift people like stock boys shift inventory at the local grocer.
Granted Merck et. al. aren't quite as crass about it as MS, but yes they do it too. They call it "continuing education" and work it through nominally disinterested third parties.
Where those professions have an advantage is that they usually have advanced coursework and experience requirements before entering the field. Computers in some sense are only now coming out of their Henry Ford era. Until now, any tinkerer could hang out his shingle and sell, repair, or install computers. And some tinkerers were better than others.
'Engineer' in the US is descriptive unless part of a specific title. The specific title might have a legal framework around it. From your description of the test you take I presume you are a Physical Engineer, which is one of those titles which usually does have a legal framework around it. But you should also keep in mind that we are the United States (plural) not singular, even though we tend to act as if it were singular since the civil war. So each state, which roughly corresponds to a country in the EU for purposes of this discussion, sets its own rules for specific titles.
Yes, you can and it comes with a cert, although you don't get to call yourself a medical doctor. Put it does provide enhanced legal protection when rendering aid and assistance:
http://www.redcross.org/take-a-class
So in some sense, and MCSE is sort of the same thing.
I'm not sure any of the bean counters even know what a developer is, let alone actively ignoring them. Somebody should have known, and pointed out that they'd need a good landing place to avoid the negative PR. Even if it was just an announcement about transitioning perks. Possibly a lifetime subscription to technet or some such.
That reminds me of the other MCSE I always think of when I hear the cert mentioned. It was 2001 and the company I was working for had just consolidated offices into one building. The pinhead in charge decided it was a good opportunity to both eliminate the aging Novell servers and upgrade from NT4 to Server 2000, but we didn't have time to convert the 95B boxes for the migration so they'd move as is. I remember the date because after we fired everything up the Help Desk was living hell. People kept losing drive mappings after logging onto the network, usually in the afternoon. The bright non-certified tech on the network team dug through technet until he found an article that exactly described our problem and gave it to the MCSE. The solution was to edit a registry entry to increase the timeout on a parameter. It seems MS knew their solution was so chatty their work-around was to turn off part of the connection. Windows 2000 would re-establish the connection, but 95 didn't have reconnect built in. But the MSCE didn't want to edit the registry because that was bad juju. So things kept on the way they were. And then the planes hit the towers. So for the first time in days the Help Desk phone stopped ringing. We had time to catch up on the back log and eagerly attacked it, not knowing what was happening out in the real world. Someone finally got to the pin head with the technet article and he overruled the MCSE. And when we all came back to work the next day the lost drive mapping issue was gone. It's not the way most Americans remember 9/11. I only realized what had happened when I got home that night and watched the news. And by that time my brother had already called my parents to tell them he and his wife were alright, although he had had a long walk home.
Financially worthwhile? Perhaps.
But show me one of those and you've only got one strike left. All of the most incompetent IT support people I've met have been MCSE certified. One in particular still stands out in my mind. On a Windows 95 box in attempt to hide a dial up password from students at a high school, they put the password into the modem profile for the administrator and couldn't fathom why it wasn't showing up when they created the student profiles. Granted this was back in the days when AOL could buy Time-Warner, but it is the first thing I think of when I think of an MCSE. The only reason you don't get an automatic three strikes is I've met one ultra-competent admin who properly locked down a high school campus using NT4 and roaming profiles. I suspect he would have come to the same solution without the cert, but it means I can't dismiss some outright if they have the cert.
Tornadoes in Kansas, hurricanes in NYC. You pay your money and you take your chances.
Given the choice, I think I'd rather build a lab to avoid tornadoes than avoid hurricanes. Mostly you can avoid tornado destruction by building appropriately underground. That doesn't work so well with hurricanes.
Wrong. Just yesterday the Washington Post ran a story about amounts of money in the black budgets. They self-reported that they self-redacted from the raw files because of the damage it would cause to National Security. It pinpoints real weaknesses in intelligence gathering capabilities as well as where money has been spent on successes. All of this is classified for good reason. Now our adversaries have it. And loathe though you may be to admit it, for the most part our adversaries are your adversaries. They're just a little more focused on us because you aren't much of a threat to them at the moment. But if they can ever neutralize us, they'll be happy to go after you next.
It seems reasonable to believe he did. Granted you are correct about needing the time machine to prove the statement, but as I recall there is exactly one word in the EOD for which the only reference in the archives is to one of his plays. At the moment I don't recall what that word is, and am unlikely to find it with a Google search.
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