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Comment How to find the articles (Score 1) 113

Deleting the Google links is a quite serious hindrance to scholarship and informed research today. One may as well put it here (with due credit to Douglas Adams for writing this.

        "But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

        "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

Comment Re:Good job, India! (Score 0) 86

It is not Islam-specific. The equivocal attitude the US displayed during the Kargil conflict — when India was clearly the injured party — is not entirely unlike the attitude displayed this year towards Ukraine (where what few Muslims reside, all strongly resent the invader).

Though Obama (as Clinton back in 1999) talks the talk of supporting the invaded victim, the US would only help with "non-lethal" supplies — and only after a significant delay.

Comment Re:Cisco is just like the rest of them (Score 1) 148

>but when you apply for them you get a response that the job doesn't exist

Oh, dear. This is a quite old trick. It's even more fascinating when they say "we already have candidates", but when your colleague with a different age, gender, or citizenship applies with similar credentials at the same time their application is accepted for review. The classic example of this is tuning HR requirements to only hire H1B candidates, as shown at:

                            https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment Re:Folks this is what happens with bad leadership (Score 1) 148

> They were suffering from price competition

Not just price competition: they were also suffering profoundly from fraudulent Cisco hardware.

          http://www.crn.com/news/networ...

Not only does it cost Cisco profits to lose the legitimate sale, but it costs them profoundly in customer support for the purchasers of fraudulent Cisco hardware. And Cisco support is a very large business cost to Cisco.

Comment Re:My company (Score 1) 148

Goodness, are you hiring? I'm doing a lot of partnership consulting with environments that have good people that have been trying to fix things for years. We respect them profoundly for their input and do our best to make sure they get full credit. But there is sometimes political infighting to get the work done and they wind up as sacrificial lambs. I'd love to send some your way: I wish _I_ could hire them, but my team is pretty well staffed and we often have non-poaching agreements.

Comment Re:The essence of enterprise (Score 2) 148

> Let me try to bring some perspective into the discussion. Lest somebody misunderstand, the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs. The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component.

I'm afraid, sir or madam, that your very opening statements show exactly why engineers will disagree with the entire rest of your statement. You've redefined a common word with a well understood social and legal meaning. Your definition reflects a business school philosophy that does not match either the common or the legal meaning. And it breaks down very, very quickly in the real world.

> It is for this reason that any contemporary HR policy is aimed at (and this is important) divorcing the work from specific individuals.

Nonsense. This guarantees failure in the long run for a tech business. It can work for Wal-Mart or even McDonald's or even non-technologically innovative business, such as spam advertising and domain squatting. There are profound evolutionary economic pressures against it for the more interesting or leading edge technologies. Networking tools and hardware, lab instruments, software virtualization, and systems security are examples that require insight and mastery to improve designs and remain effective and profitable..

> So it's up for debate really, and this isn't a new debate. It's a debate about a basic balance in our society that needs to be realigned from time to time.

And it's vital to know what the debate is really about. Please do not try to redefine basic terms in ways that obscure the actual debates. It's framing the question in a way that is misleading and helps prevent understanding of the underlying problem.

Comment Re:And he is, probably, right (Score 1) 284

I don't think Apple or Google making phone encryption suck so criminals can find and abuse the law enforcement backdoor would improve public safety.

If it were to suck so badly, yes. But it does not have to...

That said, the paranoid cynic in me suspects, it is — and will be — recoverable already. And the government simply wants us to believe otherwise...

Comment Re:Remove It (Score 2) 522

Binary logs are also far more secure, but I guess that doesn't matter to you.

That has to be most bizarre justification I've yet read. How exactly is a binary log more secure?

*nix systems have had permissions systems for the better part of half a century. If you don't want someone looking at a file, don't give them permissions, but if they do have permissions, the mere fact that a file is binary isn't an obstacle save to the technically illiterate (who wouldn't likely be looking at a log file anyways).

Comment Re:Let me get this right (Score 1) 839

Unfortunately, this will also result in the government collecting too little tax and having to look at increasing tax rates or coming up with other ideas for taxation.

No,it would force the govt to spend responsibly within a budget that allows for the govt to SAVE money for years of lower tax income to it, rather than overspending.

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