IMO, the unmade decision is a symptom.
In my personal experience, I start deferring things when there's something else going on that I don't want to deal with. Usually the something else is that I haven't accepted that I "don't know" something.
2,794 karma · joined January 12, 2011
In my personal experience, I start deferring things when there's something else going on that I don't want to deal with. Usually the something else is that I haven't accepted that I "don't know" something.
The US is so much larger in terms of both size & scope that any program would be overrun with fraud, or overrun with bureaucracy to prevent fraud immediately. If you have ever had any experience buying stuff for or selling stuff to any US government entity, you'd run away as soon as possible!
I tried to get other folks to use it, but people equate cert with complexity and money and their eyes roll back into their heads if you mention PKI.
The key difference is Apple has "computer offerings". Microsoft doesn't. With my enterprise hat on, I don't want to pay for video editors, etc. Likewise, the parent buying a laptop for a child doesn't want to pay for full disk encryption that is FIPS compliant.
A paywall would dramatically reduce the amount of new content being generated, and the open license of the existing content lowers the entry barriers for a competitor. Even an MBA can figure out that a paywall is a bad idea.
That's not to say that there isn't some other creative way that a malevolent overlord could do evil with SO, but in any case, you or I can pick up the back catalog of data and do whatever we wish.
If you sell to the Fortune 500 or government, a procurement officer does the purchase. The procurement guy's purpose in life is to extract discounts. With government, it's even worse, as you have GSA and State contracts with published price lists.
There's also legal complications. If a vendor gives a discount to one government entity, all government entities qualify for that price by law.
Before credit cards were popular, it was common for aircraft passengers to be armed with handguns and carrying a lot of cash -- yet there were few incidents. Think about that.
An organization planning an operation against any nation-state relays on secrecy and anonymity to function, period. That is what random screenings will help combat.
The current TSA regime is really trying to stop crazy people. I believe there is some documentation to establish that they are somewhat successful at that too. The problem with the TSA approach is that they are too big to be competent at what they do, and the near universal contempt that they are held in hurts that mission -- even deranged people hunk the TSA is dumb.
Is it overkill for Linus's kids? Yes. But OpenSUSE wasn't put together for his kids.
Weather companies like Accuweather were annoyed by the National Weather Service releasing weather data in KML form -- they saw it as a threat to their lucrative business of selling public domain weather data. Sen. Rick Sanatorum tried to come to the rescue with a bill that would limit their ability to release that data.
Consider that despite billions in investments, both DHL before they went away and FedEx Ground today are still not as good as UPS.
If you want to magically improve the plight of the poor, make cheap housing available in urban areas without a qualification process (ie. Section 8, public housing)
Dumb kids get in trouble like this all of the time.
I assume there's an over-diagnosis because the abuse of these drugs is both blatant and widespread.
Look at the infographic and you'll see that there is a very wide variance between states. NY and Iowa just two examples. If you have a medical condition that affects broad swaths of society and is being diagnosed so inconsistently that you have these huge variances, something is wrong.
If doctors stopped supplying prescriptions to people who want speed, as opposed to people who need to treat a recognized medical condition, there would be no supply problem.
You have a few things from an internal control POV that you can do to help prevent "bad" things from happening. Examples include: privilege separation, change control, dev/test/prod environments, scripted deployments, automation, etc.
When devs bitch about not having the privileges they need, the biggest issue is usually communication. The SAs work for a different Director, and there is an adversarial relationship. Fix that, and most of your problems go away.
That infographic tells the story -- 50% more Iowan children need amphetamines to function as compared to New Yorkers?
IMO, this is a case where the DEA is doing the right thing. Improve the guidance for prescribing this stuff, and the folks who need it will be fine.
The problem here is that not everyone lives in California, and most people think of cars as durable (vs. perishable) goods. Those two things cause problems for people who are edge cases. In places like Michigan or New York or Massachusetts, it's not 70F all year round. We have this quaint concept called "winter". In the winter, the local governments dump salt on the roads, snow and slush make driving dangerous, and when it doesn't snow, you get dusty blowing salt on the highways.
Because of this, people with the means to buy $50,000 sports cars leave them in garages for the winter. Or they head to the Caribbean for a vacation. Or both. For a car with an internal combustion engine, you usually remove the battery or trickle charge it, but the consequence of not doing so is buying a $100 battery at your local mechanic.
Another thing to consider is the meaning of "normal" as it applies to the market. If you're a working stiff, you drive every day. You may even drive to get to your vacation. People buying $50,000 cars with the limitations that electric cars have today aren't working stiffs, and their leisure patterns are probably quite different than most folks.
Really useful stuff if you need to know what the legislature is up to.
One - I don't trust them... At some point they will do "beacon" or something similar again.
Two - Facebook will eventually either make you use FB gift cards or make a cut from the retailer. Either way, it will cost more.
Three - If I want a pair of khakis from the Gap, I can type "gap.com"... Or go down the Facebook navigation rabbit hole, which changes several times per year.
The only thing that makes sense to me for Facebook commerce is marketing at people who don't have access to credit cards, or at people whose only internet access is Facebook via feature phones.
About 2 years ago, my then employer was considered a "strategic" customer to one of the big security/AV vendors. They came in to give us their dog and pony show about the future of security, etc... which basically said that the current strategy of using AV to "blacklist" bad stuff is ineffective. (I asked the awkward question "So WTF am I paying for your ineffective AV product?")
The only thing that makes me nervous about "Gatekeeper" is that it is Apple-controlled, and Apple is a mercurial vendor whom I don't really trust to do things that are in my interest. I'd be happier if I could trust other certifying authorities, which would mitigate the impact of Apple cutting of the oxygen to unsigned applications in the future.
Apple has an established track record of not getting what people want from a TV. Ala carte TV shows and a crippled set-top box is not very inspiring.
Palm wasn't exactly a superstar before the iPhone's launch. I had a Treo... the only thing that could be said about it was that the crappy web browser was better than BlackBerry's crappier one.
Singapore isn't a democracy in the same sense as the US or Britain. China is a not a democracy at all. So comparing the education levels of elected officials isn't really an apples-to-apples comparison.
In the US, a person's charisma, ability to relate to and attract the attention of voters, ability to build a political organization and ability to get things done within the political system define your success as a politician. Politicians start local, and build tight social networks as city councilmen, mayors, state legislators, etc. They then use those networks to get into Federal offices.
The great exception are candidates that skip the political process and reach high office by spending prestige capital (ie. President/General US Grant) or by spending lots of financial capital (ie. New York City Mayor Bloomberg). Even in these cases, these folks are actually buying access to someone else's political infrastructure.
None of this means that the US government does not have scientists working on policy. Scientists do work for the government as political appointees (ie. Secretary Chu of the US Department of Energy), as civil servants (ie. employees of NOAA), as contractors to government (ie. the RAND Corporation), or indirectly via unaffiliated think-tanks (ie. Federation of American Scientists).