Are you really afraid of a judicial system that barely works? You think someone who tries (unsuccessfully) to commit some retarded crime is going to sue over someone revealing it? Good luck with that.
If they had reported this promptly to the FBI, it would have had the same result.
The chances of an investigation: 0 (retarded things happen everyday) The chances of a fair investigation: 0 (fairness is irrelevant) The chances of a trial: 0 (no crime, no charges, no trial) The chances of a fair trial: 0 (In the US, we don't have fair trials)
Since there wasn't anything that really could be done to "help", entertaining countless people while humiliating an idiot is worth something.
Maybe you don't see the difference because they're basically the same thing.
Have you considered the possibility that maybe the final struggle between good and evil has already occurred and contrary to what christians are taught, evil wins? As a wise man once said, "Evil will always triumph over good because good is stupid."
That sure would explain why we have the illusion of choice in the system, but the outcome is always a system that puts money and power over justice every time. What better way to control people than by making them think they're supposed to be good and the system is supposed to work out in the end, even when all the evidence points to the contrary?
Of course, the up side of the approach we have now is that most people don't think "I'm so smart and the system is so corrupt that I can get away with killing my ex-wife if I play my cards right."
The half way process is to have an onerous process that you demand everyone use, and a wiki for the technical people to use, but isn't considered documentation and is frowned upon. A wiki is much easier for people to work with than searching through hundreds of emails on a topic and can be informal enough that people aren't afraid to make changes that haven't been reviewed by 25 levels of management.
The problem I find with using desktop based tools like this is that the documentation may exist and even be decent (in theory, I've never seen it happen in the real world), but how does anyone find the documentation? It's easy to keep things well organized for a 10 person company, but very difficult when there are over 10,000.
I work with some people like that. I'm sure they'll never give me any sort of position with authority because I'd just fire them all. I'd rather work with people who actually do something other than horde information. All of the smart people I've ever worked with will document things if you give them the time. The idea is that if you share the knowledge on the last project you worked on, you can be moved to another project later, instead of just doing maintenance for the last project. Also, people whose only value comes from the information they horde are the first to go when the system gets phased out.
It doesn't work. I work at a company that has strict requirements for following a defined process with a lot of documentation for every project. The official story is that we need to do all of this because we're a bank and SarbOx requires us to be thorough in our documentation of everything. That's +100 for creating a ton of jobs for people who perform no necessary function, but -infinity for good thinking or recognition of reality.
In reality, the official process turns a 1 month project into a 2.5+ year project (already past year 2, end still not in sight). The 6+ month projects could never be done using the official methodology, so they're clandestine. The strict requirements have caused us to abandon all reason and good judgement and just do as little as possible across the board, resulting in insecure environments that are not administered with applications that are held together with duct tape. There's such a strong push for no single point of failure from an official company perspective that it results in many key people never having time to train anyone else, so major pieces of functionality and knowledge are lost everytime someone leaves. This creates an environment where people don't want to stay.
One of our DBA's set up TWiki to document things. It looks decent and seems like a good idea to me. It's probably noncompliant with company policy on many fronts, so it probably can't be the official repository here, even though it's many times better than what we do have. I like the idea of anyone being able to find the documentation and fix it as well as using version control to allow anyone to see past revisions in case someone's "fixes" are wrong.
That's way better than the methodology we use where all the documentation has to be watered down to the point where no useful or accurate information is presented, they admit that form over function is the rule for the entire process, and no one could ever find documentation for any project anyway, because there is no common place to put the useless powerpoints.
Any employer who is asking employees to write 40 hours on their timecard and work more than that is setting themselves up. Any hourly person who documents their actual time as well as any requests to work additional time will have an easy time suing for the unbilled hours later. A lot of companies do it, so the companies don't get the benefit of the doubt when it goes to court if the worker has everything documented. You don't even have to grow a spine and be confrontational about it. You can just collect all of the information and file a complaint with the appropriate labor agency after you leave the company.
I like being a contractor. If they want me to work 80 hours/week, that's fine by me. I get paid for whatever I work. If they don't want to pay for more than 40, I take days off to even it out. If the company is serious about spending more time, they will commit to spending more money. It makes for a very simple arrangement for me - I'll do the work if they'll pay for it. If they don't want to pay for the time, they can do without. It's hard to argue unpaid time with someone who is volunteering to work really long hours if that's what they've agreed to pay for.
I think the "right" way is the one that takes the least time in the long run. The problem is that business is focused on "good enough right now" and doesn't care if spending a week instead of a month on something now may still cost the same month later, plus another couple of months of converting everything from the wrong way to the right way. From the business perspective, "later" is someone else's problem. Businesses succeed or fail based on how effectively they determine which things can be put off until later and which need to be done correctly now.
You get 2 months for something that took 3 months before? What decadent luxury. Where can I send my resume? We lose 50+% of our time AND 50+% of our people each time we get a new project. Once we were 8, now we're 1(it takes a while to get used to referring to Team Mike in the second and third person in meetings). I think next time the project is expected to do itself and finish before it starts.
The fastest way to get the job done is to not finish it. I can't count the number of times I've put together a prototype to make sure that my ideas for how to solve the problem are on the right track and the prototype got a "production code" sticker slapped on it and we were onto the next project.
I agree completely with the idea that you need to write code as if this type of thing happens because it often does.
How good a developer is depends entirely on their environment. For example, someone can do an excellent job in school where everyone is working on the same, well-defined problem, but do poorly in the real world where they are the only one working on the problem. Likewise, someone can do really well in a small company environment where the only metric is whether or not you get something done, and do poorly in a large company where a 2 month project would be turned into a 20 year career for 30 people, doing nothing more than having meetings, drawing diagrams and playing politics.
In school, you get requirements from the teacher. The teacher wants you to demonstrate that you can address the problem using the tools available. In the real world, you don't get requirements, you get a wish list from a crack smoking manager. I keep hearing about people getting requirements for their development projects, but never once have seen anyone provide them. Are "requirements" a fantasy that we choose to believe in as developers?
What separates the good from the bad in the real world isn't experience with a particular type of technology or methodology. That's what we're taught to believe, but it's just not true. The good people are the ones who can look at the pipe dream wish list and determine which parts are possible based on the skills the person has available. There may be better ways for more skilled people to solve the problem, but you don't get that choice in the real world. More importantly, you have to be objective about your own capabilities and be able to recognize those items on the wish list that you can't do or delegate to someone else in your company. By recognizing what is impractical (it would cost way too much time/money for the value it provides) and nipping that before it gets past the pipe dream stage, a lot of time is saved for everyone.
Companies like to say Six Sigma(tm) in their descriptions, but very few live up to that. For example, anyone claiming six sigma for software development likely has gaps in understanding of both topics. Does anyone who manufactures actual products have a defect rate of 3.4 per million or less? Or is this like ISO certifications where if you document your process for sweeping the defective products under the run, you don't have to count them in the defect rate?
What makes you think it failed? The post office gives them out for change from their vending machines and there are other vending machines that take them now.
The problem is that there are 4 different ways to give someone a single piece of currency valued at $1. There's the $1 bill, the old Eisenhower silver dollars, the Susan B Anthony coin, and the Sacagawea coin. The SBA's failed miserably because they are indistinguishable from quarters by the average cashier who sees thousands of quarters each day, and maybe two SBA's the entire year.
Another poster had the crux of the issue. The reason $1 coins aren't more common is because there's still plenty of paper $1's around. If the paper $1's were slowly removed from circulation, people would get used to accepting the $1 coins unless they really prefer 100 pennies.
I'm sure that going after judges would be more damaging. The RIAA would be willing to throw some expendable people out as targets. Now, how do we get a list of every judge and politician on the RIAA lawsuit list without them noticing?
I'd like to see blimps used for non-time-sensitive over land shipping. I saw an article in popular science many years ago talking about the feasability of blimps for moving things as large as tanks. For non-wartime/non-hostile equipment movement, it seems like that would have to be cheaper than ditching everything and replacing it later.
Not only do we not know how the brain works, the vast majority of people have no clue how a computer works. The computer should be much simpler to comprehend since it's a collection of pieces designed by people who do understand them.
The improvements to computers may not make people's brains work better, but one application that fills a need can make it possible for someone to do something they barely understand. The greater the capabilities of the average computer, the more resources that are available for the tasks people want to do. There are many tasks nowadays that are trivial on modern computers that required much greater knowledge to do 20 years ago. While the vast majority of people do not need the capabilities, there will be those who can make use of them and that will keep pushing the demand for improvements.
The majority of the human race always has been and always will be redundant. In your example, it takes fewer people to operate the machines that produce more, but that is only possible now because the top 1% have created leather seated combines and GPS satellites. There will continue to be improvements over time, but the majority of the work that needs to be done is going to be dull and repetetive. The sad part is how many companies have only recognized half of this equation and think the lowest common denominator is reality, ignoring research and development.
The article makes it sound like the legitimate purposes are the wink-wink-justification, while it's well known that it's being used much more frequently for other purposes.
Cephalon insists that the drug is for treating "medical" sleepiness caused by diseases such as narcolepsy and sleep apnoea.
Even so, it's clear that modafinil is becoming a lifestyle drug for people like Yves who want off-the-peg wakefulness. "At first I got it from a friend, and then I got diagnosed as a narcoleptic online," says Yves.
While I may have been overly dismissive of the legitimate aspects of this drug, the article reads like a PR plant for a pharmaceutical company trying to market this new wonder drug to the public.
You need to be awake during the times when things you like to eat are available. If you can't efficiently find them at night, you're better off sleeping at that time. While you may be vulnerable, the threat isn't too extreme based on the number of people who managed to survive sleeping in the past. Do you sleep at home, or do you figure that's what the predators expect you to do? Anyone could be the victim of a home invasion robbery, but very few people sit in the dark at home with a gun waiting for the predator to strike.
Have you seen how most people spend their lives? Most people aren't research scientists, and I suspect the more intellectual people will be more reluctant to adopt this drug for regular use. Exactly what good would be done by giving people a cure to sleep? Everyone could watch another 6 hours of television every day? What a boon for society that would be!
Also, I would expect exempt full time employees to get screwed by having more free time. Offerring a salary based on 40 hours and expecting 60 is pretty common. The reason most companies don't push to 80-100 is that people become less productive when they're worked to the point of exhaustion. If this drug gets rid of that, there's an incentive for the employee to take it (because they have to if they want to meet expectations and be successful) and the company gets to push harder without losing productivity. If companies can get more work out of fewer people, they will.
There are a lot of jobs that don't require the use of memory or higher cognitive function. This could help people who are working two jobs. I used to live in an apartment with a neighbor who needed to work two jobs to support his wife and disabled daughter. He was taking speed to be able to do it. I introduced him to pure caffeine as a substitute and he was glad to have the strong stimulant (500mg per dose, not diluted, not time released) without the cost and negative aspects of speed.
These types of drugs always strike me as solving a non-problem, but there are people who are willing to live with the side effects.
It's reassuring to see that pharmaceutical companies can make a pill to solve every problem, even ones that weren't a real problem before they came up with a pill.
I doubt this article will end up in any history textbooks. However, I think Lisa Simpson is a much better candidate in every way than Paris Hilton. As a cartoon, she has all the fakeness of Paris Hilton, but the benefit of script writers to give her a personality. =)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you really afraid of a judicial system that barely works? You think someone who tries (unsuccessfully) to commit some retarded crime is going to sue over someone revealing it? Good luck with that.
If they had reported this promptly to the FBI, it would have had the same result.
The chances of an investigation: 0 (retarded things happen everyday)
The chances of a fair investigation: 0 (fairness is irrelevant)
The chances of a trial: 0 (no crime, no charges, no trial)
The chances of a fair trial: 0 (In the US, we don't have fair trials)
Since there wasn't anything that really could be done to "help", entertaining countless people while humiliating an idiot is worth something.
Maybe you don't see the difference because they're basically the same thing.
Have you considered the possibility that maybe the final struggle between good and evil has already occurred and contrary to what christians are taught, evil wins? As a wise man once said, "Evil will always triumph over good because good is stupid."
That sure would explain why we have the illusion of choice in the system, but the outcome is always a system that puts money and power over justice every time. What better way to control people than by making them think they're supposed to be good and the system is supposed to work out in the end, even when all the evidence points to the contrary?
Of course, the up side of the approach we have now is that most people don't think "I'm so smart and the system is so corrupt that I can get away with killing my ex-wife if I play my cards right."
This might be news to many slashdot readers, but there is another quite obvious reason one might find a female's blood in a sleeping bag.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_cycle
The thing I don't get in this case is why they're moving forward so quickly as a murder case when all of the evidence appears to be circumstantial.
The half way process is to have an onerous process that you demand everyone use, and a wiki for the technical people to use, but isn't considered documentation and is frowned upon. A wiki is much easier for people to work with than searching through hundreds of emails on a topic and can be informal enough that people aren't afraid to make changes that haven't been reviewed by 25 levels of management.
The problem I find with using desktop based tools like this is that the documentation may exist and even be decent (in theory, I've never seen it happen in the real world), but how does anyone find the documentation? It's easy to keep things well organized for a 10 person company, but very difficult when there are over 10,000.
I work with some people like that. I'm sure they'll never give me any sort of position with authority because I'd just fire them all. I'd rather work with people who actually do something other than horde information. All of the smart people I've ever worked with will document things if you give them the time. The idea is that if you share the knowledge on the last project you worked on, you can be moved to another project later, instead of just doing maintenance for the last project. Also, people whose only value comes from the information they horde are the first to go when the system gets phased out.
It doesn't work. I work at a company that has strict requirements for following a defined process with a lot of documentation for every project. The official story is that we need to do all of this because we're a bank and SarbOx requires us to be thorough in our documentation of everything. That's +100 for creating a ton of jobs for people who perform no necessary function, but -infinity for good thinking or recognition of reality.
In reality, the official process turns a 1 month project into a 2.5+ year project (already past year 2, end still not in sight). The 6+ month projects could never be done using the official methodology, so they're clandestine. The strict requirements have caused us to abandon all reason and good judgement and just do as little as possible across the board, resulting in insecure environments that are not administered with applications that are held together with duct tape. There's such a strong push for no single point of failure from an official company perspective that it results in many key people never having time to train anyone else, so major pieces of functionality and knowledge are lost everytime someone leaves. This creates an environment where people don't want to stay.
One of our DBA's set up TWiki to document things. It looks decent and seems like a good idea to me. It's probably noncompliant with company policy on many fronts, so it probably can't be the official repository here, even though it's many times better than what we do have. I like the idea of anyone being able to find the documentation and fix it as well as using version control to allow anyone to see past revisions in case someone's "fixes" are wrong.
That's way better than the methodology we use where all the documentation has to be watered down to the point where no useful or accurate information is presented, they admit that form over function is the rule for the entire process, and no one could ever find documentation for any project anyway, because there is no common place to put the useless powerpoints.
Any employer who is asking employees to write 40 hours on their timecard and work more than that is setting themselves up. Any hourly person who documents their actual time as well as any requests to work additional time will have an easy time suing for the unbilled hours later. A lot of companies do it, so the companies don't get the benefit of the doubt when it goes to court if the worker has everything documented. You don't even have to grow a spine and be confrontational about it. You can just collect all of the information and file a complaint with the appropriate labor agency after you leave the company.
I like being a contractor. If they want me to work 80 hours/week, that's fine by me. I get paid for whatever I work. If they don't want to pay for more than 40, I take days off to even it out. If the company is serious about spending more time, they will commit to spending more money. It makes for a very simple arrangement for me - I'll do the work if they'll pay for it. If they don't want to pay for the time, they can do without. It's hard to argue unpaid time with someone who is volunteering to work really long hours if that's what they've agreed to pay for.
I think the "right" way is the one that takes the least time in the long run. The problem is that business is focused on "good enough right now" and doesn't care if spending a week instead of a month on something now may still cost the same month later, plus another couple of months of converting everything from the wrong way to the right way. From the business perspective, "later" is someone else's problem. Businesses succeed or fail based on how effectively they determine which things can be put off until later and which need to be done correctly now.
You get 2 months for something that took 3 months before? What decadent luxury. Where can I send my resume? We lose 50+% of our time AND 50+% of our people each time we get a new project. Once we were 8, now we're 1(it takes a while to get used to referring to Team Mike in the second and third person in meetings). I think next time the project is expected to do itself and finish before it starts.
The fastest way to get the job done is to not finish it. I can't count the number of times I've put together a prototype to make sure that my ideas for how to solve the problem are on the right track and the prototype got a "production code" sticker slapped on it and we were onto the next project.
I agree completely with the idea that you need to write code as if this type of thing happens because it often does.
You're on the windows system architecture team, aren't you?
We all know it's a burnt lump of dead meat in the middle, you're not fooling anyone.
How good a developer is depends entirely on their environment. For example, someone can do an excellent job in school where everyone is working on the same, well-defined problem, but do poorly in the real world where they are the only one working on the problem. Likewise, someone can do really well in a small company environment where the only metric is whether or not you get something done, and do poorly in a large company where a 2 month project would be turned into a 20 year career for 30 people, doing nothing more than having meetings, drawing diagrams and playing politics.
In school, you get requirements from the teacher. The teacher wants you to demonstrate that you can address the problem using the tools available. In the real world, you don't get requirements, you get a wish list from a crack smoking manager. I keep hearing about people getting requirements for their development projects, but never once have seen anyone provide them. Are "requirements" a fantasy that we choose to believe in as developers?
What separates the good from the bad in the real world isn't experience with a particular type of technology or methodology. That's what we're taught to believe, but it's just not true. The good people are the ones who can look at the pipe dream wish list and determine which parts are possible based on the skills the person has available. There may be better ways for more skilled people to solve the problem, but you don't get that choice in the real world. More importantly, you have to be objective about your own capabilities and be able to recognize those items on the wish list that you can't do or delegate to someone else in your company. By recognizing what is impractical (it would cost way too much time/money for the value it provides) and nipping that before it gets past the pipe dream stage, a lot of time is saved for everyone.
Companies like to say Six Sigma(tm) in their descriptions, but very few live up to that. For example, anyone claiming six sigma for software development likely has gaps in understanding of both topics. Does anyone who manufactures actual products have a defect rate of 3.4 per million or less? Or is this like ISO certifications where if you document your process for sweeping the defective products under the run, you don't have to count them in the defect rate?
What makes you think it failed? The post office gives them out for change from their vending machines and there are other vending machines that take them now.
The problem is that there are 4 different ways to give someone a single piece of currency valued at $1. There's the $1 bill, the old Eisenhower silver dollars, the Susan B Anthony coin, and the Sacagawea coin. The SBA's failed miserably because they are indistinguishable from quarters by the average cashier who sees thousands of quarters each day, and maybe two SBA's the entire year.
Another poster had the crux of the issue. The reason $1 coins aren't more common is because there's still plenty of paper $1's around. If the paper $1's were slowly removed from circulation, people would get used to accepting the $1 coins unless they really prefer 100 pennies.
I'm sure that going after judges would be more damaging. The RIAA would be willing to throw some expendable people out as targets. Now, how do we get a list of every judge and politician on the RIAA lawsuit list without them noticing?
Sails don't sell oil you hippy. =)
I'd like to see blimps used for non-time-sensitive over land shipping. I saw an article in popular science many years ago talking about the feasability of blimps for moving things as large as tanks. For non-wartime/non-hostile equipment movement, it seems like that would have to be cheaper than ditching everything and replacing it later.
Not only do we not know how the brain works, the vast majority of people have no clue how a computer works. The computer should be much simpler to comprehend since it's a collection of pieces designed by people who do understand them.
The improvements to computers may not make people's brains work better, but one application that fills a need can make it possible for someone to do something they barely understand. The greater the capabilities of the average computer, the more resources that are available for the tasks people want to do. There are many tasks nowadays that are trivial on modern computers that required much greater knowledge to do 20 years ago. While the vast majority of people do not need the capabilities, there will be those who can make use of them and that will keep pushing the demand for improvements.
The majority of the human race always has been and always will be redundant. In your example, it takes fewer people to operate the machines that produce more, but that is only possible now because the top 1% have created leather seated combines and GPS satellites. There will continue to be improvements over time, but the majority of the work that needs to be done is going to be dull and repetetive. The sad part is how many companies have only recognized half of this equation and think the lowest common denominator is reality, ignoring research and development.
While I may have been overly dismissive of the legitimate aspects of this drug, the article reads like a PR plant for a pharmaceutical company trying to market this new wonder drug to the public.
You need to be awake during the times when things you like to eat are available. If you can't efficiently find them at night, you're better off sleeping at that time. While you may be vulnerable, the threat isn't too extreme based on the number of people who managed to survive sleeping in the past. Do you sleep at home, or do you figure that's what the predators expect you to do? Anyone could be the victim of a home invasion robbery, but very few people sit in the dark at home with a gun waiting for the predator to strike.
Have you seen how most people spend their lives? Most people aren't research scientists, and I suspect the more intellectual people will be more reluctant to adopt this drug for regular use. Exactly what good would be done by giving people a cure to sleep? Everyone could watch another 6 hours of television every day? What a boon for society that would be!
Also, I would expect exempt full time employees to get screwed by having more free time. Offerring a salary based on 40 hours and expecting 60 is pretty common. The reason most companies don't push to 80-100 is that people become less productive when they're worked to the point of exhaustion. If this drug gets rid of that, there's an incentive for the employee to take it (because they have to if they want to meet expectations and be successful) and the company gets to push harder without losing productivity. If companies can get more work out of fewer people, they will.
There are a lot of jobs that don't require the use of memory or higher cognitive function. This could help people who are working two jobs. I used to live in an apartment with a neighbor who needed to work two jobs to support his wife and disabled daughter. He was taking speed to be able to do it. I introduced him to pure caffeine as a substitute and he was glad to have the strong stimulant (500mg per dose, not diluted, not time released) without the cost and negative aspects of speed.
These types of drugs always strike me as solving a non-problem, but there are people who are willing to live with the side effects.
It's reassuring to see that pharmaceutical companies can make a pill to solve every problem, even ones that weren't a real problem before they came up with a pill.
I doubt this article will end up in any history textbooks. However, I think Lisa Simpson is a much better candidate in every way than Paris Hilton. As a cartoon, she has all the fakeness of Paris Hilton, but the benefit of script writers to give her a personality. =)