Fake ID's are easy for kids to get, so it would be best to get a scan of credit cards, checks, bank statements, etc. That way when you start talking to them, you know that they're a great identity theft target in addition to not being a child.
The reason they're called targeted advertisements is that you're considered to be the victim(or target), not a potential customer who may be interested in certain types of products.
I still get a bunch of junk mail from various merchants based on a single purchase of a wedding gift, from a registry, over 5 years ago. I can guarantee that none of those merchants carry anything that would ever be of any interest to me. I will never make a purchase from any of them, but they will keep sending me catalogs and such because someone else sold them my name as someone who buys that kind of stuff.
I don't mind rating stuff that I buy or look at on Amazon because it helps them direct me to things that may be interesting, based on what I've already shown an interest in. I don't mind rating all of the movies I watch on Netflix because it helps them make suggestions of things I may wish to watch and therefore continue to use their service. There's nothing wrong with using information to help the company and customer benefit from suggestions. Targeted advertising doesn't care about customer preferences unless each customer takes the time to complain and ask to never be contacted again.
Our culture has become so risk averse that it's no longer possible to do anything new. Minor changes from what's already been done have minor impacts and they're "safe". No one has to worry about being sued out of existence by taking someone else's idea and finding a way to produce it cheaper. There are a lot of companies in China who only produce products based on someone else's R&D. These companies are successful because they make cheap stuff, the companies that do the R&D for new products rarely turn a new product into a giant cash cow. Someone who wants to do something truly innovative has to take substantial risks. In the case of space travel, there are so many potential risks that lives have to be risked to make progress.
A friend once used the example that in the past, projects like the Golden Gate Bridge accounted for a certain number of unavoidable deaths per mile and budgeted money for the families of those workers to make the jobs appealing, even with the risks. Now, it would be hard, maybe impossible to take on such a project because of all of the people who would insist on absolute safety. If a safety inspector makes recommendations that increase the cost of the project 100x, that doesn't matter to the inspector or governing organization. There is no one with the authority to say "we accept that risk" without the risk of being put out of business by the government or sued into the ground.
Flying cars are a bad metric of progress. People generally don't take driving seriously, spending most of their time on the phone, texting, or otherwise trying to distract themselves from the act of driving. Add to that mentality another possible axis of movement and the chances of accidents go way up. Do you want some distracted teenager flying over your house and stalling their flying car? At least if they stay on the roads, the risk areas are pretty well defined.
One of the legitimate concerns of the privacy advocates is the collateral damage that comes from easy access to information. A lot of data is collected and assembled to look for correlations between persons of interest. Once a pattern is identified, the people that match the target are of interest. The same general approach is used for law enforcement and marketing purposes. Using marketing tactics for law enforcement just seems like a bad idea.
For example, if you buy sudafed and shop at an auto parts store, you might be manufacturing meth. Hopefully someone would think to look for abnormal quantities/frequencies before wasting resources on investigating those leads. However, if you live in a state that tracks sudafed purchases, stocking up may not be such a great idea if your purchasing pattern clearly exceeds what someone could typically use.
Do aircraft have fully autonomous co-computers that can recognize an unexpected fault and take full control of the plane? That's why commercial aircraft have co-pilots. A secondary system running the same code with the same flaws as the first doesn't cut it in this context.
There's a subtlety in that the mistake isn't on the part of the email or the receiver, it's that the sender addressed the email to someone other than the intended party. While it's lame and unethical to exploit such a mistake, I doubt there would be any legal recourse if that person were to do anything they wanted with the information they received. The sender could be penalized for disclosing information to an unauthorized party, but there's no obligation on the part of the receiver of the email.
The legal distinction between incorrectly addressed email and shared files is one that I'm sure the courts will interpret in a way that makes no rational sense and can't be applied consistently. However, this guy then took that information and used it to open accounts. He clearly committed fraud and was prosecuted for it. This is the part where the legal system is actually working well since someone who caused harm is being punished, not just any random person who queried for files that could potentially contain sensitive information.
Everyone learns something on the job, so I don't think that you can later use that in your bag of tricks makes a difference. I can't think of any job I've had where I didn't end up getting experience that was worth putting on my resume, but that doesn't mean I didn't deserve to get paid for the work.
In the situation you described, I'd count it as billable time. It's directly related to a work project, it's a non-trivial amount of research, and it's due in a finite time. Basically, if you don't do the work now, you're going to be pressed for time to do it later and may be forced to cancel non-work plans to get it done.
On the other hand, I use OpenSolaris at home and learn about new/upcoming features that will be in Solaris, which is directly related to my job, but I don't count that as work time because it's my schedule, my choice of what to learn, and my choice to blow it off if I have something else to do or I find some more interesting tangent.
When I had more say in what I was doing and got to do things that were more interesting to me personally, I was working full time for the company and didn't really care whose time was whose since everyone was reasonable at that company. I've been contracting for most of the last decade and when I have people demanding that I work 60-120 hours a week on things I recommended they not do, I like to get paid for that time.
I left my last job because they required that their hourly contractors work 60-80 hours per week, but only bill for 40. I was up front about my willingness to put in additional time as needed, as long as they were willing to pay for it. Lots of companies will tell you that you have to do it and you have to decide for yourself if you're willing to let people walk all over you.
You're making the assumption that it's a simple software fix. There isn't always someone who knows the software, understands the problem and can figure out how to resolve it in the code.
A lot of companies hire the cheapest people they can to implement ill-defined code which is duct taped together and released as a product. Once the product is released, all of the expensive ($10/hr) programmers are fired and the product is supported by a group of people who have a script to follow and get paid $2/hr. Once you purchased a product, what incentive does the company have to put a lot of time and money into supporting you? The only incentive is to add enough functionality to get more customers to purchase the product, which you just happen to benefit from.
I recently spent a lot of time trying to debug a problem that was being blamed on infrastructure, but turned out to be a known bug in one of the open source java components which was being used in a commercial product. There wasn't anyone employed by the vendor who understood that component, they just relied on it as a critical piece handling all communications in their product.
It's nice to work with people who actually comprehend their job, but that's clearly in the minority. The larger the company you're dealing with, the higher the probability that there are people in critical positions whose actions cannot be distinguished from random noise. Comprehension is not a measurable metric, which causes many managers to consider it unnecessary.
If you value your privacy, you have to take measures to protect it. You can get a private mailbox for everything that wants an address and a phone that you give out freely, but don't bother answering unless you are expecting something.
Basically, you draw a clear distinction between your real life and your consumer persona. So you end up with a mailbox full of crap? If you know what you're looking for, you just throw away the rest. Same goes with answering machines on your line you give out to everyone - if you're not expecting a call, erase all every couple of weeks and you're all good.
Currently, whoever collects data about you owns that data. We have no real rights about how that information is used, which is why most of it is sold for marketing purposes. There are some rules, like companies aren't supposed to store your credit card details without your permission, but many of them do because it's cheap to store and the information may be useful in the future.
The difficulty comes in defining what information is legitimate and why. For example, if I place an order online, they need my billing information long enough to process the transaction and some subset of the information in case there are problems with the order, etc. When you send in warranty registration cards, all of that information is being collected and sold for marketing purposes. If you send in the information, you're agreeing in a sense to the reason they want it. However, when it's sold over and over to various other companies you have no interaction with, you're completely out of the loop. The problem any law is going to have is that the consumer doesn't own their own information, so they have no real recourse or way of even finding out who all of that information went to.
A piece of hardware that plugs in between your computer and your internet connection. Ie, not this product.
Re:It depends what you mean by "human waste"
on
Driving on Starch
·
· Score: 1
Who says alternative fuels needs to be a monoculture? If some people want starch, others want ethanol, others want biodiesel, etc, who cares? Everyone is paying for their own vehicle and fuel. Any transition is going to take time. Some options may not scale well. It will suck to be committed to one of those options, but isn't that the problem we're facing with gasoline that's on the horizon? There's always risks in choosing the alternatives, but people are doing it anyway because the default choice has risks as well. There doesn't need to be a one size fits all solution, just like we have gasoline and diesel as viable options right now.
There are very few programs that are as commonly used as cars. The ones that are that common are written by large companies who don't care about things like efficient energy utilization. Computers waste power being on all the time doing nothing, or waiting for the user to do something. Basically, energy is being wasted for every computer that is online. If no one cares about that, you're not going to convince anyone to spend substantially longer on a program to make it slightly more efficient in a way that no one will perceive. The better optimized a program is, the longer it will take to optimize it further. There is a point of diminishing returns and when you look at the amount of expensive people time that goes into optimization, "barely functional" is the target most companies will set.
Java is not a totally pointless layer of abstraction. You can get hardware and operating system independence if you're careful. For many applications, it's much more important to have wider distribution than better performance. I've been a C programmer since the 80's and still write code in C occaisionally when I want something efficient. However, I find that the vast majority of the time I'm better off with something like Perl where I can glue a bunch of pieces together quickly to get something done. The days of being a C only programmer may be dead, but C itself is most certainly not.
Sure they can. It's just a title. I'm surrounded by many managers who have no reports. Basically, the manager title makes some people feel good. Companies like giving out the title because it looks like the people are exempt (no overtime), which is good for pressuring people to work more without additional cost.
IT and nannies basically do the same job. They clean up crap left behind by irrational people. Nannies have the advantage of size over their tormenters.
It would be hard to outlaw this kind of data mining without hitting marketing companies pretty hard. While there's a solid argument of "so what?" on that point, the marketing companies have a lot of money to ensure that laws stay in their favor.
Don't worry, the DHS is working on correcting that. The only real difference is that there is a gate where you come in that makes it easy to fingerprint you. US citizens have the benefit of being far too numerous to fingerprint all at once. Everyone will get into the system eventually, but it's going to take a lot longer. Keep in mind, for every 10,000 people who don't want their fingerprints taken, there is one government employee who hates his job and doesn't want to take your fingerprints. How would you like to show up to work every day just to take fingerprints of people who don't even want to be there. You'd probably drag your feet, intentionally smudge half of them and "spill" coffee onto the stack of fingerprint cards too.
Typical knee jerk response. If he didn't throw the chair at me, he'd still be alive today. Anyway, the court agreed that it was manslaughter, not murder. That has absolutely nothing to do with how well I can program the devices that automatically administer painkillers to people who probably ought to be euthanised anyway. =)
In addition to looking for what you've done in the past, it ensures that there is information available in case you do something in the future. Basically, everyone gets a shot at their first chance of screwing the employer over. However, if you decide to take that path, they have enough information about you to make it hard for you to hide forever. They can definitely make it hard for you to do it a second time.
I know that slashdot has an anti-management bias, but be realistic here. Thinking outside the box is a valuable skill for all senior management positions and the people who get there have to make it through lower management positions. Managers are often faced with problems that need creative solutions. For example, when someone comes to you and says "we have a problem, they passed a law that says we can't do X anymore." Being able to think outside the box helps come up with ways to violate the spirit of the law while having a creative, almost plausible story for why you're not breaking the law when you continue to do exactly X. If you don't think this is a valuable skill for management positions, you've never been in a large company run by as-of-yet-unprosecuted-criminals. =)
The background check serves many purposes. In some cases, people are honest and only want to work with other honest people. These are the places it can be nice to work. In other cases, they're more concerned with your ability to avoid conviction while doing your job. Companies have to ask about convictions, they cannot ask about arrests. If you get acquitted on every crime you're charged with, you have a clean record as far as anyone is concerned. How many members of senior management do you know who can't recommend a good criminal defense attorney off the top of their head? =)
Slashdot Mirror
You can't use someone else's car without paying a substantial portion of the purchase price to the manufacturer, right?
Fake ID's are easy for kids to get, so it would be best to get a scan of credit cards, checks, bank statements, etc. That way when you start talking to them, you know that they're a great identity theft target in addition to not being a child.
They got it backwards. They're supposed to take fractions of a penny from many thousands of people, not many thousands of pennies from each person.
The reason they're called targeted advertisements is that you're considered to be the victim(or target), not a potential customer who may be interested in certain types of products.
I still get a bunch of junk mail from various merchants based on a single purchase of a wedding gift, from a registry, over 5 years ago. I can guarantee that none of those merchants carry anything that would ever be of any interest to me. I will never make a purchase from any of them, but they will keep sending me catalogs and such because someone else sold them my name as someone who buys that kind of stuff.
I don't mind rating stuff that I buy or look at on Amazon because it helps them direct me to things that may be interesting, based on what I've already shown an interest in. I don't mind rating all of the movies I watch on Netflix because it helps them make suggestions of things I may wish to watch and therefore continue to use their service. There's nothing wrong with using information to help the company and customer benefit from suggestions. Targeted advertising doesn't care about customer preferences unless each customer takes the time to complain and ask to never be contacted again.
Our culture has become so risk averse that it's no longer possible to do anything new. Minor changes from what's already been done have minor impacts and they're "safe". No one has to worry about being sued out of existence by taking someone else's idea and finding a way to produce it cheaper. There are a lot of companies in China who only produce products based on someone else's R&D. These companies are successful because they make cheap stuff, the companies that do the R&D for new products rarely turn a new product into a giant cash cow. Someone who wants to do something truly innovative has to take substantial risks. In the case of space travel, there are so many potential risks that lives have to be risked to make progress.
A friend once used the example that in the past, projects like the Golden Gate Bridge accounted for a certain number of unavoidable deaths per mile and budgeted money for the families of those workers to make the jobs appealing, even with the risks. Now, it would be hard, maybe impossible to take on such a project because of all of the people who would insist on absolute safety. If a safety inspector makes recommendations that increase the cost of the project 100x, that doesn't matter to the inspector or governing organization. There is no one with the authority to say "we accept that risk" without the risk of being put out of business by the government or sued into the ground.
Flying cars are a bad metric of progress. People generally don't take driving seriously, spending most of their time on the phone, texting, or otherwise trying to distract themselves from the act of driving. Add to that mentality another possible axis of movement and the chances of accidents go way up. Do you want some distracted teenager flying over your house and stalling their flying car? At least if they stay on the roads, the risk areas are pretty well defined.
One of the legitimate concerns of the privacy advocates is the collateral damage that comes from easy access to information. A lot of data is collected and assembled to look for correlations between persons of interest. Once a pattern is identified, the people that match the target are of interest. The same general approach is used for law enforcement and marketing purposes. Using marketing tactics for law enforcement just seems like a bad idea.
For example, if you buy sudafed and shop at an auto parts store, you might be manufacturing meth. Hopefully someone would think to look for abnormal quantities/frequencies before wasting resources on investigating those leads. However, if you live in a state that tracks sudafed purchases, stocking up may not be such a great idea if your purchasing pattern clearly exceeds what someone could typically use.
Do aircraft have fully autonomous co-computers that can recognize an unexpected fault and take full control of the plane? That's why commercial aircraft have co-pilots. A secondary system running the same code with the same flaws as the first doesn't cut it in this context.
There's a subtlety in that the mistake isn't on the part of the email or the receiver, it's that the sender addressed the email to someone other than the intended party. While it's lame and unethical to exploit such a mistake, I doubt there would be any legal recourse if that person were to do anything they wanted with the information they received. The sender could be penalized for disclosing information to an unauthorized party, but there's no obligation on the part of the receiver of the email.
The legal distinction between incorrectly addressed email and shared files is one that I'm sure the courts will interpret in a way that makes no rational sense and can't be applied consistently. However, this guy then took that information and used it to open accounts. He clearly committed fraud and was prosecuted for it. This is the part where the legal system is actually working well since someone who caused harm is being punished, not just any random person who queried for files that could potentially contain sensitive information.
Everyone learns something on the job, so I don't think that you can later use that in your bag of tricks makes a difference. I can't think of any job I've had where I didn't end up getting experience that was worth putting on my resume, but that doesn't mean I didn't deserve to get paid for the work.
In the situation you described, I'd count it as billable time. It's directly related to a work project, it's a non-trivial amount of research, and it's due in a finite time. Basically, if you don't do the work now, you're going to be pressed for time to do it later and may be forced to cancel non-work plans to get it done.
On the other hand, I use OpenSolaris at home and learn about new/upcoming features that will be in Solaris, which is directly related to my job, but I don't count that as work time because it's my schedule, my choice of what to learn, and my choice to blow it off if I have something else to do or I find some more interesting tangent.
When I had more say in what I was doing and got to do things that were more interesting to me personally, I was working full time for the company and didn't really care whose time was whose since everyone was reasonable at that company. I've been contracting for most of the last decade and when I have people demanding that I work 60-120 hours a week on things I recommended they not do, I like to get paid for that time.
I left my last job because they required that their hourly contractors work 60-80 hours per week, but only bill for 40. I was up front about my willingness to put in additional time as needed, as long as they were willing to pay for it. Lots of companies will tell you that you have to do it and you have to decide for yourself if you're willing to let people walk all over you.
You're making the assumption that it's a simple software fix. There isn't always someone who knows the software, understands the problem and can figure out how to resolve it in the code.
A lot of companies hire the cheapest people they can to implement ill-defined code which is duct taped together and released as a product. Once the product is released, all of the expensive ($10/hr) programmers are fired and the product is supported by a group of people who have a script to follow and get paid $2/hr. Once you purchased a product, what incentive does the company have to put a lot of time and money into supporting you? The only incentive is to add enough functionality to get more customers to purchase the product, which you just happen to benefit from.
I recently spent a lot of time trying to debug a problem that was being blamed on infrastructure, but turned out to be a known bug in one of the open source java components which was being used in a commercial product. There wasn't anyone employed by the vendor who understood that component, they just relied on it as a critical piece handling all communications in their product.
It's nice to work with people who actually comprehend their job, but that's clearly in the minority. The larger the company you're dealing with, the higher the probability that there are people in critical positions whose actions cannot be distinguished from random noise. Comprehension is not a measurable metric, which causes many managers to consider it unnecessary.
If you value your privacy, you have to take measures to protect it. You can get a private mailbox for everything that wants an address and a phone that you give out freely, but don't bother answering unless you are expecting something.
Basically, you draw a clear distinction between your real life and your consumer persona. So you end up with a mailbox full of crap? If you know what you're looking for, you just throw away the rest. Same goes with answering machines on your line you give out to everyone - if you're not expecting a call, erase all every couple of weeks and you're all good.
Currently, whoever collects data about you owns that data. We have no real rights about how that information is used, which is why most of it is sold for marketing purposes. There are some rules, like companies aren't supposed to store your credit card details without your permission, but many of them do because it's cheap to store and the information may be useful in the future.
The difficulty comes in defining what information is legitimate and why. For example, if I place an order online, they need my billing information long enough to process the transaction and some subset of the information in case there are problems with the order, etc. When you send in warranty registration cards, all of that information is being collected and sold for marketing purposes. If you send in the information, you're agreeing in a sense to the reason they want it. However, when it's sold over and over to various other companies you have no interaction with, you're completely out of the loop. The problem any law is going to have is that the consumer doesn't own their own information, so they have no real recourse or way of even finding out who all of that information went to.
A piece of hardware that plugs in between your computer and your internet connection. Ie, not this product.
Who says alternative fuels needs to be a monoculture? If some people want starch, others want ethanol, others want biodiesel, etc, who cares? Everyone is paying for their own vehicle and fuel. Any transition is going to take time. Some options may not scale well. It will suck to be committed to one of those options, but isn't that the problem we're facing with gasoline that's on the horizon? There's always risks in choosing the alternatives, but people are doing it anyway because the default choice has risks as well. There doesn't need to be a one size fits all solution, just like we have gasoline and diesel as viable options right now.
There are very few programs that are as commonly used as cars. The ones that are that common are written by large companies who don't care about things like efficient energy utilization. Computers waste power being on all the time doing nothing, or waiting for the user to do something. Basically, energy is being wasted for every computer that is online. If no one cares about that, you're not going to convince anyone to spend substantially longer on a program to make it slightly more efficient in a way that no one will perceive. The better optimized a program is, the longer it will take to optimize it further. There is a point of diminishing returns and when you look at the amount of expensive people time that goes into optimization, "barely functional" is the target most companies will set.
Java is not a totally pointless layer of abstraction. You can get hardware and operating system independence if you're careful. For many applications, it's much more important to have wider distribution than better performance. I've been a C programmer since the 80's and still write code in C occaisionally when I want something efficient. However, I find that the vast majority of the time I'm better off with something like Perl where I can glue a bunch of pieces together quickly to get something done. The days of being a C only programmer may be dead, but C itself is most certainly not.
You wrote a 4 digit code to a CD? I sure hope you put something else on that CD too. =)
Sure they can. It's just a title. I'm surrounded by many managers who have no reports. Basically, the manager title makes some people feel good. Companies like giving out the title because it looks like the people are exempt (no overtime), which is good for pressuring people to work more without additional cost.
IT and nannies basically do the same job. They clean up crap left behind by irrational people. Nannies have the advantage of size over their tormenters.
It would be hard to outlaw this kind of data mining without hitting marketing companies pretty hard. While there's a solid argument of "so what?" on that point, the marketing companies have a lot of money to ensure that laws stay in their favor.
Don't worry, the DHS is working on correcting that. The only real difference is that there is a gate where you come in that makes it easy to fingerprint you. US citizens have the benefit of being far too numerous to fingerprint all at once. Everyone will get into the system eventually, but it's going to take a lot longer. Keep in mind, for every 10,000 people who don't want their fingerprints taken, there is one government employee who hates his job and doesn't want to take your fingerprints. How would you like to show up to work every day just to take fingerprints of people who don't even want to be there. You'd probably drag your feet, intentionally smudge half of them and "spill" coffee onto the stack of fingerprint cards too.
Typical knee jerk response. If he didn't throw the chair at me, he'd still be alive today. Anyway, the court agreed that it was manslaughter, not murder. That has absolutely nothing to do with how well I can program the devices that automatically administer painkillers to people who probably ought to be euthanised anyway. =)
In addition to looking for what you've done in the past, it ensures that there is information available in case you do something in the future. Basically, everyone gets a shot at their first chance of screwing the employer over. However, if you decide to take that path, they have enough information about you to make it hard for you to hide forever. They can definitely make it hard for you to do it a second time.
Yes, because stupid and obviously dishonest is much easier to protect against. That's their typical threat profile anyway.
I know that slashdot has an anti-management bias, but be realistic here. Thinking outside the box is a valuable skill for all senior management positions and the people who get there have to make it through lower management positions. Managers are often faced with problems that need creative solutions. For example, when someone comes to you and says "we have a problem, they passed a law that says we can't do X anymore." Being able to think outside the box helps come up with ways to violate the spirit of the law while having a creative, almost plausible story for why you're not breaking the law when you continue to do exactly X. If you don't think this is a valuable skill for management positions, you've never been in a large company run by as-of-yet-unprosecuted-criminals. =)
The background check serves many purposes. In some cases, people are honest and only want to work with other honest people. These are the places it can be nice to work. In other cases, they're more concerned with your ability to avoid conviction while doing your job. Companies have to ask about convictions, they cannot ask about arrests. If you get acquitted on every crime you're charged with, you have a clean record as far as anyone is concerned. How many members of senior management do you know who can't recommend a good criminal defense attorney off the top of their head? =)