Cutting "low performers" has, in my experience, always been a sign of a company in financial trouble. One that desperately needs to save money in order to please stockholders, and employees simply are one of those "cutting costs opportunities" that stockholders love.
As Stephen J Gould pointed out, the only things that are "lean and mean" in nature are animals that can no longer hunt effectively and are dying.
I already looked thanks so your initial assumption that I didn't is false.
Strange. It's usually a safe bet on/.
I noticed that listed first is torture, which is similar to the issue I described regarding Guantanamo in that whilst I agree torture must be stopped, I wouldn't prioritise the rights of people who really are evil over those who are innocent.
The issue over Guantanamo is detention without trial by a foreign (as far as UK-based Liberty is concerned) power. The issue of torture is either deportation of people on British soil to other countries to have them tortured -- extraordinary rendition -- if that happens, it happens without trial, so why do you assume it only hapens to those who are "really evil"? -- or it's legal deportation to countries where the defendant is likely to have a confession tortured out of them whether they're guilty or not, so again this isn't an issue of defending those who are "really evil". As a UK resident, I don't want to be deported to a country where I will have a confession tortured out of me for something I haven't done. Liberty's involvement is addressing a genuine issue for the innocent UK resident.
Second up is terrorism, most work here is good because this is often used as the excuse for supression of the population.
Yep. And it's one of the things you said Liberty was not addressing adequately.
Privacy is 3rd
The site is confusing here -- the order of issues on the home page is not the same as that on subsequent pages. I'll stick with the order on the home page, and shuffle your comments around to match. Human Rights Act is third, which addresses things like public bodies trying to evade their responsibilities under the Human Rights Act by subcontracting to private bodies who are not subject to the same controls. I consider that to be an important issue.
Fourth is Free Speech:
Free speech- again, important and good. No problems here.
Agreed.
Now we're up to Privacy:
similarly this is rather important as it covers some of the stuff that's important but what's glaringly lacking here is absolutely no coverage of online privacy- RFID, CCTV, ID cards, DNA data retention but nothing about the continued infringement of online privacy.
I agree with your positives there. As for online privacy, I agree that it's hard to find on their website, but it is there, for instance here. That's an issue of poor web design, not an issue of Liberty failing to campaign where they should.
Then we have Asylum
Again, following the sequence on the home page we have Protest, then Equality:
The equality section looks rather pointless, their only equality news listings over a year are about winning the right for a sikh girl to wear a religious band in school. The problem here is that many schools put limits on what kids can and can't wear to school as part of their uniform just as many jobs dictate uniform. Religion should not be allowed as an excuse to flout the rules that everyone else adheres to unless the rules themselves are stupid in which case it should be the rules as a whole that should be defeated or changed, not an individuals right to ignore such rules over everyone else.
If you read the articles you'll see that the rules as a whole had already been defeated, 25 years earlier by the Law Lords, and the school decided to ignore the law on the matter. That was the human rights issue, and it was a legitimate one. But yes, there's not a lot in the equality section, probably because the UK is good on the issue, but more likely because there are a lot of more specialist campaign groups on specific equality
They're more interested in helping to free British citizens in places like Guantanamo who really were caught in the middle of a warzone, fighting alongside the Taliban against British soldiers than they are protecting the rights of people in the UK who really are innocent of any crime and yet who are having their liberties infringed daily.
In a word, bollocks. Did you follow the link I gave? (oh, sorry, forgot this is/.) It was Liberty who took the RIP act to the ECHR and got the ruling that it needed more oversight and transparency. It's Liberty who fought curfews for under 18s. It's Liberty who are fighting for the right to protest. It's Liberty who are fighting ID cards and the surveillance state. On the other hand, I am not aware of any Liberty campaigning on Guantanamo -- if they've done any it's been very muted (though no doubt if asked a Liberty spokesperson would say that detention without trial is a bad thing). Liberty are doing all the things you say they need to, and as far as I can see are doing none of the things you say they shouldn't. Check out what's really happening before condemning them -- their website isn't hard to find, once you realise they're not the London department store.
Rule for reading any headline of the form "[noun phrase] may [verb phrase]". Always mentally add "but almost certainly won't." The headline will almost certainly be based on something like a 99th percentile, to make the headline seem dramatic.
It's only a newspaper story. It's confused as to whether the Home Office are operating this power or talking about it.
Just so. What's particularly suspicious is that although they have a quote from Liberty about this, there doesn't seem to be anything about it on Liberty's website -- this should be front-page news for them. In fact, the last thing Liberty has on the subject is this from last year, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled that RIP was a violation of human rights and that the UK was obliged to add more transparency and accountability.
1984 didn't even get the year wrong; it was a deliberate reversal of the last two digits of 1948, the year of the book's publication, and within the limits of the technology available it was all going on then.
And yet, very similar rent control laws here in the UK give us a spread of very expensive rentals (where property prices are high anyway) to relatively cheap rentals (where property prices are low anyway). Which suggests that the difference isn't because of rent control laws. So the rental market in NYC is expensive? How about if I wanted to purchase a place in NYC? Would that be nice and cheap?
Now that the other Time Lords have been exterminated, who's to say there can't be a Fourteenth Doctor?
Which brings me to something that has puzzled me throughout the "new" Doctor Who. Just when is this "now" when the other Time Lords have been exterminated? Isn't there something about being a Time Lord that means they can move through time? And haven't the times in the new series overlapped the times in the old series when the other Time Lords had not been wiped out?
Not a lot that UK audiences are familiar with, either. The BBC news today was describing him as "relatively unknown". Still, I suppose that means we don't have any preconceived ideas about ho well he'll do. I can't help worrying, though -- particularly with RTD jumping ship, putting a young unknown in the Doctor role looks disturbingly like a cost-cutting move.
It doesn't have to be that accurate a model for GPS. Yes, the atmosphere introduces errors into the propagation delays, but those errors are measured and accounted for. Ionospheric delays vary with the square of the frequency, so now two GPS frequencies are available for civilian use it's easy to adjust for ionospheric delays moment-by-moment, wherever the ionosphere happens to be at the time. Tropospheric delays are more of a problem, and are a significant part of the residual GPS error, but if the accuracy matters to you then you can use differential GPS and measure those delays too, moment by moment, and correct for them, whatever the troposphere happens to be doing at the time.
Coz when the octopi rise up and enslave us, we will know how to curry favour with our new masters.
Mmmm, curried octopus...
Re:It's attrition in the target audience.
on
Are Newspapers Doomed?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Once most of the people who grew up reading newspapers die or just stop reading them, it's inevitable that the print form will cease to exist -- as we know it.
That would be me, then. I grew a broadsheet reader, but I don't bother nowadays. The press try to claim a "gatekeeper" role, filtering the real news from the dross (I see they're still claiming "intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on"), but they've long since abandoned that. Apart from opinion, all you find in newspapers now is PR releases reprinted almost verbatim and Associated Press reports reprinted almost verbatim (it's fascinating to compare reports of the same incident in different newspapers: big news each paper will put it's own spin on, but mid-range and low level news is often word-for-word the same between newspapers). The only question the editors ask is "will this sell" (more precisely, "will this supply readers who we can sell to advertisers"), which is no more effective as a gatekeeper than the blogger who says "will this entertain my readers". I don't see how the news press can survive; it's only added value for the readers would be investigation, fact checking and real, on-the-ground reporting, and that's expensive (too expensive for the extra readership it attracts). All that's left is pure entertainment -- celeb gossip, pictures of scantily clad young people and amusing factoids pretending to be news. The internet is a threat there, too, but at least it's cheaper. I'm guessing that it's cheaper to send a reporter to a celebrity party than to a war zone?
If ISP's voluntarily go along with limiting file sharing due to legal threats from the RIAA, anyone going for that market opening is going to need deep pockets to fight those potential lawsuits, and all of the likely contenders I can think of already have a vested interest in selling content and/or throttling P2P, so I don't think there'd be a rush to fill that gap.
I mean, their current methods have apparently atleast been in breach of investigative laws in several states and they may still end up in mess because of it, but ending the thing will atleast lessen the exposure..
Alternative explanation is that they have actually understood that extortion is bad.. nah.. not likely.
No -- look at the actual wording: "...working with the ISPs to limit file-sharing services and cut off repeated users"
Note that's not "repeated illegal downloaders", it's repeated users of file-sharing services, whether legal or not. It means that they've learned that they can't get their way via the courts, so now they want the right to get their way without having to go through the courts. This is a bad development.
Actually, you're doing it now. The public outrage and media frenzy have done a great job policing the system
I'm inclined to think that it's just the media frenzy, and that's what generated the public outrage. I'm not sure the individual can do much if they are in disagreement with the story the media want to tell. Check out Nick Davies' Flat Earth News for an insider description of how the media consensus is formed and how hard it is for anything contrary to the consensus to be heard (the analysis is in the book, rather than on the website). At present, the media consensus is that Islam is a terrorist religion, and so voices that contradict that consensus -- such as Muslim leaders condemning terrorism -- won't be reported, and so won't be heard.
Uh huh. So if moderates don't condemn violence they are supporting it, and if they do then they're cherry-picking. In other words, they can't win whatever they do, and so there's no reason for them to take any notice of your opinion. Yes, that should help undermine extremism, shouldn't it?
The extremists aren't a separate species or something. They attend the same mosques as the moderates, hear the same speeches from the same imams, and in many cases walk with the moderates afterward back to the family home.
I was responding to a post which accused all "religionists", not just Muslims.
The moderates have the authority of group pressure. They also have the religious authority to pick and choose the imams who preach religion to their children. So why don't they?
And do you know they're not? If they're a minority in a particular area they might not be able to do much, you know.
Instead, you have the British Pakistani community producing radicalized young men at a regular pace now, carrying out terrorist attacks around the globe after listening to speeches at British mosques filled with hate and incitements to violence while the community at large - their parents, grandparents and siblings - either does nothing or actively condones their actions.
If they condone the actions, might I respectfully suggest that they're not actually moderates?
I'm not saying that the moderates can prevent all extremists from committing their crimes, but their condemnation of them should be loud and long. The extremists shouldn't be granted "cover under the banner of heaven".
And as far as I can see, their condemnation is loud and long. But unfortunately, the words and actions of the extremists sell newspapers and gets TV viewers, those of the moderates don't (expecially if it's likely to disturb the readers'/viewers' prejudices) and so you won't get to see it unless you go looking. That's not the fault of the moderates, that's the fault of the "gatekeepers" of the information. Do you expect Fox News or The Daily Mail to report prominent Muslims doing the right thing?
Slashdot Mirror
Cutting "low performers" has, in my experience, always been a sign of a company in financial trouble. One that desperately needs to save money in order to please stockholders, and employees simply are one of those "cutting costs opportunities" that stockholders love.
As Stephen J Gould pointed out, the only things that are "lean and mean" in nature are animals that can no longer hunt effectively and are dying.
I already looked thanks so your initial assumption that I didn't is false.
Strange. It's usually a safe bet on /.
I noticed that listed first is torture, which is similar to the issue I described regarding Guantanamo in that whilst I agree torture must be stopped, I wouldn't prioritise the rights of people who really are evil over those who are innocent.
The issue over Guantanamo is detention without trial by a foreign (as far as UK-based Liberty is concerned) power. The issue of torture is either deportation of people on British soil to other countries to have them tortured -- extraordinary rendition -- if that happens, it happens without trial, so why do you assume it only hapens to those who are "really evil"? -- or it's legal deportation to countries where the defendant is likely to have a confession tortured out of them whether they're guilty or not, so again this isn't an issue of defending those who are "really evil". As a UK resident, I don't want to be deported to a country where I will have a confession tortured out of me for something I haven't done. Liberty's involvement is addressing a genuine issue for the innocent UK resident.
Second up is terrorism, most work here is good because this is often used as the excuse for supression of the population.
Yep. And it's one of the things you said Liberty was not addressing adequately.
Privacy is 3rd
The site is confusing here -- the order of issues on the home page is not the same as that on subsequent pages. I'll stick with the order on the home page, and shuffle your comments around to match. Human Rights Act is third, which addresses things like public bodies trying to evade their responsibilities under the Human Rights Act by subcontracting to private bodies who are not subject to the same controls. I consider that to be an important issue.
Fourth is Free Speech:
Free speech- again, important and good. No problems here.
Agreed.
Now we're up to Privacy:
similarly this is rather important as it covers some of the stuff that's important but what's glaringly lacking here is absolutely no coverage of online privacy- RFID, CCTV, ID cards, DNA data retention but nothing about the continued infringement of online privacy.
I agree with your positives there. As for online privacy, I agree that it's hard to find on their website, but it is there, for instance here. That's an issue of poor web design, not an issue of Liberty failing to campaign where they should.
Then we have Asylum
Again, following the sequence on the home page we have Protest, then Equality:
The equality section looks rather pointless, their only equality news listings over a year are about winning the right for a sikh girl to wear a religious band in school. The problem here is that many schools put limits on what kids can and can't wear to school as part of their uniform just as many jobs dictate uniform. Religion should not be allowed as an excuse to flout the rules that everyone else adheres to unless the rules themselves are stupid in which case it should be the rules as a whole that should be defeated or changed, not an individuals right to ignore such rules over everyone else.
If you read the articles you'll see that the rules as a whole had already been defeated, 25 years earlier by the Law Lords, and the school decided to ignore the law on the matter. That was the human rights issue, and it was a legitimate one. But yes, there's not a lot in the equality section, probably because the UK is good on the issue, but more likely because there are a lot of more specialist campaign groups on specific equality
This is the biggest issue I have with liberty.
They're more interested in helping to free British citizens in places like Guantanamo who really were caught in the middle of a warzone, fighting alongside the Taliban against British soldiers than they are protecting the rights of people in the UK who really are innocent of any crime and yet who are having their liberties infringed daily.
In a word, bollocks. Did you follow the link I gave? (oh, sorry, forgot this is /.) It was Liberty who took the RIP act to the ECHR and got the ruling that it needed more oversight and transparency. It's Liberty who fought curfews for under 18s. It's Liberty who are fighting for the right to protest. It's Liberty who are fighting ID cards and the surveillance state. On the other hand, I am not aware of any Liberty campaigning on Guantanamo -- if they've done any it's been very muted (though no doubt if asked a Liberty spokesperson would say that detention without trial is a bad thing). Liberty are doing all the things you say they need to, and as far as I can see are doing none of the things you say they shouldn't. Check out what's really happening before condemning them -- their website isn't hard to find, once you realise they're not the London department store.
Oh, and the article is total bullcrap
Rule for reading any headline of the form "[noun phrase] may [verb phrase]". Always mentally add "but almost certainly won't." The headline will almost certainly be based on something like a 99th percentile, to make the headline seem dramatic.
When did you ever know a project delivered on time?
It's only a newspaper story. It's confused as to whether the Home Office are operating this power or talking about it.
Just so. What's particularly suspicious is that although they have a quote from Liberty about this, there doesn't seem to be anything about it on Liberty's website -- this should be front-page news for them. In fact, the last thing Liberty has on the subject is this from last year, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled that RIP was a violation of human rights and that the UK was obliged to add more transparency and accountability.
1984 didn't even get the year wrong; it was a deliberate reversal of the last two digits of 1948, the year of the book's publication, and within the limits of the technology available it was all going on then.
And yet, very similar rent control laws here in the UK give us a spread of very expensive rentals (where property prices are high anyway) to relatively cheap rentals (where property prices are low anyway). Which suggests that the difference isn't because of rent control laws. So the rental market in NYC is expensive? How about if I wanted to purchase a place in NYC? Would that be nice and cheap?
Now that the other Time Lords have been exterminated, who's to say there can't be a Fourteenth Doctor?
Which brings me to something that has puzzled me throughout the "new" Doctor Who. Just when is this "now" when the other Time Lords have been exterminated? Isn't there something about being a Time Lord that means they can move through time? And haven't the times in the new series overlapped the times in the old series when the other Time Lords had not been wiped out?
Not a lot that UK audiences are familiar with, either. The BBC news today was describing him as "relatively unknown". Still, I suppose that means we don't have any preconceived ideas about ho well he'll do. I can't help worrying, though -- particularly with RTD jumping ship, putting a young unknown in the Doctor role looks disturbingly like a cost-cutting move.
I only got as far as "I". Although I did miss out English (French), which is as unintelligible to the English as French (British) is to the French.
And, will open source licenses ever finally get translated into languages besides English?"
(Zonker says that translation into 7 languages was done for openSUSE 11.1.)
Well, unless those seven languages are English, English, English, English, English, English and English, then I'd think it's safe to assume so.
Maybe:
It doesn't have to be that accurate a model for GPS. Yes, the atmosphere introduces errors into the propagation delays, but those errors are measured and accounted for. Ionospheric delays vary with the square of the frequency, so now two GPS frequencies are available for civilian use it's easy to adjust for ionospheric delays moment-by-moment, wherever the ionosphere happens to be at the time. Tropospheric delays are more of a problem, and are a significant part of the residual GPS error, but if the accuracy matters to you then you can use differential GPS and measure those delays too, moment by moment, and correct for them, whatever the troposphere happens to be doing at the time.
s/it's/its/3 Sorry.
Coz when the octopi rise up and enslave us, we will know how to curry favour with our new masters.
Mmmm, curried octopus...
Once most of the people who grew up reading newspapers die or just stop reading them, it's inevitable that the print form will cease to exist -- as we know it.
That would be me, then. I grew a broadsheet reader, but I don't bother nowadays. The press try to claim a "gatekeeper" role, filtering the real news from the dross (I see they're still claiming "intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on"), but they've long since abandoned that. Apart from opinion, all you find in newspapers now is PR releases reprinted almost verbatim and Associated Press reports reprinted almost verbatim (it's fascinating to compare reports of the same incident in different newspapers: big news each paper will put it's own spin on, but mid-range and low level news is often word-for-word the same between newspapers). The only question the editors ask is "will this sell" (more precisely, "will this supply readers who we can sell to advertisers"), which is no more effective as a gatekeeper than the blogger who says "will this entertain my readers". I don't see how the news press can survive; it's only added value for the readers would be investigation, fact checking and real, on-the-ground reporting, and that's expensive (too expensive for the extra readership it attracts). All that's left is pure entertainment -- celeb gossip, pictures of scantily clad young people and amusing factoids pretending to be news. The internet is a threat there, too, but at least it's cheaper. I'm guessing that it's cheaper to send a reporter to a celebrity party than to a war zone?
When are you grammer nazis going to learn, english doenst have rules of grammer, they are more like suggestions than rules.
Same goes for spelling and punctuation, I suppose.
If ISP's voluntarily go along with limiting file sharing due to legal threats from the RIAA, anyone going for that market opening is going to need deep pockets to fight those potential lawsuits, and all of the likely contenders I can think of already have a vested interest in selling content and/or throttling P2P, so I don't think there'd be a rush to fill that gap.
the French RIAA (forgot its acronym)
"SPPF". Sounds like a sound effect to me -- I'm sure I've seen it as a Bronx cheer in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon...
I mean, their current methods have apparently atleast been in breach of investigative laws in several states and they may still end up in mess because of it, but ending the thing will atleast lessen the exposure..
Alternative explanation is that they have actually understood that extortion is bad.. nah.. not likely.
No -- look at the actual wording: "...working with the ISPs to limit file-sharing services and cut off repeated users"
Note that's not "repeated illegal downloaders", it's repeated users of file-sharing services, whether legal or not. It means that they've learned that they can't get their way via the courts, so now they want the right to get their way without having to go through the courts. This is a bad development.
Actually, you're doing it now. The public outrage and media frenzy have done a great job policing the system
I'm inclined to think that it's just the media frenzy, and that's what generated the public outrage. I'm not sure the individual can do much if they are in disagreement with the story the media want to tell. Check out Nick Davies' Flat Earth News for an insider description of how the media consensus is formed and how hard it is for anything contrary to the consensus to be heard (the analysis is in the book, rather than on the website). At present, the media consensus is that Islam is a terrorist religion, and so voices that contradict that consensus -- such as Muslim leaders condemning terrorism -- won't be reported, and so won't be heard.
Uh huh. So if moderates don't condemn violence they are supporting it, and if they do then they're cherry-picking. In other words, they can't win whatever they do, and so there's no reason for them to take any notice of your opinion. Yes, that should help undermine extremism, shouldn't it?
The extremists aren't a separate species or something. They attend the same mosques as the moderates, hear the same speeches from the same imams, and in many cases walk with the moderates afterward back to the family home.
I was responding to a post which accused all "religionists", not just Muslims.
The moderates have the authority of group pressure. They also have the religious authority to pick and choose the imams who preach religion to their children. So why don't they?
And do you know they're not? If they're a minority in a particular area they might not be able to do much, you know.
Instead, you have the British Pakistani community producing radicalized young men at a regular pace now, carrying out terrorist attacks around the globe after listening to speeches at British mosques filled with hate and incitements to violence while the community at large - their parents, grandparents and siblings - either does nothing or actively condones their actions.
If they condone the actions, might I respectfully suggest that they're not actually moderates?
Are all Immams "moderates", then? That must be an obscure meaning of "moderate" of which I was previously unaware.
Remember, my question is what can moderates do, not what should everyone do.
I'm not saying that the moderates can prevent all extremists from committing their crimes, but their condemnation of them should be loud and long. The extremists shouldn't be granted "cover under the banner of heaven".
And as far as I can see, their condemnation is loud and long. But unfortunately, the words and actions of the extremists sell newspapers and gets TV viewers, those of the moderates don't (expecially if it's likely to disturb the readers'/viewers' prejudices) and so you won't get to see it unless you go looking. That's not the fault of the moderates, that's the fault of the "gatekeepers" of the information. Do you expect Fox News or The Daily Mail to report prominent Muslims doing the right thing?