I don't know, I feel like I'm getting a pretty good deal. Of course, I love cracker jacks.
Re:Crysis, the affirmative answer to the old quest
on
Review: Crysis Warhead
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· Score: 1
I was actually using a really dumb argument to poke fun at it, not as a serious response. If there is a god, then he's so far out of our league that our logic can't explain or disprove him (or her). Omnipotent can mean they can literally do anything at all, or it could just as easily mean that they can do anything that we can think of.
I have good health benefits, paid vacations, holidays, etc. If I work overtime I get paid time and a half.
I already get that, and I wouldn't even consider a job that didn't offer it. That's why we don't join unions, because we don't have to. Good programmers are so rare and valuable, they can almost write their own checks. The time it takes to find and train a replacement programmer is very expensive, requiring at least a few months, and even then only about 1/5 are worth their salt. Good companies treat their employees well so that they don't have to spend even more money training new guys; bad companies accept the huge turnover and rarely excel.
Unions help when there's a surplus of workers in the market, so that the workers have to use extraordinary means to force the company to improve their condition. For instance, when you're working in a car factory, the barrier to getting new employees is fairly low, just teach them how to use a few tools, teach them where everything goes, maybe take a week to train them. In programming, you have to sift through ~5 programmers to get one that's worth keeping, then it takes them a few weeks to even be able to do simple fixes, and months to be able to implement a major fix without introducing substantial new bugs. If you remove any source of knowledge about the code base, you can multiply those numbers by 2.
The existing market has a hard time with employees leaving for other companies that promise better pay and working conditions, and that's with individual negotiation. If half of the company's programmers (assuming that it's got a similar number of experienced and talented guys) were to threaten to strike, the company would almost certainly cave. If a few companies' worth of programmers unionized, it could bring the industry to its knees with collective bargaining.
The reason they don't do this is the same reason that car factory workers outside of Michigan think twice about unionizing: when you force the pay and benefits to an artificially high level, then it's easier for competition from areas that aren't unionized to take over for you.
Of course. If I didn't get paid overtime, I'd just be working for free. Company policy: first 40 hours of the week is free, then they pay me $10 / hr. It is, after all, the industry standard.
You don't even need an industry wide union. If EA's employees all walked out while they were being abused and picketed their offices, then there's no way they'd be able to find enough programmers to cross the picket line. If your company doesn't treat you well, go elsewhere. If there's nowhere else to go, start your own company and steal all the best programmers who are being treated like crap. With such a disparity between programmer skills and knowledge of the code base, the programming department has a lot of power.
Actually, I see a lot more democrats than libertarians. Also, IT has a shortage of good workers and high barriers for new employees, so if every worker left a company that refused to pay overtime, then the company would fail almost overnight. Any substantial company I've worked for has a code base that takes months to learn well enough to be truly effective at your job, and if you can't get bugfixes out faster than that, then you're screwed. For other companies, if they can't get new products out they're screwed. The free market cuts both ways, it's just that people get so caught up in the fact that the company is big that they fail to realize they have the company by its balls.
No, you can't kid-proof your email, but you can make it better than the default at least. A determined kid will be able to get around anything you put in place, what the poster is trying to do is make sure that their child has to seek it out instead of getting it through normal behavior. Just because it's not 100% effective doesn't mean it shouldn't be used.
Re:Is it ok to keep kids off the internet these da
on
Good Email For Kids?
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· Score: 4, Informative
I'd also suggest putting a computer as your gateway with Dan's Guardian on it. It's certainly not perfect, but it's the best filter I've ever seen, and allows for different filtering levels through user names. It runs on a linux box, so you can combine it with iptables to disallow a lot of other things like p2p as well. I'd highly recommend it as a good tool to make sure that your internet connection gets used on your terms whether you've got kids or not.
If things are not that bad, why has the Fed spent $1 trillion on investment bank bailouts, and requested another $0.7 trillion for mortgage bailouts.
The same reason that billions of people believing that Muhammad was the last true prophet of God doesn't mean that he was (a prophet or the last one). It's entirely possible that the government is reacting to a problem that isn't there. Are you really suggesting that President Bush (the most hated president of our lifetimes) and this congress (more hated than Bush and, at one point, less popular than the theory that we never landed on the moon) are infallible?
The government should make sure that the credit markets should stay open, and they've got the perfect vehicles to do so through fannie and freddie. They could have done without AIG, but now that they've got it they can do it. If a company requires a government bailout to remain operational, then they should die, end of story. Consequences are a vital part of the free market, and the removal of those consequences has been fueling a lot of the corruption that we've seen recently.
Re:Crysis, the affirmative answer to the old quest
on
Review: Crysis Warhead
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but upon trying to run it, He would instantly become capable. Thus the paradox is resolved.
The Act was intended to penalize "competitor's" who engaged in the infringement where income was earned on the enterprise, not so much a consumer who is actually getting nothing in the process
That's funny, because I thought the DMCA specifically put in ridiculous sums of money where consumers were doing the pirating. They might have justified it by saying that it was for use with corporations, but the way I read it leaves little doubt in my mind that they wanted it used against consumers as well.
Not at all. When it comes right down to it, open source has quite a foothold in American servers. In addition, the majority of the software that Europeans replace with Open Source was developed on our west coast, so we're keeping the development local. If the roles were reversed, I'm sure you'd see more Americans pushing for open source over the "foreign, closed software".
Yesterday, while searching for open office's market share, google was full of links about google docs passing open office (it was a video presentation by someone at google). Now I can't find it. Sorry.
There is no reason why behavioral analysis shouldn't be useful and effective in places where there are few legitimate reasons why you should be [on the tarmac] at all.
Yes there is. The people who are on the tarmac are already subjected to background checks and scrutiny well before they're hired. I haven't heard of a single incident of terrorism being committed by someone with access to the tarmac, but I've heard of nearly a dozen terrorism/hijacking situations which involved passengers. Also, false positives will desensitize security even faster for people on the tarmac than it would regular passengers, because they delay passengers all day long, but delaying employees hurts the bottom line and results in pressure from management to make REALLY sure that Jimmy's not just having a bad day or that Tommy's not suffering from first month blues. There is no demographic for which the number of false positives will not vastly outnumber the number of true positives. When you find a situation where that's not the case, then you can use this device effectively.
They had an awful summary of Outlaw Planet, since that's the one I'm most interested in seeing discussions on (preferably without '1984' references - think for yourself, please*). Instead, it's how governments are struggling to deal with the increase in hacking, spam, etc online, which has reached epidemic proportions!!!!1!11!! Haxors are hacking banks and getting the money to buy World of Starcraft credits online! (I'm not making this up)
Hackers cannot and will never be able to strike anywhere and everywhere with impunity. There's a limit to the number of exploits, and if it really reached the proportions they were talking about in their promo video, they would do the unthinkable and *gasp* stop making those systems available to the internet! Tsunami sensors giving false hits because of spam? That's ridiculous, and anyone who would allow something like that to happen should be shot.
Hacking, spam, and the ease of exploiting online resources are things that should be discussed, but this takes them to extremes and provides viewpoints that are skewed. They leave out some of the more interesting possibilities of a government that's out of control with surveillance on their populace and the hacker underground that fights them.
*1984 was a good book, and George Orwell was a good writer. Unfortunately, every time the slightest comparison can be made to 1984, people quote it like it's scripture and a bunch of people throw their hands into the air and yell, "Amen!" George Orwell was a man, not a prophet. Make an intelligent argument or none at all, please.
No, 50-59% is an 'E'. However, 75% is a solid C, and the way that it was written says that individual assignments will be recorded as 50%, not just the quarters' overall grades. that means you can pick and choose individual assignments. In my district growing up, they mandated that 70% of the grade had to come from homework, since a lot of students had troubles with tests. If Pittsburg has a similar policy, they can skip every test and either choose to get 85% on each of their homework assignments, or just skip 1/5 of their homework and still get a C overall. That's fucked up.
I have a hard time figuring out how this qualifies as an idle story. This is a serious subject with potentially far reaching effects since bullshit policies like this tend to spread like wildfire by school boards who believe dumb kids can be loved into knowledge.
Is it that they want us to suffer through a comment box that inhabits 10% of the page's width? Do they not like the quote tag? Is this a power struggle between samzenpus and the other editors?
Yeah, this is really just a terrible idea. Mark the grades differently for quarters and allow children to do makeup work to bring a quarter up, a lot like they do with retaking classes in college.
Seriously, don't the administrators see something's wrong when the retired Home Ec teacher is saying that they're being too easy on the kids? In my high school, home ec was the class you took when you wanted an easy A.
This is shorthand for: "if you ignore the market leader, our product is doing well".
No, that's shorthand for, "This market's very different than other console markets that have come before, like comparing business laptop sales to the grows of OLPC sales. The Wii is a fundamentally different platform, where the Wii's hardware's less than half of what you get with the other consoles, the controller is unusable for anything but motion controls, and the target market is a decade or two younger. Therefore, coming in second to the Wii with more serious hardware lands you a market segment that the Wii doesn't touch, which has traditionally been very lucrative and driven the sales of consoles. Only time will tell if the Wii can pulverize the other consoles like the PS2 did, but right now it could easily be argued that the Wii doesn't even compete with the XBox and PS3."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know, I feel like I'm getting a pretty good deal. Of course, I love cracker jacks.
I was actually using a really dumb argument to poke fun at it, not as a serious response. If there is a god, then he's so far out of our league that our logic can't explain or disprove him (or her). Omnipotent can mean they can literally do anything at all, or it could just as easily mean that they can do anything that we can think of.
I have good health benefits, paid vacations, holidays, etc. If I work overtime I get paid time and a half.
I already get that, and I wouldn't even consider a job that didn't offer it. That's why we don't join unions, because we don't have to. Good programmers are so rare and valuable, they can almost write their own checks. The time it takes to find and train a replacement programmer is very expensive, requiring at least a few months, and even then only about 1/5 are worth their salt. Good companies treat their employees well so that they don't have to spend even more money training new guys; bad companies accept the huge turnover and rarely excel.
Unions help when there's a surplus of workers in the market, so that the workers have to use extraordinary means to force the company to improve their condition. For instance, when you're working in a car factory, the barrier to getting new employees is fairly low, just teach them how to use a few tools, teach them where everything goes, maybe take a week to train them. In programming, you have to sift through ~5 programmers to get one that's worth keeping, then it takes them a few weeks to even be able to do simple fixes, and months to be able to implement a major fix without introducing substantial new bugs. If you remove any source of knowledge about the code base, you can multiply those numbers by 2.
The existing market has a hard time with employees leaving for other companies that promise better pay and working conditions, and that's with individual negotiation. If half of the company's programmers (assuming that it's got a similar number of experienced and talented guys) were to threaten to strike, the company would almost certainly cave. If a few companies' worth of programmers unionized, it could bring the industry to its knees with collective bargaining.
The reason they don't do this is the same reason that car factory workers outside of Michigan think twice about unionizing: when you force the pay and benefits to an artificially high level, then it's easier for competition from areas that aren't unionized to take over for you.
That's really an interesting correlation. Do you know or suspect why that is?
Of course. If I didn't get paid overtime, I'd just be working for free. Company policy: first 40 hours of the week is free, then they pay me $10 / hr. It is, after all, the industry standard.
You don't even need an industry wide union. If EA's employees all walked out while they were being abused and picketed their offices, then there's no way they'd be able to find enough programmers to cross the picket line. If your company doesn't treat you well, go elsewhere. If there's nowhere else to go, start your own company and steal all the best programmers who are being treated like crap. With such a disparity between programmer skills and knowledge of the code base, the programming department has a lot of power.
Actually, I see a lot more democrats than libertarians. Also, IT has a shortage of good workers and high barriers for new employees, so if every worker left a company that refused to pay overtime, then the company would fail almost overnight. Any substantial company I've worked for has a code base that takes months to learn well enough to be truly effective at your job, and if you can't get bugfixes out faster than that, then you're screwed. For other companies, if they can't get new products out they're screwed. The free market cuts both ways, it's just that people get so caught up in the fact that the company is big that they fail to realize they have the company by its balls.
No, you can't kid-proof your email, but you can make it better than the default at least. A determined kid will be able to get around anything you put in place, what the poster is trying to do is make sure that their child has to seek it out instead of getting it through normal behavior. Just because it's not 100% effective doesn't mean it shouldn't be used.
I'd also suggest putting a computer as your gateway with Dan's Guardian on it. It's certainly not perfect, but it's the best filter I've ever seen, and allows for different filtering levels through user names. It runs on a linux box, so you can combine it with iptables to disallow a lot of other things like p2p as well. I'd highly recommend it as a good tool to make sure that your internet connection gets used on your terms whether you've got kids or not.
If things are not that bad, why has the Fed spent $1 trillion on investment bank bailouts, and requested another $0.7 trillion for mortgage bailouts.
The same reason that billions of people believing that Muhammad was the last true prophet of God doesn't mean that he was (a prophet or the last one). It's entirely possible that the government is reacting to a problem that isn't there. Are you really suggesting that President Bush (the most hated president of our lifetimes) and this congress (more hated than Bush and, at one point, less popular than the theory that we never landed on the moon) are infallible?
The government should make sure that the credit markets should stay open, and they've got the perfect vehicles to do so through fannie and freddie. They could have done without AIG, but now that they've got it they can do it. If a company requires a government bailout to remain operational, then they should die, end of story. Consequences are a vital part of the free market, and the removal of those consequences has been fueling a lot of the corruption that we've seen recently.
Yes, but upon trying to run it, He would instantly become capable. Thus the paradox is resolved.
I knew that sticking with ASCII porn would pay off someday.
The Act was intended to penalize "competitor's" who engaged in the infringement where income was earned on the enterprise, not so much a consumer who is actually getting nothing in the process
That's funny, because I thought the DMCA specifically put in ridiculous sums of money where consumers were doing the pirating. They might have justified it by saying that it was for use with corporations, but the way I read it leaves little doubt in my mind that they wanted it used against consumers as well.
What else would they ban players from? Their list of cool people?
Especially with the way the Sony rootkit debacle went down. They're not identical situations, but they're similar enough to give one hope.
Not at all. When it comes right down to it, open source has quite a foothold in American servers. In addition, the majority of the software that Europeans replace with Open Source was developed on our west coast, so we're keeping the development local. If the roles were reversed, I'm sure you'd see more Americans pushing for open source over the "foreign, closed software".
Yesterday, while searching for open office's market share, google was full of links about google docs passing open office (it was a video presentation by someone at google). Now I can't find it. Sorry.
There is no reason why behavioral analysis shouldn't be useful and effective in places where there are few legitimate reasons why you should be [on the tarmac] at all.
Yes there is. The people who are on the tarmac are already subjected to background checks and scrutiny well before they're hired. I haven't heard of a single incident of terrorism being committed by someone with access to the tarmac, but I've heard of nearly a dozen terrorism/hijacking situations which involved passengers. Also, false positives will desensitize security even faster for people on the tarmac than it would regular passengers, because they delay passengers all day long, but delaying employees hurts the bottom line and results in pressure from management to make REALLY sure that Jimmy's not just having a bad day or that Tommy's not suffering from first month blues. There is no demographic for which the number of false positives will not vastly outnumber the number of true positives. When you find a situation where that's not the case, then you can use this device effectively.
If inept, corrupt, deceptive companies aren't allowed to fail, why should we allow children to fail?
They had an awful summary of Outlaw Planet, since that's the one I'm most interested in seeing discussions on (preferably without '1984' references - think for yourself, please*). Instead, it's how governments are struggling to deal with the increase in hacking, spam, etc online, which has reached epidemic proportions!!!!1!11!! Haxors are hacking banks and getting the money to buy World of Starcraft credits online! (I'm not making this up)
Hackers cannot and will never be able to strike anywhere and everywhere with impunity. There's a limit to the number of exploits, and if it really reached the proportions they were talking about in their promo video, they would do the unthinkable and *gasp* stop making those systems available to the internet! Tsunami sensors giving false hits because of spam? That's ridiculous, and anyone who would allow something like that to happen should be shot.
Hacking, spam, and the ease of exploiting online resources are things that should be discussed, but this takes them to extremes and provides viewpoints that are skewed. They leave out some of the more interesting possibilities of a government that's out of control with surveillance on their populace and the hacker underground that fights them.
*1984 was a good book, and George Orwell was a good writer. Unfortunately, every time the slightest comparison can be made to 1984, people quote it like it's scripture and a bunch of people throw their hands into the air and yell, "Amen!" George Orwell was a man, not a prophet. Make an intelligent argument or none at all, please.
No, 50-59% is an 'E'. However, 75% is a solid C, and the way that it was written says that individual assignments will be recorded as 50%, not just the quarters' overall grades. that means you can pick and choose individual assignments. In my district growing up, they mandated that 70% of the grade had to come from homework, since a lot of students had troubles with tests. If Pittsburg has a similar policy, they can skip every test and either choose to get 85% on each of their homework assignments, or just skip 1/5 of their homework and still get a C overall. That's fucked up.
I have a hard time figuring out how this qualifies as an idle story. This is a serious subject with potentially far reaching effects since bullshit policies like this tend to spread like wildfire by school boards who believe dumb kids can be loved into knowledge.
Is it that they want us to suffer through a comment box that inhabits 10% of the page's width? Do they not like the quote tag? Is this a power struggle between samzenpus and the other editors?
Yeah, this is really just a terrible idea. Mark the grades differently for quarters and allow children to do makeup work to bring a quarter up, a lot like they do with retaking classes in college.
Seriously, don't the administrators see something's wrong when the retired Home Ec teacher is saying that they're being too easy on the kids? In my high school, home ec was the class you took when you wanted an easy A.
This is shorthand for: "if you ignore the market leader, our product is doing well".
No, that's shorthand for, "This market's very different than other console markets that have come before, like comparing business laptop sales to the grows of OLPC sales. The Wii is a fundamentally different platform, where the Wii's hardware's less than half of what you get with the other consoles, the controller is unusable for anything but motion controls, and the target market is a decade or two younger. Therefore, coming in second to the Wii with more serious hardware lands you a market segment that the Wii doesn't touch, which has traditionally been very lucrative and driven the sales of consoles. Only time will tell if the Wii can pulverize the other consoles like the PS2 did, but right now it could easily be argued that the Wii doesn't even compete with the XBox and PS3."
You were close though.