Every culture has a set of rules that they have to learn to get by in society. But some are more regimented than others, and some have more explicit training. Now, recent times are different, but for a few hundred years, American culture has been about individualism, while Japanese culture has been very regimented. Japanese children are very explicitly trained in procedures; American children are trained by their parents in ways that are less similar between families, and there seems to be an assumption that many subtleties will be picked up automatically. Japanese social behavior has always struck me as having a very heavy robotic component. Now, if you have a large segment of your population that is autistic, they're going to have an easier time learning a very mechanical system. So at a time when Japanese culture was more uniform and regimented, mild autism would go more unnoticed. Now that attitudes have changed in Japan, and people are more individualistic, autistic children are not being forced to engage in traditional social behaviors. So, ironically, in an age of individualism, to help these people get out of the house, some more rigorous training in Japanese traditions would do them some good (not that there's anything particularly wrong with Japanese traditions in the first place).
All I'm saying is that if you want to make jokes like that in the name of free speech, then you should realize that you're doing it before you say anything.
Wow did you miss my point. My point is that if you're going to offend government officials, do it with a PURPOSE. I think government officials should be offended a LOT. They do stupid things and create stupid policies. But if you're going to do something that appears to be very threatening, you have to have your ducks in a row to get back out of trouble once you've exposed the government stupidity.
One thing that surprises me about Snowden is that I haven't heard a lot about protections he may have put in place through his attorney. If I were going to do something like that, I'd have my lawyers on standby. However, the fact that he was conveniently in Hong Kong after the blowout suggests that he probably did all that CYA and I just haven't read all the details.
I don't disagree with you. I'm just pointing out the fact that people will mine the Internet your past for reasons to criticize you. You can't change that.
Actually, criticizing the government (even specific officials) is not only a right, but it's a vital part of American politics. However, criticizing is not the same as threatening with bodily harm. With regard to Obama, you can threaten to say he's stupid, threaten to not vote for him, threaten to oppose him in all sorts of ways, threaten to not let him visit your city, etc. But you're a moron if you threaten his health, because even if you don't have the means, the secret service will take that very seriously. And sensible people will also criticise you for being a total moron.
And besides, even if someone were to succeed in harming the president, that would not affect the implementation of his policies, which is what you want to change, right? Instead, it would just make him a martyr for those policies.
Bottom line: Unless you're talking about burgulars entering your home or someone you're going to meet in a boxing ring, threatening physical harm is a really really stupid thing to do. For many cases, it's legal, but it's always stupid.
No, not anymore. Remember, we no longer have any right to be forgotten.:) Seriously, though, we not leave an indelible mark on the world when we say things on the internet, and future employers will scrutinize us based on that. There's no getting around that. This is particularly an issue in today's economy with floods of peolpe looking for jobs but so few jobs. Employers look for anything superficial to take you out of consideration, and they're not going to hire someone who did some stupid things as a kid in favor or someone who didn't (as far as they can tell).
You don't read well. I SAID it wasn't a fake bomb. And this has nothing to do with arresting anyone. It's about not going into the woods with meat strapped to your shirt and prodding bears with sticks.
I already replied to this thread, so I can't mod you up. I'm going to agree with you and disagree with the other respondents. When people make comments like he did, there is at least limited probable cause for investigation. Whether an arrest was warranted or not, I'm not sure, but you're right that it's hard to tell the false positives from the false negatives. You're even more right that this kid should simply not have said something so stupid and should not be surprised that it got him into trouble. His parents should beat the crap out of him (perhaps figuratively) for it.
Also, as for the arrest, let's keep in mind that he will not ultimately be convicted of any crime. Sometimes, innocent people get arrested and usually, the police figure out they have the wrong person (or someone who isn't a threat) before anything goes to trial, and many people are found not guilty at trial. A conviction here would indeed be a thread to freedom of speech. Being arrested and then let go is simply a warning that statements like his are a huge red flag, a strong-enough indication of a potential thread that they are worth looking into. (As I mentioned in my other post, if you're going to tick off the authorities, do it intentionally, for a good and productive reason, and have your ass covered.)
Put another way, there are many things that are legal (and should be legal for various reasons) that nevertheless (depending on the circumstances) are still unethical or just plain stupid. Compare this to the idea of disagreeing with someone but fighting for their right to nevertheless freely hold their opinion. It's not a contradiction to tell the kid he was stupid and at the same time the authorities not to criminally charge him for what he did.
I agree with others that since there's neither a direct threat nor any intent to harm anyone (quite obvously, I might add), this kid should not be in jail. However, his parents (not the government or the police) should take away his computer for being so stupid. People these days just don't think about the consequences of their actions. This reminds me of that MIT student who went to the airport with a "fake bomb" strapped to her chest. It wasn't a fake bomb, but she damn well should have known better than to think that TSA grunts were going to know the difference.
See, if you're trying to make a political statement, then it's sometimes necessary to do something like this. Like if you're trying to expose flaws in the TSA scanning systems or demonstrate principles of free speech. But that is NOT what these kids were trying to do at all. They were just being stupid and would have been better off doing something different. All they accomplished was to make things difficult for themselves. What I mean is, if you're going to tick off the authorities, do it for a REASON, with a meaningful and productive goal in mind, with your ass covered (i.e. your plan documented with your attorney) in the (likely) event that you get arrested. When the authorities inevitably screw up, they look stupid. Ticking off the authorities "by accident" like this just makes YOU look stupid.
One thing people keep neglecting to mention is that for the stuff we WANT to be public (e.g. source code), the cloud is a GREAT place to put it (but certainly not the only place we should put it).
BTW, "the cloud" is far too nebulous of a term for this discussion.
I have a doctorate in computer engineering. While working on that, I did coursework in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. While my CS courses were challenging, and I learned a lot, it was familiar territory with familiar thinking. In the social science courses, I had to think in a different way. Engiineering papers and psych papers are organized in totally different ways and have totally different concepts of proof. I came away from those courses not just more knowledgable but feeling as though I had grown as a person.
This is the kind of thing we want undergrads to get out of humanities, liberal arts, and social sciences. Make people think in unfamiliar ways, and then they'll come back to their own familiar domains with new approaches. It is this cross polination that forms the basis for fundamental approaches in psychology now; signal detection theory was brought over by an electrical engineer.
Also, if you're an engineer, and you want to meet really really smart women, take grad courses in psychology.:)
Computer Science is a theoretical discipline pertaining about things that you can make programs do and how programs are structured. It has always seemed to me that programming languages are just a tool that you learn on the side. Then again, I learned multiple programming languages before I finished high school, so my perspective may be a little skewed. What I can say is that my software designs after formal CS theoretical training are much better, because I'm smarter about how I go about solving problems. It also seems to me that if you don't have the motivation to learn some things on your own, then you're probably in the wrong degree program, because you're just not that interested. The people who try to breeze through a CS program on coursework alone are only there for the certification, and they're not the kinds of people I'd want to hire, because they're unlikely to give a crap enough about the job to do it well.
We whine and complain about the RIAA and MPAA suing people in bulk for sharing files on bit torrent. Our reasoning is that the record companies cheat the artists out of legitimate revenue and then they add on a new litigation-based business model so they can extract more revenue from people who may or may not have violated copyright. We justify some copyright violation as civil disobedience, because the media companies are criminals (in an ethical sense). There's a lot of truth and a lot of bullshit in that. I'm a fan of neither the media companies nor rampant copyright violation.
But with these subscription models, I don't see where you have room to complain. In general, we pay a small fee for access to unlimited streaming of digital content. If we don't like the price or customer service, we try another service. And the availability/uptime of these services is phenomenal. I'm a fan of subscription services, because I don't want to fill up my house with content that I'm only ever going to watch one time.
Anyhow, I don't get why you're advocating violating their terms of service. Do you think that all content should be free? That's absurd. The terms of service are generally "one account per household." Why is that so hard to accept? They're trying to make a profit so they can stay in business and continue to offer content, and they charge very reasonable fees.
Also, in general, sharing passwords is considered a no-no. Sure, if I have ssh on my home server, I can share passwords all I want, because it's MY SERVER. But if I share my passwords for my accounts at work, I can get fired. Why? Security breach, policy violation. For subscription services, it's a violation of terms of service. The punishment should be to have your account revoked to free up bandwidth for legitimate customers.
One reason why we don't want ubiquitous surveilance is that we don't want law enforcement mining people's daily activities looking for new things to make illegal. This would be too easy to do. Is Mr. X politically inconvenient? "Well, let's see if he does something regularly that we can argue people shouldn't do, and see lots of people do this, and a statiscal analysis shows that this behavior has certain negative consequences." Now, we have a new law specially tailored to allow the arrest of this person they don't like.
Another reason is that people do many "illegal" things that are not necessarily harmful or unethical at the time. If they weren't being monitored, they'd never be caught, because there are no consequences to anyone, so there would otherwise be nothing to trigger any investigation.
In this digital age, having to get a warrant for every search impedes the efficiency of law enforcement. And that is exactly why we want them to have to get warrants. Otherwise, the sorting factor that keeps people in and out of our crowded and money-sucking prisons needs to be objective based on evidence of wrongdoing and an impartial judge and jury. If law enforcement can make anything a crime, then the sorting factor becomes subjective based on corruption and which people police officers and prosecutors like.
I keep hearing this over and over from people. It seems like biologists are never educated in certain aspects of basic research. I know a CS grad student (who also has a degree in biology) who was talking about Google Scholar with some other biology grad students; they started taking notes because they'd never heard of it before. I asked how they managed to cite anything, and I was told that they do get the journals as they are published, and they do read, but they never SEARCH for anything.
No. It's not. Just as there is a dedicated Netflix app for the iPhone, there could be a dedicated Netflix app for Linux. It doesn't HAVE to be in a browser, using a common plugin. There's more than one way to skin a cat. It's not a DRM problem. It's a platform support problem.
I'm not a fan of DRM. If I purchase and download a video or audio file, I don't want some stupid protection scheme preventing me from playing it on arbitrary devices. I want to transcode it and watch it on my smart phone. I want to watch it on a Linux box.
But Netflix is a SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE. By paying a monthly fee, I get access to unlimited streaming content, with the tradeoff that I can't just suck content down to my computer and hoard it. So when I choose to end my subscription, access to the unlimited streaming ends. This is a perfectly reasonable business model. It's analogous to renting a DVD vs. buying one. If I buy one, I should be able to rip it. If I rent one, it's unethical for me to rip it. The DRM scheme is orthogonal to this moral dilemma. So as far as Netflix is concerned, the DRM is something I don't even need to know about it, as long as I'm able to reliably stream content I've paid for access to.
People complain about the patent protection on H.264 for content they want to download. But I believe the FSF has even pointed out how this is irrelevant for subscription streaming services. You're paying a subscription fee, and a small portion of this is paid to the patent holder to give you and your provider use of the technology. Keep in mind that patents aren't evil; they're just heavily abused. And use of patented technology in a streaming service isn't abusive (at least not in the case of Netflix).
In other words what we want isn't "no DRM." What we want is control over media we've rightfully paid for. Most of us aren't pirates. We just want our money's worth. What that means, in many cases, is a requirement for "no DRM." When you're using a subscripion service, failure to access the content you've paid for is an IT problem, not an abuse of DRM. (The fact that Netflix isn't yet available for Linux is a side issue. That's a gap in platform support, not a DRM problem.)
Oh, and one other point: Supporting DRM is WAY MORE of a pain for Netflix than it is for the user. For most users (except those on unsupported platforms), Netflix "just works." Netflix engineers have to wrestle with this stupid impediment in order to do what they really want to do, which is to stream content. But they can't get that content without satifying the content providers who demand the use of DRM. If you really want to pick on someone, go after the content companies.
Unfortunately, the way this particular Resume template organized the text, copy and paste from the PDF would get things munged together in the wrong orders. It was really weird. For instance, I think it laid it out so that the section titles on the left were "first", followed by the sections on the right. It didn't make a lot of sense to me. Really, copy/paste from the PDF was the first thing I thought of, but this was the weirdest PDF I'd ever encountered. I don't know if it's the fault of TeX or the template or what.
Actually, you have an excellent point. It makes sense that an organization would apply a degree of automated filtering. I'm sure they would be laughed at by anyone doing real natural language processing, but this is a theoretically reasonable statistical way to filter resumes. This is also a great revenue stream for those with inside knowledge about just what certain companies filters look for, matches that will be missed, and non-matches that will be false positives, etc.
This makes a solid case for having two CVs. And some automated application systems do allow you to put in two forms of the CV. They want a PDF form for the human, and then they want you to paste the content into a textarea for automated processing. Those should be structured in totally different ways.
In this market? Are you serious? I didn't leave any stone unturned. Not counting the various head-hunters, I applied for nearly 150 different academic positions. And probably around 50 industry positions. I got maybe a dozen responses, a few phone interviews, six real interviews, and four offers. (In retrospect, if I got 4 offers out of 6 in-person interviews, I'm actually kindof impressed with myself there. And I didn't even think my presentation was the most polished I'd ever seen.)
I came into this knowing that I'm trying to get a new job in a horrible economy. My CV had to stand out in both form AND content. I had to apply for absolutely everything out there, academic and industry. And head-hunters are just another way of looking for jobs. Why would I want to cut off that avenue of search? Sure, the probability of getting a good job that way is LOW, but it's not zero, and I'd been dealing with nothing but low probabilities the whole way along.
Oh, and one benefit to contacting multiple headhunters is that I DID get really useful constructive feedback on my CV that I took seriously and implemented.
People want to bitch about the effort involved in applying. What choice do we have? You have to at least slightly customize every application. I spent several hours a day for weeks and weeks, in two waves, applying for jobs. It's a statistics game for the employer, and it's a statistics game for the applicant, and I was under no illusion otherwise. I consider myself very fortunate that the move was only 500 miles away and the university (my new employer) paid for the move.
BTW, there are some things that really suck about moving to Upstate New York. Weird laws, lag payroll, waiting period for medical insurance. My wife was denied a drivers license for changing her name when we got married, until I got the local legislator involved (this is sexual discrimination). I have a long laundry list of things that really irritate me about being a NYS employee. But I try not to bitch too much, because I'm EXTREMELY FORTUNATE to have a job that I REALLY LIKE in an economy this horrible. Although I do want to take SOME credit for it, because I worked really damn hard to get here. A lot of people who bitch about problems finding jobs really just haven't worked very hard.
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Every culture has a set of rules that they have to learn to get by in society. But some are more regimented than others, and some have more explicit training. Now, recent times are different, but for a few hundred years, American culture has been about individualism, while Japanese culture has been very regimented. Japanese children are very explicitly trained in procedures; American children are trained by their parents in ways that are less similar between families, and there seems to be an assumption that many subtleties will be picked up automatically. Japanese social behavior has always struck me as having a very heavy robotic component. Now, if you have a large segment of your population that is autistic, they're going to have an easier time learning a very mechanical system. So at a time when Japanese culture was more uniform and regimented, mild autism would go more unnoticed. Now that attitudes have changed in Japan, and people are more individualistic, autistic children are not being forced to engage in traditional social behaviors. So, ironically, in an age of individualism, to help these people get out of the house, some more rigorous training in Japanese traditions would do them some good (not that there's anything particularly wrong with Japanese traditions in the first place).
True. But responsible people still consider the ethical consequences of their actions.
All I'm saying is that if you want to make jokes like that in the name of free speech, then you should realize that you're doing it before you say anything.
Yes, Rosa Parks is a perfect example of what I was talking about. Thank you!
Wow did you miss my point. My point is that if you're going to offend government officials, do it with a PURPOSE. I think government officials should be offended a LOT. They do stupid things and create stupid policies. But if you're going to do something that appears to be very threatening, you have to have your ducks in a row to get back out of trouble once you've exposed the government stupidity.
One thing that surprises me about Snowden is that I haven't heard a lot about protections he may have put in place through his attorney. If I were going to do something like that, I'd have my lawyers on standby. However, the fact that he was conveniently in Hong Kong after the blowout suggests that he probably did all that CYA and I just haven't read all the details.
I don't disagree with you. I'm just pointing out the fact that people will mine the Internet your past for reasons to criticize you. You can't change that.
Actually, criticizing the government (even specific officials) is not only a right, but it's a vital part of American politics. However, criticizing is not the same as threatening with bodily harm. With regard to Obama, you can threaten to say he's stupid, threaten to not vote for him, threaten to oppose him in all sorts of ways, threaten to not let him visit your city, etc. But you're a moron if you threaten his health, because even if you don't have the means, the secret service will take that very seriously. And sensible people will also criticise you for being a total moron.
And besides, even if someone were to succeed in harming the president, that would not affect the implementation of his policies, which is what you want to change, right? Instead, it would just make him a martyr for those policies.
Bottom line: Unless you're talking about burgulars entering your home or someone you're going to meet in a boxing ring, threatening physical harm is a really really stupid thing to do. For many cases, it's legal, but it's always stupid.
No, not anymore. Remember, we no longer have any right to be forgotten. :) Seriously, though, we not leave an indelible mark on the world when we say things on the internet, and future employers will scrutinize us based on that. There's no getting around that. This is particularly an issue in today's economy with floods of peolpe looking for jobs but so few jobs. Employers look for anything superficial to take you out of consideration, and they're not going to hire someone who did some stupid things as a kid in favor or someone who didn't (as far as they can tell).
You don't read well. I SAID it wasn't a fake bomb. And this has nothing to do with arresting anyone. It's about not going into the woods with meat strapped to your shirt and prodding bears with sticks.
I already replied to this thread, so I can't mod you up. I'm going to agree with you and disagree with the other respondents. When people make comments like he did, there is at least limited probable cause for investigation. Whether an arrest was warranted or not, I'm not sure, but you're right that it's hard to tell the false positives from the false negatives. You're even more right that this kid should simply not have said something so stupid and should not be surprised that it got him into trouble. His parents should beat the crap out of him (perhaps figuratively) for it.
Also, as for the arrest, let's keep in mind that he will not ultimately be convicted of any crime. Sometimes, innocent people get arrested and usually, the police figure out they have the wrong person (or someone who isn't a threat) before anything goes to trial, and many people are found not guilty at trial. A conviction here would indeed be a thread to freedom of speech. Being arrested and then let go is simply a warning that statements like his are a huge red flag, a strong-enough indication of a potential thread that they are worth looking into. (As I mentioned in my other post, if you're going to tick off the authorities, do it intentionally, for a good and productive reason, and have your ass covered.)
Put another way, there are many things that are legal (and should be legal for various reasons) that nevertheless (depending on the circumstances) are still unethical or just plain stupid. Compare this to the idea of disagreeing with someone but fighting for their right to nevertheless freely hold their opinion. It's not a contradiction to tell the kid he was stupid and at the same time the authorities not to criminally charge him for what he did.
I agree with others that since there's neither a direct threat nor any intent to harm anyone (quite obvously, I might add), this kid should not be in jail. However, his parents (not the government or the police) should take away his computer for being so stupid. People these days just don't think about the consequences of their actions. This reminds me of that MIT student who went to the airport with a "fake bomb" strapped to her chest. It wasn't a fake bomb, but she damn well should have known better than to think that TSA grunts were going to know the difference.
See, if you're trying to make a political statement, then it's sometimes necessary to do something like this. Like if you're trying to expose flaws in the TSA scanning systems or demonstrate principles of free speech. But that is NOT what these kids were trying to do at all. They were just being stupid and would have been better off doing something different. All they accomplished was to make things difficult for themselves. What I mean is, if you're going to tick off the authorities, do it for a REASON, with a meaningful and productive goal in mind, with your ass covered (i.e. your plan documented with your attorney) in the (likely) event that you get arrested. When the authorities inevitably screw up, they look stupid. Ticking off the authorities "by accident" like this just makes YOU look stupid.
One thing people keep neglecting to mention is that for the stuff we WANT to be public (e.g. source code), the cloud is a GREAT place to put it (but certainly not the only place we should put it).
BTW, "the cloud" is far too nebulous of a term for this discussion.
I have a doctorate in computer engineering. While working on that, I did coursework in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. While my CS courses were challenging, and I learned a lot, it was familiar territory with familiar thinking. In the social science courses, I had to think in a different way. Engiineering papers and psych papers are organized in totally different ways and have totally different concepts of proof. I came away from those courses not just more knowledgable but feeling as though I had grown as a person.
This is the kind of thing we want undergrads to get out of humanities, liberal arts, and social sciences. Make people think in unfamiliar ways, and then they'll come back to their own familiar domains with new approaches. It is this cross polination that forms the basis for fundamental approaches in psychology now; signal detection theory was brought over by an electrical engineer.
Also, if you're an engineer, and you want to meet really really smart women, take grad courses in psychology. :)
Computer Science is a theoretical discipline pertaining about things that you can make programs do and how programs are structured. It has always seemed to me that programming languages are just a tool that you learn on the side. Then again, I learned multiple programming languages before I finished high school, so my perspective may be a little skewed. What I can say is that my software designs after formal CS theoretical training are much better, because I'm smarter about how I go about solving problems. It also seems to me that if you don't have the motivation to learn some things on your own, then you're probably in the wrong degree program, because you're just not that interested. The people who try to breeze through a CS program on coursework alone are only there for the certification, and they're not the kinds of people I'd want to hire, because they're unlikely to give a crap enough about the job to do it well.
We whine and complain about the RIAA and MPAA suing people in bulk for sharing files on bit torrent. Our reasoning is that the record companies cheat the artists out of legitimate revenue and then they add on a new litigation-based business model so they can extract more revenue from people who may or may not have violated copyright. We justify some copyright violation as civil disobedience, because the media companies are criminals (in an ethical sense). There's a lot of truth and a lot of bullshit in that. I'm a fan of neither the media companies nor rampant copyright violation.
But with these subscription models, I don't see where you have room to complain. In general, we pay a small fee for access to unlimited streaming of digital content. If we don't like the price or customer service, we try another service. And the availability/uptime of these services is phenomenal. I'm a fan of subscription services, because I don't want to fill up my house with content that I'm only ever going to watch one time.
Anyhow, I don't get why you're advocating violating their terms of service. Do you think that all content should be free? That's absurd. The terms of service are generally "one account per household." Why is that so hard to accept? They're trying to make a profit so they can stay in business and continue to offer content, and they charge very reasonable fees.
Also, in general, sharing passwords is considered a no-no. Sure, if I have ssh on my home server, I can share passwords all I want, because it's MY SERVER. But if I share my passwords for my accounts at work, I can get fired. Why? Security breach, policy violation. For subscription services, it's a violation of terms of service. The punishment should be to have your account revoked to free up bandwidth for legitimate customers.
One reason why we don't want ubiquitous surveilance is that we don't want law enforcement mining people's daily activities looking for new things to make illegal. This would be too easy to do. Is Mr. X politically inconvenient? "Well, let's see if he does something regularly that we can argue people shouldn't do, and see lots of people do this, and a statiscal analysis shows that this behavior has certain negative consequences." Now, we have a new law specially tailored to allow the arrest of this person they don't like.
Another reason is that people do many "illegal" things that are not necessarily harmful or unethical at the time. If they weren't being monitored, they'd never be caught, because there are no consequences to anyone, so there would otherwise be nothing to trigger any investigation.
In this digital age, having to get a warrant for every search impedes the efficiency of law enforcement. And that is exactly why we want them to have to get warrants. Otherwise, the sorting factor that keeps people in and out of our crowded and money-sucking prisons needs to be objective based on evidence of wrongdoing and an impartial judge and jury. If law enforcement can make anything a crime, then the sorting factor becomes subjective based on corruption and which people police officers and prosecutors like.
That's a very Confucian concept.
I keep hearing this over and over from people. It seems like biologists are never educated in certain aspects of basic research. I know a CS grad student (who also has a degree in biology) who was talking about Google Scholar with some other biology grad students; they started taking notes because they'd never heard of it before. I asked how they managed to cite anything, and I was told that they do get the journals as they are published, and they do read, but they never SEARCH for anything.
No. It's not. Just as there is a dedicated Netflix app for the iPhone, there could be a dedicated Netflix app for Linux. It doesn't HAVE to be in a browser, using a common plugin. There's more than one way to skin a cat. It's not a DRM problem. It's a platform support problem.
I'm not a fan of DRM. If I purchase and download a video or audio file, I don't want some stupid protection scheme preventing me from playing it on arbitrary devices. I want to transcode it and watch it on my smart phone. I want to watch it on a Linux box.
But Netflix is a SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE. By paying a monthly fee, I get access to unlimited streaming content, with the tradeoff that I can't just suck content down to my computer and hoard it. So when I choose to end my subscription, access to the unlimited streaming ends. This is a perfectly reasonable business model. It's analogous to renting a DVD vs. buying one. If I buy one, I should be able to rip it. If I rent one, it's unethical for me to rip it. The DRM scheme is orthogonal to this moral dilemma. So as far as Netflix is concerned, the DRM is something I don't even need to know about it, as long as I'm able to reliably stream content I've paid for access to.
People complain about the patent protection on H.264 for content they want to download. But I believe the FSF has even pointed out how this is irrelevant for subscription streaming services. You're paying a subscription fee, and a small portion of this is paid to the patent holder to give you and your provider use of the technology. Keep in mind that patents aren't evil; they're just heavily abused. And use of patented technology in a streaming service isn't abusive (at least not in the case of Netflix).
In other words what we want isn't "no DRM." What we want is control over media we've rightfully paid for. Most of us aren't pirates. We just want our money's worth. What that means, in many cases, is a requirement for "no DRM." When you're using a subscripion service, failure to access the content you've paid for is an IT problem, not an abuse of DRM. (The fact that Netflix isn't yet available for Linux is a side issue. That's a gap in platform support, not a DRM problem.)
Oh, and one other point: Supporting DRM is WAY MORE of a pain for Netflix than it is for the user. For most users (except those on unsupported platforms), Netflix "just works." Netflix engineers have to wrestle with this stupid impediment in order to do what they really want to do, which is to stream content. But they can't get that content without satifying the content providers who demand the use of DRM. If you really want to pick on someone, go after the content companies.
Haha. That's funny. Unfortunately, their automated buzzword parsers don't do OCR.
Unfortunately, the way this particular Resume template organized the text, copy and paste from the PDF would get things munged together in the wrong orders. It was really weird. For instance, I think it laid it out so that the section titles on the left were "first", followed by the sections on the right. It didn't make a lot of sense to me. Really, copy/paste from the PDF was the first thing I thought of, but this was the weirdest PDF I'd ever encountered. I don't know if it's the fault of TeX or the template or what.
Yeah, SUNY-Binghamton. Excellent school for my particular research, and I love the topography here.
Actually, you have an excellent point. It makes sense that an organization would apply a degree of automated filtering. I'm sure they would be laughed at by anyone doing real natural language processing, but this is a theoretically reasonable statistical way to filter resumes. This is also a great revenue stream for those with inside knowledge about just what certain companies filters look for, matches that will be missed, and non-matches that will be false positives, etc.
This makes a solid case for having two CVs. And some automated application systems do allow you to put in two forms of the CV. They want a PDF form for the human, and then they want you to paste the content into a textarea for automated processing. Those should be structured in totally different ways.
In this market? Are you serious? I didn't leave any stone unturned. Not counting the various head-hunters, I applied for nearly 150 different academic positions. And probably around 50 industry positions. I got maybe a dozen responses, a few phone interviews, six real interviews, and four offers. (In retrospect, if I got 4 offers out of 6 in-person interviews, I'm actually kindof impressed with myself there. And I didn't even think my presentation was the most polished I'd ever seen.)
I came into this knowing that I'm trying to get a new job in a horrible economy. My CV had to stand out in both form AND content. I had to apply for absolutely everything out there, academic and industry. And head-hunters are just another way of looking for jobs. Why would I want to cut off that avenue of search? Sure, the probability of getting a good job that way is LOW, but it's not zero, and I'd been dealing with nothing but low probabilities the whole way along.
Oh, and one benefit to contacting multiple headhunters is that I DID get really useful constructive feedback on my CV that I took seriously and implemented.
People want to bitch about the effort involved in applying. What choice do we have? You have to at least slightly customize every application. I spent several hours a day for weeks and weeks, in two waves, applying for jobs. It's a statistics game for the employer, and it's a statistics game for the applicant, and I was under no illusion otherwise. I consider myself very fortunate that the move was only 500 miles away and the university (my new employer) paid for the move.
BTW, there are some things that really suck about moving to Upstate New York. Weird laws, lag payroll, waiting period for medical insurance. My wife was denied a drivers license for changing her name when we got married, until I got the local legislator involved (this is sexual discrimination). I have a long laundry list of things that really irritate me about being a NYS employee. But I try not to bitch too much, because I'm EXTREMELY FORTUNATE to have a job that I REALLY LIKE in an economy this horrible. Although I do want to take SOME credit for it, because I worked really damn hard to get here. A lot of people who bitch about problems finding jobs really just haven't worked very hard.