That's because the factors for the "it depends" answer depends on other aspects, like the exact characteristics of your application. Here's some rules of thumb:
NoSQL is good for statistics, where a few missing records won't matter. It's good for absorbing an enormous number of write operations at high speed. It's good for parallel computation across distributed data sets. It's good for when you have a lot of data to store, and little insight into how it will be queried in the future (management loves this one).
RDBMS is good for absolute consistency. It's good for serving an enormous number of parallel reads at high speeds. It's good for legacy applications, and applications that have to interface with legacy applications. It's good for small-scale projects that just need to work now. It's good for compatibility.
Of course there are exceptions to every statement I just made, but the nuances are subtle. Just bear in mind that NoSQL is generally more about single-record storage, where a RDBMS is by nature based around sets. If your algorithms are more easily applied to one model over the other, it might be a good indicator of what kind of storage to look at.
I agree wholeheartedly. We could apply it to comments whose authors clearly jumped to conclusions.
We should also have a "knowledgeable people who use their practical skills to attempt an idea that seems insane to uninformed bystanders" tag, but that's not as short and appealing.
Oh look, another Slashdot AC troll who thinks a handful of paragraphs explains a person.
My opinion of African politics comes mostly from the collective opinions of a group of Peace Corps volunteers I met, who had all been in their projects at least a year already. I asked them why it seemed so hard to get anything done in my own project, and they explained the political problems they'd run into. The next few months reaffirmed what they'd said, to the point where I saw a small labor dispute (where one tradesman refused to work with a tradesman from another tribe) erupt into violence, with shootings in both tribes' areas of the city.
I get a little annoyed when people claim that the solution to wasted resources is to dump in more resources, rather than fix the mismanagement of what's already there. You can go ahead and assume you understand my motivations and my character, and I'll continue to assume you're just a jackass.
I absolutely agree. There are needs for volunteers in every city in every country, needing practically every skill. The troll mentioned a subject I actually have firsthand knowledge of, and pissed me off. As an aside, I personally don't do much for the local homeless. My wife's the one who manages an annual fundraiser and awareness event with a local youth group.
When I was there, condoms ran about 15 cents each, which was the price of a small meal for one person from a street vendor. They were sold in boxes with porn on the package.
Birth control pills were only rarely available, because you had to find a doctor who would actually support their use. Unfortunately a few unscrupulous Christian missionaries have managed to spread misinformation about the rates of side effects.
True, but I didn't write the post for the mods. I wrote it because it pisses me off to see a troll talking about the starving kids in Africa that he's never seen and really doesn't care about. I wrote it mostly to blow off a bit of steam and partly to express what I saw firsthand.
However, the +1 mods do help to spread ideas. Currently my comment is the only +5 on this article, and that puts it on the RSS feed and in AlterSlash, too. Maybe, just maybe, someone will read it and decide to do something more meaningful to help, like volunteer for Peace Corps or even just be a friendlier person. Here's hoping.
What local dictators should be overthrown, and who should replace them? A foreign leader won't be accepted by the locals, and a local will have the same millennia-long history of tribal politics swaying their decisions. Sure, you could go for that silly "democracy" thing, but who will run the elections? More locals who have been taught that the tribe is more important than the nation?
No, the first step is acceptance of each other, and more reliable distribution of resources. After that, the tribes can live together without competing, and from there peace can grow.
Those problems really depend on what organizations you're dealing with. I was volunteering with an organization that collected school supplies. I brought a whole suitcase of miscellaneous supplies, and it went right into the storage closet at the school I was teaching in. I brought some food, too, which I cooked up personally and brought to an end-of-term party for the students, supplementing their rice-and-peanuts lunch with a small bowl of macaroni and cheese.
The majority of "free stuff" problems come from charities that don't actually have people on the ground managing the whole project end-to-end. Some American charity will gather cans of food, ship them to some government contact, and that corrupt contact will just take the food and hand it out however he wants (according to the aforementioned tribal and familial prejudices), maybe being considerate enough to forge a nice letter from a local chief.
In contrast, one well-known organization whose volunteers I met was Peace Corps. Their volunteers are dropped alone into some of the worst-off villages, with some survival gear (water purifier, first aid supplies, and whatever region-specific resources they need), project plans (for projects like preparing farmland, building granaries, or digging wells) and access to liaisons for anything else they need. Typically, the village chiefs have worked for years to get a volunteer, so their work is almost always greatly appreciated by the locals, and especially the ones who look past the politics toward the future of the village. I was told a story about a female Peace Corps volunteer who was attacked, and the chief lined up everyone in the village for her to pick out the attacker.
That's the kind of organization that does the most good: where the entire process is under the supervision of people with nothing to gain, and the "handouts" don't start until the entire local society is heavily invested. Then there's enough riding on the project's success that the local tribal chiefs will be honestly supportive, and the villagers won't disappoint the chiefs. There's still no guarantee of absolute success, but at least the local politics will work in the project's favor.
Hi. I'm a computer scientist who spent a few months volunteering in rural Africa. You know what I saw? Cell phones everywhere. Those starving kids can barely feed themselves, but they have a cell phone. You see, the cell phone connects them to their father who moved to the city to earn enough to feed them, and with the cell phone, they pay about 10 cents a week to periodically call him and say what they need. Then he goes to market, buys a sack of rice, some spices, and whatever else they can afford, and makes the day-long trek back to the village to feed his family. In previous decades, the communication wouldn't be possible, so the family would gamble on how long they could stretch food until the father was scheduled to return, If they guessed too long, they run out of food, and have to go hungry (or pay higher local prices) until the father came back. If they guessed too short, the father makes extra trips (which cost about a full day's wage).
Granted, the starving families didn't often have smartphones, but they did have old Nokia models and cheap Chinese phones. Smartphones weren't even that big in America while I was there, so I'd expect to find a good number of them in Africa now. First-world technology doesn't just stay in the first world. Like everything other technology, it spreads across the globe, generally improving lives.
So now I ask, what are you doing about the problem of starving children in Africa? Trolling on Slashdot won't help them, nor will throwing insults at your fellow man. In fact, that haste to insult is exactly part of the problem: There is plenty of food in most areas of Africa, with massive surpluses in some regions. Due to tribal and religions politics, the trade is severely restricted. In some cases, children are trained from birth to hate people from other tribes, and that the other tribes don't deserve to have possessions. When these children grow up, they're the perpetrators of the genocides, crop burnings, and highway robberies that disrupt the distribution of food.
Let's lead by example. Support endeavors for their merits, and respect all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender identity, age, or any other criteria. Let's just try to play nice, and help those we can, either directly or indirectly.
A lot of money was wasted making those silly 9-letter acronyms to be printed in hundreds of thousands of textbooks, and now they all have to be redone! The economic burden is astronomical.
What types of crimes does the Secret Service investigate?
The Secret Service has primary jurisdiction to investigate threats against Secret Service protectees as well as financial crimes, which include counterfeiting of U.S. currency or other U.S. Government obligations; forgery or theft of U.S. Treasury checks, bonds or other securities; credit card fraud; telecommunications fraud; computer fraud, identify fraud and certain other crimes affecting federally insured financial institutions.
Emphasis mine. The term "fraud" is conveniently vague in most legal definitions, but generally covers any unauthorized appropriation of equipment or identity for any unauthorized purpose, like installing your own program on a store's display computers.
I did not say I worked at an Apple store. I worked at a large multi-industry multinational corporation that recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. I'd assume the Apple training videos don't date from 1970, but I'd also assume the same reasoning applies for the confidentiality: They'd rather not waste the time and money remaking their training materials whenever someone on the Internet finds something they don't like.
My understanding is that they don't touch any investment themselves unless it's squeaky-clean, highly rated, and grossly undervalued. The mere mention of Goldman Sachs investing in something is likely to make the value jump, not so much from insider knowledge, but from a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So where's the few thousand stories generated each day from business deals that go perfectly well? What site can I visit to read the sensational headline "Yet another thing went as expected; business continues as normal"?
The "little guys" like to hear about how they're being oppressed, and the evil bad nasty Big Corporation is persecuting them. It forms solidarity, and brings warm fuzzy feelings of community to those "little guys", while the people in the Big Corporation get a good laugh at how unrealistic the story is.
Disclaimer: I currently work with one of those Big Corporations, with an office right down the hall from the lunchroom, where I get to hear all the laughter, often interrupting some mentally-intensive work.
Except that it's not really relevant. Two years is a long time in high finance, and a screwup by a company's division on a different continent is a long way from calling the whole company a "known fraudster". Just because Goldman Sachs declined one particular investment deal (which, not seeing further details, I must assume to be a generic capital-campaign investment) does not mean Lernaut & Hauspie are suddenly banned from further investments, and especially not a purchase deal that's within their field.
That's my interpretation, too. The job is permanent; the person filling it not so much. If the plant's expected minimum staff is 20, that means that at all times through the plant's life, 20 people will be employed (ideally). Of course, more may be brought on for construction, upgrades, or maintenance, but those wouldn't be considered permanent.
So you are saying Apple other than handing off the information (and the computers) to the authorities has to be involved with every step?
No, but at some point they would have been consulted to see if they wanted to proceed.
When you report a crime to the police, are you involved with every step of their investigation? The police and Secret Service probably want to do the investigation on their own. The last time someone took something from my car, I didn't tag along with the detective or ask the tech guys if they processed the fingerprints.
If they had ever caught someone, you'd be asked if you wanted to press charges. If they had suspects, there's a good chance you'd be shown a set of pictures and be asked if you recognize anyone.
This artist who broke laws has no consequences to his own actions?
The artist should face consequences, but of the "mild discomfort and inconvenience" variety that the Apple stores faced when they couldn't explain what the display computers had just done.
Just above you said that Apple should have been more involved but then you blame them for actions that they didn't take even though they were not more involved.
In TFA, the artist mentions that he had pictures of an Apple technician working with the program. They did some of their own investigation. It's reasonable to assume that they could figure out what was going on, and they chose to pass it to the Secret Service.
If someone breaks into my house and steals things; I report it to the police. The police put the thief into jail where he gets stabbed to death, you are saying that I screwed this guy's life?
In that circumstance, no. The thief (barring mental disorders) would probably know that what he was doing was outright against the law, and he made the conscious decision to screw up his own life. In another example that I think is a little more fitting, let's suppose you have a large lawn that borders a public park with no fence. If someone wanders into your yard, you could report them for trespassing. If you're a nice guy, you politely tell them that the park is back there, and they're currently walking over your work-in-progress miniature golf course. If you're out to screw up their life, you pull out the Castle Doctrine and start shooting.
The artist should have thought more about the legal implications of his methods,
Apple should have tried to quietly just end the project with discussion rather than force.
The Secret Service apparently followed their protocol well, and from TFA don't seem too objectionable, so my only objections to them are the standard-issue complaints about federal law enforcement (confiscations lasting far too long, generally hostile demeanor, provocation, etc...).
I'd expect Apple to have been fully involved in the case. It would have to have been one of their staff who noticed the guy installing application (or the app itself), one of their legal representatives who passed it to the Secret Service, and once the Secret Service's investigation showed who it was and (roughly) what was going on, they probably got a call asking "Is this one of your guys?" to make sure the Secret Service wasn't about to raid the home of a hired security consultant or the like.
Somewhere along the line, an Apple representative made the decision to screw up this guy's life for a while. That's bad enough to disgust me.
...so it's like any other company? For a while I worked at a large corporation covering many roles, and I noticed the same air of secrecy, but upon asking, I was given reasons for it.
All training is confidential, because certain statements are easier to convey in an informal setting, but the public would get agitated by them. One training video I watched was incredibly sexist. All the food service jobs were depicted by women, and the operations were handled by men. The video was made in 1970, so it's pretty easy, in an internal setting, to just not care. Another training session included the statement of "don't do X, because it is offensive to group Y". Someone could take offense that group Y was being singled out as being troublesome. Rather than scour every piece of training material, and remake it whenever yet another term is deemed offensive, the training is just declared confidential, and (good) managers start each training session with the phrase "This stuff is really old and a little politically incorrect. Sorry about that."
During the shadowing experience, you're still considered as being in training. You don't know everything, and even if you do know something, there's a good chance you'll screw up the protocol the company wants you to follow. Maybe there's an easy fix for a broken Apple product, but it only works for certain models. A helpful eager newbie might tell the customer the fix, which could void their warranty and make things worse, while an experienced staff member knows to just escalate such issues to someone who can find the appropriate solution for the model.
Once your sales training is complete, you're a salesman. You're in the sales department, not PR. You might hear rumors of a product the company doesn't want to announce yet, so you're not allowed to talk about it. If someone has a major injury on your sales floor, you aren't allowed to speak to the press about it, because you aren't likely to say just the right thing to align with the company image, and you probably don't have all the facts of the situation, anyway.
The first rule of being a corporate minion is that you do not talk about being a corporate minion. You assume you aren't the all-seeing all-knowing god of the world, and you say only what the manager tells you to say, which has been decided by the various committees that are higher up than you are, who are working with a big-picture view of what the company as a whole wants to say to the world.
As an avid fan of "people doing what's right", I find I can't really support anybody in this case.
The artist (yeah, I'll grant him the liberal use of the term, and give him the freedom to declare his work as art) should have considered the effect of his work on others... not just the final product, but the production. He could have worked with the store to come to a mutually-acceptable agreement, he could have staged the pictures with actual models making the expressions seen in the surreptitious photos, or he could have conveyed his message (whatever that may be) in another medium that doesn't involve as much disrespect for the people and organizations involved.
Apple, once offended, could have sent a letter, or a lawyer, a C&D notice, or maybe just shoot for a restraining order against the artist ever entering their stores again. To draw in the federal government to raid the guy's house? That's pretty extreme. It's so extreme that I wonder if there's more to this story than we're being told. I mean, it makes sense in a jumping-to-conclusions sort of way. The guy installed his own application onto every computer in a store, without management approval. That's malicious activity, and could be construed as a target malware attack.
Apple's supposed to be a computer company, though. would it have really been so hard to look at the program and see what it did? Maybe send the guy a final picture of the manager holding a note reading "We're uninstalling your program; don't ever set foot in here again", and be done with it? They instead chose to go straight to the nuclear option.
Good job, everyone involved. You've disgusted a very patient and accepting person. I hope you are all happy with yourselves.
Holy Ad Hominem, Batman! If your paragraphs were just a bit shorter, or you used just a little bold text, I'd expect the post to be signed "APK"...
Irrelevant.
On the contrary. At birth (and by extension, your ancestors' births), you have exactly nothing of value. Since all trade consists of getting something you value for something someone else values, you must start with something valuable. Somewhere through your life, you (or your charitable benefactor) had to do something to create the initial value, which could then be sold.
You can either create this value by producing something directly (expending effort in its production) or by facilitating trade between others (thereby expending effort in the transport, marketing, and management of the intermediate goods). In the latter case, you are producing an intangible trade route, which has some value in itself created by the effort you expended to found it.
What you produce does not equate to value.
Then what's the motivation to produce it? Sure, there's lots of things to be made that other people don't hold as valuable, but the producer does. The exact quantity of value does not have to be perfectly in agreement by all parties - indeed, little trade would ever occur if this were the case.
Physical possessions that I or others decide have value (there's no absolute value). Possession is a social contract.
Okay. The contract is simple enough: You respect my valuation of what I have, and I'll respect your valuation of what you have, and neither of us will diminish that value.
There's no value [i]mbued in possessions themselves. The characteristics of the possessions are of no value. - This includes the details on a specific item (for example, the dimples on a golfball or the bits on disk). That's the assertion.
No, that's begging the question. As an aside, the arrangement of dimples on a golf ball is a fascinating branch of study in aerodynamics, and finding the perfect arrangement that maximizes range (or stabilizes flight, or any other particular desired effect that may or may not adhere to official rules) is something that many golfers would find very valuable, but it will take an enormous amount of effort by mathematicians and physicists to develop.
Now, if I produce a certain piece of knowledge, such as the perfect dimple arrangement, it is as the result of my own investment of effort. Am I under a moral obligation to give away the fruits of my mental labor to the world, for little or no return? If so, then why is that different from a physical effort, whose fruits almost never lose value? When a physical product is acquired without the producer agreeing to the contract, it's clearly labeled as theft. Why is mental work devalued?
If I copy the details/likeness there is pressure to reimburse "copyright holders", a legal concept (social contract) as if something was lost (opportunity for credit).
I agree so far...
I recognize it as social pressure born of social contracts which I do not abide by.
...And now we're into the unfair part.
There is no moral obligation unless I choose to participate...
By accepting the producer's work, you are agreeing to participate. Then you are throwing his half of the contract out the window by rejecting his terms, but still keeping the product, effectively stealing a portion of the producer's effort. You do have the option to absolve yourself of any moral obligation by not dealing with the producer at all, but that means you don't get to benefit from his work.
Being told I am agreeing to unknown parties when agreeing to another is just another sham by retailers and lawmakers to create moral obligation where there is none.
Water, O2, those minerals people pulled from the Earth... The value is already there to be worth the effort to the human.
So you pay for every breath you take and every molecule of water you absorb? No? Perhaps it isn't so inherently valuable in the ubiquitous form.
The value is ascribed to the substance when someone wants it enough to exert effort to make it available, by separating the oxygen from other gasses, or laying pipes to carry the water. If someone is in a situation that requires more effort to get the water or oxygen (say, for instance, being in a polluted city or on a space station), they will value the substance higher, and someone who values their own effort highly can make a profit selling the ubiquitous substance.
Perhaps we should live in a world where we are forced to tithe the descendents of Throkk, the caveman who invented fire, every time we strike a match?
Sounds good. We'll divide the value of his effort equally among every person who's ever used his invention, and arrive at an infinitesimal amount, which I consider covered when someone says, "Gee, it sure is nice humans have conquered fire". Thanks, Throkk.
China executes roughly 5000-8000 people each year for various crimes. The United States has been declining since 1999, and is currently somewhere around 40 per year. Accounting for (rather than ignoring) scale, China executes about 30 to 40 times as much of its own population as the United States. Of course, that's just one metric, but it's pretty illustrative.
China is big, but it's not big enough to dilute its atrocities.
I have no idea what you're trying to say, so I will assume you are practicing a typing lesson. Given the word choice, I'll also assume it's based on some post-modern poetry.
I estimate a speed of about 30 words per minute. Keep trying, you're doing great!
I'm a programmer too. I can only speak for myself as well, but fuck everything about that pricing.
It's pretty obvious that the authors are grossly overvaluing their work. This still doesn't give potential customers the right to force them to accept a different valuation, though. The options are to pay the high price, don't use the upgrades, or try to communicate with the authors to negotiate a more reasonable deal.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because the factors for the "it depends" answer depends on other aspects, like the exact characteristics of your application. Here's some rules of thumb:
NoSQL is good for statistics, where a few missing records won't matter. It's good for absorbing an enormous number of write operations at high speed. It's good for parallel computation across distributed data sets. It's good for when you have a lot of data to store, and little insight into how it will be queried in the future (management loves this one).
RDBMS is good for absolute consistency. It's good for serving an enormous number of parallel reads at high speeds. It's good for legacy applications, and applications that have to interface with legacy applications. It's good for small-scale projects that just need to work now. It's good for compatibility.
Of course there are exceptions to every statement I just made, but the nuances are subtle. Just bear in mind that NoSQL is generally more about single-record storage, where a RDBMS is by nature based around sets. If your algorithms are more easily applied to one model over the other, it might be a good indicator of what kind of storage to look at.
I agree wholeheartedly. We could apply it to comments whose authors clearly jumped to conclusions.
We should also have a "knowledgeable people who use their practical skills to attempt an idea that seems insane to uninformed bystanders" tag, but that's not as short and appealing.
Oh look, another Slashdot AC troll who thinks a handful of paragraphs explains a person.
My opinion of African politics comes mostly from the collective opinions of a group of Peace Corps volunteers I met, who had all been in their projects at least a year already. I asked them why it seemed so hard to get anything done in my own project, and they explained the political problems they'd run into. The next few months reaffirmed what they'd said, to the point where I saw a small labor dispute (where one tradesman refused to work with a tradesman from another tribe) erupt into violence, with shootings in both tribes' areas of the city.
I get a little annoyed when people claim that the solution to wasted resources is to dump in more resources, rather than fix the mismanagement of what's already there. You can go ahead and assume you understand my motivations and my character, and I'll continue to assume you're just a jackass.
Your cousin seems nice, though.
I absolutely agree. There are needs for volunteers in every city in every country, needing practically every skill. The troll mentioned a subject I actually have firsthand knowledge of, and pissed me off. As an aside, I personally don't do much for the local homeless. My wife's the one who manages an annual fundraiser and awareness event with a local youth group.
When I was there, condoms ran about 15 cents each, which was the price of a small meal for one person from a street vendor. They were sold in boxes with porn on the package.
Birth control pills were only rarely available, because you had to find a doctor who would actually support their use. Unfortunately a few unscrupulous Christian missionaries have managed to spread misinformation about the rates of side effects.
True, but I didn't write the post for the mods. I wrote it because it pisses me off to see a troll talking about the starving kids in Africa that he's never seen and really doesn't care about. I wrote it mostly to blow off a bit of steam and partly to express what I saw firsthand.
However, the +1 mods do help to spread ideas. Currently my comment is the only +5 on this article, and that puts it on the RSS feed and in AlterSlash, too. Maybe, just maybe, someone will read it and decide to do something more meaningful to help, like volunteer for Peace Corps or even just be a friendlier person. Here's hoping.
What local dictators should be overthrown, and who should replace them? A foreign leader won't be accepted by the locals, and a local will have the same millennia-long history of tribal politics swaying their decisions. Sure, you could go for that silly "democracy" thing, but who will run the elections? More locals who have been taught that the tribe is more important than the nation?
No, the first step is acceptance of each other, and more reliable distribution of resources. After that, the tribes can live together without competing, and from there peace can grow.
Those problems really depend on what organizations you're dealing with. I was volunteering with an organization that collected school supplies. I brought a whole suitcase of miscellaneous supplies, and it went right into the storage closet at the school I was teaching in. I brought some food, too, which I cooked up personally and brought to an end-of-term party for the students, supplementing their rice-and-peanuts lunch with a small bowl of macaroni and cheese.
The majority of "free stuff" problems come from charities that don't actually have people on the ground managing the whole project end-to-end. Some American charity will gather cans of food, ship them to some government contact, and that corrupt contact will just take the food and hand it out however he wants (according to the aforementioned tribal and familial prejudices), maybe being considerate enough to forge a nice letter from a local chief.
In contrast, one well-known organization whose volunteers I met was Peace Corps. Their volunteers are dropped alone into some of the worst-off villages, with some survival gear (water purifier, first aid supplies, and whatever region-specific resources they need), project plans (for projects like preparing farmland, building granaries, or digging wells) and access to liaisons for anything else they need. Typically, the village chiefs have worked for years to get a volunteer, so their work is almost always greatly appreciated by the locals, and especially the ones who look past the politics toward the future of the village. I was told a story about a female Peace Corps volunteer who was attacked, and the chief lined up everyone in the village for her to pick out the attacker.
That's the kind of organization that does the most good: where the entire process is under the supervision of people with nothing to gain, and the "handouts" don't start until the entire local society is heavily invested. Then there's enough riding on the project's success that the local tribal chiefs will be honestly supportive, and the villagers won't disappoint the chiefs. There's still no guarantee of absolute success, but at least the local politics will work in the project's favor.
Hi. I'm a computer scientist who spent a few months volunteering in rural Africa. You know what I saw? Cell phones everywhere. Those starving kids can barely feed themselves, but they have a cell phone. You see, the cell phone connects them to their father who moved to the city to earn enough to feed them, and with the cell phone, they pay about 10 cents a week to periodically call him and say what they need. Then he goes to market, buys a sack of rice, some spices, and whatever else they can afford, and makes the day-long trek back to the village to feed his family. In previous decades, the communication wouldn't be possible, so the family would gamble on how long they could stretch food until the father was scheduled to return, If they guessed too long, they run out of food, and have to go hungry (or pay higher local prices) until the father came back. If they guessed too short, the father makes extra trips (which cost about a full day's wage).
Granted, the starving families didn't often have smartphones, but they did have old Nokia models and cheap Chinese phones. Smartphones weren't even that big in America while I was there, so I'd expect to find a good number of them in Africa now. First-world technology doesn't just stay in the first world. Like everything other technology, it spreads across the globe, generally improving lives.
So now I ask, what are you doing about the problem of starving children in Africa? Trolling on Slashdot won't help them, nor will throwing insults at your fellow man. In fact, that haste to insult is exactly part of the problem: There is plenty of food in most areas of Africa, with massive surpluses in some regions. Due to tribal and religions politics, the trade is severely restricted. In some cases, children are trained from birth to hate people from other tribes, and that the other tribes don't deserve to have possessions. When these children grow up, they're the perpetrators of the genocides, crop burnings, and highway robberies that disrupt the distribution of food.
Let's lead by example. Support endeavors for their merits, and respect all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender identity, age, or any other criteria. Let's just try to play nice, and help those we can, either directly or indirectly.
A lot of money was wasted making those silly 9-letter acronyms to be printed in hundreds of thousands of textbooks, and now they all have to be redone! The economic burden is astronomical.
What types of crimes does the Secret Service investigate?
The Secret Service has primary jurisdiction to investigate threats against Secret Service protectees as well as financial crimes, which include counterfeiting of U.S. currency or other U.S. Government obligations; forgery or theft of U.S. Treasury checks, bonds or other securities; credit card fraud; telecommunications fraud; computer fraud, identify fraud and certain other crimes affecting federally insured financial institutions.
Emphasis mine. The term "fraud" is conveniently vague in most legal definitions, but generally covers any unauthorized appropriation of equipment or identity for any unauthorized purpose, like installing your own program on a store's display computers.
I did not say I worked at an Apple store. I worked at a large multi-industry multinational corporation that recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. I'd assume the Apple training videos don't date from 1970, but I'd also assume the same reasoning applies for the confidentiality: They'd rather not waste the time and money remaking their training materials whenever someone on the Internet finds something they don't like.
My understanding is that they don't touch any investment themselves unless it's squeaky-clean, highly rated, and grossly undervalued. The mere mention of Goldman Sachs investing in something is likely to make the value jump, not so much from insider knowledge, but from a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So where's the few thousand stories generated each day from business deals that go perfectly well? What site can I visit to read the sensational headline "Yet another thing went as expected; business continues as normal"?
The "little guys" like to hear about how they're being oppressed, and the evil bad nasty Big Corporation is persecuting them. It forms solidarity, and brings warm fuzzy feelings of community to those "little guys", while the people in the Big Corporation get a good laugh at how unrealistic the story is.
Disclaimer: I currently work with one of those Big Corporations, with an office right down the hall from the lunchroom, where I get to hear all the laughter, often interrupting some mentally-intensive work.
Except that it's not really relevant. Two years is a long time in high finance, and a screwup by a company's division on a different continent is a long way from calling the whole company a "known fraudster". Just because Goldman Sachs declined one particular investment deal (which, not seeing further details, I must assume to be a generic capital-campaign investment) does not mean Lernaut & Hauspie are suddenly banned from further investments, and especially not a purchase deal that's within their field.
That's my interpretation, too. The job is permanent; the person filling it not so much. If the plant's expected minimum staff is 20, that means that at all times through the plant's life, 20 people will be employed (ideally). Of course, more may be brought on for construction, upgrades, or maintenance, but those wouldn't be considered permanent.
So you are saying Apple other than handing off the information (and the computers) to the authorities has to be involved with every step?
No, but at some point they would have been consulted to see if they wanted to proceed.
When you report a crime to the police, are you involved with every step of their investigation? The police and Secret Service probably want to do the investigation on their own. The last time someone took something from my car, I didn't tag along with the detective or ask the tech guys if they processed the fingerprints.
If they had ever caught someone, you'd be asked if you wanted to press charges. If they had suspects, there's a good chance you'd be shown a set of pictures and be asked if you recognize anyone.
This artist who broke laws has no consequences to his own actions?
The artist should face consequences, but of the "mild discomfort and inconvenience" variety that the Apple stores faced when they couldn't explain what the display computers had just done.
Just above you said that Apple should have been more involved but then you blame them for actions that they didn't take even though they were not more involved.
In TFA, the artist mentions that he had pictures of an Apple technician working with the program. They did some of their own investigation. It's reasonable to assume that they could figure out what was going on, and they chose to pass it to the Secret Service.
If someone breaks into my house and steals things; I report it to the police. The police put the thief into jail where he gets stabbed to death, you are saying that I screwed this guy's life?
In that circumstance, no. The thief (barring mental disorders) would probably know that what he was doing was outright against the law, and he made the conscious decision to screw up his own life. In another example that I think is a little more fitting, let's suppose you have a large lawn that borders a public park with no fence. If someone wanders into your yard, you could report them for trespassing. If you're a nice guy, you politely tell them that the park is back there, and they're currently walking over your work-in-progress miniature golf course. If you're out to screw up their life, you pull out the Castle Doctrine and start shooting.
The artist should have thought more about the legal implications of his methods,
Apple should have tried to quietly just end the project with discussion rather than force.
The Secret Service apparently followed their protocol well, and from TFA don't seem too objectionable, so my only objections to them are the standard-issue complaints about federal law enforcement (confiscations lasting far too long, generally hostile demeanor, provocation, etc...).
I'd expect Apple to have been fully involved in the case. It would have to have been one of their staff who noticed the guy installing application (or the app itself), one of their legal representatives who passed it to the Secret Service, and once the Secret Service's investigation showed who it was and (roughly) what was going on, they probably got a call asking "Is this one of your guys?" to make sure the Secret Service wasn't about to raid the home of a hired security consultant or the like.
Somewhere along the line, an Apple representative made the decision to screw up this guy's life for a while. That's bad enough to disgust me.
...so it's like any other company? For a while I worked at a large corporation covering many roles, and I noticed the same air of secrecy, but upon asking, I was given reasons for it.
All training is confidential, because certain statements are easier to convey in an informal setting, but the public would get agitated by them. One training video I watched was incredibly sexist. All the food service jobs were depicted by women, and the operations were handled by men. The video was made in 1970, so it's pretty easy, in an internal setting, to just not care. Another training session included the statement of "don't do X, because it is offensive to group Y". Someone could take offense that group Y was being singled out as being troublesome. Rather than scour every piece of training material, and remake it whenever yet another term is deemed offensive, the training is just declared confidential, and (good) managers start each training session with the phrase "This stuff is really old and a little politically incorrect. Sorry about that."
During the shadowing experience, you're still considered as being in training. You don't know everything, and even if you do know something, there's a good chance you'll screw up the protocol the company wants you to follow. Maybe there's an easy fix for a broken Apple product, but it only works for certain models. A helpful eager newbie might tell the customer the fix, which could void their warranty and make things worse, while an experienced staff member knows to just escalate such issues to someone who can find the appropriate solution for the model.
Once your sales training is complete, you're a salesman. You're in the sales department, not PR. You might hear rumors of a product the company doesn't want to announce yet, so you're not allowed to talk about it. If someone has a major injury on your sales floor, you aren't allowed to speak to the press about it, because you aren't likely to say just the right thing to align with the company image, and you probably don't have all the facts of the situation, anyway.
The first rule of being a corporate minion is that you do not talk about being a corporate minion. You assume you aren't the all-seeing all-knowing god of the world, and you say only what the manager tells you to say, which has been decided by the various committees that are higher up than you are, who are working with a big-picture view of what the company as a whole wants to say to the world.
As an avid fan of "people doing what's right", I find I can't really support anybody in this case.
The artist (yeah, I'll grant him the liberal use of the term, and give him the freedom to declare his work as art) should have considered the effect of his work on others... not just the final product, but the production. He could have worked with the store to come to a mutually-acceptable agreement, he could have staged the pictures with actual models making the expressions seen in the surreptitious photos, or he could have conveyed his message (whatever that may be) in another medium that doesn't involve as much disrespect for the people and organizations involved.
Apple, once offended, could have sent a letter, or a lawyer, a C&D notice, or maybe just shoot for a restraining order against the artist ever entering their stores again. To draw in the federal government to raid the guy's house? That's pretty extreme. It's so extreme that I wonder if there's more to this story than we're being told. I mean, it makes sense in a jumping-to-conclusions sort of way. The guy installed his own application onto every computer in a store, without management approval. That's malicious activity, and could be construed as a target malware attack.
Apple's supposed to be a computer company, though. would it have really been so hard to look at the program and see what it did? Maybe send the guy a final picture of the manager holding a note reading "We're uninstalling your program; don't ever set foot in here again", and be done with it? They instead chose to go straight to the nuclear option.
Good job, everyone involved. You've disgusted a very patient and accepting person. I hope you are all happy with yourselves.
Holy Ad Hominem, Batman! If your paragraphs were just a bit shorter, or you used just a little bold text, I'd expect the post to be signed "APK"...
Irrelevant.
On the contrary. At birth (and by extension, your ancestors' births), you have exactly nothing of value. Since all trade consists of getting something you value for something someone else values, you must start with something valuable. Somewhere through your life, you (or your charitable benefactor) had to do something to create the initial value, which could then be sold.
You can either create this value by producing something directly (expending effort in its production) or by facilitating trade between others (thereby expending effort in the transport, marketing, and management of the intermediate goods). In the latter case, you are producing an intangible trade route, which has some value in itself created by the effort you expended to found it.
What you produce does not equate to value.
Then what's the motivation to produce it? Sure, there's lots of things to be made that other people don't hold as valuable, but the producer does. The exact quantity of value does not have to be perfectly in agreement by all parties - indeed, little trade would ever occur if this were the case.
Physical possessions that I or others decide have value (there's no absolute value). Possession is a social contract.
Okay. The contract is simple enough: You respect my valuation of what I have, and I'll respect your valuation of what you have, and neither of us will diminish that value.
There's no value [i]mbued in possessions themselves. The characteristics of the possessions are of no value. - This includes the details on a specific item (for example, the dimples on a golfball or the bits on disk). That's the assertion.
No, that's begging the question. As an aside, the arrangement of dimples on a golf ball is a fascinating branch of study in aerodynamics, and finding the perfect arrangement that maximizes range (or stabilizes flight, or any other particular desired effect that may or may not adhere to official rules) is something that many golfers would find very valuable, but it will take an enormous amount of effort by mathematicians and physicists to develop.
Now, if I produce a certain piece of knowledge, such as the perfect dimple arrangement, it is as the result of my own investment of effort. Am I under a moral obligation to give away the fruits of my mental labor to the world, for little or no return? If so, then why is that different from a physical effort, whose fruits almost never lose value? When a physical product is acquired without the producer agreeing to the contract, it's clearly labeled as theft. Why is mental work devalued?
If I copy the details/likeness there is pressure to reimburse "copyright holders", a legal concept (social contract) as if something was lost (opportunity for credit).
I agree so far...
I recognize it as social pressure born of social contracts which I do not abide by.
...And now we're into the unfair part.
There is no moral obligation unless I choose to participate...
By accepting the producer's work, you are agreeing to participate. Then you are throwing his half of the contract out the window by rejecting his terms, but still keeping the product, effectively stealing a portion of the producer's effort. You do have the option to absolve yourself of any moral obligation by not dealing with the producer at all, but that means you don't get to benefit from his work.
Being told I am agreeing to unknown parties when agreeing to another is just another sham by retailers and lawmakers to create moral obligation where there is none.
It's a
Water, O2, those minerals people pulled from the Earth... The value is already there to be worth the effort to the human.
So you pay for every breath you take and every molecule of water you absorb? No? Perhaps it isn't so inherently valuable in the ubiquitous form.
The value is ascribed to the substance when someone wants it enough to exert effort to make it available, by separating the oxygen from other gasses, or laying pipes to carry the water. If someone is in a situation that requires more effort to get the water or oxygen (say, for instance, being in a polluted city or on a space station), they will value the substance higher, and someone who values their own effort highly can make a profit selling the ubiquitous substance.
Perhaps we should live in a world where we are forced to tithe the descendents of Throkk, the caveman who invented fire, every time we strike a match?
Sounds good. We'll divide the value of his effort equally among every person who's ever used his invention, and arrive at an infinitesimal amount, which I consider covered when someone says, "Gee, it sure is nice humans have conquered fire". Thanks, Throkk.
China executes roughly 5000-8000 people each year for various crimes. The United States has been declining since 1999, and is currently somewhere around 40 per year. Accounting for (rather than ignoring) scale, China executes about 30 to 40 times as much of its own population as the United States. Of course, that's just one metric, but it's pretty illustrative.
China is big, but it's not big enough to dilute its atrocities.
I have no idea what you're trying to say, so I will assume you are practicing a typing lesson. Given the word choice, I'll also assume it's based on some post-modern poetry.
I estimate a speed of about 30 words per minute. Keep trying, you're doing great!
I'm a programmer too. I can only speak for myself as well, but fuck everything about that pricing.
It's pretty obvious that the authors are grossly overvaluing their work. This still doesn't give potential customers the right to force them to accept a different valuation, though. The options are to pay the high price, don't use the upgrades, or try to communicate with the authors to negotiate a more reasonable deal.