apparently the federal government's anti-discrimination laws escape you.
I am indeed unaware of any general anti-discimination law at the federal level, in the sense that anything limits firing to "work related behavior" or any other generic protection against employers' whims.
If you know of such a law, and are still checking for replies, please link to it; I've worked for years under the impression that I have not been protected in these matters.
There are certainly many protections against specific discrimination, none of which include political affiliation. The EEOC has a summary of what is illegal.
This is the fourth link I've placed, all consistent, against zero references contradicting it. Please, if you have better information on the matter, let me know the source. My impression continues to be that most workers simply don't know the narrow limits of their private employment rights, but I'd honestly love to find I'm wrong and that I have more rights than I thought.
There are no general "anti-discrimination" laws in most states. There are protected categories, of which political affiliation is not one (again, in most state).
It's rare, but the case I linked to above isn't the only time I've seen a news story on it happening. The no-legal-remedy kind gives away the problem with your assertion, no?
It's illegal in "at-will" states. Political affiliation is a "protected class" (Federally, actually, not even at the state level)
I gave links above that assert otherwise; the federally mandated employment poster down the hall from my desk doesn't list it as a protected category; not is it on the wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class)
If you have a link to support your claim, I'd be interested in seeing it, but it seems to me that it's one of those things that everyone believes but isn't true.
There's so much well-publicized complaints by businesses about how hard it is to fire someone, and some legitimately silly lawsuits, that a lot of workers actually think the "at-will" provisions in US employment agreements are just so much ink, and they'd have legal recourse if their boss fired them on a whim.
It is the case that most employers, especially publicly held companies, don't want to fire good workers for non-work related reasons, and don't need the bad PR, so do not generally not allow a boss to use that a reason to let someone go.
But political belief is not a protected category. (Except for government agencies, where there are first amendment considerations, IIUC.)
In addition to the fact that you pay for a lot of open source software, including GPL'd stuff, yet a lot more is bundled with other commercial products.
Dell selling desktops preloaded with Linux, or the companies who make money off of services after giving away a free app/OS, would certainly both be liable. Itemizing a bill to claim you didn't charge them for the broken part of your product is a pretty transparently lame defense.
So at a minimum you get commercial vendors who sell to consumers will be exposed to liability under this law. Whether for-profit companies that pay developers (e.g., IBM to Linux) or even funded not-for-profit projects could ever be targets is unknown to me; it'd probably depend on the law and the situation. But if the law isn't explicit I'd suspect it would end up decided by courts.
I can't imagine the hobbyist-style projects and small collaborations that never get commercial exposure would ever be a target, so if that's the only style of open-source project you use it may not matter (directly). But the blanket claims like "open source would not be liable" is certainly false.
If that's what his e-mail said, it's because you aren't reading that well, presumably because it goes against your preconceived notions.
JMS is a TV guy. The "story" for him includes actors, visual effects, scenes, sound--it's a performance. Maybe you view it as narrative, but it was always clear from his posts that he did not. It's challenging enough to pull this off in the best of circumstances (as season 5 showed), of course he's going to be unhappy when people seal off certain options completely, and limit future ones. (Plenty of writers, including apparently JMS, recycle unrealized ideas in future projects).
That you don't value JMS's future creative ambitions all that much isn't surprising--what's his private hopes to you? Honestly, I don't care much either--I wouldn't give great odds he'll ever produce another series I want to see, so trading *his* chance for an hour or two of *my* diversions is a fair trade. As always, when you can impose the costs on someone else.
But it doesn't mean he's a 'sellout' or lacks creativity because he's determined to keep trying.
Too bad you can't fire people (lovely government interventions) for having been too stupid to get value for their money when they shopped for "education".
Sure you can. I'm not sure what government intervention you think prevents this.
The only thing that would prevent you is HR (or other internal) policies, or having signed a contract. Either one is voluntary.
The government didn't need to "forcibly confiscate" the five million dollars, true. They just needed to "forcibly confiscate" the other $315 million to make the whole thing work.
Obviously, your post would be more as a convincing general model of funding if the Fermilab had been set up with private money. Instead, you got one person funding a small fraction of one year's budget, long after the government investment had made the lab famous and productive.
Most sources of research funding are either profit-motivated or government led, and there's no evidence that philanthropy will replace either one.
If you want lower taxes, expect less basic research to get done. Don't pretend you and everyone else is going to get a free lunch.
The question itself is a little like asking a football coach whether a run play is better than a pass play. There's no objective answer; any coach he even answers the question is really expressing an opinion that one or the other is over-valued, rather than that one is just 'better' in all situations.
Same with data vs. algorithms.
One thing I haven't even seen mentioned--which surprises me--is that it's well known that more data will often make an algorithm perform worse. It's not that the data's bad, it simply produces spurious connections or obscures real ones that were apparent in the smaller set. The idea that more data always produces better results is as incorrect as the idea that more training, or more complexity, is better. There's a point not just of diminishing returns, but of negative ones.
Which is the other reason the question makes me scratch my head. The implicit assumption seems to be that the more 'sophisticated' algorithm is inherently 'better'. But algorithms, especially for this sort of problem, are good or bad based on their results; there's no abstract 'superiority' for an algorithm that makes it better for all problems. (See the 'No Free Lunch' theorem.)
As an empirical matter, I wouldn't doubt that computer science students are prone to approach every problem as thinking that if they just program more, they can solve everything. After all, downloading data is not sexy. So the instructor's post is a decent corrective to that. But trying to abstract some rule ('data is better than programming') is not helpful.
Nowadays one tries to break power generation up into much smaller parts - perhaps as far as to your own cellar. This would have in fact many advantages besides reliability, "combined heat and power" comes to mind.
I'm not sure where you're getting that, but it's certainly not my understanding of the way the industry works.
There has simply been no ability to make very small reactors remotely competitive. There is a huge incentive to do so, since bringing small reactors selectively on line would give you a much better way to deal with demand spikes (e.g., hot days) as well as supply interruptions. It would also allow building reactors when there's a demand (such as the California power crisis a few years ago) instead of ending up with a five year lag, so by the time your company is supplying more power things have changed and you're not making a profit.
It's not surprising that dividing up a generator into dozens of little plants gives you an efficiency loss. It's true, as some said earlier, that a "bigger is better" approach existed in the '50s, but the economics has long since moved past that. So it's not like no one recognizes the benefit or bothers trying--there are simply technical problems that don't appear easy to overcome.
I work for a biotech company in that district. There are lots of such companies, and we depend on drug patents; even the idea of seriously curtailing them would affect me personally, and probably bankrupt many startups. (Startups in this industry collect money from VC firms partly because they will develop a broad set of patents with legitimate market value to other biotech/pharma companies--not patent trolls--which guarantees a partial return on investment).
Now, having actually read stuff by him (including Future of Ideas, which I loved), I wouldn't have a problem voting for him even from the narrowest of professional self-interest perspectives. At least a few years ago, he was recognized a distinction between software and business process patents, and drug patents--research in the former was likely to happen regardless out of self-interest, not necessarily in the latter. Which meant placing one type of invention in the commons would help innovation (and the nation), but drugs and similar inventions would presumably need to remain privately held.
Great for me--I'll vote for him if he runs, in both the primary and general election; if the draft-Lessig movement is serious, I may donate money as well. But how many people in this district are going to read one or two of his books and so recognize how he'd want to approach the problem? And how many of his most enthusiastic supporters even care about that distinction--he'd get a lot of internet support from people who like polemics but don't know much about policy. It would be almost impossible, I think, for him to avoid getting pigeon-holed by people as "radical professor dreaming of utopia", when he's not. I doubt most people would feel comfortable casting a vote for (they think) might legislate away the economy of the region.
Which leads to a different problem: if he ran and lost badly, would it delegitmatize his ideas? Probably not if he lost the primary, definitely I think if he lost in the general election. This could be similar to his losing the extension case at the Supreme Court--it was a noble effort, but probably means no other attempt through the courts can be made for decades, if ever.
Finally, his temperament seems unlikely to thrive in Congress. He encourages a lot of people to write, think out loud, and play with new ideas--which is great, but sadly not something there seems to be a role for in Congress. In fact, writing this post and thinking about the ways he wouldn't fit in our system is making me fairly depressed.
Both of the applications mentioned are old, respected and not very easy to implement. I've known people who've worked on various versions of them--attaching molecules that are going to be absorbed by cancerous cells to dyes or radioactive payloads, then hoping they selectively destroy the bad cells. The idea's gone far enough that companies get funding, but obviously the approach hasn't produced a silver bullet. I don't see any reason that using carbon nanotubes will make things easier than using traditional carbon-based (ie, organic) molecules--in fact, if I had to guess, I would have said they are likely to be less selective and more difficult to work with.
I don't mean to imply that the idea's not worth pursuing, but like many research programs I suspect this is getting press because it's a good story (buzzwords + easy to explain mechanism), not because it's more likely to succeed than various other therapies.
Slashdot Mirror
apparently the federal government's anti-discrimination laws escape you.
I am indeed unaware of any general anti-discimination law at the federal level, in the sense that anything limits firing to "work related behavior" or any other generic protection against employers' whims.
If you know of such a law, and are still checking for replies, please link to it; I've worked for years under the impression that I have not been protected in these matters.
There are certainly many protections against specific discrimination, none of which include political affiliation. The EEOC has a summary of what is illegal.
This is the fourth link I've placed, all consistent, against zero references contradicting it. Please, if you have better information on the matter, let me know the source. My impression continues to be that most workers simply don't know the narrow limits of their private employment rights, but I'd honestly love to find I'm wrong and that I have more rights than I thought.
There are no general "anti-discrimination" laws in most states. There are protected categories, of which political affiliation is not one (again, in most state).
It's rare, but the case I linked to above isn't the only time I've seen a news story on it happening. The no-legal-remedy kind gives away the problem with your assertion, no?
It's illegal in "at-will" states. Political affiliation is a "protected class" (Federally, actually, not even at the state level)
I gave links above that assert otherwise; the federally mandated employment poster down the hall from my desk doesn't list it as a protected category; not is it on the wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class)
If you have a link to support your claim, I'd be interested in seeing it, but it seems to me that it's one of those things that everyone believes but isn't true.
Firing someone for political affiliation is illegal even in "at will" states.
This is completely wrong. A handful of jurisdictions may have protections for political affiliation; most don't.
One example
Is illegal in DC
There's so much well-publicized complaints by businesses about how hard it is to fire someone, and some legitimately silly lawsuits, that a lot of workers actually think the "at-will" provisions in US employment agreements are just so much ink, and they'd have legal recourse if their boss fired them on a whim.
It is the case that most employers, especially publicly held companies, don't want to fire good workers for non-work related reasons, and don't need the bad PR, so do not generally not allow a boss to use that a reason to let someone go.
But political belief is not a protected category. (Except for government agencies, where there are first amendment considerations, IIUC.)
In addition to the fact that you pay for a lot of open source software, including GPL'd stuff, yet a lot more is bundled with other commercial products.
Dell selling desktops preloaded with Linux, or the companies who make money off of services after giving away a free app/OS, would certainly both be liable. Itemizing a bill to claim you didn't charge them for the broken part of your product is a pretty transparently lame defense.
So at a minimum you get commercial vendors who sell to consumers will be exposed to liability under this law. Whether for-profit companies that pay developers (e.g., IBM to Linux) or even funded not-for-profit projects could ever be targets is unknown to me; it'd probably depend on the law and the situation. But if the law isn't explicit I'd suspect it would end up decided by courts.
I can't imagine the hobbyist-style projects and small collaborations that never get commercial exposure would ever be a target, so if that's the only style of open-source project you use it may not matter (directly). But the blanket claims like "open source would not be liable" is certainly false.
If that's what his e-mail said, it's because you aren't reading that well, presumably because it goes against your preconceived notions.
JMS is a TV guy. The "story" for him includes actors, visual effects, scenes, sound--it's a performance. Maybe you view it as narrative, but it was always clear from his posts that he did not. It's challenging enough to pull this off in the best of circumstances (as season 5 showed), of course he's going to be unhappy when people seal off certain options completely, and limit future ones. (Plenty of writers, including apparently JMS, recycle unrealized ideas in future projects).
That you don't value JMS's future creative ambitions all that much isn't surprising--what's his private hopes to you? Honestly, I don't care much either--I wouldn't give great odds he'll ever produce another series I want to see, so trading *his* chance for an hour or two of *my* diversions is a fair trade. As always, when you can impose the costs on someone else.
But it doesn't mean he's a 'sellout' or lacks creativity because he's determined to keep trying.
Too bad you can't fire people (lovely government interventions) for having been too stupid to get value for their money when they shopped for "education".
Sure you can. I'm not sure what government intervention you think prevents this.
The only thing that would prevent you is HR (or other internal) policies, or having signed a contract. Either one is voluntary.
The government didn't need to "forcibly confiscate" the five million dollars, true. They just needed to "forcibly confiscate" the other $315 million to make the whole thing work.
Obviously, your post would be more as a convincing general model of funding if the Fermilab had been set up with private money. Instead, you got one person funding a small fraction of one year's budget, long after the government investment had made the lab famous and productive.
Most sources of research funding are either profit-motivated or government led, and there's no evidence that philanthropy will replace either one.
If you want lower taxes, expect less basic research to get done. Don't pretend you and everyone else is going to get a free lunch.
The question itself is a little like asking a football coach whether a run play is better than a pass play. There's no objective answer; any coach he even answers the question is really expressing an opinion that one or the other is over-valued, rather than that one is just 'better' in all situations.
Same with data vs. algorithms.
One thing I haven't even seen mentioned--which surprises me--is that it's well known that more data will often make an algorithm perform worse. It's not that the data's bad, it simply produces spurious connections or obscures real ones that were apparent in the smaller set. The idea that more data always produces better results is as incorrect as the idea that more training, or more complexity, is better. There's a point not just of diminishing returns, but of negative ones.
Which is the other reason the question makes me scratch my head. The implicit assumption seems to be that the more 'sophisticated' algorithm is inherently 'better'. But algorithms, especially for this sort of problem, are good or bad based on their results; there's no abstract 'superiority' for an algorithm that makes it better for all problems. (See the 'No Free Lunch' theorem.)
As an empirical matter, I wouldn't doubt that computer science students are prone to approach every problem as thinking that if they just program more, they can solve everything. After all, downloading data is not sexy. So the instructor's post is a decent corrective to that. But trying to abstract some rule ('data is better than programming') is not helpful.
Nowadays one tries to break power generation up into much smaller parts - perhaps as far as to your own cellar. This would have in fact many advantages besides reliability, "combined heat and power" comes to mind.
I'm not sure where you're getting that, but it's certainly not my understanding of the way the industry works.
There has simply been no ability to make very small reactors remotely competitive. There is a huge incentive to do so, since bringing small reactors selectively on line would give you a much better way to deal with demand spikes (e.g., hot days) as well as supply interruptions. It would also allow building reactors when there's a demand (such as the California power crisis a few years ago) instead of ending up with a five year lag, so by the time your company is supplying more power things have changed and you're not making a profit.
It's not surprising that dividing up a generator into dozens of little plants gives you an efficiency loss. It's true, as some said earlier, that a "bigger is better" approach existed in the '50s, but the economics has long since moved past that. So it's not like no one recognizes the benefit or bothers trying--there are simply technical problems that don't appear easy to overcome.
I work for a biotech company in that district. There are lots of such companies, and we depend on drug patents; even the idea of seriously curtailing them would affect me personally, and probably bankrupt many startups. (Startups in this industry collect money from VC firms partly because they will develop a broad set of patents with legitimate market value to other biotech/pharma companies--not patent trolls--which guarantees a partial return on investment).
Now, having actually read stuff by him (including Future of Ideas, which I loved), I wouldn't have a problem voting for him even from the narrowest of professional self-interest perspectives. At least a few years ago, he was recognized a distinction between software and business process patents, and drug patents--research in the former was likely to happen regardless out of self-interest, not necessarily in the latter. Which meant placing one type of invention in the commons would help innovation (and the nation), but drugs and similar inventions would presumably need to remain privately held.
Great for me--I'll vote for him if he runs, in both the primary and general election; if the draft-Lessig movement is serious, I may donate money as well. But how many people in this district are going to read one or two of his books and so recognize how he'd want to approach the problem? And how many of his most enthusiastic supporters even care about that distinction--he'd get a lot of internet support from people who like polemics but don't know much about policy. It would be almost impossible, I think, for him to avoid getting pigeon-holed by people as "radical professor dreaming of utopia", when he's not. I doubt most people would feel comfortable casting a vote for (they think) might legislate away the economy of the region.
Which leads to a different problem: if he ran and lost badly, would it delegitmatize his ideas? Probably not if he lost the primary, definitely I think if he lost in the general election. This could be similar to his losing the extension case at the Supreme Court--it was a noble effort, but probably means no other attempt through the courts can be made for decades, if ever.
Finally, his temperament seems unlikely to thrive in Congress. He encourages a lot of people to write, think out loud, and play with new ideas--which is great, but sadly not something there seems to be a role for in Congress. In fact, writing this post and thinking about the ways he wouldn't fit in our system is making me fairly depressed.
Both of the applications mentioned are old, respected and not very easy to implement. I've known people who've worked on various versions of them--attaching molecules that are going to be absorbed by cancerous cells to dyes or radioactive payloads, then hoping they selectively destroy the bad cells. The idea's gone far enough that companies get funding, but obviously the approach hasn't produced a silver bullet. I don't see any reason that using carbon nanotubes will make things easier than using traditional carbon-based (ie, organic) molecules--in fact, if I had to guess, I would have said they are likely to be less selective and more difficult to work with.
I don't mean to imply that the idea's not worth pursuing, but like many research programs I suspect this is getting press because it's a good story (buzzwords + easy to explain mechanism), not because it's more likely to succeed than various other therapies.