You are being a tad too gentle on management in this case. Anyone who uses that sort of language on a public website is showing a lack of professionalism that goes beyond incompetence. Professionalism in the workplace exists for a bunch of reasons, one is to maintain cordial relations between people who work together so that you don't end up with a tit-for-tat culture in the workplace.
Let's try to keep facts straight. The articles that I have read did not bring his professional competence into question. His professional competence would only be an issue if he was unable to perform his duties (due to his religious beliefs or otherwise).
The issue was that his conduct in the workplace was interfering with the function of that workplace. If he said that he believed in intelligent design and left it at that, there probably wouldn't have been an issue. Yet he upped the ante by being aggressive about promoting those beliefs. Since the promotion of individual beliefs is outside the scope of most workplaces, it is outside the realm of religious freedoms.
These angles don't bring open source into direct competition with Microsoft, so it doesn't undermine them. (FLOSS operating systems and office suites do compete with Microsoft, so that stuff would never receive a bounty from Gates.)
On the other hand, Gates seems to have a genuine concern for education. A huge problem in education is acquiring modern tools and delivering modern tools. Education providers are a bunch of leeches, providing sub-par products at prices that would make you cringe. (Prices are often in the range of Adobe's or Microsoft's professional offerings, yet the products are barely consumer grade.)
So, no conflict of interest. Get a warm-fuzzy feeling. Why not support it?
Even though I don't think that skeuomorphism is the way to go about it, people just want something that looks interesting. They are also willing to pay for the cosmetic changes from version to version, so it makes business sense too. Pretty much everything goes through these stylistic trends. Clothes, cars, and other home electronics come to mind.
A second even though: even though I'm not big into fashion or appearances, I also want the computer screen to look interesting. The standard OS X and Windows 8 interface is a bit boring in my mind, simply because I am staring at it for hours a day and for days on end.
The thing we have to understand is that the vast majority of people bought personal computers because of what they could do. This means that the personal computer is very much replaceable in the lives of most people, especially if the replacements offer greater convenience.
That isn't to say that the computer is going to disappear entirely. Things like tablets are going to become more computer like, up until the point that they reflect the needs of most consumers. There will also be a market for personal computers, albeit a smaller one, for those of us who want something more than a digital appliance (e.g. higher performance or capacity, better options for I/O devices, more sophisticated tools). The market for business, education, and industrial applications won't die off either because they also place greater demands upon computers.
Personal computers aren't going to pass away any more than trains passed away due to the development of the airplane. But the personal computer era is passing because it will no longer be the most significant device that people use to communicate.
Maybe I'm atypical, but I've never been interested in the ads on TV, in the newspaper, or online. Throw a trade publication at me though, and the advertising is more interesting because of the products and substance. So my suggestion is that TV advertising is ineffective because it is poorly designed, and that targetting poorly designed advertising isn't going to do much.
Another thing that I've noticed is that a lot of targetted advertising is trying to sell me stuff that I already have. That may be good for keeping customers, but it is worthless when you're trying to persuade new customers to buy your products. That's fine when you're selling consumable products (Coke and Pepsi sorts of things), but probably isn't so useful when you're trying to sell non-consumables (things like cars and insurance).
So if targetted advertising is useless, why would they even want to invade my privacy?
His suicide was widely reported as fact. I have serious doubts that anyone who looked into the life of Turing actually believed that his suicide was a fact. (Opinions seemed to vary from conspiracy theories focussed on a government assassination, to it was probably suicide but the investigation was so botched up that we'll never know.)
In a lot of respects, I agree with that assessment. Yet I'd add a caveat: the value of an employee depends upon how much they contribute to the company's bottom line. This favours Apple employees: fast food involves a lot of labour for a low cost product.
If your company doesn't want you to install unauthorized software, they probably don't want you to run unauthorized software either. This is doubly true since you are going to want to run the software you developed. So I would suggest a web based alternative, or to SSH into a remote host (you can use a java based SSH client).
I would advise finding out which language you want to program first, then asking for the options available since there are a lot of options available.
If you're just interested in learning basic programming skills, JavaScript is also a good starting point and would probably work well with your existing development tools.
People seem to forget that learning continues after a person has reached adulthood. Among other things, this means that they will learn to appreciate and implement security measures as they get older. It isn't an odd generational thing.
The US has plenty of excellent public and private schools. These families are aware of that, and will choose where to live carefully. At the primary and secondary level, you also have to consider that these families are interested in obtaining a North American diploma to ensure acceptance in western universities. They also seem to be accutely aware of the cost of education in North America and attempt to establish some sort of residence status in order to pay local rates.
Get a summer job in your field. You will acquire attitudes that will be useful when you start your studies in the fall.
If you're having trouble finding work, phone companies up. Make it clear that you are looking for summer work in your field of study, and many employers will be much more sympathetic. A lot of them are willing to give students a hand up if the student is demonstrating initiative. (They were there too at one time, and often they need people who will do grunt work.) If companies don't work out, try calling up your future professors.
As for enjoying your last summer, that's something that I would suggest holding off on until you've completed your first year of studies. Simply put, if you don't go into first year with the right attitudes, you may not make it through first year. And even if you do make it through first year, you may not have the right attitudes to get and hold down a job after graduation.
So do I get to choose a topic that is outside of your domain of knowledge, declare that any reasonable person should know it, then state that anyone who doesn't know it is stupid. Because that is pretty much what you're saying.
Believe it or not, stuff like the radius of the earth, the length of the equator, or even the size of your own country is called trivia. Most people don't know them because they don't have an immediate bearing on their life. That doesn't make them stupid.
There are various reasons why you should not be using your employers computers for personal use. One is that you are using company resources for non-business purposes. And that is something that you don't do unless you have your boss' blessing.
... a backlash against education. Schools have been training too many people for certain disciplines for decades, but it seems as though they are now training too many people for all disciplines. In some cases, there are 10 people holding a degree in a field for every job opening. Not only are those other 9 people looking for work out of their field, they are often stuck with minimum wage jobs, over four years of lost income, and their career is set back over four years.
So what are these graduates going to end up telling their children?
1) Unless a portion of the crime takes place in the physical world, it is very difficult to gather the evidence required to obtain a warrant. In those cases some form of electronic monitoring would be required in order to obtain that evidence. At the very least you need to know that computer A connected to computer B. Those records should be external to computer A and computer B since neither party is likely to maintain logs or, if they do maintain logs, they are possible to tamper with.
2) Many of the people who oppose electronic monitoring also oppose ISPs divulging which IP address is associated with which user. Sometimes that is for legitimate reasons, such as multiple users can share an IP address. The only way the police may be able to establish the identity of a user, in order to obtain a warrant, is to use some sort of monitoring in the first place.
There may be ways to get around these problems: e.g. establish that illegal activities are being conducted with computer A, get a warrant to monitor connections to computer A, then use that warrant to obtain a further warrant for computer B. Yet even there you run into a hitch. If computer A is in another nation you won't be able to monitor all of the connections to that computer in your own nation because you won't be able to monitor it at computer A's ISP.
Simply put, it is too easy to hide criminal activities online.
I definitely don't like the idea of my online activities being monitored since I value my privacy very highly.
On the other hand, governments are in a bit of a bind. They are responsible for enforcing the law and creating an effective justice system. This is incredibly difficult for them to do given the scope of activities that can (and do) take place online. After all, you can't exactly place a police officer on a beat to keep the peace without having some sort of electronic monitoring. Likewise, you cannot collect evidence to prove innocence or guilt without maintaining some sort of record of electronic transactions.
I don't know where the solutions to these problems lay. That being said, I would suggest that those of us who oppose electronic surveilence start thinking about solutions to this problem. After all, governments need a way to do their job, and simply opposing legislation like this doesn't exactly help them do their job.
The article makes it sound that they are offering free access to a limited range of online services. It is only the "Internet" in the sense that these services are delivered over the Internet, but it is not the Internet in the sense that it only provides access to services approved by the service provider. Those services are in all likelihood revenue generating subsidiaries of Virgin, services paying Virgin for the privilege of being accessible on the subway platforms, or contractual obligations between Virgin and and the transit authority. In otherwords, it's utility as anything other than a propaganda machine is limited.
On top of that, they are only offering platform service. Now I don't know about London's tubes, but every heavy and light rail public transit system that I've seen runs trains at 2 minute intervals (peak hours) to 15 minute intervals (at an hour that you wouldn't want to pull out a gadget). You may be able to pull down a transit schedule and maybe a couple of articles to read on the train, but not much else. Train arrival times will probably be posted on the platform anyhow and the only devices usable on platforms are cell phones and tablets. The former is a terrible reading device for anything more than plain text, the latter is an okay reading device but awkward to handle on a busy platform. People who want that type of service would be better served by their cell phone's data plan anyhow since chances are that it's unfiltered and may work on the platforms anyhow. (I can't speak for London's system, but Toronto and Vancouver have decent cell reception on the platforms).
In other words, big freaking deal. Let me know when they offer real internet service and service that can be access in the place where you're spending most of your time: on the train.
I always consider the geography when looking for a house. River valley, probably a flood plain. Dense bush nearby, forest fire risk. Steep slopes, too prone to landslides. Silt bed in an earthquake zone, well, let's just say that I want a chance of survival. The thing is, after taking out the crazy risks, there are still plenty of places to live.
Problem is, homeowners want something scenic. Developers want something cheap to build upon. City planners are more concerned about tax revenues. If they want to accept the risks, fine. It's their homes and their lives.
Just don't make the wiser folks pay for it when the disasters ultimately strike.
I disagree with the ban, but anyone who frames this as a question of freedom is fooling themselves. These major corporations put huge amounts of money into influencing consumers to buy more. In the case of carbonated sugar water, it should be obvious why: the restaurant's major expense is labour. Selling a large instead of a small doesn't increase the cost of labour, but it does increase the revenues (with a minor increase in the cost of materials).
So the government is really stepping up to say that it is protecting us from the corporations. It isn't really stepping up to protect us from ourselves.
I would argue that the problem is that many men don't know how to behave respectfully around women. That is a result of many factors: pop culture (games, porn, television, music, etc.), parenting, and the failure to establish civil social norms in a society where all genders are considered equal.
I am fairly certain that a lot of good work has been done by the SETI Institute in terms of science (e.g. consistent monitoring of parts of the RF spectrum and identifying new sources) and engineering (e.g. signal processing and distributed computing). Of course, I would also love to find an extraterrestrial funding.
But the Intelligent Funding has never been with SETI. When SETI started, we did not even know if extrasolar planets existed. Smart money would say that they did, since the abundance of stars in our galaxy alone puts the odds in favour of there being an awful lot of planets out there, but we only had a rough idea of how planetary systems formed based upon a sample of one. That left major gaps in our knowledge, such as the probability of finding a planet around any given star and what the composition of those planets would be. Even our present knowledge of extrasolar planets is skewed because of observational limitations.
There remain many limitations to the idea of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Searching for weak signals is challenging even if you knew what to look for and where to look. Because of that, I believe that the Intelligent Funding should be directed towards astronomical research that would lay down a foundation for a real SETI in the future. This would be things like finding and characterizing extrasolar planets, creating better models of star formation (particularly with respect to the protoplanetary disc), and getting a better handle on the chemistry of the objects that we are observing.
Slashdot Mirror
You are being a tad too gentle on management in this case. Anyone who uses that sort of language on a public website is showing a lack of professionalism that goes beyond incompetence. Professionalism in the workplace exists for a bunch of reasons, one is to maintain cordial relations between people who work together so that you don't end up with a tit-for-tat culture in the workplace.
Let's try to keep facts straight. The articles that I have read did not bring his professional competence into question. His professional competence would only be an issue if he was unable to perform his duties (due to his religious beliefs or otherwise).
The issue was that his conduct in the workplace was interfering with the function of that workplace. If he said that he believed in intelligent design and left it at that, there probably wouldn't have been an issue. Yet he upped the ante by being aggressive about promoting those beliefs. Since the promotion of individual beliefs is outside the scope of most workplaces, it is outside the realm of religious freedoms.
You are missing an angle here.
These angles don't bring open source into direct competition with Microsoft, so it doesn't undermine them. (FLOSS operating systems and office suites do compete with Microsoft, so that stuff would never receive a bounty from Gates.)
On the other hand, Gates seems to have a genuine concern for education. A huge problem in education is acquiring modern tools and delivering modern tools. Education providers are a bunch of leeches, providing sub-par products at prices that would make you cringe. (Prices are often in the range of Adobe's or Microsoft's professional offerings, yet the products are barely consumer grade.)
So, no conflict of interest. Get a warm-fuzzy feeling. Why not support it?
Even though I don't think that skeuomorphism is the way to go about it, people just want something that looks interesting. They are also willing to pay for the cosmetic changes from version to version, so it makes business sense too. Pretty much everything goes through these stylistic trends. Clothes, cars, and other home electronics come to mind.
A second even though: even though I'm not big into fashion or appearances, I also want the computer screen to look interesting. The standard OS X and Windows 8 interface is a bit boring in my mind, simply because I am staring at it for hours a day and for days on end.
The thing we have to understand is that the vast majority of people bought personal computers because of what they could do. This means that the personal computer is very much replaceable in the lives of most people, especially if the replacements offer greater convenience.
That isn't to say that the computer is going to disappear entirely. Things like tablets are going to become more computer like, up until the point that they reflect the needs of most consumers. There will also be a market for personal computers, albeit a smaller one, for those of us who want something more than a digital appliance (e.g. higher performance or capacity, better options for I/O devices, more sophisticated tools). The market for business, education, and industrial applications won't die off either because they also place greater demands upon computers.
Personal computers aren't going to pass away any more than trains passed away due to the development of the airplane. But the personal computer era is passing because it will no longer be the most significant device that people use to communicate.
There is this thing called a fad. It is fashionable to own iPads and iPhones, so people will pay the price.
Will it remain fashionable in a few years? Probably not. Will people continue to buy iPads in a few years? Only if the price justifies it.
Maybe I'm atypical, but I've never been interested in the ads on TV, in the newspaper, or online. Throw a trade publication at me though, and the advertising is more interesting because of the products and substance. So my suggestion is that TV advertising is ineffective because it is poorly designed, and that targetting poorly designed advertising isn't going to do much.
Another thing that I've noticed is that a lot of targetted advertising is trying to sell me stuff that I already have. That may be good for keeping customers, but it is worthless when you're trying to persuade new customers to buy your products. That's fine when you're selling consumable products (Coke and Pepsi sorts of things), but probably isn't so useful when you're trying to sell non-consumables (things like cars and insurance).
So if targetted advertising is useless, why would they even want to invade my privacy?
His suicide was widely reported as fact. I have serious doubts that anyone who looked into the life of Turing actually believed that his suicide was a fact. (Opinions seemed to vary from conspiracy theories focussed on a government assassination, to it was probably suicide but the investigation was so botched up that we'll never know.)
In a lot of respects, I agree with that assessment. Yet I'd add a caveat: the value of an employee depends upon how much they contribute to the company's bottom line. This favours Apple employees: fast food involves a lot of labour for a low cost product.
If your company doesn't want you to install unauthorized software, they probably don't want you to run unauthorized software either. This is doubly true since you are going to want to run the software you developed. So I would suggest a web based alternative, or to SSH into a remote host (you can use a java based SSH client).
I would advise finding out which language you want to program first, then asking for the options available since there are a lot of options available.
If you're just interested in learning basic programming skills, JavaScript is also a good starting point and would probably work well with your existing development tools.
People seem to forget that learning continues after a person has reached adulthood. Among other things, this means that they will learn to appreciate and implement security measures as they get older. It isn't an odd generational thing.
The US has plenty of excellent public and private schools. These families are aware of that, and will choose where to live carefully. At the primary and secondary level, you also have to consider that these families are interested in obtaining a North American diploma to ensure acceptance in western universities. They also seem to be accutely aware of the cost of education in North America and attempt to establish some sort of residence status in order to pay local rates.
Get a summer job in your field. You will acquire attitudes that will be useful when you start your studies in the fall.
If you're having trouble finding work, phone companies up. Make it clear that you are looking for summer work in your field of study, and many employers will be much more sympathetic. A lot of them are willing to give students a hand up if the student is demonstrating initiative. (They were there too at one time, and often they need people who will do grunt work.) If companies don't work out, try calling up your future professors.
As for enjoying your last summer, that's something that I would suggest holding off on until you've completed your first year of studies. Simply put, if you don't go into first year with the right attitudes, you may not make it through first year. And even if you do make it through first year, you may not have the right attitudes to get and hold down a job after graduation.
So do I get to choose a topic that is outside of your domain of knowledge, declare that any reasonable person should know it, then state that anyone who doesn't know it is stupid. Because that is pretty much what you're saying.
Believe it or not, stuff like the radius of the earth, the length of the equator, or even the size of your own country is called trivia. Most people don't know them because they don't have an immediate bearing on their life. That doesn't make them stupid.
They use "non-standard units" to give the reader a mental picture of the near miss. It has nothing to do with perceived stupidity.
There are various reasons why you should not be using your employers computers for personal use. One is that you are using company resources for non-business purposes. And that is something that you don't do unless you have your boss' blessing.
... a backlash against education. Schools have been training too many people for certain disciplines for decades, but it seems as though they are now training too many people for all disciplines. In some cases, there are 10 people holding a degree in a field for every job opening. Not only are those other 9 people looking for work out of their field, they are often stuck with minimum wage jobs, over four years of lost income, and their career is set back over four years.
So what are these graduates going to end up telling their children?
There are two issues with warrants:
1) Unless a portion of the crime takes place in the physical world, it is very difficult to gather the evidence required to obtain a warrant. In those cases some form of electronic monitoring would be required in order to obtain that evidence. At the very least you need to know that computer A connected to computer B. Those records should be external to computer A and computer B since neither party is likely to maintain logs or, if they do maintain logs, they are possible to tamper with.
2) Many of the people who oppose electronic monitoring also oppose ISPs divulging which IP address is associated with which user. Sometimes that is for legitimate reasons, such as multiple users can share an IP address. The only way the police may be able to establish the identity of a user, in order to obtain a warrant, is to use some sort of monitoring in the first place.
There may be ways to get around these problems: e.g. establish that illegal activities are being conducted with computer A, get a warrant to monitor connections to computer A, then use that warrant to obtain a further warrant for computer B. Yet even there you run into a hitch. If computer A is in another nation you won't be able to monitor all of the connections to that computer in your own nation because you won't be able to monitor it at computer A's ISP.
Simply put, it is too easy to hide criminal activities online.
I definitely don't like the idea of my online activities being monitored since I value my privacy very highly.
On the other hand, governments are in a bit of a bind. They are responsible for enforcing the law and creating an effective justice system. This is incredibly difficult for them to do given the scope of activities that can (and do) take place online. After all, you can't exactly place a police officer on a beat to keep the peace without having some sort of electronic monitoring. Likewise, you cannot collect evidence to prove innocence or guilt without maintaining some sort of record of electronic transactions.
I don't know where the solutions to these problems lay. That being said, I would suggest that those of us who oppose electronic surveilence start thinking about solutions to this problem. After all, governments need a way to do their job, and simply opposing legislation like this doesn't exactly help them do their job.
Question:
Why make up a bed in the morning when it's just going to be unmade that evening (or sooner if one likes an afternoon nap?)
Answer:
To demonstrate to your future girlfriend that you aren't a slob.
The article makes it sound that they are offering free access to a limited range of online services. It is only the "Internet" in the sense that these services are delivered over the Internet, but it is not the Internet in the sense that it only provides access to services approved by the service provider. Those services are in all likelihood revenue generating subsidiaries of Virgin, services paying Virgin for the privilege of being accessible on the subway platforms, or contractual obligations between Virgin and and the transit authority. In otherwords, it's utility as anything other than a propaganda machine is limited.
On top of that, they are only offering platform service. Now I don't know about London's tubes, but every heavy and light rail public transit system that I've seen runs trains at 2 minute intervals (peak hours) to 15 minute intervals (at an hour that you wouldn't want to pull out a gadget). You may be able to pull down a transit schedule and maybe a couple of articles to read on the train, but not much else. Train arrival times will probably be posted on the platform anyhow and the only devices usable on platforms are cell phones and tablets. The former is a terrible reading device for anything more than plain text, the latter is an okay reading device but awkward to handle on a busy platform. People who want that type of service would be better served by their cell phone's data plan anyhow since chances are that it's unfiltered and may work on the platforms anyhow. (I can't speak for London's system, but Toronto and Vancouver have decent cell reception on the platforms).
In other words, big freaking deal. Let me know when they offer real internet service and service that can be access in the place where you're spending most of your time: on the train.
I always consider the geography when looking for a house. River valley, probably a flood plain. Dense bush nearby, forest fire risk. Steep slopes, too prone to landslides. Silt bed in an earthquake zone, well, let's just say that I want a chance of survival. The thing is, after taking out the crazy risks, there are still plenty of places to live.
Problem is, homeowners want something scenic. Developers want something cheap to build upon. City planners are more concerned about tax revenues. If they want to accept the risks, fine. It's their homes and their lives.
Just don't make the wiser folks pay for it when the disasters ultimately strike.
I disagree with the ban, but anyone who frames this as a question of freedom is fooling themselves. These major corporations put huge amounts of money into influencing consumers to buy more. In the case of carbonated sugar water, it should be obvious why: the restaurant's major expense is labour. Selling a large instead of a small doesn't increase the cost of labour, but it does increase the revenues (with a minor increase in the cost of materials).
So the government is really stepping up to say that it is protecting us from the corporations. It isn't really stepping up to protect us from ourselves.
I would argue that the problem is that many men don't know how to behave respectfully around women. That is a result of many factors: pop culture (games, porn, television, music, etc.), parenting, and the failure to establish civil social norms in a society where all genders are considered equal.
I am fairly certain that a lot of good work has been done by the SETI Institute in terms of science (e.g. consistent monitoring of parts of the RF spectrum and identifying new sources) and engineering (e.g. signal processing and distributed computing). Of course, I would also love to find an extraterrestrial funding.
But the Intelligent Funding has never been with SETI. When SETI started, we did not even know if extrasolar planets existed. Smart money would say that they did, since the abundance of stars in our galaxy alone puts the odds in favour of there being an awful lot of planets out there, but we only had a rough idea of how planetary systems formed based upon a sample of one. That left major gaps in our knowledge, such as the probability of finding a planet around any given star and what the composition of those planets would be. Even our present knowledge of extrasolar planets is skewed because of observational limitations.
There remain many limitations to the idea of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Searching for weak signals is challenging even if you knew what to look for and where to look. Because of that, I believe that the Intelligent Funding should be directed towards astronomical research that would lay down a foundation for a real SETI in the future. This would be things like finding and characterizing extrasolar planets, creating better models of star formation (particularly with respect to the protoplanetary disc), and getting a better handle on the chemistry of the objects that we are observing.