Generally speaking you've got a legitimate gripe with that question. I've done a decent chunk of working with multinational organizations over the years so I've got some insight for you.
That being said, their may be legitimate reasons to ask depending on the type of work your doing. I've done work that involved working for foreign governments and my nationality was an issue. If your working with certain DOD requirements than it might be okay if your an American, English, Australian, Japanese or so on.
I had one DOD project that was a cooperative project with the South Korean military. Certain nationalities were okay, others were not. I had another where I did work for the Australian government and again certain nationalities were okay, others were not.
I had one place I interviewed at that did data recovery for several governments. Nationality was an issue as you had to be able to pass background checks for multiple countries. Depending on your nationality you might work on recovering data for one government contract and be prevented from recovering data for another government contract. In some countries (Saudi Arabia etc) if your an Israeli citizen you can't legally perform any work by their law.
It is also quite possible you were being interviewed for a government project and didn't know about it. You would be surprised how much government is carried out in small office building by innocuous companies. I've worked with people that were hired for one thing and discovered themselves flying on a private airplane going to undisclosed location.
I won't doubt your figures, my point is on disposable income. Kids are really expensive and they take up almost all of your discretionary income. Making more income doesn't help either as you just end up buying more expensive stuff for the kids.
It's the power of the DINK (Dual income No Kids) that makes gays such a juicy marketing target. The single guy doesn't have the Dual Income part to help his budget. Going by your figures a hetrosexual DINK couple would be even more valuable. However I would imagine that it would be harder to target that market than the gay market.
The gay's tend not to have kids. That means that they have more discretionary income. More discretionary income equates to more readily purchasing more expensive toys more often than the guy that supports a family. It's why you see shiny things like the latest Itoy so often in the hands of gay people, they can afford them. It's just math and the logic is sound.
The second part though, the idea that someone would go to all the trouble to use something like this to track down a bunch of gays is absurd. Why bother doing that when if your a nutter you just go to your local gay bar instead? You know the one that advertises to attract all of those gays?
Blathering liberals think we can solve this problem through reducing demand alone. Archaic conservatives think we can solve through only increasing supply.
They are both wrong and both missing the whole point of supply and demand - 'and'. You have to increase supply/AND/ you have to decrease demand. We can't conserve our way out of European levels of gas prices any more than we can drill our way out of them. We have to work with both and get the radicals on both sides of the equation to start compromising!
So in essence your talking about a two stage steam turbine? I understood it ran so hot that no material on earth could contain it (they use magnetic fields to contain it). What I didn't know was how practical it would be to run the material to be heated near the power source. I ask this because I understand the heat is not steady but fluctuates a fair bit.
If you know your heat source is 'x' you can place your heat transfer material at a distance of 'y'. If your heat source varies too much your going to either melt your piping or fail to heat it up enough. I think holding the temperature/steady/ enough to have a predictable 'x' is going to prove a greater challenge that simply having fusion to begin with.
The casino's will still come out ahead though in the end. This guy will inspire a thousand some imitators and those imitators will repay the casino in spades. They lose money on one guy just to make it up by the throng inspired from the first. It's the same reason casino's put a big winners in their advertisements and a jackpot has lots of flashing lights and noise./Credit to the guy for doing this without cheating, not an easy thing to do.
How do you extract the heat once you are successful in fusion? Is there a safe zone where it is just right to run water to convert to steam? With fusion running so hot and containment being such an issue it makes me think that extracting the energy could also be a fair challenge.
He Internet probably has a lot to do with it. It can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars to design a new car. Now with the intenet if that new car is crap people will talk about it online. Think back to the pinto, once a very popular car. Who would have ever bought one if they knew they had a bad habit of catching fire in rear end collisions?
Fact of the matter is manufactures invest too much money in a new model today to risk producing something that is complete crap. In today's hyper competitive market you can't afford to keep making a bad car by offering an extra discount.
Simply suing everyone who casually pirates your software is only going to turn the public against you and worst of all it could succeed by getting people to stop using your software and to use a competitors instead. I can't think of a single successful case of companies suing the public for pirating their IP and coming out ahead in the long run.
Instead make your software free for non-commercial use. Students and the curious / casual user can safely use the software without worry. After a few years of using the software they will insist on having it when they make the transition to professionals. It's like Microsoft Office, people use it because it is what they are used to.
Meanwhile if there is someone using the software commercially without paying, that is when you get the lawyers involved.
This is a great precedent! A drone is used to harass people doing a lawful activity and is shot down. In the future when people are doing something legal and a group of asshats are harassing them with a drone they will now have cause to step back and ponder the great question.
Should I be an asshole that forces my views on others today?
If it takes someone with a gun to stop you from being an ass to other people than you really need to stop and look at your behavior.
For starters ships would look nothing like what you see on sci-fi shows. For example they always put the bridge exposed to the outside with panoramic views. In space that would gain you nothing and be a huge liability. Ships would not have wings and there would be no point in having a ship that was pointy on one end or the other like a sea going one.
The concept of maneuverability in space is completely unrelated to what you would have on the surface. Nothing is gained from having something that is nimble, handling in space is completely unrelated to what you would have from a ship, car or plane on the surface. Form follows function and surface type functions largely are absent in that scenario.
To answer your question you have to look at function. Are you talking about a current theoretical battle between nations in the orbit of our planet or are you talking about deep space? The answers to your questions depend entirely on the scenario and the requirements.
The catchpa is worthless against an army of Indians being paid just pennies a pop to break them. The only thing they do is annoy the script kiddies. Far better success would be had in doing pattern recognition on sign ups instead.
Reality check, and it doesn't have a damn thing to do with European politics. Europe was forced into peace by the constant threat of the soviets and their occupation of the entire eastern half of the continent. One of the earliest treaties that helped establish peace in Europe was the one that founded NATO in 1949.
By your own count on the number of people killed it has been a phenomenal success. WWI alone saw an estimated 8.5 million killed and WWII saw another 20 million killed. And I'm not even including civilian casualties.
Consider that the population of the world has expanded from roughly 2 billion in WW2 to 7 billion now that is an achievement otherwise unheralded in human history. Insinuate what you will about humanity but it took nuclear weapons to bring about today's age of relative peace.
Study your history, there has never been a single year without war. This is why nukes were named 'peacemakers', it was what they did.
This is really overdue and your a fool if you think it isn't inevitable. We accept regulation for critical infrastructure like electricity and gas distribution. Why should IT be any different than any other piece of infrastructure?
I've worked with ITIL, SOX, HIPAA, SEC and a number of other regulations or standards for years. They are also largely similar in what they require, once you learn one the others are a quick learning curve. Mostly they are nothing more than attempt to codify best practices that you should be following anyways.
It's like the rail companies that cried foul when regulations required that they install safe coupling mechanisms in the 1800's. The railroads cried foul at the new expenses until they discovered that the regulations ended up saving more in labor than they can cost in parts.
Outside of the UK, than it's fair game for a 500# bomb. The nice thing is it is even conveniently located for a nearby F-15 to get to. Who want's to starts the SeaLand Death Watch website?
I think this is a great idea for both users and the company. Users have only a single place that they have to go to for their privacy concerns. Likewise for the company they only have to have corporate counsel review one privacy policy instead of several. The company saves money and the consumer saves hassle.
Note that I'm only talking about the idea of consolidating the privacy policies themselves. I am not talking about the merit of whether or not the privacy policy is a good one or not.
In my case I was rewarded for my honesty by being promptly laid off. All things considered that was a far better solution than being tied up in court for months on end. I got another job within a few days for which I was grateful. I carried away enough experience from that large failure to lead to a successful career as a consultant. It's amazing how you can learn so much more from failure than success.
The opposite in this case, both of their cases were strong. I got dragged into the contract stuff later on to make sure that I knew what both sides were looking for.
The vendor offered in plain language that they could do the migration without needing a single field engineer. This of course was something a salesman came up with that had no basis in anything remotely realistic.
The client offered in plain language that their network migration would be completed before the vendor's contract started. The client reneged after they found out it would cost $400 per port the vendor that still had the management contract to change things out before the contract ran out.
They both had strong cases against each other, it was two fortune 25's arguing about who was more wrong, not about who was right.
The reason I got dragged into is because I produced reports on a daily basis that explained why things failed in a detailed format. They both looked at my reports and decided that they liked my judgement and would use it for daily penalty assessments. This went on for months without me knowing the repercussions of the reports I wrote each day.
140 million dollar contract
on
Tales of IT Idiocy
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Fortune 25 contractor promises another Fortune 25 client that they can migrate their entire operation without a single desktop engineer. This was a 140 million dollar contract. Client also promised that their network conversion from 10Mb hubs to 100Mb switches would be finished before we started and then postponed the network conversion.
When everything was said and done lawyers for both companies mutually decided that I was the best the person on the ground with the best insight into why things fell apart. I was told by lawyers on both sides I would be subpoenaed as the primary witness and that the trial was expected to take about four months. I wasn't being blamed by either side, I was just the one who knew what the hell was going on.
When you testify as a witness (vs expert witness) you are limited to a $50 court fee and can't be otherwise reimbursed. I would have been financially ruined for other peoples idiocy and figured out a perfectly honest way to get out of situation their idiocy created.
I told lawyers for both sides that I would appear and testify, and they would neither one like what I had to say. They settled two days later.
Sounds like a great idea. What they really need to is delist companies that crap flood their results with dozens of websites which really only have one back end. An easy example of this is to find is done by plugging in a phone number. You will find dozens of web sites that crap flood the first several pages of Google result's and are obviously all for the same site.
The executive class of these companies have been farming out more and more work to China. They do so under the arrogant premise that the manufacturing can be done without learning the original design work. Already fair parts of the design work have been taken over by Chinese companies.
The arrogant part is in thinking that we are the only ones that can come up with a good design, that we can create 'intellectual property' and make profits solely off of that. Nature grants no exclusive rights to creativity or intelligence. There is no inherent reason that the creative minds in China can't take over the one piece we think we can exclusively own. This is why American companies are so big on intellectual property. They think they are the only ones that can do high profit design work and that this is the only thing worth doing.
One day these companies will wake up and realize that Apple etc need the ODM's far more than they need the brand names. They will simply refuse more contracts and start manufacturing their own original work. Apple etc will have no place to build or design their hardware and Foxconn etc will become the next Apple.
I give at most five years before we see Chinese brand names taking the place of our familiar brand names on our store shelves. By the time this happens there won't be a damn thing we can do about it in less than two decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally speaking you've got a legitimate gripe with that question. I've done a decent chunk of working with multinational organizations over the years so I've got some insight for you.
That being said, their may be legitimate reasons to ask depending on the type of work your doing. I've done work that involved working for foreign governments and my nationality was an issue. If your working with certain DOD requirements than it might be okay if your an American, English, Australian, Japanese or so on.
I had one DOD project that was a cooperative project with the South Korean military. Certain nationalities were okay, others were not. I had another where I did work for the Australian government and again certain nationalities were okay, others were not.
I had one place I interviewed at that did data recovery for several governments. Nationality was an issue as you had to be able to pass background checks for multiple countries. Depending on your nationality you might work on recovering data for one government contract and be prevented from recovering data for another government contract. In some countries (Saudi Arabia etc) if your an Israeli citizen you can't legally perform any work by their law.
It is also quite possible you were being interviewed for a government project and didn't know about it. You would be surprised how much government is carried out in small office building by innocuous companies. I've worked with people that were hired for one thing and discovered themselves flying on a private airplane going to undisclosed location.
I won't doubt your figures, my point is on disposable income. Kids are really expensive and they take up almost all of your discretionary income. Making more income doesn't help either as you just end up buying more expensive stuff for the kids.
It's the power of the DINK (Dual income No Kids) that makes gays such a juicy marketing target. The single guy doesn't have the Dual Income part to help his budget. Going by your figures a hetrosexual DINK couple would be even more valuable. However I would imagine that it would be harder to target that market than the gay market.
The gay's tend not to have kids. That means that they have more discretionary income. More discretionary income equates to more readily purchasing more expensive toys more often than the guy that supports a family. It's why you see shiny things like the latest Itoy so often in the hands of gay people, they can afford them. It's just math and the logic is sound.
The second part though, the idea that someone would go to all the trouble to use something like this to track down a bunch of gays is absurd. Why bother doing that when if your a nutter you just go to your local gay bar instead? You know the one that advertises to attract all of those gays?
Blathering liberals think we can solve this problem through reducing demand alone. Archaic conservatives think we can solve through only increasing supply.
They are both wrong and both missing the whole point of supply and demand - 'and'. You have to increase supply /AND/ you have to decrease demand. We can't conserve our way out of European levels of gas prices any more than we can drill our way out of them. We have to work with both and get the radicals on both sides of the equation to start compromising!
So in essence your talking about a two stage steam turbine? I understood it ran so hot that no material on earth could contain it (they use magnetic fields to contain it). What I didn't know was how practical it would be to run the material to be heated near the power source. I ask this because I understand the heat is not steady but fluctuates a fair bit.
If you know your heat source is 'x' you can place your heat transfer material at a distance of 'y'. If your heat source varies too much your going to either melt your piping or fail to heat it up enough. I think holding the temperature /steady/ enough to have a predictable 'x' is going to prove a greater challenge that simply having fusion to begin with.
The casino's will still come out ahead though in the end. This guy will inspire a thousand some imitators and those imitators will repay the casino in spades. They lose money on one guy just to make it up by the throng inspired from the first. It's the same reason casino's put a big winners in their advertisements and a jackpot has lots of flashing lights and noise. /Credit to the guy for doing this without cheating, not an easy thing to do.
How do you extract the heat once you are successful in fusion? Is there a safe zone where it is just right to run water to convert to steam? With fusion running so hot and containment being such an issue it makes me think that extracting the energy could also be a fair challenge.
Facebook does this for two very simple reasons:
1. They have to do it or they have nasty legal problems of their own.
2. They make a lot of money by doing so.
Your proposed check on power through the budget hit is in fact alive and well and has been for many years.
The case you cited.
He Internet probably has a lot to do with it. It can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars to design a new car. Now with the intenet if that new car is crap people will talk about it online. Think back to the pinto, once a very popular car. Who would have ever bought one if they knew they had a bad habit of catching fire in rear end collisions?
Fact of the matter is manufactures invest too much money in a new model today to risk producing something that is complete crap. In today's hyper competitive market you can't afford to keep making a bad car by offering an extra discount.
Simply suing everyone who casually pirates your software is only going to turn the public against you and worst of all it could succeed by getting people to stop using your software and to use a competitors instead. I can't think of a single successful case of companies suing the public for pirating their IP and coming out ahead in the long run.
Instead make your software free for non-commercial use. Students and the curious / casual user can safely use the software without worry. After a few years of using the software they will insist on having it when they make the transition to professionals. It's like Microsoft Office, people use it because it is what they are used to.
Meanwhile if there is someone using the software commercially without paying, that is when you get the lawyers involved.
This is a great precedent! A drone is used to harass people doing a lawful activity and is shot down. In the future when people are doing something legal and a group of asshats are harassing them with a drone they will now have cause to step back and ponder the great question.
Should I be an asshole that forces my views on others today?
If it takes someone with a gun to stop you from being an ass to other people than you really need to stop and look at your behavior.
For starters ships would look nothing like what you see on sci-fi shows. For example they always put the bridge exposed to the outside with panoramic views. In space that would gain you nothing and be a huge liability. Ships would not have wings and there would be no point in having a ship that was pointy on one end or the other like a sea going one.
The concept of maneuverability in space is completely unrelated to what you would have on the surface. Nothing is gained from having something that is nimble, handling in space is completely unrelated to what you would have from a ship, car or plane on the surface. Form follows function and surface type functions largely are absent in that scenario.
To answer your question you have to look at function. Are you talking about a current theoretical battle between nations in the orbit of our planet or are you talking about deep space? The answers to your questions depend entirely on the scenario and the requirements.
The catchpa is worthless against an army of Indians being paid just pennies a pop to break them. The only thing they do is annoy the script kiddies. Far better success would be had in doing pattern recognition on sign ups instead.
Reality check, and it doesn't have a damn thing to do with European politics. Europe was forced into peace by the constant threat of the soviets and their occupation of the entire eastern half of the continent. One of the earliest treaties that helped establish peace in Europe was the one that founded NATO in 1949.
By your own count on the number of people killed it has been a phenomenal success. WWI alone saw an estimated 8.5 million killed and WWII saw another 20 million killed. And I'm not even including civilian casualties.
Consider that the population of the world has expanded from roughly 2 billion in WW2 to 7 billion now that is an achievement otherwise unheralded in human history. Insinuate what you will about humanity but it took nuclear weapons to bring about today's age of relative peace.
Study your history, there has never been a single year without war. This is why nukes were named 'peacemakers', it was what they did.
This is really overdue and your a fool if you think it isn't inevitable. We accept regulation for critical infrastructure like electricity and gas distribution. Why should IT be any different than any other piece of infrastructure?
I've worked with ITIL, SOX, HIPAA, SEC and a number of other regulations or standards for years. They are also largely similar in what they require, once you learn one the others are a quick learning curve. Mostly they are nothing more than attempt to codify best practices that you should be following anyways.
It's like the rail companies that cried foul when regulations required that they install safe coupling mechanisms in the 1800's. The railroads cried foul at the new expenses until they discovered that the regulations ended up saving more in labor than they can cost in parts.
They have just created a challenge in regards to just that Internet address is...
Outside of the UK, than it's fair game for a 500# bomb. The nice thing is it is even conveniently located for a nearby F-15 to get to. Who want's to starts the SeaLand Death Watch website?
I think this is a great idea for both users and the company. Users have only a single place that they have to go to for their privacy concerns. Likewise for the company they only have to have corporate counsel review one privacy policy instead of several. The company saves money and the consumer saves hassle.
Note that I'm only talking about the idea of consolidating the privacy policies themselves. I am not talking about the merit of whether or not the privacy policy is a good one or not.
In my case I was rewarded for my honesty by being promptly laid off. All things considered that was a far better solution than being tied up in court for months on end. I got another job within a few days for which I was grateful. I carried away enough experience from that large failure to lead to a successful career as a consultant. It's amazing how you can learn so much more from failure than success.
The opposite in this case, both of their cases were strong. I got dragged into the contract stuff later on to make sure that I knew what both sides were looking for.
The vendor offered in plain language that they could do the migration without needing a single field engineer. This of course was something a salesman came up with that had no basis in anything remotely realistic.
The client offered in plain language that their network migration would be completed before the vendor's contract started. The client reneged after they found out it would cost $400 per port the vendor that still had the management contract to change things out before the contract ran out.
They both had strong cases against each other, it was two fortune 25's arguing about who was more wrong, not about who was right.
The reason I got dragged into is because I produced reports on a daily basis that explained why things failed in a detailed format. They both looked at my reports and decided that they liked my judgement and would use it for daily penalty assessments. This went on for months without me knowing the repercussions of the reports I wrote each day.
Fortune 25 contractor promises another Fortune 25 client that they can migrate their entire operation without a single desktop engineer. This was a 140 million dollar contract. Client also promised that their network conversion from 10Mb hubs to 100Mb switches would be finished before we started and then postponed the network conversion.
When everything was said and done lawyers for both companies mutually decided that I was the best the person on the ground with the best insight into why things fell apart. I was told by lawyers on both sides I would be subpoenaed as the primary witness and that the trial was expected to take about four months. I wasn't being blamed by either side, I was just the one who knew what the hell was going on.
When you testify as a witness (vs expert witness) you are limited to a $50 court fee and can't be otherwise reimbursed. I would have been financially ruined for other peoples idiocy and figured out a perfectly honest way to get out of situation their idiocy created.
I told lawyers for both sides that I would appear and testify, and they would neither one like what I had to say. They settled two days later.
Sounds like a great idea. What they really need to is delist companies that crap flood their results with dozens of websites which really only have one back end. An easy example of this is to find is done by plugging in a phone number. You will find dozens of web sites that crap flood the first several pages of Google result's and are obviously all for the same site.
The executive class of these companies have been farming out more and more work to China. They do so under the arrogant premise that the manufacturing can be done without learning the original design work. Already fair parts of the design work have been taken over by Chinese companies.
The arrogant part is in thinking that we are the only ones that can come up with a good design, that we can create 'intellectual property' and make profits solely off of that. Nature grants no exclusive rights to creativity or intelligence. There is no inherent reason that the creative minds in China can't take over the one piece we think we can exclusively own. This is why American companies are so big on intellectual property. They think they are the only ones that can do high profit design work and that this is the only thing worth doing.
One day these companies will wake up and realize that Apple etc need the ODM's far more than they need the brand names. They will simply refuse more contracts and start manufacturing their own original work. Apple etc will have no place to build or design their hardware and Foxconn etc will become the next Apple.
I give at most five years before we see Chinese brand names taking the place of our familiar brand names on our store shelves. By the time this happens there won't be a damn thing we can do about it in less than two decades.