Honestly, that makes the whole thing seem even weirder and sleazier:
If the restrictions are actually so tepid that fungibility allows a simple reorganization of a few internal payments and no actual changes, then why would anybody bother to have them? Is somebody involved in the process actually that dumb or that petty?
If the restrictions are there for reasons that aren't dumb or petty and spiteful, then one has to be nervous about how they are working, what other mechanisms might be in place to help achieve the same goal, and so on. Given that they are embarrassing, they would not be in either Google or Stanford's interest if they had no other effects besides potential embarrassment. Unless there's a loose idiot involved, somebody thought that they were worth the risk of writing down, possibly for good reasons...
Statements like these are mindboggling.... "Because they are no longer reporting to Wall Street, they can be more competitive." Your share holders want you to maximize profits and growth, this rarely results in wanting you to be less competitive...
Only if you treat market rationality as axiomatic, rather than as something that requires empirical demonstration...
It is not beyond the realm of possibility; but it is hardly self evident.
Indeed. I did not intend to imply that his allegations were true, so hopefully I didn't.
My point was just that, even according to his own alleged version of events, he was never stripped of tenure (at all, much less on the basis of anonymous comments), he just suffered loss of tenure when he had an unsuccessful transition between two jobs.
I have no way of telling whether his story is absolutely true or absolute bullshit; but either way it's much, much, less notable than the idea that he would directly lose tenure over these comments. Having an offer fall through sucks; but revoking the tenure of an already tenured faculty member is Serious Business. The article makes the timeline fairly clear; but the summary and some of the discussion made it seem more like he was stripped of tenure over some nasty internet comments, which would be real news.
I'm far from enough of a political scientist to say whether it's a matter of presidents drawing attention away from power, or a matter of president selection strongly reflecting the same factors that govern other areas of power allocation; but either way I'm having a hard time thinking of cases where killing the president will get you a new president with markedly different foreign policy attributes.
And, thanks to the combination of sheer size of government and the assorted more-than-slightly-creepy 'continuity' stuff they hashed out during the cold war, you'd really need to shoot Washington up to deplete the supply of people who are at least vaguely capable of keeping the status quo running for some time.
Ultimately, that's probably a better defense than the secret service could ever hope to be. If shooting the president were a good way to get a new president with substantially different behavior, it'd be worth it to a variety of interested parties with access to all sorts of dangerous toys. If it were a way to paralyze the American state, it would likely be even more interesting. In absence of those cases, you get a variety of dubiously rational actors and some domestic grudge settling, and most such attempts are far less competent and conducted on a relative shoestring.
With the critical caveat that cellular data caps tend to make even the biggest assholes in fixed broadband look like an improvement. Contemporary wireless data standards can, indeed, hit very impressive peak rates; but you'd better not be planning on doing any bulk data transfers, nor should you necessarily be optimistic about ping times.
According to TFA, even the guy's lawyer is asserting that the loss of tenure was an indirect consequence of the anonymous campaign:
Sarkar was a tenured researcher at Wayne State University.
He applied for, and initially received, an offer from University of Mississippi Medical Center. In order to take that job, he resigned his position at Wayne State.
Before his new job started, they revoked the offer. His lawyer says that the revocation was clearly a result of the anonymous campaign against him.
Wayne State allowed him to un-resign; but not to grant him tenure again.
My understanding is that actually being stripped of tenure is a much, much, bigger deal, one that would take some nice evidence of malpractice or some very, very, ugly togetherness issues with a substantial portion of the faculty and administration. In this case, he never actually lost tenure anywhere; but resigned it and then was unable to get it back when his other job fell through. Similar end result; but very different process.
Why is it a given that validity and factual basis should be enforced by the site's moderators?
Legally, Section 230 protections are largely in favor of the site and moderators. Not absolutely; but it takes some work to be liable for what a commenter said on your site. As a matter of practice, I'm certainly open to arguments in favor of the idea (and definitely open to the notion that a site wishing to be taken seriously might want to voluntarily practice good moderation); but it's hardly so self-evident that you can just toss it out without comment.
It's possible that they were actually fooled(maybe somebody ancient enough to think that the internet has an editorial staff is still alive and has more seniority than god, maybe anonymous innuendo works even against people who think that they totally aren't fooled); but it's also possible that they weren't really interested:
It's not exactly news that, at least for jobs higher level than bagging groceries and not utterly standardized by some sort of hiring bureaucracy, a variety of somewhat intangible factors come into play. Good 'fit', how good the interviewers felt after talking with you, etc. If he rubbed somebody the wrong way; but but for one of those fuzzy reasons that either don't look good or probably aren't legal if written down, leaving some FUD on the table would be perfectly reasonable, if not entirely honest.
Though, if memory serves, US presidents have an amazing record of not getting shot over foreign policy issues and instead being taken down by domestic opponents or just plain nutjobs.
It's honestly a bit surprising: I'm not sure if we just watch the foreigners better, or if they know that basically any failover president is going to adhere to very similar policies(only more so, because they'll have greater support for Doing Something) and so it really isn't worth the trouble, expense, or risk...
Guy walks on White House lawn, agents take him down. Nobody was hurt, never was the president or his family in danger. The Secret Service did his job. End of story. The rest is just the usual sensational media hysteria.
But, but, what if the guy on the lawn had secretly been a super ninja assassin? Or an android from the future with a 50 kiloton nuclear failsafe embedded in its torso? Why aren't you busy hyperventilating about all the hypothetical threats that are somehow unimportant on one side of a fence but are Super Terrifying if they make it to the other side?
America's Lawn was in existential danger here, and the secret service did nothing!
(In all seriousness, if you have some sort of cool exotic agent and/or heavy weapon that would let you frag the president from the front lawn the fence around the lawn isn't going to stop it. Wind will blow right through, and it's just a fence, not some sort of 18 foot blast wall. If you don't, isn't playing the 'jump the fence and hope that nobody manages to shoot you as you cross a giant strip of grass' plan about the worst possible one? It's not as though politicians don't come out of their lairs to kiss babies, eat at America's Small Town Restaurants, and assorted other things that make it much easier to get close...)
NFC implementations (should) be interoperable unless somebody screwed up implementation to spec; but that promises nothing about compatibility for anything built on top of NFC.
Right now, ISO 7813 mag-stripe cards are nice and standardized; but that only gets you as far as having the reader hardware work. Whether your card will be accepted by a given vendor is an entirely separate matter governed by some ghastly pile of contractual arrangements.
Ah, that's just because today's ultra-high-density platters require high-coercivity materials in order to adequately maintain the magnetization patterns that store the data. Low coercivity magnetic media just don't work at those densities.
It'll never quite stop being weird that Commander Keen, cartoony platformer, is what the guys behind Doom and Quake were working on in their early days....
It is a matter of taste; but the proliferation of 'widescreen' has really made multiple orientation setups more attractive. In particular, the ubiquitous 1920x1080 is cheap as dirt and nice and wide; but actually throws fewer vertical pixels than a nasty old 1280x1024 17' from about 2001. If you read or write a lot of text, or code with reasonably short lines, taking a cheapo 1920x1080 and rotating it gives you a 1080x1920: this is handy because it's still wider than 1024(so even old and horrible programs/layouts generally won't break, since anything that old and horrible probably expects 768 or 1024 pixel wide screens); but provides more vertical resolution than even substantially more expensive monitors in their native orientation.
I prefer my 'primary' monitor to be unrotated; but the amount of vertical resolution you can get for the money, without totally sacrificing width, from a rotated secondary monitor is pretty compelling.
In this case, you might want to go after the vets before the doctors...
It's not an accident that they were looking at agricultural workers (rather than, say, elementary school teachers, who would be seeing the worst of it from antibiotics-for-the-sniffles patients), nor is it an accident that there are 'livestock-associated' drug resistant strains.
Aside from price, which makes accepting multiple monitors rather compelling(you can get physically big ones for relatively small amounts of money, because of TVs; but if you want resolution the cost goes up fast and things really start to misbehave if you go high enough that DP MST or the like is required to drive the thing), it mostly comes down to how good your windowing system is at tiling and how well applications that expect 'full screen' can handle playing with others.
A good window manager makes carving up a single large monitor into chunks suitably sized for your various programs easy and painless. If you are enduring a less obliging one, it can be a fairly ugly business, actually less pleasant than getting some help from multiple physical displays, which are more widely respected even by poorly behaved programs.
That said, the 'two side by side, giant bezel in the middle' configuration is not my favorite. A larger primary screen, with ancillary screens on one or both sides gives you plenty of room for assorted lesser windows; but also avoids annoying bezels in the center of your field of view.
You don't choose between workspaces and physical screens, you just have multiple physical screens so that each workspace can be even larger and more pleasant to use...
You do eventually run into diminishing returns; but being able to display more than one monitor worth of stuff simultaneously definitely has its uses, and is something that being able to switch between workspaces, be the transition ever so elegant, cannot replace.
Given that 8 was the "Just because it's called 'Windows' doesn't mean it needs a functional windowing system!" release, It's pretty hard to argue with them.
Maybe some of that works on touchscreen laptops; but 'metro' is a tragicomedy on any monitor configuration worth using.
In addition, Tesla(whether or not you see this as an improvement is a distinct issue, it simply is so) sells cars much more like an enterprise IT hardware vendor sells hardware: at least within the warranty period, there is very much an ongoing interaction between the hardware and the vendor. System health information gets sent directly back, on site techs with specialized parts and firmware get sent out and so on. More traditional car companies are closer to buying a PC: the dealer will offer (often absurdly priced; but available) maintenance; and the vendor may become involved with certain warranty or recall cases; but they are otherwise largely out of the loop, with third parties handling the ongoing interaction with the hardware.
We will, of course, run all your errands for you without gathering the data for marketing and other purposes; because doing that would be just too easy...
How is blinding someone with a laser worse than killing or maiming them with a bullet?
The assorted 'laws of war' are heavily leavened by what their framers suspect that they can actually get at least some people to agree to; but the overall theoretical foundation always seems to be an attempt to steer weapons in the direction of "Kills outright, or leaves a wound that, if treated, will heal with comparatively limited permanent damage."
It's not an easy standard to maintain(both in terms of convenience, mass-maiming is a hell of a shock to morale and logistics, and engineering, something that will kill if it hits you as designed will likely cause serious tissue damage and/or amputation if it scores a sub-par hit); but it's not really a terribly strange shared desire, from the perspective of the warring European powers of the 20th century that wrote most of them.
I'm fairly out of my depth with this stuff, so this is an honest inquiry: how do the magnetic nanoparticles fit into the equation?
I realize that, once coated with a suitably tailored binding protein, the particles will collect whatever target the binding protein was specified for (presumably this could even be tailored, for any target where a suitably tame binding compound is available), and probably fairly efficiently because of the absurd surface area of nanoparticles.
What I don't understand is the necessity of using the nanoparticles. It was my understanding that, outside of seriously immunocompromised victims, T-cells(and possibly other flavors of phagocytes, I'm fuzzy on the details) are extremely adept at engulfing and destroying foreign bodies, including 'clumps' produced by targets bound to the antigens produced by B-cells. This technique appears to be using a synthetic/introduced antigen(which makes sense if the immune system isn't producing the necessary antigen, or not ramping up production fast enough); but it also introduces the nanoparticles so that the antigen clumps can be magnetically scrubbed from the bloodstream, rather than cleaned up by the T Cells.
What is the peculiarity here that would make introducing the novel clump-scrubbing mechanism necessary and worthwhile?
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, that makes the whole thing seem even weirder and sleazier:
If the restrictions are actually so tepid that fungibility allows a simple reorganization of a few internal payments and no actual changes, then why would anybody bother to have them? Is somebody involved in the process actually that dumb or that petty?
If the restrictions are there for reasons that aren't dumb or petty and spiteful, then one has to be nervous about how they are working, what other mechanisms might be in place to help achieve the same goal, and so on. Given that they are embarrassing, they would not be in either Google or Stanford's interest if they had no other effects besides potential embarrassment. Unless there's a loose idiot involved, somebody thought that they were worth the risk of writing down, possibly for good reasons...
Tungsten might work. It won't actually perform any better; but it should make the phone prohibitively uncomfortable to carry in pocket.
Statements like these are mindboggling.... "Because they are no longer reporting to Wall Street, they can be more competitive." Your share holders want you to maximize profits and growth, this rarely results in wanting you to be less competitive...
Only if you treat market rationality as axiomatic, rather than as something that requires empirical demonstration...
It is not beyond the realm of possibility; but it is hardly self evident.
Indeed. I did not intend to imply that his allegations were true, so hopefully I didn't.
My point was just that, even according to his own alleged version of events, he was never stripped of tenure (at all, much less on the basis of anonymous comments), he just suffered loss of tenure when he had an unsuccessful transition between two jobs.
I have no way of telling whether his story is absolutely true or absolute bullshit; but either way it's much, much, less notable than the idea that he would directly lose tenure over these comments. Having an offer fall through sucks; but revoking the tenure of an already tenured faculty member is Serious Business. The article makes the timeline fairly clear; but the summary and some of the discussion made it seem more like he was stripped of tenure over some nasty internet comments, which would be real news.
I'm far from enough of a political scientist to say whether it's a matter of presidents drawing attention away from power, or a matter of president selection strongly reflecting the same factors that govern other areas of power allocation; but either way I'm having a hard time thinking of cases where killing the president will get you a new president with markedly different foreign policy attributes.
And, thanks to the combination of sheer size of government and the assorted more-than-slightly-creepy 'continuity' stuff they hashed out during the cold war, you'd really need to shoot Washington up to deplete the supply of people who are at least vaguely capable of keeping the status quo running for some time.
Ultimately, that's probably a better defense than the secret service could ever hope to be. If shooting the president were a good way to get a new president with substantially different behavior, it'd be worth it to a variety of interested parties with access to all sorts of dangerous toys. If it were a way to paralyze the American state, it would likely be even more interesting. In absence of those cases, you get a variety of dubiously rational actors and some domestic grudge settling, and most such attempts are far less competent and conducted on a relative shoestring.
Ah, sorry. I thought you were referring to improved tower backhaul or similar technical upgrades, not the guys on the billing side of the office.
With the critical caveat that cellular data caps tend to make even the biggest assholes in fixed broadband look like an improvement. Contemporary wireless data standards can, indeed, hit very impressive peak rates; but you'd better not be planning on doing any bulk data transfers, nor should you necessarily be optimistic about ping times.
According to TFA, even the guy's lawyer is asserting that the loss of tenure was an indirect consequence of the anonymous campaign:
Sarkar was a tenured researcher at Wayne State University.
He applied for, and initially received, an offer from University of Mississippi Medical Center. In order to take that job, he resigned his position at Wayne State.
Before his new job started, they revoked the offer. His lawyer says that the revocation was clearly a result of the anonymous campaign against him.
Wayne State allowed him to un-resign; but not to grant him tenure again.
My understanding is that actually being stripped of tenure is a much, much, bigger deal, one that would take some nice evidence of malpractice or some very, very, ugly togetherness issues with a substantial portion of the faculty and administration. In this case, he never actually lost tenure anywhere; but resigned it and then was unable to get it back when his other job fell through. Similar end result; but very different process.
Why is it a given that validity and factual basis should be enforced by the site's moderators?
Legally, Section 230 protections are largely in favor of the site and moderators. Not absolutely; but it takes some work to be liable for what a commenter said on your site. As a matter of practice, I'm certainly open to arguments in favor of the idea (and definitely open to the notion that a site wishing to be taken seriously might want to voluntarily practice good moderation); but it's hardly so self-evident that you can just toss it out without comment.
It's possible that they were actually fooled(maybe somebody ancient enough to think that the internet has an editorial staff is still alive and has more seniority than god, maybe anonymous innuendo works even against people who think that they totally aren't fooled); but it's also possible that they weren't really interested:
It's not exactly news that, at least for jobs higher level than bagging groceries and not utterly standardized by some sort of hiring bureaucracy, a variety of somewhat intangible factors come into play. Good 'fit', how good the interviewers felt after talking with you, etc. If he rubbed somebody the wrong way; but but for one of those fuzzy reasons that either don't look good or probably aren't legal if written down, leaving some FUD on the table would be perfectly reasonable, if not entirely honest.
Though, if memory serves, US presidents have an amazing record of not getting shot over foreign policy issues and instead being taken down by domestic opponents or just plain nutjobs.
It's honestly a bit surprising: I'm not sure if we just watch the foreigners better, or if they know that basically any failover president is going to adhere to very similar policies(only more so, because they'll have greater support for Doing Something) and so it really isn't worth the trouble, expense, or risk...
Guy walks on White House lawn, agents take him down. Nobody was hurt, never was the president or his family in danger. The Secret Service did his job. End of story. The rest is just the usual sensational media hysteria.
But, but, what if the guy on the lawn had secretly been a super ninja assassin? Or an android from the future with a 50 kiloton nuclear failsafe embedded in its torso? Why aren't you busy hyperventilating about all the hypothetical threats that are somehow unimportant on one side of a fence but are Super Terrifying if they make it to the other side?
America's Lawn was in existential danger here, and the secret service did nothing!
(In all seriousness, if you have some sort of cool exotic agent and/or heavy weapon that would let you frag the president from the front lawn the fence around the lawn isn't going to stop it. Wind will blow right through, and it's just a fence, not some sort of 18 foot blast wall. If you don't, isn't playing the 'jump the fence and hope that nobody manages to shoot you as you cross a giant strip of grass' plan about the worst possible one? It's not as though politicians don't come out of their lairs to kiss babies, eat at America's Small Town Restaurants, and assorted other things that make it much easier to get close...)
NFC implementations (should) be interoperable unless somebody screwed up implementation to spec; but that promises nothing about compatibility for anything built on top of NFC.
Right now, ISO 7813 mag-stripe cards are nice and standardized; but that only gets you as far as having the reader hardware work. Whether your card will be accepted by a given vendor is an entirely separate matter governed by some ghastly pile of contractual arrangements.
Ah, that's just because today's ultra-high-density platters require high-coercivity materials in order to adequately maintain the magnetization patterns that store the data. Low coercivity magnetic media just don't work at those densities.
It'll never quite stop being weird that Commander Keen, cartoony platformer, is what the guys behind Doom and Quake were working on in their early days....
It is a matter of taste; but the proliferation of 'widescreen' has really made multiple orientation setups more attractive. In particular, the ubiquitous 1920x1080 is cheap as dirt and nice and wide; but actually throws fewer vertical pixels than a nasty old 1280x1024 17' from about 2001. If you read or write a lot of text, or code with reasonably short lines, taking a cheapo 1920x1080 and rotating it gives you a 1080x1920: this is handy because it's still wider than 1024(so even old and horrible programs/layouts generally won't break, since anything that old and horrible probably expects 768 or 1024 pixel wide screens); but provides more vertical resolution than even substantially more expensive monitors in their native orientation.
I prefer my 'primary' monitor to be unrotated; but the amount of vertical resolution you can get for the money, without totally sacrificing width, from a rotated secondary monitor is pretty compelling.
In this case, you might want to go after the vets before the doctors...
It's not an accident that they were looking at agricultural workers (rather than, say, elementary school teachers, who would be seeing the worst of it from antibiotics-for-the-sniffles patients), nor is it an accident that there are 'livestock-associated' drug resistant strains.
Aside from price, which makes accepting multiple monitors rather compelling(you can get physically big ones for relatively small amounts of money, because of TVs; but if you want resolution the cost goes up fast and things really start to misbehave if you go high enough that DP MST or the like is required to drive the thing), it mostly comes down to how good your windowing system is at tiling and how well applications that expect 'full screen' can handle playing with others.
A good window manager makes carving up a single large monitor into chunks suitably sized for your various programs easy and painless. If you are enduring a less obliging one, it can be a fairly ugly business, actually less pleasant than getting some help from multiple physical displays, which are more widely respected even by poorly behaved programs.
That said, the 'two side by side, giant bezel in the middle' configuration is not my favorite. A larger primary screen, with ancillary screens on one or both sides gives you plenty of room for assorted lesser windows; but also avoids annoying bezels in the center of your field of view.
You don't choose between workspaces and physical screens, you just have multiple physical screens so that each workspace can be even larger and more pleasant to use...
You do eventually run into diminishing returns; but being able to display more than one monitor worth of stuff simultaneously definitely has its uses, and is something that being able to switch between workspaces, be the transition ever so elegant, cannot replace.
Given that 8 was the "Just because it's called 'Windows' doesn't mean it needs a functional windowing system!" release, It's pretty hard to argue with them.
Maybe some of that works on touchscreen laptops; but 'metro' is a tragicomedy on any monitor configuration worth using.
In addition, Tesla(whether or not you see this as an improvement is a distinct issue, it simply is so) sells cars much more like an enterprise IT hardware vendor sells hardware: at least within the warranty period, there is very much an ongoing interaction between the hardware and the vendor. System health information gets sent directly back, on site techs with specialized parts and firmware get sent out and so on. More traditional car companies are closer to buying a PC: the dealer will offer (often absurdly priced; but available) maintenance; and the vendor may become involved with certain warranty or recall cases; but they are otherwise largely out of the loop, with third parties handling the ongoing interaction with the hardware.
Something has to provide coordination and theatre-level intelligence for all deployed Highlander batteries, no?
We will, of course, run all your errands for you without gathering the data for marketing and other purposes; because doing that would be just too easy...
How is blinding someone with a laser worse than killing or maiming them with a bullet?
The assorted 'laws of war' are heavily leavened by what their framers suspect that they can actually get at least some people to agree to; but the overall theoretical foundation always seems to be an attempt to steer weapons in the direction of "Kills outright, or leaves a wound that, if treated, will heal with comparatively limited permanent damage."
It's not an easy standard to maintain(both in terms of convenience, mass-maiming is a hell of a shock to morale and logistics, and engineering, something that will kill if it hits you as designed will likely cause serious tissue damage and/or amputation if it scores a sub-par hit); but it's not really a terribly strange shared desire, from the perspective of the warring European powers of the 20th century that wrote most of them.
I'm fairly out of my depth with this stuff, so this is an honest inquiry: how do the magnetic nanoparticles fit into the equation?
I realize that, once coated with a suitably tailored binding protein, the particles will collect whatever target the binding protein was specified for (presumably this could even be tailored, for any target where a suitably tame binding compound is available), and probably fairly efficiently because of the absurd surface area of nanoparticles.
What I don't understand is the necessity of using the nanoparticles. It was my understanding that, outside of seriously immunocompromised victims, T-cells(and possibly other flavors of phagocytes, I'm fuzzy on the details) are extremely adept at engulfing and destroying foreign bodies, including 'clumps' produced by targets bound to the antigens produced by B-cells. This technique appears to be using a synthetic/introduced antigen(which makes sense if the immune system isn't producing the necessary antigen, or not ramping up production fast enough); but it also introduces the nanoparticles so that the antigen clumps can be magnetically scrubbed from the bloodstream, rather than cleaned up by the T Cells.
What is the peculiarity here that would make introducing the novel clump-scrubbing mechanism necessary and worthwhile?