It doesn't matter what generation anyone belongs to -- you'll do things the way the employer wants them done, or you won't be employed.
Now, are there some new technologies that are in common use in the consumer market that can be used effectively in the business environment? Probably, yes. And businesses will use them if it makes sense in their environment. But they won't use them because the pouty-faced punks with their newly-minted college degrees will throw a hissy-fit if the boss doesn't let them use their personal gadgets.
Business don't give a damn about their current employees, let alone potential future employees. You'll do as you're told if you want the money... and eating is such an addictive hobby.
Of course, young people just might start up their own businesses where everyone can stay focused on their iWhatevers all day, and if it's better than the old businesses than the young folks will win. I wouldn't put my money in their stock, though.
It's always been difficult to learn about "the land of the free" in an institution where you (the students) are forced by law to go there whether you want to or not.
Excellent training ground for applied sarcasm and irony appreciation, though.
And if publishers lose, we all lose, because quite honestly ebooks are a far inferior experience to real, dead tree books. I dread the day when real books become considered "obsolete" and are no longer published. That's the day I stop reading books.
Which "real, dead tree books"? There are the books made by publishers like Easton Press, which are made with high quality paper, leather-bound, and gilded edges; these books are very expensive but will last literally (all puns intended) generations. Then there are the usual hard-back mass produced books, which have the cardboard binding and fair quality paper; might get a few decades out of them, but at least they don't cost too much. Then there's the cheap paperback books; read 'em twice and they're starting to fall apart.
I used to think just like you: I love books, I want books, and to hell with these e-reader things. Then I got a Kindle (long story). And I realized I was not quite right; I do love the high-quality leather bound books AS books. But the cheap stuff are just delivery methods for what I really love: stories. I love stories. And e-readers give me the stories in a far better delivery method than a paperback.
The high-quality book publishers will still hang around and produce their specialty products. The mass publishers are finding that their delivery methods are being overtaken by technology, just like the music and movie delivery middlemen have had happen to them.
Do you really think it's going to be good for our standing in the world if it gets around that our arrogant need to self aggrandize just cost one of their citizens' lives?
Fuck our "standing in the world". I don't give a damn what others think of my country, and I'm pretty sure they don't care what I think of theirs.
Don't know about "laws of ethics" but there are innate Natural Rights, which all human beings share simply because they are human. Example: The right (or instinct if you prefer) to own one's self, rather than be owned as a slave.
There are no innate Natural Rights. "Rights" is a concept that human beings invented, and has no actual existence in the physical world.
"Rights" are a set of ideas, held by some (but not all) people, as to how people should behave in relation to each other. And that's all. The people who don't agree with those ideas are still quite physically capable of "violating" your "rights" -- for example, your supposed "right to life" will not stop a bullet fired from a gun from blowing out your brains.
I'm not saying that rights, and all the philosophical and societal stuff that's been hung off the concept are a bad thing. It's a pretty good way to run a society. But when you talk about them as if they actually really honestly exist in the world, or that human beings are somehow infused with them in some way as soon as they pop out of the womb, then you're in the same sort of fantasy-land that any given religious believer exists in. And you're just as easily ignored by those who don't share your particular fantasy.
*Ding dong the witch is dead*. And good riddance. Censorship has no place in a freedom loving society and its really appalling that Republicans who blather on about freedom are the first to support authoritarian censorship.
It's also appalling that you don't think Democrats do the same thing. Reference hate-speech codes, where saying a discouraging word can get you jail time -- if the Democrats had had their way.
The reality is that this is no longer a freedom-loving society. Why, I can't even advocate genocide without someone getting their feathers ruffled. (It's a joke. Remember what a joke is?)
Casino Royale gets a PG-13, even with all its James Bond violence, and the sadistic clubbing of the protagonist's testicles while he's tied to a chair.
The earlier poster must be right about the middle-aged white women on the rating board. They were too busy swooning over Daniel Craig to notice the torture.
Most of the middle-aged women I know would be too busy cheering on the torture of a man to pay much attention to who the man actually was.
What you're basically saying is that we don't need no stinking privacy, if you've done nothing wrong you got nothing to hide.
It's not that we don't need privacy. It's that if you encrypt your phone, the cops will beat the password out of you anyway. And if you complain of being beaten, they'll beat you more, and no one will stop them.
Of course, not every cop is corrupt like this. Plenty of cops would never dream of beating a person in custody. They have other prisoners do the beating, instead.
The lesson is not "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", it's "don't put the stuff you need to hide on your damn phone".
I had pretty much the same attitude as you. Why buy an ebook reader, when print books are just fine?
Then I found myself alone in a hotel room, at 2 AM. I was making the 2 day drive back home from visiting family for Thanksgiving. The bed was awful and I couldn't sleep. Usually I can read a bit and get to sleep that way... but all the print books I'd brought on the trip with me, I'd already read, and left them with the family for them to read.
I booted up the netbook I had with me, looking to go online to read something... and the hotel's wifi was so slow it was maddening. Even when I got to my favorite blogs, even, no one had updated anything because it was Thanksgiving and they had better things to do than provide entertainment to a desperate guy in a hotel far away from home and any open bookstore.
It occurred to me that if I had a Kindle, I could order a book right damn then, and start reading.
So I ordered it. Didn't get it 'til I got home, of course. And now I'm loading it with a ton of books so I doubt I'll ever be without something new to read (unless the battery fails). But as long as it's working, I can get a book RIGHT NOW. Any time. Almost anywhere.
That's the advantage to me -- not so much the ebook in and of itself (although they've been fine so far), but getting it immediately.
From the postal service's own Inspector General report:
The following paper demonstrates that the current system of funding the Postal
Service’s Civil Service Retirement System pension responsibility is inequitable and has
resulted in the Postal Service overpaying $75 billion to the pension fund.
The postal service is having money extracted from it each year, channeled to other parts of the federal government pension systems (mostly military). This is to help disguise how bad the federal budget is overdrawn.
If the post office were allowed to fund their peoples' pensions the way every other government agency is, they'd be showing a profit.
I am continuously offended by the asinine idiocy of "you must take all packages weighing 16 oz or more to the counter". This is supposedly a Unibomber-era security regulation but in reality it's a way for the union to keep window staff high.
I believe that's not quite true. The rule is that packages over 13 ounces (they changed it in January 2010 to 13 down from 16 ounces) that only have postage stamps on them to pay for postage, must be taken to the counter. If you use one of the Automated Postal Center (APC) units that most post offices have in their lobbies, you can purchase postage for the package there, pay with a credit/debit card, put the printed label on the package and drop it in the collection bin. Supposedly by paying with a credit card, there's increased security because they can track the owner of the card.
Do you really want pig farms to move in next to you? How about a slaughterhouse?
Farming isn't all beautiful waves of grain and rolling meadows with horses frolicking. Some things need to be out in the middle of nowhere. But those places also need to be connected to the rest of the country -- that is, after all, where the food comes from.
I hate to say it about my fellow Americans, but we're a bunch of paranoid, over-judgmental, overreacting, intolerant, lynch-mob forming loonies sometimes.
I don't understand it either. You'd think that the people running the company were far more interested in having control over their customers than in having their customers' money.
Can't someone in marketing break into a board meeting and explain to these cretins that the more versatile a product is, it is usually more attractive to a wider segment of the potential customer base, which tends to result in more sales.
But don't worry, you are not required to realize that. It just means you're far more likely to exit life quite soon. We'll laugh at the very surprised look on your face as you leave.
Yeah, but just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you should.
Actually, just because you can -- that is, you have the right to -- do a thing, you damn well SHOULD do it. Just to remind the authoritarian assholes that you have the right to!
People go on and on about the rights their society gives them without bothering to mention the responsibilities. It's not that far a stretch to say that you have a responsibility to not wander around the President with a loaded gun or put the lives of the families of peace officers in danger.
People also go on and on about the security of the President without bothering to mention the President's responsibilities. Yes, no one has any business going to the White House with a loaded gun -- but the President has no business coming to where I (or anyone else) lives and trying to suppress my right to be on private property with my loaded gun. If the President doesn't want to be around folks with guns, he can keep his ass in the White House. Every President swears to uphold the Constitution, so he has a responsibility to recognize the people's second amendment right. (Every President in recent memory has acted badly in this regard, not just the current office holder.)
This woman is clearly trying to put the police and, by posting address information, their families in danger.
People who commit certain crimes are put on the 'sex offenders' list, which provides to the public the person's name and address -- which by your logic puts their families in danger. And this goes on for years after the person has paid their debt to society.
You may say that the public's need to know about potentially dangerous sex offenders in their area outweighs their right to privacy. Well, to me the public's need to know about potentially corrupt and dangerous police in their area outweighs their right to privacy. If they don't like it, they can quit.
Yet while in holland we recently had proposal to make holocaust (not just THE holocaust but all similar events before and since) denial an actual and specific crime. At the moment it already falls under hate crime laws.
Then if I said, while in Holland, something like "Isn't it awful how those poor white people in Finland had to almost all perish in the Finnish Holocaust of 2005?" it would be a crime to deny my statement? Even if it wasn't true? Because denying my statement would be holocaust denial.
Outlawing "denial" is outlawing an attempt to search for the truth. Because those "deniers" that you hate so much... what if they're right? No, I don't think those who deny the Jewish Holocaust in WWII are right, but I read their arguments and made up my own mind, thank you very much.
The very act of outlawing their arguments makes their arguments seem stronger! Because the truth doesn't need the protection of the law, only lies do. And that a society seeks to suppress a debate, however silly, about historical events is a sign of that society's weakness.
No, it's because that's a fucking ridiculous idea. Unless you have someone actually watching the entire length of that fence 24/7, it may as well not be there. If you've got someone watching the fence 24/7, why do you need the fence?
You need the fence AND people watching it 24/7. The fence slows the invaders down a bit which makes it easier for the guards to shoot them.
Although we need more than just a fence. We need a fence, and behind that another fence, and behind that a minefield, and then another fence, and probably an access road, and another fence, and another fence, and then a 40 foot high sheer concrete wall, complete with guard towers that provide complete fire coverage. Oh, we'll also need ways to detect attempts at tunneling so we can blow the tunnels down on their heads and kill them that way.
Yeah, this will require a lot of manpower. If we'd bring the U.S. military back from every damn country on the planet, we'd have plenty of people.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do research like this on just 24 people? That is NOT a statistically valid sample size. So this study is not only obvious, it's invalid.
Damn it, just once I'd like to see a "research team" submit a report that says they spent the grant money on hookers and blow.
Third, I'm pretty sure you are not being taxed at twelve years old, so there's not really an issue of representation. :)
Sales taxes. Even the disenfranchised must pay them on their purchases.
It doesn't matter what generation anyone belongs to -- you'll do things the way the employer wants them done, or you won't be employed.
Now, are there some new technologies that are in common use in the consumer market that can be used effectively in the business environment? Probably, yes. And businesses will use them if it makes sense in their environment. But they won't use them because the pouty-faced punks with their newly-minted college degrees will throw a hissy-fit if the boss doesn't let them use their personal gadgets.
Business don't give a damn about their current employees, let alone potential future employees. You'll do as you're told if you want the money... and eating is such an addictive hobby.
Of course, young people just might start up their own businesses where everyone can stay focused on their iWhatevers all day, and if it's better than the old businesses than the young folks will win. I wouldn't put my money in their stock, though.
It's always been difficult to learn about "the land of the free" in an institution where you (the students) are forced by law to go there whether you want to or not.
Excellent training ground for applied sarcasm and irony appreciation, though.
And if publishers lose, we all lose, because quite honestly ebooks are a far inferior experience to real, dead tree books. I dread the day when real books become considered "obsolete" and are no longer published. That's the day I stop reading books.
Which "real, dead tree books"? There are the books made by publishers like Easton Press, which are made with high quality paper, leather-bound, and gilded edges; these books are very expensive but will last literally (all puns intended) generations. Then there are the usual hard-back mass produced books, which have the cardboard binding and fair quality paper; might get a few decades out of them, but at least they don't cost too much. Then there's the cheap paperback books; read 'em twice and they're starting to fall apart.
I used to think just like you: I love books, I want books, and to hell with these e-reader things. Then I got a Kindle (long story). And I realized I was not quite right; I do love the high-quality leather bound books AS books. But the cheap stuff are just delivery methods for what I really love: stories. I love stories. And e-readers give me the stories in a far better delivery method than a paperback.
The high-quality book publishers will still hang around and produce their specialty products. The mass publishers are finding that their delivery methods are being overtaken by technology, just like the music and movie delivery middlemen have had happen to them.
Do you really think it's going to be good for our standing in the world if it gets around that our arrogant need to self aggrandize just cost one of their citizens' lives?
Fuck our "standing in the world". I don't give a damn what others think of my country, and I'm pretty sure they don't care what I think of theirs.
Don't know about "laws of ethics" but there are innate Natural Rights, which all human beings share simply because they are human. Example: The right (or instinct if you prefer) to own one's self, rather than be owned as a slave.
There are no innate Natural Rights. "Rights" is a concept that human beings invented, and has no actual existence in the physical world.
"Rights" are a set of ideas, held by some (but not all) people, as to how people should behave in relation to each other. And that's all. The people who don't agree with those ideas are still quite physically capable of "violating" your "rights" -- for example, your supposed "right to life" will not stop a bullet fired from a gun from blowing out your brains.
I'm not saying that rights, and all the philosophical and societal stuff that's been hung off the concept are a bad thing. It's a pretty good way to run a society. But when you talk about them as if they actually really honestly exist in the world, or that human beings are somehow infused with them in some way as soon as they pop out of the womb, then you're in the same sort of fantasy-land that any given religious believer exists in. And you're just as easily ignored by those who don't share your particular fantasy.
*Ding dong the witch is dead*. And good riddance. Censorship has no place in a freedom loving society and its really appalling that Republicans who blather on about freedom are the first to support authoritarian censorship.
It's also appalling that you don't think Democrats do the same thing. Reference hate-speech codes, where saying a discouraging word can get you jail time -- if the Democrats had had their way.
The reality is that this is no longer a freedom-loving society. Why, I can't even advocate genocide without someone getting their feathers ruffled. (It's a joke. Remember what a joke is?)
The earlier poster must be right about the middle-aged white women on the rating board. They were too busy swooning over Daniel Craig to notice the torture.
Most of the middle-aged women I know would be too busy cheering on the torture of a man to pay much attention to who the man actually was.
What you're basically saying is that we don't need no stinking privacy, if you've done nothing wrong you got nothing to hide.
It's not that we don't need privacy. It's that if you encrypt your phone, the cops will beat the password out of you anyway. And if you complain of being beaten, they'll beat you more, and no one will stop them.
Of course, not every cop is corrupt like this. Plenty of cops would never dream of beating a person in custody. They have other prisoners do the beating, instead.
The lesson is not "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", it's "don't put the stuff you need to hide on your damn phone".
I had pretty much the same attitude as you. Why buy an ebook reader, when print books are just fine?
Then I found myself alone in a hotel room, at 2 AM. I was making the 2 day drive back home from visiting family for Thanksgiving. The bed was awful and I couldn't sleep. Usually I can read a bit and get to sleep that way... but all the print books I'd brought on the trip with me, I'd already read, and left them with the family for them to read.
I booted up the netbook I had with me, looking to go online to read something... and the hotel's wifi was so slow it was maddening. Even when I got to my favorite blogs, even, no one had updated anything because it was Thanksgiving and they had better things to do than provide entertainment to a desperate guy in a hotel far away from home and any open bookstore.
It occurred to me that if I had a Kindle, I could order a book right damn then, and start reading.
So I ordered it. Didn't get it 'til I got home, of course. And now I'm loading it with a ton of books so I doubt I'll ever be without something new to read (unless the battery fails). But as long as it's working, I can get a book RIGHT NOW. Any time. Almost anywhere.
That's the advantage to me -- not so much the ebook in and of itself (although they've been fine so far), but getting it immediately.
The following paper demonstrates that the current system of funding the Postal Service’s Civil Service Retirement System pension responsibility is inequitable and has resulted in the Postal Service overpaying $75 billion to the pension fund.
The postal service is having money extracted from it each year, channeled to other parts of the federal government pension systems (mostly military). This is to help disguise how bad the federal budget is overdrawn. If the post office were allowed to fund their peoples' pensions the way every other government agency is, they'd be showing a profit.
To me the democrats are incompetent and the republicans are evil, but I don't live in the US and am just happy that this bill finally passed.
To me, the Republicans are incompetent and the Democrats are evil.
Perhaps we're both right.
Yes. That is damn cool. The naysayers and nitpickers will swarm on this story soon enough. But it's still cool.
The only way to correct Wikipedia is pretty much the same way to correct politics. Sweep in with an enraged mob and hang 'em all from the lampposts.
Eve was the second thing I thought of. The first thing I thought was, "That outfit doesn't look at all like Sailor Moon!"
I am continuously offended by the asinine idiocy of "you must take all packages weighing 16 oz or more to the counter". This is supposedly a Unibomber-era security regulation but in reality it's a way for the union to keep window staff high.
I believe that's not quite true. The rule is that packages over 13 ounces (they changed it in January 2010 to 13 down from 16 ounces) that only have postage stamps on them to pay for postage, must be taken to the counter. If you use one of the Automated Postal Center (APC) units that most post offices have in their lobbies, you can purchase postage for the package there, pay with a credit/debit card, put the printed label on the package and drop it in the collection bin. Supposedly by paying with a credit card, there's increased security because they can track the owner of the card.
Do you really want pig farms to move in next to you? How about a slaughterhouse?
Farming isn't all beautiful waves of grain and rolling meadows with horses frolicking. Some things need to be out in the middle of nowhere. But those places also need to be connected to the rest of the country -- that is, after all, where the food comes from.
I hate to say it about my fellow Americans, but we're a bunch of paranoid, over-judgmental, overreacting, intolerant, lynch-mob forming loonies sometimes.
Just like all the other humans on the planet are?
I don't understand it either. You'd think that the people running the company were far more interested in having control over their customers than in having their customers' money.
Can't someone in marketing break into a board meeting and explain to these cretins that the more versatile a product is, it is usually more attractive to a wider segment of the potential customer base, which tends to result in more sales.
doesn't seem fair
Life ain't fair.
But don't worry, you are not required to realize that. It just means you're far more likely to exit life quite soon. We'll laugh at the very surprised look on your face as you leave.
Yeah, but just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you should.
Actually, just because you can -- that is, you have the right to -- do a thing, you damn well SHOULD do it. Just to remind the authoritarian assholes that you have the right to!
People go on and on about the rights their society gives them without bothering to mention the responsibilities. It's not that far a stretch to say that you have a responsibility to not wander around the President with a loaded gun or put the lives of the families of peace officers in danger.
People also go on and on about the security of the President without bothering to mention the President's responsibilities. Yes, no one has any business going to the White House with a loaded gun -- but the President has no business coming to where I (or anyone else) lives and trying to suppress my right to be on private property with my loaded gun. If the President doesn't want to be around folks with guns, he can keep his ass in the White House. Every President swears to uphold the Constitution, so he has a responsibility to recognize the people's second amendment right. (Every President in recent memory has acted badly in this regard, not just the current office holder.)
This woman is clearly trying to put the police and, by posting address information, their families in danger.
People who commit certain crimes are put on the 'sex offenders' list, which provides to the public the person's name and address -- which by your logic puts their families in danger. And this goes on for years after the person has paid their debt to society.
You may say that the public's need to know about potentially dangerous sex offenders in their area outweighs their right to privacy. Well, to me the public's need to know about potentially corrupt and dangerous police in their area outweighs their right to privacy. If they don't like it, they can quit.
Yet while in holland we recently had proposal to make holocaust (not just THE holocaust but all similar events before and since) denial an actual and specific crime. At the moment it already falls under hate crime laws.
Then if I said, while in Holland, something like "Isn't it awful how those poor white people in Finland had to almost all perish in the Finnish Holocaust of 2005?" it would be a crime to deny my statement? Even if it wasn't true? Because denying my statement would be holocaust denial.
Outlawing "denial" is outlawing an attempt to search for the truth. Because those "deniers" that you hate so much... what if they're right? No, I don't think those who deny the Jewish Holocaust in WWII are right, but I read their arguments and made up my own mind, thank you very much.
The very act of outlawing their arguments makes their arguments seem stronger! Because the truth doesn't need the protection of the law, only lies do. And that a society seeks to suppress a debate, however silly, about historical events is a sign of that society's weakness.
No, it's because that's a fucking ridiculous idea. Unless you have someone actually watching the entire length of that fence 24/7, it may as well not be there. If you've got someone watching the fence 24/7, why do you need the fence?
You need the fence AND people watching it 24/7. The fence slows the invaders down a bit which makes it easier for the guards to shoot them.
Although we need more than just a fence. We need a fence, and behind that another fence, and behind that a minefield, and then another fence, and probably an access road, and another fence, and another fence, and then a 40 foot high sheer concrete wall, complete with guard towers that provide complete fire coverage. Oh, we'll also need ways to detect attempts at tunneling so we can blow the tunnels down on their heads and kill them that way.
Yeah, this will require a lot of manpower. If we'd bring the U.S. military back from every damn country on the planet, we'd have plenty of people.