"The foreman decides when they wake up, when they eat, and when they go to the bathroom. The foreman decides when it's time to let them go to bed at the end of the day."
The pollution is bad, just like in a war zone. Well military recruits can still be sent to one. Police (here in Australia) walk around - in the post-bushfire charred remains of home - to search for bodies of the deceased.
Life & work is hard...
I grant, of course, that soldiers & police get much better salaries & living conditions (when away from work), so there's no comparison.
Just reminding you of some of the (few) similarities...
So, do[es any of] these standards make it easier for a gov't or other organization to notice that someone (eg, a journalist) has got his/her data (eg, article, photo's, interview audio, important video clips, etc.) encrypted on a device, ie, as they try to sneak from, say, within a war zone (closed to journalists) back to friendly soil?
If so, which encryption software (eg, Trucrypt, etc.) - that DOESN'T adhere to standards - will save this journo's life and/or media, in the above situation?
I seem to recall reading reports / rumors of AVG being a dangerous product, at the latest major version release (was it 7.0?).
At that point, we removed it, but still have one computer trying to run it, but (hopefully) unable to do so, due to a missing AVG DLL file (deleted, with others, when manual remove wouldn't work).
Who would use a program, with such a recent (alleged) history of infecting computers, rather than protecting them?:-/
IF the donor really wants to support their fav charity, let them put $17,000 into an plain, unmarked envelope & ship it to the CCF's treasurer, marked "Anonymous Donation" (or, to disguise the source further, they can also slice that amount of money into parts, and ship the parts in various, separate envelopes, variously addressed by different hands and/or computer-labels with various fonts/character attributes / sizes, etc.
After all, you've just told everybody about them...
Next, we'll do away with customers...!
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
Which car-buying customers really know how their car works, especially, now that cars include microprocessors in their engine systems?
Do you want the car-makers to decide what each customer should buy?
I don't think so.
Hold on! Maybe you're right: After all look at the monstrosities that General Motors, and other "dinosaur-makers" have put on the market... eg, Hummer, & the like...
I'll buy into your plan for this industry, if not the IT departments within it:
Let's remove the heads of such companies, eg, replacing them with people who understand Global Warming, electric vehicles, the joy of bicycling or motor-scooting through a scenic place on a warm, summer's day and really care about energy independence (as a political goal).
Let's see what the new "people's boards of directors" would direct their companies' engineers to design, and how soon they manage to overcome all the problems that present ones seem unable to solve.
Smaller, lighter, electric "smart, city-commuter cars" would save much & would cost less (when in production), enabling first-car buyers to skip 8-cylinder gas-guzzlers, thereby putting more of their money into supporting the new energy-efficient car-makers, and less into ancient, off-shore oil-producers.
US car companies would begin to lead, again, and jobs would be created instead of going off-shore.
More important, people would feel proud to buy locally designed/made cars, again.
Win, win, win, win, win...
Yes, I think I like your idea after all... in its place!
With some luck, going Solar (eg, with Photo-Voltaic panels, etc.) will see our future homes able to supply DC voltages, directly, without all the chargers.
It's just a matter of time before PV panels get cheaper to make and/or more efficient at converting solar to electrical power.
In Australia, an ISP's customers can complain to the Telecommunications Ombudsman (TIO).
If the TIO considers that the complaint has merit (even -before- it is investigated & decided), the ISP must pay TIO a fee, upwards of Au$200.
The TIO may then propose a solution that costs the ISP additional money, eg, if it has to compensate the customer for some loss of service, etc.
An ISP would tend think twice, before dumping customers, with such fees hanging over their heads.
Perhaps USA (and other places) needs such a mechanism, to keep ISPs a bit more honest...
One thing to avoid: In Australia, an ISP is required to "join" TIO, but there have been some cases of ISP's failing to join; in these cases, the fees wouldn't apply, at least until the ISP is belatedly persuaded to join.
To make this work, a large fine for failure to join should be part of the enabling legislation.
Australia's [defacto] monopoly telco - Telstra - has a big internal promoter, who was heard (giving a talk on ABC Radio National, in a recent month) promoting the idea of Telstra offering to pay thousands of dollars to organizations, if one of their (ie, Telstra's) employees gets elected to the organization's Boards.
On one level, it's a chance for skilled Telstra people to "contribute" to their communities, but (I think) doing also so, disrupts the democracy of the organizations and makes them beholden to (and less likely to speak out against) their monopolistic telco "sponsor".
It also gives Telstra opportunities to learn of plans to invest in products & services that the big telco can supply (by way of more than recouping its "investment in the community").
First Q: If you're so dead set against your company patenting your software IP, did you negotiate (eg, by crossing-out lines of your contract that apply to it) by way of -precluding- your unwilling involvement and/or conflicts that might arise over your tenure with this organisation?
If not, I don't like your chances.
2nd Q: How committed are you to your position?
If your employer asks you to choose between your job & your position on Software Patents, are you prepared to forfeit your job?
(Of course, even if you choose to depart from the present context, eg, to make a statement that everyone involved in the current negotiation would understand, there's every chance that your [then-to-be past-] employer would still go ahead and apply for the patent, after you've been replaced.)
The best way is to work for yourself, eg, in a small group of like-minded people, and be careful about what you sign... set an example, that others might pick-up & try.
(The guy, who runs Photo.net has a couple of books, one of which outlines such a structure, based on groups of 5 talented people, who - together - create database-based web sites, on their own terms, for their clients; roles such as project lead & client liaison rotate after each completed project, and people have different skills, useful to project goals.)
While staying at Adelaide's YHA hostel (in 2007), I met a Japanese nurse, who told me she worked in a small team (including surgeons) on one of the [then only two very costly, but highly effective] Robot Surgery machines in Japan.
(Advantages, by the way, seem to include reducing the size of the entry hole for most procedures, thereby reducing the amount of scarring & recovery time. There may also be procedures that only robotic surgery machines can perform.)
It would be good to have a quick (ie, TED-style) survey of the world's high-end Robot Surgery systems (just if some of them aren't so expensive anymore).
One point that I recall her making was that - compared to some other group(s), elsewhere, her group had very stable team memberships, and it was observed that keeping a stable team working together (whenever possible) seemed to increase the system's success rate.
This observation/rumor should provide seeds for important research, even if the topic doesn't make it to TED.
Are similar machines coming down in price, eg, so that they might go where costly surgeons are not, as a rule, being sent today (eg, smaller indigenous communities, disaster scenes, etc.)?
Perhaps some Freakonomics research is needed, eg, to compare the cost of evacuation vs near-site surgery in a mobile, flown-in, robot surgery system, for some of the world's larger, remote incidents.
BTW, if any such research is already complete & results are available to read, we'd appreciate a URL or other citation to it. TIA.
With China (& Japan) loaning so much $$ to the US, eg, to fund the Iraq war, etc. (Go check it out!)...it won't be -too- long before China (&/or Japan) will -own- the US.
If China gets the Country, then it's Great Firewall will "protect" US citizens & residents from all those troublesome ideas, that they worry will infect their own people, today.
If he's not got a P2P client that lets him reduce its bandwidth use, get him to use one that does.
Alternatively, insert a cheap PC with 2 LAN interfaces (NICs), running SmoothWall (firewall) between your ADSL modem & your switch.
Among other things, SmoothWall can regulate bandwidth to guarantee each of you fair amounts.
Actually, there OUGHT TO BE a ONE MORE FEATURE - yet to be developed? - in any such device:
When one isn't using their portion of the bandwidth (& -certainly- when not connected to the switch or SmoothWall firewall), it should insure that all bandwidth goes to the one who is (& vice versa).
After [Queensland] Australia's & other "Doctor Death" tragedies (in which doctors' many errors have left patients much worse off, or dead...) and other situations, in which doctors sexually abuse or just undulu fondle patients, as part of their "treatment" - a partly public online data base might be just what we need to help find & eradicate "bad" medical professionals.
Let Google Health be modified to compile results of medical procedures - by the practitioner(s), who perform them - and compare longer-term performance with expected failure & complication rates across the hospital...
and then compare each hospital's rates to "best practice" -...ie, to see if practitioners and/or hospitals need retraining or further investigation.
We could also get very useful (even valuable) data on risks of working / living in certain areas, eg, by post code... if correlations between location and diseases are available to all via Google Health.
Mapping sources of pollutions & overlaying incidence rate contour lines onto the same maps, might affect property prices... giving folks another [if economic] reason to cleanup the mess before people would move to a new development/location.
Gov't-held data is already held & analyzed, around the world, to support such analyses; eg:
While in South Australia, attending a Data Mining seminar (atop the EDS building in Adelaide), I heard some public sector IT managers report how Data Mining - even in -existing- Public Health Service databases - showed useful patterns of disease occuramces vs postcode... but another public sector IT manager was quick to poit out that such results would not be made known to members of the public.
(Tell me: Does this kind of data hiding happen in such places as Sweden? I hope not... but give me the facts & some URLs where they are available; yes, some of us read Swedish here...;-)
Just as Google "earns" (however indirectly) from what we search for (eg, enabling it to increase its ad revenues, by positioning "relavent" ad's beside our search results)...
so can it (very likely) continue to earn even more, eg, automatically listening-in on our future phone conversations - using well-developed voice-to-text technologies - to gather valuable information from them.
Perhaps we should be -paid- for each use of Google's "free" VoIP service, ie, if/when it is unfolded before us... more as harvested info is sold at higher prices, less before it is sold.
A similar rewards model should also apply to Google Mail messages sent & received.
A public health expert from Sweden - Hans Rosling, who teaches at Karolinska Institutet - has (some time ago, already) announced that he was able to persuade holders of UN-collected population data to publish their data on-line for anyone wanting to analyze it (eg, using his innovative tools for displaying it: GapMinder).
I would say that the data which he managed to get put on-line for anyone's use might be a counterexample to the poster's claim.
Of course, you can decide for yourself...;-)
See his 2nd talk at TED.com for URL's and other details regarding access.
Hey, before they dump the survey results into a shreader, I'd like to know if there is any correlation between the use of -each- of the drugs (ie, at least 3 more data analyses needed here) and some reasonable measure of performance, eg:
1. # of papers published, 2. ever held a leadership position in their dep't or company, 3. ever won a Nobel prize, and/or 4. ever (and/or 3 of times) nominated for a Nobel, etc.)
Well, forcing your customers to use your subsidiary company (or any supplier, for that matter) sounds pretty anti-competitive to me... and - if the Aussie comtetition watchdog barks loudly enough, eBay may have to play fair again.
I'm sure credit card vendors will scream "Fowl!" soon...
By some coincidence, we had a representative attend a local Fuel Cell talk. A former CSIRO researcher seemed to suggest that BMW's H car used H-powered fuel-cells to generate electri- city for auxiliary systems, NOT to drive the car.
BMW was reportedly quite happy with petro & diesel engines powering its drive trains...
Slashdot Mirror
"The foreman decides when they wake up,
when they eat, and when they go to the bathroom.
The foreman decides when it's time
to let them go to bed at the end of the day."
The pollution is bad, just like in a war zone.
Well military recruits can still be sent to one.
Police (here in Australia) walk around - in the
post-bushfire charred remains of home - to search
for bodies of the deceased.
Life & work is hard...
I grant, of course, that soldiers & police
get much better salaries & living conditions
(when away from work), so there's no comparison.
Just reminding you of some of the (few) similarities...
So, do[es any of] these standards make it easier for a gov't or other organization to notice that someone (eg, a journalist) has got his/her data (eg, article, photo's, interview audio, important video clips, etc.) encrypted on a device, ie, as they try to sneak from, say, within a war zone (closed to journalists) back to friendly soil?
If so, which encryption software (eg, Trucrypt, etc.) - that DOESN'T adhere to standards - will save this journo's life and/or media, in the above situation?
Maybe... just maybe... the OLPC project would get more L's donated if they allowed donors to choose the country to which the donated machine would go.
Is this provided, eg, by the Amazon interface?
If not, does the OLPC project provide it in other ways?
(Forget how it might look, to on-lookers... to maximize the number of kids who get computers, let donors have a bit more control as to destination.)
If the following link doesn't get you there, just access the organization's home page & search for "Code of Ethics"...
http://acs.org.au/index.cfm?action=show&conID=coe
I'd be interested in other IT (or Engineering) societies' Codes of Ethics (or similar)...
Kindly post links in a reply to this post, thanks.
I seem to recall reading reports / rumors of AVG being a dangerous product, at the latest major version release (was it 7.0?).
At that point, we removed it, but still have one computer trying to run it, but (hopefully) unable to do so, due to a missing AVG DLL file (deleted, with others, when manual remove wouldn't work).
Who would use a program, with such a recent (alleged) history of infecting computers, rather than protecting them? :-/
IF the donor really wants to support their fav charity,
let them put $17,000 into an plain, unmarked envelope
& ship it to the CCF's treasurer, marked "Anonymous
Donation" (or, to disguise the source further, they can
also slice that amount of money into parts, and ship
the parts in various, separate envelopes, variously
addressed by different hands and/or computer-labels
with various fonts/character attributes / sizes, etc.
Simple test...
After all, you've just told everybody about them...
Which car-buying customers really know how their car works, especially, now that cars include microprocessors in their engine systems?
Do you want the car-makers to decide what each customer should buy?
I don't think so.
Hold on! Maybe you're right: After all look at the monstrosities that General Motors, and other "dinosaur-makers" have put on the market... eg, Hummer, & the like...
I'll buy into your plan for this industry, if not the IT departments within it:
Let's remove the heads of such companies, eg, replacing them with people who understand Global Warming, electric vehicles, the joy of bicycling or motor-scooting through a scenic place on a warm, summer's day and really care about energy independence (as a political goal).
Let's see what the new "people's boards of directors" would direct their companies' engineers to design, and how soon they manage to overcome all the problems that present ones seem unable to solve.
Smaller, lighter, electric "smart, city-commuter cars" would save much & would cost less (when in production), enabling first-car buyers to skip 8-cylinder gas-guzzlers, thereby putting more of their money into supporting the new energy-efficient car-makers, and less into ancient, off-shore oil-producers.
US car companies would begin to lead, again, and jobs would be created instead of going off-shore.
More important, people would feel proud to buy locally designed/made cars, again.
Win, win, win, win, win...
Yes, I think I like your idea after all... in its place!
With some luck, going Solar (eg, with Photo-Voltaic panels, etc.) will see our future homes able to supply DC voltages, directly, without all the chargers.
It's just a matter of time before PV panels get cheaper to make and/or more efficient at converting solar to electrical power.
In Australia, an ISP's customers can complain to the Telecommunications Ombudsman (TIO).
If the TIO considers that the complaint has merit (even -before- it is investigated & decided), the ISP must pay TIO a fee, upwards of Au$200.
The TIO may then propose a solution that costs the ISP additional money, eg, if it has to compensate the customer for some loss of service, etc.
An ISP would tend think twice, before dumping customers, with such fees hanging over their heads.
Perhaps USA (and other places) needs such a mechanism, to keep ISPs a bit more honest...
One thing to avoid: In Australia, an ISP is required to "join" TIO, but there have been some cases of ISP's failing to join; in these cases, the fees wouldn't apply, at least until the ISP is belatedly persuaded to join.
To make this work, a large fine for failure to join should be part of the enabling legislation.
Australia's [defacto] monopoly telco - Telstra - has a big internal promoter, who was heard (giving a talk on ABC Radio National, in a recent month) promoting the idea of Telstra offering to pay thousands of dollars to organizations, if one of their (ie, Telstra's) employees gets elected to the organization's Boards.
On one level, it's a chance for skilled Telstra people to "contribute" to their communities, but (I think) doing also so, disrupts the democracy of the organizations and makes them beholden to (and less likely to speak out against) their monopolistic telco "sponsor".
It also gives Telstra opportunities to learn of plans to invest in products & services that the big telco can supply (by way of more than recouping its "investment in the community").
First Q: If you're so dead set against your company patenting your software IP, did you negotiate (eg, by crossing-out lines of your contract that apply to it) by way of -precluding- your unwilling involvement and/or conflicts that might arise over your tenure with this organisation?
If not, I don't like your chances.
2nd Q: How committed are you to your position?
If your employer asks you to choose between your job & your position on Software Patents, are you prepared to forfeit your job?
(Of course, even if you choose to depart from the present context, eg, to make a statement that everyone involved in the current negotiation would understand, there's every chance that your [then-to-be past-] employer would still go ahead and apply for the patent, after you've been replaced.)
The best way is to work for yourself, eg, in a small group of like-minded people, and be careful about what you sign... set an example, that others might pick-up & try.
(The guy, who runs Photo.net has a couple of books, one of which outlines such a structure, based on groups of 5 talented people, who - together - create database-based web sites, on their own terms, for their clients; roles such as project lead & client liaison rotate after each completed project, and people have different skills, useful to project goals.)
(OK, we don't know if it's already been published; it it has, then "Move along, nothing to see here, folks...")
Let a thousand minds mull over these parallel programs, some of whom might just have access to its code. Then we'll see...
PS Is anybody (eg, group of well-known / reliable / respectable whitehat hackers, or the like) suing for access to some of those voting machines?
That'd certainly be worth some /. "air-time" in (hopefully near) future.
(Advantages, by the way, seem to include reducing the size of the entry hole for most procedures, thereby reducing the amount of scarring & recovery time. There may also be procedures that only robotic surgery machines can perform.)
It would be good to have a quick (ie, TED-style) survey of the world's high-end Robot Surgery systems (just if some of them aren't so expensive anymore).
One point that I recall her making was that - compared to some other group(s), elsewhere, her group had very stable team memberships, and it was observed that keeping a stable team working together (whenever possible) seemed to increase the system's success rate.
This observation/rumor should provide seeds for important research, even if the topic doesn't make it to TED.
Are similar machines coming down in price, eg, so that they might go where costly surgeons are not, as a rule, being sent today (eg, smaller indigenous communities, disaster scenes, etc.)?
Perhaps some Freakonomics research is needed, eg, to compare the cost of evacuation vs near-site surgery in a mobile, flown-in, robot surgery system, for some of the world's larger, remote incidents.
BTW, if any such research is already complete & results are available to read, we'd appreciate a URL or other citation to it. TIA.
With China (& Japan) loaning so much $$ to the US, eg, to fund the Iraq war, etc. (Go check it out!) ...it won't be -too- long before China (&/or Japan) will -own- the US.
:-/
If China gets the Country, then it's Great Firewall will "protect" US citizens & residents from all those troublesome ideas, that they worry will infect their own people, today.
Better learn Chinese, folks!
If he's not got a P2P client that lets him reduce its bandwidth use, get him to use one that does.
Alternatively, insert a cheap PC with 2 LAN interfaces (NICs), running SmoothWall (firewall) between your ADSL modem & your switch.
Among other things, SmoothWall can regulate bandwidth to guarantee each of you fair amounts.
Actually, there OUGHT TO BE a ONE MORE FEATURE - yet to be developed? - in any such device:
When one isn't using their portion of the bandwidth (& -certainly- when not connected to the switch or SmoothWall firewall), it should insure that all bandwidth goes to the one who is (& vice versa).
Is there any OSS firewall, etc. that does that?
TIA
After [Queensland] Australia's & other "Doctor Death" tragedies (in which doctors' many errors have left patients much worse off, or dead...) and other situations, in which doctors sexually abuse or just undulu fondle patients, as part of their "treatment" - a partly public online data base might be just what we need to help find & eradicate "bad" medical professionals.
...ie, to see if practitioners and/or hospitals need retraining or further investigation.
;-)
Let Google Health be modified to compile results of medical procedures - by the practitioner(s), who perform them - and compare longer-term performance with expected failure & complication rates across the hospital...
and then compare each hospital's rates to "best practice" -
We could also get very useful (even valuable) data on risks of working / living in certain areas, eg, by post code... if correlations between location and diseases are available to all via Google Health.
Mapping sources of pollutions & overlaying incidence rate contour lines onto the same maps, might affect property prices... giving folks another [if economic] reason to cleanup the mess before people would move to a new development/location.
Gov't-held data is already held & analyzed, around the world, to support such analyses; eg:
While in South Australia, attending a Data Mining seminar (atop the EDS building in Adelaide), I heard some public sector IT managers report how Data Mining - even in -existing- Public Health Service databases - showed useful patterns of disease occuramces vs postcode...
but another public sector IT manager was quick to poit out that such results would not be made known to members of the public.
(Tell me: Does this kind of data hiding happen in such places as Sweden? I hope not... but give me the facts & some URLs where they are available; yes, some of us read Swedish here...
Just as Google "earns" (however indirectly) from what we search for (eg, enabling it to increase its ad revenues, by positioning "relavent" ad's beside our search results)...
so can it (very likely) continue to earn even more, eg, automatically listening-in on our future phone conversations - using well-developed voice-to-text technologies - to gather valuable information from them.
Perhaps we should be -paid- for each use of Google's "free" VoIP service, ie, if/when it is unfolded before us... more as harvested info is sold at higher prices, less before it is sold.
A similar rewards model should also apply to Google Mail messages sent & received.
A public health expert from Sweden - Hans Rosling, who teaches at Karolinska Institutet - has (some time ago, already) announced that he was able to persuade holders of UN-collected population data to publish their data on-line for anyone wanting to analyze it (eg, using his innovative tools for displaying it: GapMinder).
;-)
I would say that the data which he managed to get put on-line for anyone's use might be a counterexample to the poster's claim.
Of course, you can decide for yourself...
See his 2nd talk at TED.com for URL's and other details regarding access.
Hey, before they dump the survey results into a shreader, I'd like to know if there is any correlation between the use of -each- of the drugs (ie, at least 3 more data analyses needed here) and some reasonable measure of performance, eg:
1. # of papers published,
2. ever held a leadership position in their dep't or company,
3. ever won a Nobel prize, and/or
4. ever (and/or 3 of times) nominated for a Nobel, etc.)
Has anyone done similar analyses, as yet?
Doesn't eBay -own- PayPal...?!?
Well, forcing your customers to use your subsidiary company (or any supplier, for that matter) sounds pretty anti-competitive to me... and - if the Aussie comtetition watchdog barks loudly enough, eBay may have to play fair again.
I'm sure credit card vendors will scream "Fowl!" soon...
Sure, they might go OK when there's fighting to be done...
but there's more to Life than just that!
Creativity has many faces, and their NOT all punched a virtual
black & blue from fights, even if that's the only way to win
some computer gamce.
Games just don't have the breadth of Life experiences for me.
If this system is still "standing up"
you might give folks a quick preview,
eg, by opening it to demo access...?
Haven't you listened to the TED talk (cf: http://ted.com/
on Spaghetti Sauces, which refers to Moskowicz's idea that:
There isn't a (one) best , only best
eg, best spaghetti sauceS, etc.
Some find one best, others find another best [for them]...
Whatcha think?
By some coincidence, we had a representative
attend a local Fuel Cell talk. A former CSIRO
researcher seemed to suggest that BMW's H car
used H-powered fuel-cells to generate electri-
city for auxiliary systems, NOT to drive the
car.
BMW was reportedly quite happy with petro &
diesel engines powering its drive trains...