I suppose in a technical sense that there is DRM on consoles, but not in a practical sense. When I buy a Wii game, I consider it equivalent to buying an 8-track - it's meant to be used on a single type of machine. No-one complains when their CDs don't work on a cassette player.:)
Additionally, I don't have to register/confirm/anything for a console game. I plug in console, insert game, play. (At least, that's how it works for all the consoles I own - NES, N64, PS2, Wii - can't speak for the PS3 / Xbox family)
Won't take long for institutions to "correct" for this:
50 -> 20
60 -> 40
70 -> 60
80 -> 80
100 -> 100
All you're hurting are those 60-80% students who are actually trying, but will now be more likely to be punished (since the assumption will be that some of their mark was freebie 50s)
So you don't mind if people have personal facts about you, so long as knowing those facts has no negative ramifications in cases where you don't think it's fair. That's great, but if you put that information out about yourself, I don't see how you're going to control how people use those facts. So... Might it be a better idea to keep things to yourself?
Maybe you're right.
Maybe we should sterilize our lives, removing anything that might be out of the ordinary, unusual, or remotely interesting. We can all watch the exact same shows, listen to the exact same music, and read the exact same books.
Even better - we can let our employers tell us what is acceptable uses of our off time. Put it right in the job description:
Job Opening - Customer Service Associate. Must have computer skills, good customer relations, and watch Seinfeld. Readers of War and Piece need not apply.
Or, we could be human beings.
My question to you is, what does my hobbies possibly have to do with my job performance? Why do you, Mr. Employer, care about what I do after I clock out for the day?
And the answer is - they care because they'd rather you not have plans, or hobbies, or commitments to charities. It's much more profitable to them if you spend your time donating to their charities, and working on their projects. And if they need you to come in on the weekends, they know that you don't have anything else going on.
Maybe it's not the optimal corporate drone policy, having a life. But I work because that's how I feed my family. My life != my work.
I don't care if people know that I post to Slashdot, play RPGs and CCGs, and have an adorable daughter.
What I object to is people using those facts in unrelated contexts (for example, none of them are relevant to my job, and none of them were relevant when I was in school).
Bullshit. Personal life and professional life are impossible to untangle. If you're likely to get arrested in the next year because you've started dealing drugs on the side and have a website promoting your new business, then the company has a lot of reason to know that.
If anything that *might* affect the company is their business, then let's start filtering for:
Are you married? (Might have a kid, which means the company has to allow for leave - no hire)
Ailing family members? (Wouldn't want to have to pay out bereavement leave - no hire)
Part of any sports teams? (Chance of injury affecting job performance - no hire)
Political affiliations? (Won't be able to put in overtime during elections - no hire)
Drives to work? (Dangerous roads out there - require relocation to walking distance or no hire)
Don't forget to check their diet, too - wouldn't want unhealthy employees increasing your premiums..
And so on...
Of course, we should get full details on our employers as well - any dirty secrets that might affect my employment?
How about people just stop posting pictures of themselves and their friends smoking pot on the internet? It's really retarded. Putting your "private life" on MySpace and expecting it to stay private is like running an ad in the newpaper about your "private life" and then getting upset when people know about it.
It's not a question of knowledge, it's a question of relevance - if I do (activity X), and it's unrelated to my job, why does my interviewer care? To use the earlier example of the Air Traffic Controller, as long as he walks in the door sober, it's no-one's business how smashed he was all weekend.
Seems the defense is to put something on each of your sites that *is* protected (religion, or whatnot), and just tell people that your personal sites are protected under employment law.
What if it's something a little less stereotypical? Say you're a political activist of some stripe. If you are publicly active in the pro-X movement, do you want to be dismissed for a job consideration because the guy checking your resume is anti-X?
Had it happen to a friend - he worked on a campaign (in a paid position) for Candidate X's re-election, and the candidate lost.
Month later, during a job interview for an unrelated position, he gets torpedoed by one of the board members for "working for the wrong side". Turns out the interviewer supported Candidate Y.
I had a "supervisor training" course that strongly recommended building a dossier on each of my reports, to create the illusion that I cared about their home lives. It took the form of a two-page questionaire - marital status, name of SO and kids (incl. age), church (if any), sports team (if any), etc etc etc. Everytime someone mentioned a bit of their personal life, I was supposed to mark it down. (Don't remember the name of the system, mainly because I was disgusted by the entire idea).
Needless to say, I opted to actually *care* about my employee's personal lives, which took the form of (a) not tracking their every move, and (b) making sure they got to go home on time and actually have a personal life.
Business is a lot like acting - what people think is going on is a lot more important than what is really going on.
Absolutely correct. No one who has a really active social life has enough time to type their activities into FaceBook or any other sort of trashy tabloid-like social network.
Facebook is a web app. My "friends" include family, people I went to school with, co-workers, the works. And I'd say you've got it backwards - the people who are the busiest socially are the ones who are on Facebook the most. Because that's where things are discussed and organized.
The real truth is that companies don't *want* people with independent social lives. They want folks who will only socialize within the company bounds, who have plenty of free time to "donate" to company-sponsored charities, and who don't want to leave their jobs because their entire existence is wrapped up in those four walls.
People with outside lives have this silly expectation of "weekends", "vacations", and "personal time". And all those are bad for profits.
Could make a point that someone with no online presence is either (a) technologically deficient (and not worth the additional expense required to train), or (b) deliberately hiding something.
If people are going to take web-search snapshots of your life, then just build some vanity pages (you helping orphans, feeding the homeless, rescuing kittens).
You want a BS version of my life? I can happily supply one.
I suspect this is all related to the fact most companies don't give out references anymore (too many lawsuits). Won't take long for people to start suing for this as well.
I'd still rather hire someone who didn't drop acid on camera 5 years ago.
And of course, you don't have any embarassing stories in your past...
"On camera" doesn't mean what it used to - I was at a family birthday party last night, and over three hundred pictures were taken (no reason not to in the age of digital cameras). Don't know if I'd want a picture of me taking shots of tequila going to my boss. I do know it's none of his business, however. (And I've seen worse at the company Christmas party).
With digital cameras and phones and what-not, the pictures are going to be taken. People just need to accept that yes, folks drink, and fornicate, and all the things that your parents and grandparents did. Except now, there's more likely to be a picture. Doesn't make the act worse.
This is the equivalent of you searching for your boss, to make sure you want to take his money. "Oh, looks like Mr. Wilkins tokes up on the weekends. Don't want to work for him."
If the kid's got the grades to get in, what does it matter if he spends his off-hours studying or smoking up? And what business of it is U-WhereEver?
People need to stop tolerating this sort of thing - just because I go to your school (or work for your company) doesn't mean you control the rest of my life.
According to the article, he registered the name two *years* before Chicago put the bid in. They've had plenty of time to notice and do something about it.
Also: if it's the "logical default domain", why did they register the.org version rather than the.com?
Lastly, they can almost certainly afford to throw enough money at this problem to make it go away. (And future bids will drop the ~100 bucks it costs to grab all the domain variations they want well in advance.)
Myst drives you nuts for a very good reason - because everything makes sense, once you understand the background.
It's what I love about the series (less so in the later ones, sadly) - it's not a series of arbitrary puzzles. Once you understand what's going on, the solution becomes rather simple. You get the feeling of actually understanding rather than bruteforcing the solution.
Expect to see less of that. My last trip Stateside was two year ago (arrived the day before The Small Liquid Bottle Incident).
Hate to break it to you folks, but I still get a more stringent inspection going through Canadian customs/immigration (as a Canadian citizen!) than I did travelling out of the U.S. immediately after a major "scare".
And I'm not likely to go back for fun. I'll try to avoid going back for business as well (if Home Office wants me to go, I'll try and make sure I've got plenty of "see, nice person, please don't torture me" documentation on hand.)
And I suspect U.S. tourism is just hunkering down and hiding until this settles down - hard to say "Come to Disneyworld! There's only a small chance we'll send you to Cuba and torture you, honest!"
Unbiased: Some believe Earth is flat, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Still biased - "overwhelming evidence" belies which side of the issue you believe.
Actually unbiased: Some believe Earth is flat.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
I don't think a manager needs to be able to do the job *well*, but they should be able to follow the conversation. They definately should know enough to be able to BS-detect (people padding estimates, saying things are impossible instead of inconvienent, etc).
From TOFA: "Childs, being held in a jail cell on $5 million bond, also happens to be a former felon convicted of aggravated robbery and burglary stemming from charges over two decades ago, which the city knew when it hired him as a city computer engineer."
Which, considering the rest of the FUD around this case, doesn't surprise me.
Went a couple years ago with the wife. The behind-the-scene tour was the best part - you get to see how the effects are done, and you get to spend some actual time in the hallways and bridge, sit in the chairs, and generally geek out at being on the closest thing to the actual -D set.
Only downer was that they didn't allow photography (and the prices for the in-house pictures were too steep to justify).
In my mind, there's a simple solution (from the perspective of Honest Law Enforcement):
If I have access to 25 heavily-armed police officers, could I not just wait politely outside? If they come out sans-weaponry, all is well. And if they come out with weaponry, then you have some cause to start knocking heads. But I would suspect that a minor amount of respect (read: hi, glad you're going to the rally, but I can't really let you wander downtown armed like that, hint hint) might go a long way.
From the protester side, I'm amazed no-one's come up with a way to combine those USB "internet sticks" to a digital camcorder and stream live video (or at least live upload to somewhere more secure).
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose in a technical sense that there is DRM on consoles, but not in a practical sense. When I buy a Wii game, I consider it equivalent to buying an 8-track - it's meant to be used on a single type of machine. No-one complains when their CDs don't work on a cassette player. :)
Additionally, I don't have to register/confirm/anything for a console game. I plug in console, insert game, play. (At least, that's how it works for all the consoles I own - NES, N64, PS2, Wii - can't speak for the PS3 / Xbox family)
Won't take long for institutions to "correct" for this:
All you're hurting are those 60-80% students who are actually trying, but will now be more likely to be punished (since the assumption will be that some of their mark was freebie 50s)
So you don't mind if people have personal facts about you, so long as knowing those facts has no negative ramifications in cases where you don't think it's fair. That's great, but if you put that information out about yourself, I don't see how you're going to control how people use those facts. So... Might it be a better idea to keep things to yourself?
Maybe you're right.
Maybe we should sterilize our lives, removing anything that might be out of the ordinary, unusual, or remotely interesting. We can all watch the exact same shows, listen to the exact same music, and read the exact same books.
Even better - we can let our employers tell us what is acceptable uses of our off time. Put it right in the job description:
Job Opening - Customer Service Associate. Must have computer skills, good customer relations, and watch Seinfeld. Readers of War and Piece need not apply.
Or, we could be human beings.
My question to you is, what does my hobbies possibly have to do with my job performance? Why do you, Mr. Employer, care about what I do after I clock out for the day?
And the answer is - they care because they'd rather you not have plans, or hobbies, or commitments to charities. It's much more profitable to them if you spend your time donating to their charities, and working on their projects. And if they need you to come in on the weekends, they know that you don't have anything else going on.
Maybe it's not the optimal corporate drone policy, having a life. But I work because that's how I feed my family. My life != my work.
I don't care if people know that I post to Slashdot, play RPGs and CCGs, and have an adorable daughter.
What I object to is people using those facts in unrelated contexts (for example, none of them are relevant to my job, and none of them were relevant when I was in school).
Bullshit. Personal life and professional life are impossible to untangle. If you're likely to get arrested in the next year because you've started dealing drugs on the side and have a website promoting your new business, then the company has a lot of reason to know that.
If anything that *might* affect the company is their business, then let's start filtering for:
And so on...
Of course, we should get full details on our employers as well - any dirty secrets that might affect my employment?
How about people just stop posting pictures of themselves and their friends smoking pot on the internet? It's really retarded. Putting your "private life" on MySpace and expecting it to stay private is like running an ad in the newpaper about your "private life" and then getting upset when people know about it.
It's not a question of knowledge, it's a question of relevance - if I do (activity X), and it's unrelated to my job, why does my interviewer care? To use the earlier example of the Air Traffic Controller, as long as he walks in the door sober, it's no-one's business how smashed he was all weekend.
Seems the defense is to put something on each of your sites that *is* protected (religion, or whatnot), and just tell people that your personal sites are protected under employment law.
What if it's something a little less stereotypical? Say you're a political activist of some stripe. If you are publicly active in the pro-X movement, do you want to be dismissed for a job consideration because the guy checking your resume is anti-X?
Had it happen to a friend - he worked on a campaign (in a paid position) for Candidate X's re-election, and the candidate lost.
Month later, during a job interview for an unrelated position, he gets torpedoed by one of the board members for "working for the wrong side". Turns out the interviewer supported Candidate Y.
Of course, that's not the "official" reason.
Not at all - business is a world all it's own.
I had a "supervisor training" course that strongly recommended building a dossier on each of my reports, to create the illusion that I cared about their home lives. It took the form of a two-page questionaire - marital status, name of SO and kids (incl. age), church (if any), sports team (if any), etc etc etc. Everytime someone mentioned a bit of their personal life, I was supposed to mark it down. (Don't remember the name of the system, mainly because I was disgusted by the entire idea).
Needless to say, I opted to actually *care* about my employee's personal lives, which took the form of (a) not tracking their every move, and (b) making sure they got to go home on time and actually have a personal life.
Business is a lot like acting - what people think is going on is a lot more important than what is really going on.
Absolutely correct. No one who has a really active social life has enough time to type their activities into FaceBook or any other sort of trashy tabloid-like social network.
Facebook is a web app. My "friends" include family, people I went to school with, co-workers, the works. And I'd say you've got it backwards - the people who are the busiest socially are the ones who are on Facebook the most. Because that's where things are discussed and organized.
The real truth is that companies don't *want* people with independent social lives. They want folks who will only socialize within the company bounds, who have plenty of free time to "donate" to company-sponsored charities, and who don't want to leave their jobs because their entire existence is wrapped up in those four walls.
People with outside lives have this silly expectation of "weekends", "vacations", and "personal time". And all those are bad for profits.
Could make a point that someone with no online presence is either (a) technologically deficient (and not worth the additional expense required to train), or (b) deliberately hiding something.
If people are going to take web-search snapshots of your life, then just build some vanity pages (you helping orphans, feeding the homeless, rescuing kittens).
You want a BS version of my life? I can happily supply one.
I suspect this is all related to the fact most companies don't give out references anymore (too many lawsuits). Won't take long for people to start suing for this as well.
I'd still rather hire someone who didn't drop acid on camera 5 years ago.
And of course, you don't have any embarassing stories in your past...
"On camera" doesn't mean what it used to - I was at a family birthday party last night, and over three hundred pictures were taken (no reason not to in the age of digital cameras). Don't know if I'd want a picture of me taking shots of tequila going to my boss. I do know it's none of his business, however. (And I've seen worse at the company Christmas party).
With digital cameras and phones and what-not, the pictures are going to be taken. People just need to accept that yes, folks drink, and fornicate, and all the things that your parents and grandparents did. Except now, there's more likely to be a picture. Doesn't make the act worse.
This is the equivalent of you searching for your boss, to make sure you want to take his money. "Oh, looks like Mr. Wilkins tokes up on the weekends. Don't want to work for him."
If the kid's got the grades to get in, what does it matter if he spends his off-hours studying or smoking up? And what business of it is U-WhereEver?
People need to stop tolerating this sort of thing - just because I go to your school (or work for your company) doesn't mean you control the rest of my life.
Like the inalienable right to keep and bear slaves.
Well, if you don't keep an eye on those bears, they get all uppity.
McCain's is in Canada as well, and for whatever reason they and Rotten Ronnie's co-exist happily.
I suppose if there was ever a line of walking sticks in with the happy meals, though...
According to the article, he registered the name two *years* before Chicago put the bid in. They've had plenty of time to notice and do something about it.
Also: if it's the "logical default domain", why did they register the .org version rather than the .com?
Lastly, they can almost certainly afford to throw enough money at this problem to make it go away. (And future bids will drop the ~100 bucks it costs to grab all the domain variations they want well in advance.)
If I followed you, taking pictures and tracking your every movement, that would be stalking.
But if a consortium decides to take pictures and track every movement of a whole *lot* of people, it's a new revenue stream?
Myst drives you nuts for a very good reason - because everything makes sense, once you understand the background.
It's what I love about the series (less so in the later ones, sadly) - it's not a series of arbitrary puzzles. Once you understand what's going on, the solution becomes rather simple. You get the feeling of actually understanding rather than bruteforcing the solution.
Expect to see less of that. My last trip Stateside was two year ago (arrived the day before The Small Liquid Bottle Incident).
Hate to break it to you folks, but I still get a more stringent inspection going through Canadian customs/immigration (as a Canadian citizen!) than I did travelling out of the U.S. immediately after a major "scare".
And I'm not likely to go back for fun. I'll try to avoid going back for business as well (if Home Office wants me to go, I'll try and make sure I've got plenty of "see, nice person, please don't torture me" documentation on hand.)
And I suspect U.S. tourism is just hunkering down and hiding until this settles down - hard to say "Come to Disneyworld! There's only a small chance we'll send you to Cuba and torture you, honest!"
Unbiased: Some believe Earth is flat, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Still biased - "overwhelming evidence" belies which side of the issue you believe.
Actually unbiased: Some believe Earth is flat.
I don't think a manager needs to be able to do the job *well*, but they should be able to follow the conversation. They definately should know enough to be able to BS-detect (people padding estimates, saying things are impossible instead of inconvienent, etc).
Really, if you're going to sack someone, do make sure they can't screw you on the way out...
Which, considering the rest of the FUD around this case, doesn't surprise me.
Only downer was that they didn't allow photography (and the prices for the in-house pictures were too steep to justify).
If I have access to 25 heavily-armed police officers, could I not just wait politely outside? If they come out sans-weaponry, all is well. And if they come out with weaponry, then you have some cause to start knocking heads. But I would suspect that a minor amount of respect (read: hi, glad you're going to the rally, but I can't really let you wander downtown armed like that, hint hint) might go a long way.
From the protester side, I'm amazed no-one's come up with a way to combine those USB "internet sticks" to a digital camcorder and stream live video (or at least live upload to somewhere more secure).