Just because I leave my student ID at home doesn't mean I didn't come to class.
It is, quite frankly, not clear to me what a prof would do with this data, but if he were to say, adjust the grades of attending students upward, is he likely to adjust for false negatives -- that is, students who come but don't bring their IDs.
Well, if the school has a written money-back guarantee, then it probably should give them their money back.
Last time I checked, though, no serious educational institution worth attending had such a policy. Who would take a guaranteed-passing-or-your-money-back degree seriously? You pay tuition for the privilege of attending, whether or not you make the grade. If you flunk, you come back next semester, or you transfer, or you go see if Macy's is hiring. Schools don't have to defend themselves against whining, they just show you the door.
Great point. Indeed I had a series of terrible professors in college. I honestly believe that their terrible teaching caused me to fail. However, I wouldn't say that it's exactly unfair that I had them -- many in that class had the same professor and they passed, so what exactly would be my cause to sue?
Let's pretend that most of the class failed anyway, and most of this prof's classes fail year-after-year-after-year -- what will happen? Yeah, nothing. You've seen it. I've seen it. There are terrible professors and they get away with it regardless of whether people complain.
Your argument is extremely critical because tracking student attendance for "warranty" purposes is really the only valid business reason for tracking student attendance. Since there is no pedagogical reason, the only other reason can by voyeurism.
Exactly. If Powerpoint were seen as a replacement for old-school slides (which usually provided visual aids to complement a presentation) rather than the presentation content itself, presentations would improve markedly.
I can't even count how many times I've asked someone for information about this system or that system and an e-mail comes back with some powerpoint brief that says exactly....nothing. Power point makes it far too easy to say "These are the materials you get. I'll tell you everything else." The impact is that nothing anyone says is ever sharable. This is somewhat opposite than the scenario you sketch out -- there is too little information on the slide to do what the people that send it to me want it to do. The real problem is that no one sat down and wrote a paper pre-brief so that everyone knows what the guy is going to talk about -- however, this attitude of not writing information for everything has its root in directives of "thou shalt powerpoint."
How much more likely are you to open emails saying they're from Martin and a FYI that his email address changed, which could (in a followup email) lead you to opening a trojan/virus?
Why would Martin be sending me a.exe file? Oh I get it -- in this scenario, I am stupid. Got it, thanks...
How long until identity thieves, 419 scammers & spammers create software that can trawl sites like facebook for useful info?
Seriously, what are they going to find that will be so useful? "Hello, sir -- I note that you went to the University of Nebraska and worked for a while at Cargill. Because of this, I am interested in repatriating my family's fortune to your bank account, for which you will get a fee." Get real...
The realistic threat of facebook vis a vis privacy is that of your youthful indiscretions being on wide display for coworkers and bosses to see.
The corporate IT departments that are using McAfee should just take this as a lesson and pull McAfee off of their computers. It's not as if McAfee AV is held-up by users as this amazing piece of software. See.See.
Corporate IT departments need to get the message that McAfee is a piece of junk -- in that sense, McAfee kind of did them a favor...
Word on the street is that Google has already powered up its copiers, and will be chunking out an iPad clone.
This characterization of google as "chunking out" clones is unfair. Google is going to enter the pad computer market with its own line of products; if anyone that enters a device market is cloning, the 99% of the tech business is engaged in "cloning."
Who wears jackets with lapels all day anymore? This is not an irrelevant question -- I'm not sure where I'd put this thing if I were wearing just a t-shirt.
All that a newspaper reporter does is collect facts, determine if they are reasonable, and format and contextualize them. Why haven't they been replaced by computer programs?
So whenever you work greater than 40 hours, you get overtime, right?
No, but my manager does not require me to work overtime.
First of all, consider yourself very lucky. I think it's pretty rare to have a boss that manages your work load well enough to keep you to 40 hours.
Most of us that do mind-intensive work are non-overtime employees. Some weeks, the work takes more than 40 hours and we don't get paid a nickel for that extra work.
The next week, everything has calmed down and there's not as much to do -- should I really be expected to bust my ass looking for stuff to do so that I can fill 40 hours even though I put in 50 the previous week?
You said you usually work about 10-15 hours per week. So that means that on some weeks, you fuck off on the internet for 30 hours a week!?! Sorry you to hear you get "interrupted a few times per day" while Facebooking. You poor, poor thing.
We need to get away from this paradigm of "You must work 40 hours a week" to the paradigm of "You must do this, this, and this for me and I will pay you X." Sometimes we work the full 40, sometimes we work more, sometimes we work less -- the important part is delivering to your employer what he wants. Clearly, asker is doing that or he wouldn't be employed.
I subscribe to the "As long as you're not illegally gambling or moonlighting from your desk, and as long as you're getting me what I need and not bothering anyone else, screw around on the Web as much as you want."
If I can replace you with a program, can I get your salary?
You act like I'm just filling in forms with standard data -- not the case. Think of it more as a "spreadsheet programming." It's building unique relationships between cells, structuring tables to be presentable, etc. These are a little more complicated than just tables of raw data.
I rarely get called to meetings (which is good) but that means to keep my brain from overheating I spend several hours a week surfing the web (usually reading tech news but also a few stops on Facebook, email, etc).
My only work product is Excel spreadsheets and the occasional Word document. When I'm building these spreadsheets and documents, I'll get data for them over the phone, which I promptly type into my computer. The net impact is that I'm sitting at my computer all day, 40 hours a week. You just can't sit there and work spreadsheets all day, every day. If your job doesn't involve anything else, you're probably going to end up browsing the web to stay sane.
Unfortunately this is a guerrilla war, we don't have the convenience of being able to easily identifying enemy combatants.
The United States should not go to war against a country where its troops have to have the liberty to shoot any random person on the street in order to protect themselves from sudden death.
I would also submit that, regardless of who is doing the interdiction, whether it's the Apaches or the armored Bradleys, they could have taken a damn minute to figure out if these guys on the ground had hostile intent. These guys were clearly just wondering around. Did they have AK-47s? Yes. But not everyone had one. No one was pointing them at anything.
So, you'd rather see a slaughter of innocent civilians by Bradleys than by attack choppers? Not seeing how ground interception would make a difference.
Wow -- you really teed that one up for me; thanks!
Ground personnel can easily identify whether Iraqis on the ground are actually threatening. Though they may choose to shoot even though the guys were just milling around, they will certainly have a better perspective as to whether they are actually milling around.
The only thing I'd disagree with at that linked site is that journalists are fair game if they are embedded with enemy forces. You can't shoot journalists just because you don't like the side they are reporting from.
This calls into question these "Jawa" guys' whole attitude. Here's a good quote:
Whatever happened to the good old fashioned military pool reporter?
Basically, the are for taking the military at their word about the conditions on the ground and how it is executing operations, which allows the military a blank check to do what Jawa Report wants most -- dead Muslims.
Multiple people had AKs along with at least one RPG-7 less than 5 blocks away from a US ground patrol.
They could have been bodyguards. Besides, there were only a half-dozen of these guys; the US troops, who were armed with a Bradley IFV could have easily handled this posse.
First of all, they do identify the lens that goes around the corner as an RPG:
He ducks behind this building. Then a few seconds later he sees someone down on the ground with something that looks like it could be an RPG.
Could that be the Reuters photojournalist with a long lense? [sic] Maybe. But from what the pilot is seeing the man seems like a threat. In war you eliminate threats.
"Jawa Report" is biased toward the war-fighter. They have no reason to believe that the lens is an RPG -- they assume that the warfighter is correct. It is plainly not an RPG.
Second of all:
This screenshot is at 3:35. This guy is definitely carrying a weapon. In motion it looks like it might be a rifle, but from the profile angle snapped below it looks like an RPG.
A few seconds later at 3:50 he puts the weapon down. The weapon is long enough that it's comes up well beyond his waist and it certainly has the width of an RPG. Or at least from this angle it looks that way.
I think it looks like a rifle. They are biased toward the viewpoint of the war fighter -- they trust his judgment even though they have no reason to believe that that looks like an RPG at all.
I think what is more important is the following statement:
Let alone embed with the enemy. Whatever happened to the good old fashioned military pool reporter? Alas, gone out with the era of the dinosaurs and when "supporting the troops" actually meant, you know, supporting the troops.
"Jawa Report" does not believe it is healthy to question the troops as long as they're killing people that Jawa thinks are terrorists, which is any random person with a guy in Baghdad, apparently. They are about supporting whatever efforts the military determines on its own are necessary.
That's fine if that's their approach, but to suggest that these guys are journalists and that this posts offers facts about what happened is allowing them to take the wheel and drive. I think that Americans are owed the opportunity to see with our own eyes what we're doing/what we did over there.
After all, if we're doing the right thing, why hide it?
They continue to identify the zoom lens being pointed around a corner as an RPG. It was a LENS! In any case, these guys were not taking aim at US troops or the helicopters. They were just standing around. Those guys with AK-47s could be bodyguards for the reporters, for all you know.
If this attack by the Apache helicopter was pre-emptive, then it easily could have been made by ground-interception by nearby US troops. These half-dozen would have had no hope facing Bradley IFVs and their mounted and heavily armed infantry.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because I leave my student ID at home doesn't mean I didn't come to class.
It is, quite frankly, not clear to me what a prof would do with this data, but if he were to say, adjust the grades of attending students upward, is he likely to adjust for false negatives -- that is, students who come but don't bring their IDs.
Well, if the school has a written money-back guarantee, then it probably should give them their money back.
Last time I checked, though, no serious educational institution worth attending had such a policy. Who would take a guaranteed-passing-or-your-money-back degree seriously? You pay tuition for the privilege of attending, whether or not you make the grade. If you flunk, you come back next semester, or you transfer, or you go see if Macy's is hiring. Schools don't have to defend themselves against whining, they just show you the door.
Great point. Indeed I had a series of terrible professors in college. I honestly believe that their terrible teaching caused me to fail. However, I wouldn't say that it's exactly unfair that I had them -- many in that class had the same professor and they passed, so what exactly would be my cause to sue?
Let's pretend that most of the class failed anyway, and most of this prof's classes fail year-after-year-after-year -- what will happen? Yeah, nothing. You've seen it. I've seen it. There are terrible professors and they get away with it regardless of whether people complain.
Your argument is extremely critical because tracking student attendance for "warranty" purposes is really the only valid business reason for tracking student attendance. Since there is no pedagogical reason, the only other reason can by voyeurism.
Exactly. If Powerpoint were seen as a replacement for old-school slides (which usually provided visual aids to complement a presentation) rather than the presentation content itself, presentations would improve markedly.
I can't even count how many times I've asked someone for information about this system or that system and an e-mail comes back with some powerpoint brief that says exactly....nothing. Power point makes it far too easy to say "These are the materials you get. I'll tell you everything else." The impact is that nothing anyone says is ever sharable. This is somewhat opposite than the scenario you sketch out -- there is too little information on the slide to do what the people that send it to me want it to do. The real problem is that no one sat down and wrote a paper pre-brief so that everyone knows what the guy is going to talk about -- however, this attitude of not writing information for everything has its root in directives of "thou shalt powerpoint."
How much more likely are you to open emails saying they're from Martin and a FYI that his email address changed, which could (in a followup email) lead you to opening a trojan/virus?
Why would Martin be sending me a .exe file? Oh I get it -- in this scenario, I am stupid. Got it, thanks...
How long until identity thieves, 419 scammers & spammers create software that can
trawl sites like facebook for useful info?
Seriously, what are they going to find that will be so useful? "Hello, sir -- I note that you went to the University of Nebraska and worked for a while at Cargill. Because of this, I am interested in repatriating my family's fortune to your bank account, for which you will get a fee." Get real...
The realistic threat of facebook vis a vis privacy is that of your youthful indiscretions being on wide display for coworkers and bosses to see.
The corporate IT departments that are using McAfee should just take this as a lesson and pull McAfee off of their computers. It's not as if McAfee AV is held-up by users as this amazing piece of software. See. See.
Corporate IT departments need to get the message that McAfee is a piece of junk -- in that sense, McAfee kind of did them a favor...
Cancer is bad. Implanting cancer into mice is bad for the mice. But it is good for humans.
Because we hate mice.
So when we do trials for brand-new drugs, we can just do them on you, right?
From the article:
Word on the street is that Google has already powered up its copiers, and will be chunking out an iPad clone.
This characterization of google as "chunking out" clones is unfair. Google is going to enter the pad computer market with its own line of products; if anyone that enters a device market is cloning, the 99% of the tech business is engaged in "cloning."
A "life recorder" you can wear on your lapel
Who wears jackets with lapels all day anymore? This is not an irrelevant question -- I'm not sure where I'd put this thing if I were wearing just a t-shirt.
Good thing that its posted AC. It's not an original work.
Thanks for pointing this out -- I've gotten this in e-mail form a few times over the past year or so.
google news doesn't write the articles.
All that a newspaper reporter does is collect facts, determine if they are reasonable, and format and contextualize them. Why haven't they been replaced by computer programs?
So whenever you work greater than 40 hours, you get overtime, right?
No, but my manager does not require me to work overtime.
First of all, consider yourself very lucky. I think it's pretty rare to have a boss that manages your work load well enough to keep you to 40 hours.
Most of us that do mind-intensive work are non-overtime employees. Some weeks, the work takes more than 40 hours and we don't get paid a nickel for that extra work.
The next week, everything has calmed down and there's not as much to do -- should I really be expected to bust my ass looking for stuff to do so that I can fill 40 hours even though I put in 50 the previous week?
Do you bold text sometimes too...
I do, but I'm very good: keyboard shortcuts, you see...
I get paid to be available for what my boss wants me to do. I get paid per hour of time, not per job.
So whenever you work greater than 40 hours, you get overtime, right?
You said you usually work about 10-15 hours per week. So that means that on some weeks, you fuck off on the internet for 30 hours a week!?! Sorry you to hear you get "interrupted a few times per day" while Facebooking. You poor, poor thing.
We need to get away from this paradigm of "You must work 40 hours a week" to the paradigm of "You must do this, this, and this for me and I will pay you X." Sometimes we work the full 40, sometimes we work more, sometimes we work less -- the important part is delivering to your employer what he wants. Clearly, asker is doing that or he wouldn't be employed.
I subscribe to the "As long as you're not illegally gambling or moonlighting from your desk, and as long as you're getting me what I need and not bothering anyone else, screw around on the Web as much as you want."
If I can replace you with a program, can I get your salary?
You act like I'm just filling in forms with standard data -- not the case. Think of it more as a "spreadsheet programming." It's building unique relationships between cells, structuring tables to be presentable, etc. These are a little more complicated than just tables of raw data.
I rarely get called to meetings (which is good) but that means to keep my brain from overheating I spend several hours a week surfing the web (usually reading tech news but also a few stops on Facebook, email, etc).
My only work product is Excel spreadsheets and the occasional Word document. When I'm building these spreadsheets and documents, I'll get data for them over the phone, which I promptly type into my computer. The net impact is that I'm sitting at my computer all day, 40 hours a week. You just can't sit there and work spreadsheets all day, every day. If your job doesn't involve anything else, you're probably going to end up browsing the web to stay sane.
The troops on the ground find the RPG.
Doesn't change the fact that the guys are literally just standing around.
Unfortunately this is a guerrilla war, we don't have the convenience of being able to easily identifying enemy combatants.
The United States should not go to war against a country where its troops have to have the liberty to shoot any random person on the street in order to protect themselves from sudden death.
I would also submit that, regardless of who is doing the interdiction, whether it's the Apaches or the armored Bradleys, they could have taken a damn minute to figure out if these guys on the ground had hostile intent. These guys were clearly just wondering around. Did they have AK-47s? Yes. But not everyone had one. No one was pointing them at anything.
So, you'd rather see a slaughter of innocent civilians by Bradleys than by attack choppers? Not seeing how ground interception would make a difference.
Wow -- you really teed that one up for me; thanks!
Ground personnel can easily identify whether Iraqis on the ground are actually threatening. Though they may choose to shoot even though the guys were just milling around, they will certainly have a better perspective as to whether they are actually milling around.
The only thing I'd disagree with at that linked site is that journalists are fair game if they are embedded with enemy forces. You can't shoot journalists just because you don't like the side they are reporting from.
This calls into question these "Jawa" guys' whole attitude. Here's a good quote:
Whatever happened to the good old fashioned military pool reporter?
Basically, the are for taking the military at their word about the conditions on the ground and how it is executing operations, which allows the military a blank check to do what Jawa Report wants most -- dead Muslims.
Multiple people had AKs along with at least one RPG-7 less than 5 blocks away from a US ground patrol.
They could have been bodyguards. Besides, there were only a half-dozen of these guys; the US troops, who were armed with a Bradley IFV could have easily handled this posse.
First of all, they do identify the lens that goes around the corner as an RPG:
He ducks behind this building. Then a few seconds later he sees someone down on the ground with something that looks like it could be an RPG.
Could that be the Reuters photojournalist with a long lense? [sic] Maybe. But from what the pilot is seeing the man seems like a threat. In war you eliminate threats.
"Jawa Report" is biased toward the war-fighter. They have no reason to believe that the lens is an RPG -- they assume that the warfighter is correct. It is plainly not an RPG.
Second of all:
This screenshot is at 3:35. This guy is definitely carrying a weapon. In motion it looks like it might be a rifle, but from the profile angle snapped below it looks like an RPG.
A few seconds later at 3:50 he puts the weapon down. The weapon is long enough that it's comes up well beyond his waist and it certainly has the width of an RPG. Or at least from this angle it looks that way.
I think it looks like a rifle. They are biased toward the viewpoint of the war fighter -- they trust his judgment even though they have no reason to believe that that looks like an RPG at all.
I think what is more important is the following statement:
Let alone embed with the enemy. Whatever happened to the good old fashioned military pool reporter? Alas, gone out with the era of the dinosaurs and when "supporting the troops" actually meant, you know, supporting the troops.
"Jawa Report" does not believe it is healthy to question the troops as long as they're killing people that Jawa thinks are terrorists, which is any random person with a guy in Baghdad, apparently. They are about supporting whatever efforts the military determines on its own are necessary.
That's fine if that's their approach, but to suggest that these guys are journalists and that this posts offers facts about what happened is allowing them to take the wheel and drive. I think that Americans are owed the opportunity to see with our own eyes what we're doing/what we did over there.
After all, if we're doing the right thing, why hide it?
They continue to identify the zoom lens being pointed around a corner as an RPG. It was a LENS! In any case, these guys were not taking aim at US troops or the helicopters. They were just standing around. Those guys with AK-47s could be bodyguards for the reporters, for all you know.
If this attack by the Apache helicopter was pre-emptive, then it easily could have been made by ground-interception by nearby US troops. These half-dozen would have had no hope facing Bradley IFVs and their mounted and heavily armed infantry.