"Most of the companies are part of mandatory collective bargaining agreements with a similar clause... I'm surprised this isn't a standard clause in the USA as well, because it solves most of the issues in this area."
In other words, unions make this possible. The USA has been victim to concerted anti-union propaganda for about 40 years, and most people are down on collective bargaining agreements. Hugely more so, IT workers. So, they're hung out to dry in ways like this.
"A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don't have in other industries such as film... Really, what this is, is an attempt to salvage a problem. The industry is still losing a lot of money to piracy as the market becomes more online-based. So it’s encouraging to see strategies outlined to combat this.'"
None of this makes any goddamn sense. It's borderline not even grammatical. Salvage a problem? Demos related to piracy?
"It gives IP-related companies an advantage, but I'd say that's better than turning the entire country into an unemployed wasteland because companies don't want to produce material that's just going to get stolen."
What fraction of the population are employed in IP content work? Very few. It's not like health care, education, food delivery, construction, etc. An IP economy concentrates great wealth in a very small number of hands, a feudal-like oligarchy; we've seen this as a fact over several decades now. If IP businesses were taxed at 80% and redistributed in a Marxist-like system, then maybe there would be a connection between IP and overall employment, but not as it stands today.
"Now, I don't use Facebook (or any similar site), but can't he just block her? Since when have people become so helpless online that they cry for help every time somebody does something they don't like? You can TAKE YOURSELF OF OF ANY SITUATION ONLINE. "
FTA: "In a document from the Clark County prosecutor, he alleges she hacked his account, changed his password and posted things that involve slander about his personal life... New's son lives with his grandmother who has custodial rights..."
"I suppose simply unfriending her would not be feasible. (Maybe she'd take away his computer if he tried or punish him or something). There are clear and easy alternatives. Delete her posts after she makes them, or even better, use Facebook privacy controls to remove her ability to comment on his posts. I'm kinda surprised he didn't put her on Limited Profile, like everyone else seems to do. That's the best because people don't always realize they're being shut out of something."
FTA: "In a document from the Clark County prosecutor, he alleges she hacked his account, changed his password and posted things that involve slander about his personal life... New's son lives with his grandmother who has custodial rights..."
"Others have felt the urge to communicate with their parents and work out a resolution to stop them from doing these things - was he not given the ability to talk with her? To Unfriend her? To mark his profile as private? These are HIS choices - not ours."
FTA: "In a document from the Clark County prosecutor, he alleges she hacked his account, changed his password and posted things that involve slander about his personal life... New's son lives with his grandmother who has custodial rights..."
Which would take away at least some of your proposed choices.
It's bad enough that corporations are legally treated as people. Heaven help us if each multiple-personality-fragment gets to have a separate and distinct legal status.
"'This is what happens in war'... This. This is the part that is always missing from certain sections of anti-war protestors [sic] and war-supporters alike."
How is this missing from anti-war protesters? Isn't that the entire point?
I remember back in 2003, there were protesters on TV with signs that said "War Sucks", and the Fox commentators were making fun of them and calling them idiots, and "duh, that's obvious". Sounds enormously one-sided to me.
"What exactly do we think will happen when the most powerful military force in our planet's history is employed in what is essentially a police/intelligence capacity?"
This is terrorism! Only an idiot thinks this is a police matter! These people are savages! The old rules don't apply! Etc. etc. etc.
"Taking away our believes, in a better life afterwards, makes people lose hope for this live, losing the moral, making humankind do all kind of bad things, making live for themselves or for others unlivable."
Said the Anonymous Coward.
Also, funny how rampant grammatical errors are an excellent clue towards the quality of one's argument. Feel free to get out of the Dark Ages at any time, man.
Off topic, but -- I'm realizing that from nature-of-argument and general writing style, I can usually guess a Slashdot user's ID (at least to order-of-magnitude). I could tell this one had to be up in the high 6-digits.
"The game is 'a feed 'em up game, not a shoot 'em up' says Tawiah where you 'defend your village by feeding and driving away the animals before they crash it and feed on your livestock and garden!'"
Gotta call BS on this one. The gameplay is fundamentally the same as Galaga or Centipede; hostile stuff comes down the screen and you shoot it. On some levels here the backstory is "throw stones to frighten", on others it's "throw hay to distract", but the mechanics are identical. It's a shoot-em-up.
"RTFA. It says the system is voluntary. If you send money in your birthday card (and it is never a good idea to send cash in the mail), then don't volunteer to have that piece of mail scanned!"
RTFA yourself. The system is currently voluntary for the recipient, for whom all of their mail will be scanned. It's neither (1) optable by the sender, nor (2) optable per piece of mail. On top of all that, this is a test for a universal (presumably non-optable) rollout.
"...why did the news report that it is just a correlation when there is no way* it can't imply causation? Looks like some uninformed journalist just read the wikipedia article on logic falacies."
This brain-glitch exists only in the Slashdot summary. The actual article says exactly the opposite.
"Young points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the RTJP, morality and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another."
What is it with Slashdotters' completely fucked-in-the-head understanding of correlation vs. causation? The article says exactly the opposite of this summary!
"Recent fMRI studies of moral judgment find fascinating correlations, but Young et al usher in a new era by moving beyond correlation to causation," says Sinnott-Armstrong, who was not involved in this research.
And that was completely obvious without even needing to see the article anyway. This is a designed experiment. Designed experiments establish causation. (See Weiss, Introductory Statistics 7E, p. 22, et. al.) Obviously a person's moral judgements aren't causing the magnet that you're switching on-and-off to work. For chrissake.
SAIC, by the way, is the company the FBI threw off the job a few years ago after charging the agency $170 million for a virtual file system that never worked.
So, this one company worked on two of the most legendary government-related failed IT projects of all time. For the corporate apologists, it's hard not to smell this really bad odor coming from the company in question.
Several former CityTime workers have told The News city officials have ignored their complaints about questionable consultant timesheets, defective software and possible conflicts of interest between key CityTime managers and subcontractors... In January, Liu rejected an extension of Spherion's contract and began the first-ever audit of the entire project. Liu has since labeled CityTime a "money pit." He urged Bloomberg to suspend payments until the audit is finished.
So we have documented allegations of conflicts-of-interest at the company. Moreover for the "can't believe taxpayers allow this" crowd (NYC political info here): Anger at Mayor Bloomberg is high. His first two terms, he had an allied city controller (audits, etc.) For the first time in November '09 we elected a non-allied city controller (over Bloomberg's opposition), and he is just now getting to serious audits of the project, recommending suspension of payments, etc. So this whole article wouldn't have come to light if not for the will of the electorate last fall.
In the United States, the number of women represented in engineering and information technology peaked in the late 1980s. Since then, the percentage of women in the computing profession declined from 35.2% in 1990 to 28.4% in 2000.[1] Particularly in computer science, there has been a dramatic drop in women earning bachelor's degrees. A report from the Computing Research Association indicated that the number recently fell below 20%, from nearly 40% in the mid 80s.[2] A similar situation is observed in Canada, where the declination of women in computer science is apparent.
"As the City Councilor of Toronto said about the project, 'It may be the only time a young person comes in. It can act as a magnet to attract people. Once we get them in there, you can be darn sure that our librarians will be hard at work to introduce them to everything else the library can offer.'"
That's the most utterly ridiculous thing I've heard in days. In my entire life (of fairly significant library usage) I've never been in a library anywhere and had a librarian "pitch" me stuff I didn't ask for like they're a used car salesman or something. That's not their job, and they have better stuff to do with their time. Totally fucking ridiculous.
He should've said "it's a slam dunk" instead of "darn sure". That would make it even more convincing.
Slashdot Mirror
"On the other hand, every time I here a 'waaah, cry cry, science is being mean to my bullshit creation myths, mommy make it stop!'..."
So shall it ever be.
"Most of the companies are part of mandatory collective bargaining agreements with a similar clause... I'm surprised this isn't a standard clause in the USA as well, because it solves most of the issues in this area."
In other words, unions make this possible. The USA has been victim to concerted anti-union propaganda for about 40 years, and most people are down on collective bargaining agreements. Hugely more so, IT workers. So, they're hung out to dry in ways like this.
"A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don't have in other industries such as film... Really, what this is, is an attempt to salvage a problem. The industry is still losing a lot of money to piracy as the market becomes more online-based. So it’s encouraging to see strategies outlined to combat this.'"
None of this makes any goddamn sense. It's borderline not even grammatical. Salvage a problem? Demos related to piracy?
And: game demo = movie trailer.
"It gives IP-related companies an advantage, but I'd say that's better than turning the entire country into an unemployed wasteland because companies don't want to produce material that's just going to get stolen."
What fraction of the population are employed in IP content work? Very few. It's not like health care, education, food delivery, construction, etc. An IP economy concentrates great wealth in a very small number of hands, a feudal-like oligarchy; we've seen this as a fact over several decades now. If IP businesses were taxed at 80% and redistributed in a Marxist-like system, then maybe there would be a connection between IP and overall employment, but not as it stands today.
"Now, I don't use Facebook (or any similar site), but can't he just block her? Since when have people become so helpless online that they cry for help every time somebody does something they don't like? You can TAKE YOURSELF OF OF ANY SITUATION ONLINE. "
FTA: "In a document from the Clark County prosecutor, he alleges she hacked his account, changed his password and posted things that involve slander about his personal life... New's son lives with his grandmother who has custodial rights..."
"I suppose simply unfriending her would not be feasible. (Maybe she'd take away his computer if he tried or punish him or something). There are clear and easy alternatives. Delete her posts after she makes them, or even better, use Facebook privacy controls to remove her ability to comment on his posts. I'm kinda surprised he didn't put her on Limited Profile, like everyone else seems to do. That's the best because people don't always realize they're being shut out of something."
FTA: "In a document from the Clark County prosecutor, he alleges she hacked his account, changed his password and posted things that involve slander about his personal life... New's son lives with his grandmother who has custodial rights..."
"Others have felt the urge to communicate with their parents and work out a resolution to stop them from doing these things - was he not given the ability to talk with her? To Unfriend her? To mark his profile as private? These are HIS choices - not ours."
FTA: "In a document from the Clark County prosecutor, he alleges she hacked his account, changed his password and posted things that involve slander about his personal life... New's son lives with his grandmother who has custodial rights..."
Which would take away at least some of your proposed choices.
It's bad enough that corporations are legally treated as people. Heaven help us if each multiple-personality-fragment gets to have a separate and distinct legal status.
"'This is what happens in war'... This. This is the part that is always missing from certain sections of anti-war protestors [sic] and war-supporters alike."
How is this missing from anti-war protesters? Isn't that the entire point?
I remember back in 2003, there were protesters on TV with signs that said "War Sucks", and the Fox commentators were making fun of them and calling them idiots, and "duh, that's obvious". Sounds enormously one-sided to me.
Quoth the GP: "no weapons in sight".
The gunner was outright lying in order to get authorization to gun down unarmed good samaritans.
"What exactly do we think will happen when the most powerful military force in our planet's history is employed in what is essentially a police/intelligence capacity?"
This is terrorism! Only an idiot thinks this is a police matter! These people are savages! The old rules don't apply! Etc. etc. etc.
"Taking away our believes, in a better life afterwards, makes people lose hope for this live, losing the moral, making humankind do all kind of bad things, making live for themselves or for others unlivable."
Said the Anonymous Coward.
Also, funny how rampant grammatical errors are an excellent clue towards the quality of one's argument. Feel free to get out of the Dark Ages at any time, man.
Off topic, but -- I'm realizing that from nature-of-argument and general writing style, I can usually guess a Slashdot user's ID (at least to order-of-magnitude). I could tell this one had to be up in the high 6-digits.
UK & US (Texas) doctors compare notes in a meeting. How many shootings does your hospital get? UK: 1-2 a year. US: 2-3 per night. We win, eh!?
http://northern-doc.blogspot.com/2010/02/couple-of-old-chestnuts-001-trauma.html
"Q: What is 2 + 5? A: It is 5 + 2 of course."
My blog posting a year ago on how a community college classroom of 20-year-olds will be utterly stunned when presented with this information: http://angrymath.blogspot.com/2009/03/never-ending-amazement.html
"The game is 'a feed 'em up game, not a shoot 'em up' says Tawiah where you 'defend your village by feeding and driving away the animals before they crash it and feed on your livestock and garden!'"
Gotta call BS on this one. The gameplay is fundamentally the same as Galaga or Centipede; hostile stuff comes down the screen and you shoot it. On some levels here the backstory is "throw stones to frighten", on others it's "throw hay to distract", but the mechanics are identical. It's a shoot-em-up.
"RTFA. It says the system is voluntary. If you send money in your birthday card (and it is never a good idea to send cash in the mail), then don't volunteer to have that piece of mail scanned!"
RTFA yourself. The system is currently voluntary for the recipient, for whom all of their mail will be scanned. It's neither (1) optable by the sender, nor (2) optable per piece of mail. On top of all that, this is a test for a universal (presumably non-optable) rollout.
"As long as reasonable attempts are made to keep this information secure and out of the hands of the police..."
When the hell has that ever been done?
"...why did the news report that it is just a correlation when there is no way* it can't imply causation? Looks like some uninformed journalist just read the wikipedia article on logic falacies."
This brain-glitch exists only in the Slashdot summary. The actual article says exactly the opposite.
"Young points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the RTJP, morality and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another."
What is it with Slashdotters' completely fucked-in-the-head understanding of correlation vs. causation? The article says exactly the opposite of this summary!
"Recent fMRI studies of moral judgment find fascinating correlations, but Young et al usher in a new era by moving beyond correlation to causation," says Sinnott-Armstrong, who was not involved in this research.
And that was completely obvious without even needing to see the article anyway. This is a designed experiment. Designed experiments establish causation. (See Weiss, Introductory Statistics 7E, p. 22, et. al.) Obviously a person's moral judgements aren't causing the magnet that you're switching on-and-off to work. For chrissake.
Correct answer is "both".
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_the_saying_'all_intents_and_purposes'_or_'all_intense_purposes'
First, from the article (p. 2):
SAIC, by the way, is the company the FBI threw off the job a few years ago after charging the agency $170 million for a virtual file system that never worked.
So, this one company worked on two of the most legendary government-related failed IT projects of all time. For the corporate apologists, it's hard not to smell this really bad odor coming from the company in question.
Several former CityTime workers have told The News city officials have ignored their complaints about questionable consultant timesheets, defective software and possible conflicts of interest between key CityTime managers and subcontractors... In January, Liu rejected an extension of Spherion's contract and began the first-ever audit of the entire project. Liu has since labeled CityTime a "money pit." He urged Bloomberg to suspend payments until the audit is finished.
So we have documented allegations of conflicts-of-interest at the company. Moreover for the "can't believe taxpayers allow this" crowd (NYC political info here): Anger at Mayor Bloomberg is high. His first two terms, he had an allied city controller (audits, etc.) For the first time in November '09 we elected a non-allied city controller (over Bloomberg's opposition), and he is just now getting to serious audits of the project, recommending suspension of payments, etc. So this whole article wouldn't have come to light if not for the will of the electorate last fall.
"Wouldn't you scoop up a girl like that, especially back then when women were still really rare in the field?"
Women are actually more rare in the field now than then. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing
In the United States, the number of women represented in engineering and information technology peaked in the late 1980s. Since then, the percentage of women in the computing profession declined from 35.2% in 1990 to 28.4% in 2000.[1] Particularly in computer science, there has been a dramatic drop in women earning bachelor's degrees. A report from the Computing Research Association indicated that the number recently fell below 20%, from nearly 40% in the mid 80s.[2] A similar situation is observed in Canada, where the declination of women in computer science is apparent.
It looks like you're trying to write an English-language forum post. Would you like me to:
* Change "marked" to "marketed"?
* Change "For all intensive purposes" to "For all intents and purposes"?
"As the City Councilor of Toronto said about the project, 'It may be the only time a young person comes in. It can act as a magnet to attract people. Once we get them in there, you can be darn sure that our librarians will be hard at work to introduce them to everything else the library can offer.'"
That's the most utterly ridiculous thing I've heard in days. In my entire life (of fairly significant library usage) I've never been in a library anywhere and had a librarian "pitch" me stuff I didn't ask for like they're a used car salesman or something. That's not their job, and they have better stuff to do with their time. Totally fucking ridiculous.
He should've said "it's a slam dunk" instead of "darn sure". That would make it even more convincing.