And since humans are closely related to other mammals, I guess we can't have opposible thumbs. What about something like the diving response in some mammals. Perhaps the dino could clamp down on the return veins; leaving enough O2 and glucose in the brain for the minute or so it takes to raise its head and take a bite. Lower head, turn the flow back on. No big deal. It's damn near impossible to "prove" that they never lifted their heads. Most likely they didn't walk around all day with their heads up high, but we don't walk around on tip-toes most of the time. Doesn't mean we can't when we want to.
Dear God. They put an NMR on the 4th floor? Everyone knows NMRs belong in the basement. Both because of the field and the weight. In my old uni lab, there were high mag field warnings on the 1st floor above the NMRs because the highest field is along the bore, and goes straight up through the floor. If you put a magnet on the 4th floor, both the 3rd and the 5th would have problems. Sheesh.
We use a SCSI CD-R for data backups, average about 2CDRs per week. I've ended up with one coaster in the last year, and it had a scratch on it. There's no reduction in the machines (heavy) load while burning. SCSI rocks!
Wow! Intel's top of the line processor is overpriced compared to other processors! The price/performance ratio has ALWAYS been better with the lower end processors-- go way way way back and look at the 486SX vs. DX machines from the early 90's-- same exact thing. DX's were a bit faster, and cost twice as much. As soon as pentium came around, the DX prices dropped like a rock. Yawn.
So send a letter to terms@amazon.com, something like:
Sirs,
I have read and understood the alterations in Amazon's privacy
policy, and will no longer be using Amazon as a supplier in any way. I
expect that information provided by me to Amazon under the terms of your
previous policies, is covered by those policies and is not subject to the
alterations in your new policy. My name, shipping address, last five
digits of credit card number, etc. are not Amazon property, and I will not
do business with any firm that would treat them as such. Thank you for
your business in the past,
Let them know why they won't be hearing from you again!
Trust me, you do NOT want to fsck with your cAMP levels like that. Get the levels just right, in the right tissues, and you could reproduce cholera toxin poisoning. Explosive diarrhoea anyone?
When an employer needs the tool of tabs on internet and phone use to assure their employees are puting in their money's worth of work...
That's usually not the issue. Ordinary productivity goals/yearly reviews are good enough for that. The reason to archive/be able to review e-mail records isn't to make sure the employee is working, it's to make sure the employee isn't using the company hardware to do something illegal for which the fscked up US justice system could break the company.
Although the law is not quite clear most people expect the same protection against reading of their E-mail as there is against the unauthorised opening of ordinary mail, WHY NOT?
Erm, I'm not sure about Holland, but in the US if a letter arrives addressed to me as Me, Agent of My company, My Company's address, it's company mail and while it wouldn't normally be opened, if the company wanted to, it could. It's NOT ordinary mail, it's company correspondance. And any mail I send out on letterhead is company business, and is normally photocopied before being sent.
I don't know for sure, but if you work for the government, all that mail may be subject to Freedom of Information rules that not only let your employer read it, but everyone else who asks.
Modern companies set productivity targets and when people are meeting them it's rather unimportant what else they do!
Well, in the US, modern companies have a reasonable fear of multi-million dollar lawsuits if an employee abuses the company resources. I don't care how productive you are, if you do something to get the company sued into bankruptcy, you're not meeting your productivity target. And it's so trivially simple to prevent these things by keeping personal & public e-mail separate. I don't even make personal phone calls on the company phone any more-- the cell phone is mine, paid for by me, and all my personal calls go through it, unless it's an emergency. It costs a little more, but it sure keeps life simple.
The monitoring has nothing to do with employee quality, it has to do with what the fscked up legal system in this country demands of people who own things(i.e. business owners): accountability as to what gets done with things they own.
The same issue pops up with drug testing : it's not really needed, and seldom catches anyone anyway, but if you don't do it, and a crack-smoking employee drives a dumptruck into a schoolbus, you're dead. If you've had drug monitoring, you can say "we excercised due diligance in maintaining a drug-free workplace. This guy never showed positive for crack before". You're still fscked, but probably not as badly as before.
I agree completely. People, try to think of it in small terms first:
Would you appreciate it if a roommate hopped on your computer and sent harrasing/threatening e-mails out under your name? Probably not.
Now what if you hire that roommate to write some code for you using your machine. He sends out threatening e-mails using your machine, again under your name, but now he's an employee. It's your computer, does the fact that you've hired him to write code on it give him the right to use it any way he wants?
Now make it a small business with you hiring two coders, you own all the machines, do they have the right to use them as they please? Scale it all up-- at every level, the person/persons/shareholders who OWN the machines have the right to say what gets done with them. If you don't like it get a machine at home and a dial-up account.
There is one gigantic difference between e-mail and phone-- an employee's phone conversation is not temporarily stored on an employer-owned machine prior to being sent. E-mail is. And the incoming e-mail is stored on company machines indefinitly. This changes things quite a bit. It makes e-mail much more similar to business correspondance on letterhead. The phone is a poor analogy for e-mail in a business setting.
There are a few simple things you can do to cover your end and make employees life easier:
1) Have a written internet policy. Work it over carefully. And have every employee who gets a internet-connected computer sign that they've read, understand, and agree to abide by the agreement.
2) Business e-mail is the same thing as letterhead. Employees don't use letterhead for personal correspondance, they shouldn't use business e-mail for personal purposes. Hotmail, yahoo! mail, go mail, there are a hundred free e-mail services out there that work just fine. Simply make policy that the business e-mail is business use only. Period. Help users setup hotmail/yahoo/whatever if they want. Bingo! You have no ethics problems with full logging/reading every e-mail that goes through. There are no personal/privacy issues to deal with. If an employee gets caught using it for personal purposes, there's no reasonable expectation of privacy since you've already stated that it's business only and will be logged.
3) Make policy on personal web-browsing. Make it clear what is not acceptable. And deal with abusers promptly.
4) Sexual harassment: this is only a real problem if something is brought to your attention and you fail to act on it. If the delivery guy is being inappropriate, you ought to be on the horn to the local delivery office immediately if not sooner! As soon as you mention "sexual harassment" and "we're discussing this with legal" the guy will be on notice, and if it happens again, he'll be fired. Guarenteed.
Expensive? WTF? Maybe if you want the thin & light ultra-fast machines, but I just got a low-end notebook for travel only purposes, Toshiba 1675, dual scan, 550 MHz, 6GB, etc for 1K$. Pretty cheap, and does lcd projection just as well as a 3K$ 15" monstrosity.
We've been using CD-Rs for real backups for three years now and CD-RWs for working backups for a year (in a working lab). Using a SCSI writer & SCSI harddrives, I've written numerous CDs with both procs pegged at 80-100% working on other jobs with not a single coaster. SCSI rules!
Davies' other books are good, as well
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 2
I just finished going throuh his Arrow of Time. It's as good as The Mind of God, but on a more practical physics level. Great stuff for a chemist to read, while trying to understand the True Science while we muck around stamp collecting (/sarcasm)
DNA work isn't expensive anymore. PCR machines are well within the budget of a reasonably well off school-- for the price of a PC you could get two or three thermocyclers. Oligonucleotides run around $1/base. The total cost of this work (using other people's equiment) might have been as low as $1k or so. The main block to mainstream high-schools doing DNA stuff is teacher knowledge and the need to be follow recombinant DNA safety rules, which are _very_ important in things like this. The last thing we need is for some wiseass to clone tet toxin or such into E. coli & innoculate the school lunch dessert line. DNA tech has moved into frosh biology labs at many major U's and in 10 years it'll be routine in high school biology classes.
Photolith isn't expensive-- perfect wafers of silicon are. With this hi-res of a screen, they're not going to care about a few dozen flawed pixels, so it shouldn't be much more expensive than working with moly or tungsten.
Dear God, scientists have discovered chemical-sensitive/temperature sensitive induction of gene expression! Oh NO! For crying out loud, temperature/chemical induction of gene expression has only been going on for twenty years or so. Cloning a gene and putting it under IPTG-controlled expression in E. coli is now a second-year college molecular biology lab excercise. Putting it into higher organisms isn't anything new, or particularly exciting.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else think "V" when they read this? Showing my age, I guess.
And since humans are closely related to other mammals, I guess we can't have opposible thumbs. What about something like the diving response in some mammals. Perhaps the dino could clamp down on the return veins; leaving enough O2 and glucose in the brain for the minute or so it takes to raise its head and take a bite. Lower head, turn the flow back on. No big deal. It's damn near impossible to "prove" that they never lifted their heads. Most likely they didn't walk around all day with their heads up high, but we don't walk around on tip-toes most of the time. Doesn't mean we can't when we want to.
Dear God. They put an NMR on the 4th floor? Everyone knows NMRs belong in the basement. Both because of the field and the weight. In my old uni lab, there were high mag field warnings on the 1st floor above the NMRs because the highest field is along the bore, and goes straight up through the floor. If you put a magnet on the 4th floor, both the 3rd and the 5th would have problems. Sheesh.
We use a SCSI CD-R for data backups, average about 2CDRs per week. I've ended up with one coaster in the last year, and it had a scratch on it. There's no reduction in the machines (heavy) load while burning. SCSI rocks!
Doh! Man, they steal my clothes or my bed, they can have them. They steal my comp. or my cat, I will hunt them down! Bastards.
Wow! Intel's top of the line processor is overpriced compared to other processors! The price/performance ratio has ALWAYS been better with the lower end processors-- go way way way back and look at the 486SX vs. DX machines from the early 90's-- same exact thing. DX's were a bit faster, and cost twice as much. As soon as pentium came around, the DX prices dropped like a rock. Yawn.
So send a letter to terms@amazon.com, something like:
Sirs, I have read and understood the alterations in Amazon's privacy policy, and will no longer be using Amazon as a supplier in any way. I expect that information provided by me to Amazon under the terms of your previous policies, is covered by those policies and is not subject to the alterations in your new policy. My name, shipping address, last five digits of credit card number, etc. are not Amazon property, and I will not do business with any firm that would treat them as such. Thank you for your business in the past,
Let them know why they won't be hearing from you again!
Trust me, you do NOT want to fsck with your cAMP levels like that. Get the levels just right, in the right tissues, and you could reproduce cholera toxin poisoning. Explosive diarrhoea anyone?
When an employer needs the tool of tabs on internet and phone use to assure their employees are puting in their money's worth of work...
That's usually not the issue. Ordinary productivity goals/yearly reviews are good enough for that. The reason to archive/be able to review e-mail records isn't to make sure the employee is working, it's to make sure the employee isn't using the company hardware to do something illegal for which the fscked up US justice system could break the company.
Although the law is not quite clear most people expect the same protection against reading of their E-mail as there is against the unauthorised opening of ordinary mail, WHY NOT?
Erm, I'm not sure about Holland, but in the US if a letter arrives addressed to me as Me, Agent of My company, My Company's address, it's company mail and while it wouldn't normally be opened, if the company wanted to, it could. It's NOT ordinary mail, it's company correspondance. And any mail I send out on letterhead is company business, and is normally photocopied before being sent.
I don't know for sure, but if you work for the government, all that mail may be subject to Freedom of Information rules that not only let your employer read it, but everyone else who asks.
Modern companies set productivity targets and when people are meeting them it's rather unimportant what else they do!
Well, in the US, modern companies have a reasonable fear of multi-million dollar lawsuits if an employee abuses the company resources. I don't care how productive you are, if you do something to get the company sued into bankruptcy, you're not meeting your productivity target. And it's so trivially simple to prevent these things by keeping personal & public e-mail separate. I don't even make personal phone calls on the company phone any more-- the cell phone is mine, paid for by me, and all my personal calls go through it, unless it's an emergency. It costs a little more, but it sure keeps life simple.
I'm sorry, but the logic here (or lack thereof) was causing me a headache-- can you explain:
The First Rule of Link Club is: you don't talk about !Link Club
and then
JOIN !LINK CLUB! spread the word...
The monitoring has nothing to do with employee quality, it has to do with what the fscked up legal system in this country demands of people who own things(i.e. business owners): accountability as to what gets done with things they own.
The same issue pops up with drug testing : it's not really needed, and seldom catches anyone anyway, but if you don't do it, and a crack-smoking employee drives a dumptruck into a schoolbus, you're dead. If you've had drug monitoring, you can say "we excercised due diligance in maintaining a drug-free workplace. This guy never showed positive for crack before". You're still fscked, but probably not as badly as before.
Of course, IANALAIDPOOTV.
I agree completely. People, try to think of it in small terms first:
Would you appreciate it if a roommate hopped on your computer and sent harrasing/threatening e-mails out under your name? Probably not.
Now what if you hire that roommate to write some code for you using your machine. He sends out threatening e-mails using your machine, again under your name, but now he's an employee. It's your computer, does the fact that you've hired him to write code on it give him the right to use it any way he wants?
Now make it a small business with you hiring two coders, you own all the machines, do they have the right to use them as they please? Scale it all up-- at every level, the person/persons/shareholders who OWN the machines have the right to say what gets done with them. If you don't like it get a machine at home and a dial-up account.
There is one gigantic difference between e-mail and phone-- an employee's phone conversation is not temporarily stored on an employer-owned machine prior to being sent. E-mail is. And the incoming e-mail is stored on company machines indefinitly. This changes things quite a bit. It makes e-mail much more similar to business correspondance on letterhead. The phone is a poor analogy for e-mail in a business setting.
There are a few simple things you can do to cover your end and make employees life easier:
1) Have a written internet policy. Work it over carefully. And have every employee who gets a internet-connected computer sign that they've read, understand, and agree to abide by the agreement.
2) Business e-mail is the same thing as letterhead. Employees don't use letterhead for personal correspondance, they shouldn't use business e-mail for personal purposes. Hotmail, yahoo! mail, go mail, there are a hundred free e-mail services out there that work just fine. Simply make policy that the business e-mail is business use only. Period. Help users setup hotmail/yahoo/whatever if they want. Bingo! You have no ethics problems with full logging/reading every e-mail that goes through. There are no personal/privacy issues to deal with. If an employee gets caught using it for personal purposes, there's no reasonable expectation of privacy since you've already stated that it's business only and will be logged.
3) Make policy on personal web-browsing. Make it clear what is not acceptable. And deal with abusers promptly.
4) Sexual harassment: this is only a real problem if something is brought to your attention and you fail to act on it. If the delivery guy is being inappropriate, you ought to be on the horn to the local delivery office immediately if not sooner! As soon as you mention "sexual harassment" and "we're discussing this with legal" the guy will be on notice, and if it happens again, he'll be fired. Guarenteed.
Expensive? WTF? Maybe if you want the thin & light ultra-fast machines, but I just got a low-end notebook for travel only purposes, Toshiba 1675, dual scan, 550 MHz, 6GB, etc for 1K$. Pretty cheap, and does lcd projection just as well as a 3K$ 15" monstrosity.
We've been using CD-Rs for real backups for three years now and CD-RWs for working backups for a year (in a working lab). Using a SCSI writer & SCSI harddrives, I've written numerous CDs with both procs pegged at 80-100% working on other jobs with not a single coaster. SCSI rules!
I just finished going throuh his Arrow of Time. It's as good as The Mind of God, but on a more practical physics level. Great stuff for a chemist to read, while trying to understand the True Science while we muck around stamp collecting (/sarcasm)
DNA work isn't expensive anymore. PCR machines are well within the budget of a reasonably well off school-- for the price of a PC you could get two or three thermocyclers. Oligonucleotides run around $1/base. The total cost of this work (using other people's equiment) might have been as low as $1k or so. The main block to mainstream high-schools doing DNA stuff is teacher knowledge and the need to be follow recombinant DNA safety rules, which are _very_ important in things like this. The last thing we need is for some wiseass to clone tet toxin or such into E. coli & innoculate the school lunch dessert line. DNA tech has moved into frosh biology labs at many major U's and in 10 years it'll be routine in high school biology classes.
Photolith isn't expensive-- perfect wafers of silicon are. With this hi-res of a screen, they're not going to care about a few dozen flawed pixels, so it shouldn't be much more expensive than working with moly or tungsten.
Dear God, scientists have discovered chemical-sensitive/temperature sensitive induction of gene expression! Oh NO! For crying out loud, temperature/chemical induction of gene expression has only been going on for twenty years or so.
Cloning a gene and putting it under IPTG-controlled expression in E. coli is now a second-year college molecular biology lab excercise. Putting it into higher organisms isn't anything new, or particularly exciting.