There's definitely a difference in fields. "Liberal Arts" is a pretty broad catchall just like STEM, probably far moreso. There's also the importance of what the job is, and what duties it requires. Would you hire a Liberal Arts major as a core programmer who has no responsibilities outside of coding? Probably not, or at least not based even in part on that.
What about jobs that require more social interaction, writing/communication, or interaction with non-technical people? Working on the security side, I find you do need a lot of technical knowledge, but all that knowledge only goes so far if you can't explain to people, including your bosses/company executives/etc what things mean, and why they should take X or Y seriously. What about sales? What about getting proper requirements?
Sometimes, you really do need a guy who can translate between the customers and the engineers.
Honestly though, a true 'well rounded' individual these days isn't just someone versed in the liberal arts or STEM alone - it's someone who has a grounding in both.
First, this isn't the same as the H-1B issue. This would actually be a better solution if we were facing a shortage of skilled workers, because more trained entry level sorts would directly address that. The problem is, the tech moguls pushing for H-1Bs don't really care about that, they just want cheaper workers. The fact that most H-1Bs are used not to bring in highly paid experts in their field, but instead to bring in contract workers for IT sweatshops, should tell you something. That, and the fact that H-1Bs are largely stuck in their one job, are part of why this solution will likely not have any tech moguls or the like pushing for it.
I do find it disingenuous that the lawyer quoted conflates the two though. Entry level types who happen to be foreign graduates of a US university aren't going to be competing for any jobs that aren't already at risk of being given to any US-born graduates (which is a problem in Tech, but is a rather different one). That said, the Obama administration (and politicians in general) ought to be doing a lot more to crack down on the H-1B fuckery, just in general, nevermind in relation to a broader immigration overhaul.
Yeah, like we can do any worse than a former Tech CEO whose product is mostly known for slowing systems that use it to a crawl. I mean, I guess it could be worse - you could have someone who ruined one of the iconic tech companies of Silicon Valley by pushing a buyout of an increasingly unprofitable hardware company against the advice of pretty much everyone and their dog, nevermind laying off tens of thousands of workers, who's now running for president claiming that as part of their qualifying experience.
Most people also have a crazy/wrong idea about what cloning is. It's not going to give you a carbon copy of your pet, all it gives you is an identical twin. I also seem to recall hearing that with some animals a twin won't even look the same due to things like color pattern being influenced by its time in the womb, but I could be completely off in left field with that. Regardless, you're just getting another pet with the same DNA makeup.
And really, so much of the anti-cloning hysteria comes from that sort of wrong-headed thinking, that's there's something horribly unnatural or mad-science-y about cloning, when nature makes clones all the time - it just doesn't time-shift them.
Pretty much. Just about the only time that's not true is when the politician _is_ themselves one of those ridiculously wealthy enough to be benefactors if they wanted in the first place.
I'd like to see a better trade agreement with certain countries in the Pacific. I'm perhaps less keen on others, since I tend to think that free trade is far less efficient when you're talking about countries with wildly divergent levels of economic development, but depending on the way it's done, and the country in question, maybe.
What I'm decidedly not cool about is all the fuckery that seems to be getting snuck into the treaty by various companies and special interests, particularly about intellectual property. That sort of stuff is a poison pill, and we should demand that a treaty represent OUR interest, the citizens/voters, not the IP holders.
Sometimes this is true... I mean, look at the Iran deal, and all the screaming about that (which, while probably not a great deal, is far better than no deal when you really dig into things), and that's -after- the fact. Also, look at how many times proposals were floated and people not involved in the negotiations on both sides tried to pre-emptively shoot them down, without consider concessions, and letting the negotiators work.
At the same time though, when it comes to a trade treaty like this, there seems to be so much fuckery going on with provisions being slipped in that are entirely about protecting wealthy interests that are decidedly NOT in the interest of the average citizen. It's the fact that this stuff is being kept secret, in hopes of sneaking it into the treaty, which must then be either accepted or rejected as a whole, so that we're forced to take it along with the other beneficial stuff. No, it's bullshit, and it needs to stop.
So how do you do that without denying the negotiators any wiggle room? Well, for one, I'd suggest that drafts be published at regular intervals. You can keep the proceedings themselves secret, so long as we get a record of what they have so far at reasonable periods, and can provide feedback based on that.
That, and maybe force the input and recommendations/asks from any corporation/special interest/lobbying group to go on public record from the moment it's submitted.
Seriously, if I wanted to run an authoritarian regime restricting internet content, there are certain things that would be absolutely left unblocked, namely porn and cat memes/videos.
What about the Gulags that residents of Salisbury were shipped off to, and the political commissars patrolling the streets? Didn't these people pay any attention to the warnings from the telecommunications companies about what would happen if the government was allowed to institute socialist internet?..what do you mean none of that happened?
Well, what about the crippling taxes to pay for it, while fatcat government bureaucrats refuse to answer the phones, harass people, change their customer account names to things like "Asshole", refuse to let them cancel service, and generally make their customers' lives a living hell?...what do you mean, that was Comcast?
This sounds like the perfect sort of thing to include in a comment to them, so they know just how bad of an idea making the rule change would be. I encourage you to submit it, if you haven't already.
I try to at least take it into consideration. I don't feel like I need complete privacy and anonymity, in part because I like some of the aspects of the connected and digital world.
That said, I try to at least be aware of some of the trade-offs, and who my information is going to (which sadly is a lot more effort than most people are interested in making). It comes down to who I'm willing to grant access to what information, to what degree - in part because of what they're likely to do with it, as well as what I feel like I get out of the service.
It's part of why I avoid using Facebook, because of their (nightmarish) track record and attitude towards things. On the other hand I use a number of services that are quite capable of tracking lots of things about me, and in some cases noticeably do - everyone from my cellphone provider, to Amazon when I browse or buy stuff, to Google when I search for something or use their map service, etc.
Why do I use those and not Facebook? Mostly because I'm of the opinion Facebook doesn't give a rat's ass who it sells stuff to, and wants to know every last thing about me and my personal life. If anything, they're more like an Intelligence Agency in their overwhelming and aggressive interest in my information. The others are at least more content with the stuff I give them. Amazon? Amazon can know what I buy and view from Amazon, in part because sometimes they'll later show me more stuff that I'm sometimes interested in. I'd be happier with the option to turn it off, maybe, but that's still a choice I can make between shopping there and not.
But there's a difference between having applications that I choose to use - such as Skype for instance - that links back into Microsoft's cloud, and having the very OS itself basically running in SaaS mode with a cloud based account. It's also not just about the privacy issues, but also the security issues that syncing my local password and my cloud password presents.
It was the final straw with the cloud-based stuff they were trying to shoehorn in. I have it all disabled now, though as I noted in another post, I expect they'll try harder and harder to force that on everyone as time goes by.
Hacking a foreign government's computers to steal secrets? Fair game.
Hacking a foreign defense contracting company? Eh, probably fair game too.
Hacking a foreign non-military company to provide commercial advantage? Nope, out of bounds.
The US has held this viewpoint for a long time - I seem to remember some issue something like 15-20 years ago where it came out that Air France had bugged the seats of its planes on behalf of French intelligence (or was accused of doing so) to spy on businesspeople. It was something of a big deal at the time.
I really want to like Windows 10. It seems to have a lot of nice features, was a smooth upgrade from 7, and probably the single most painless OS upgrade I've had on any MS platform (I had to correct a single driver, for a minor issue, and that was it).
But I'm really, really sick of just how blatantly Microsoft is trying to jam every single stupid thing into this, and tie it back to their cloud based bit. And I might even be okay with some of that, because I'm well aware that I wind up giving a lot to Google when I'm using stuff on Android. I might even use some of it, if they weren't going far beyond even what Google does.
The final straw was when they wanted to essentially remove my local account on the machine and replace it with me using a Microsoft account for my local login. No, sorry, but Redmond can go get fucked if they want that. It's one thing to have stuff in a cloud based application that has its own password, but it's another thing for that cloud based password to be my entire system. Perhaps I'm being overly negative, but it's just too much, that they want all this personal data, and they want to tie it all not just to what I do in application land with Outlook/Bing/Edge/Cortana/Skype whatever, but down to the OS level?
No. And if it gets worse, I may just have to bite the bullet and do my PC gaming on Linux, and give up on doing anything bleeding edge.
Actually, this would be a perfect idea. There used to be a guy in Maryland known as the "Route 29 Batman" who would dress up in a (really nice) Batman costume, and would go to hospitals to visit sick children and entertain them.
And sadly, he was killed in a car accident just a few weeks ago, so there's certainly an opening for it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Yes - and not just her, this is something that all of the Alaska politicians have been pushing for, for several decades now. The current governor of Alaska, who is also a Republican, also hailed the decision.
Not every issue is a Republicans vs Democrats issue, or a Right vs Left issue. This is one of the (increasingly rare) state vs. state issues. In fact, I'm pretty sure you could find any number of Ohio Democrats (as well as Ohio Republicans) that had been busy opposing this.
That's easily fixed by making sure the results provided to the FOIA/etc type request are sufficiently anonymized. The audit trail shouldn't rely on matching each vote to a specific individual voter. If there is fraud involved, it will show up through other patterns, because they don't match what reality would be expected to generate, and tend to stand out as massive statistical outliers.
Slashdot Mirror
There's definitely a difference in fields. "Liberal Arts" is a pretty broad catchall just like STEM, probably far moreso. There's also the importance of what the job is, and what duties it requires. Would you hire a Liberal Arts major as a core programmer who has no responsibilities outside of coding? Probably not, or at least not based even in part on that.
What about jobs that require more social interaction, writing/communication, or interaction with non-technical people? Working on the security side, I find you do need a lot of technical knowledge, but all that knowledge only goes so far if you can't explain to people, including your bosses/company executives/etc what things mean, and why they should take X or Y seriously. What about sales? What about getting proper requirements?
Sometimes, you really do need a guy who can translate between the customers and the engineers.
Honestly though, a true 'well rounded' individual these days isn't just someone versed in the liberal arts or STEM alone - it's someone who has a grounding in both.
I'm cheering for Microsoft, too.
Leave it to the DOJ to turn Microsoft into the good guys.
First, this isn't the same as the H-1B issue. This would actually be a better solution if we were facing a shortage of skilled workers, because more trained entry level sorts would directly address that. The problem is, the tech moguls pushing for H-1Bs don't really care about that, they just want cheaper workers. The fact that most H-1Bs are used not to bring in highly paid experts in their field, but instead to bring in contract workers for IT sweatshops, should tell you something. That, and the fact that H-1Bs are largely stuck in their one job, are part of why this solution will likely not have any tech moguls or the like pushing for it.
I do find it disingenuous that the lawyer quoted conflates the two though. Entry level types who happen to be foreign graduates of a US university aren't going to be competing for any jobs that aren't already at risk of being given to any US-born graduates (which is a problem in Tech, but is a rather different one). That said, the Obama administration (and politicians in general) ought to be doing a lot more to crack down on the H-1B fuckery, just in general, nevermind in relation to a broader immigration overhaul.
Yeah, like we can do any worse than a former Tech CEO whose product is mostly known for slowing systems that use it to a crawl. I mean, I guess it could be worse - you could have someone who ruined one of the iconic tech companies of Silicon Valley by pushing a buyout of an increasingly unprofitable hardware company against the advice of pretty much everyone and their dog, nevermind laying off tens of thousands of workers, who's now running for president claiming that as part of their qualifying experience.
Oh, wait...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08...
I'm thinking Charlie Sheen. Together, they've probably done more drugs than half the country combined. It'd certainly be entertaining!
Apparently in Europe, since he can no longer clone new posts to put in this thread.
Most people also have a crazy/wrong idea about what cloning is. It's not going to give you a carbon copy of your pet, all it gives you is an identical twin. I also seem to recall hearing that with some animals a twin won't even look the same due to things like color pattern being influenced by its time in the womb, but I could be completely off in left field with that. Regardless, you're just getting another pet with the same DNA makeup.
And really, so much of the anti-cloning hysteria comes from that sort of wrong-headed thinking, that's there's something horribly unnatural or mad-science-y about cloning, when nature makes clones all the time - it just doesn't time-shift them.
Pretty much. Just about the only time that's not true is when the politician _is_ themselves one of those ridiculously wealthy enough to be benefactors if they wanted in the first place.
I'd like to see a better trade agreement with certain countries in the Pacific. I'm perhaps less keen on others, since I tend to think that free trade is far less efficient when you're talking about countries with wildly divergent levels of economic development, but depending on the way it's done, and the country in question, maybe.
What I'm decidedly not cool about is all the fuckery that seems to be getting snuck into the treaty by various companies and special interests, particularly about intellectual property. That sort of stuff is a poison pill, and we should demand that a treaty represent OUR interest, the citizens/voters, not the IP holders.
Sometimes this is true... I mean, look at the Iran deal, and all the screaming about that (which, while probably not a great deal, is far better than no deal when you really dig into things), and that's -after- the fact. Also, look at how many times proposals were floated and people not involved in the negotiations on both sides tried to pre-emptively shoot them down, without consider concessions, and letting the negotiators work.
At the same time though, when it comes to a trade treaty like this, there seems to be so much fuckery going on with provisions being slipped in that are entirely about protecting wealthy interests that are decidedly NOT in the interest of the average citizen. It's the fact that this stuff is being kept secret, in hopes of sneaking it into the treaty, which must then be either accepted or rejected as a whole, so that we're forced to take it along with the other beneficial stuff. No, it's bullshit, and it needs to stop.
So how do you do that without denying the negotiators any wiggle room? Well, for one, I'd suggest that drafts be published at regular intervals. You can keep the proceedings themselves secret, so long as we get a record of what they have so far at reasonable periods, and can provide feedback based on that.
That, and maybe force the input and recommendations/asks from any corporation/special interest/lobbying group to go on public record from the moment it's submitted.
Pretty much.
Seriously, if I wanted to run an authoritarian regime restricting internet content, there are certain things that would be absolutely left unblocked, namely porn and cat memes/videos.
What about the Gulags that residents of Salisbury were shipped off to, and the political commissars patrolling the streets? Didn't these people pay any attention to the warnings from the telecommunications companies about what would happen if the government was allowed to institute socialist internet? ..what do you mean none of that happened?
Well, what about the crippling taxes to pay for it, while fatcat government bureaucrats refuse to answer the phones, harass people, change their customer account names to things like "Asshole", refuse to let them cancel service, and generally make their customers' lives a living hell? ...what do you mean, that was Comcast?
This sounds like the perfect sort of thing to include in a comment to them, so they know just how bad of an idea making the rule change would be. I encourage you to submit it, if you haven't already.
Nevermind the fact that the poor bastards they're suing are already suffering from having to use Comcast as an ISP.
I try to at least take it into consideration. I don't feel like I need complete privacy and anonymity, in part because I like some of the aspects of the connected and digital world.
That said, I try to at least be aware of some of the trade-offs, and who my information is going to (which sadly is a lot more effort than most people are interested in making). It comes down to who I'm willing to grant access to what information, to what degree - in part because of what they're likely to do with it, as well as what I feel like I get out of the service.
It's part of why I avoid using Facebook, because of their (nightmarish) track record and attitude towards things. On the other hand I use a number of services that are quite capable of tracking lots of things about me, and in some cases noticeably do - everyone from my cellphone provider, to Amazon when I browse or buy stuff, to Google when I search for something or use their map service, etc.
Why do I use those and not Facebook? Mostly because I'm of the opinion Facebook doesn't give a rat's ass who it sells stuff to, and wants to know every last thing about me and my personal life. If anything, they're more like an Intelligence Agency in their overwhelming and aggressive interest in my information. The others are at least more content with the stuff I give them. Amazon? Amazon can know what I buy and view from Amazon, in part because sometimes they'll later show me more stuff that I'm sometimes interested in. I'd be happier with the option to turn it off, maybe, but that's still a choice I can make between shopping there and not.
But there's a difference between having applications that I choose to use - such as Skype for instance - that links back into Microsoft's cloud, and having the very OS itself basically running in SaaS mode with a cloud based account. It's also not just about the privacy issues, but also the security issues that syncing my local password and my cloud password presents.
It was the final straw with the cloud-based stuff they were trying to shoehorn in. I have it all disabled now, though as I noted in another post, I expect they'll try harder and harder to force that on everyone as time goes by.
I can keep using a local account, I just have to disable all the stuff they keep trying to shove into it that wants to use it.
At this rate though, I expect they'll soon try to remove even that option for anything except corporate users.
That's pretty much where the norms should be.
Hacking a foreign government's computers to steal secrets? Fair game.
Hacking a foreign defense contracting company? Eh, probably fair game too.
Hacking a foreign non-military company to provide commercial advantage? Nope, out of bounds.
The US has held this viewpoint for a long time - I seem to remember some issue something like 15-20 years ago where it came out that Air France had bugged the seats of its planes on behalf of French intelligence (or was accused of doing so) to spy on businesspeople. It was something of a big deal at the time.
I really want to like Windows 10. It seems to have a lot of nice features, was a smooth upgrade from 7, and probably the single most painless OS upgrade I've had on any MS platform (I had to correct a single driver, for a minor issue, and that was it).
But I'm really, really sick of just how blatantly Microsoft is trying to jam every single stupid thing into this, and tie it back to their cloud based bit. And I might even be okay with some of that, because I'm well aware that I wind up giving a lot to Google when I'm using stuff on Android. I might even use some of it, if they weren't going far beyond even what Google does.
The final straw was when they wanted to essentially remove my local account on the machine and replace it with me using a Microsoft account for my local login. No, sorry, but Redmond can go get fucked if they want that. It's one thing to have stuff in a cloud based application that has its own password, but it's another thing for that cloud based password to be my entire system. Perhaps I'm being overly negative, but it's just too much, that they want all this personal data, and they want to tie it all not just to what I do in application land with Outlook/Bing/Edge/Cortana/Skype whatever, but down to the OS level? No. And if it gets worse, I may just have to bite the bullet and do my PC gaming on Linux, and give up on doing anything bleeding edge.
Next month on SyFy: Sharknado 4 - Sharkicane!
There have been very few Atlantic hurricanes this season - but that's not entirely unusual.
Meanwhile, the Pacific has been going crazy, both in terms of Typhoons and Hurricanes.
Actually, this would be a perfect idea. There used to be a guy in Maryland known as the "Route 29 Batman" who would dress up in a (really nice) Batman costume, and would go to hospitals to visit sick children and entertain them.
And sadly, he was killed in a car accident just a few weeks ago, so there's certainly an opening for it:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Yes - and not just her, this is something that all of the Alaska politicians have been pushing for, for several decades now. The current governor of Alaska, who is also a Republican, also hailed the decision.
Not every issue is a Republicans vs Democrats issue, or a Right vs Left issue. This is one of the (increasingly rare) state vs. state issues. In fact, I'm pretty sure you could find any number of Ohio Democrats (as well as Ohio Republicans) that had been busy opposing this.
That's easily fixed by making sure the results provided to the FOIA/etc type request are sufficiently anonymized. The audit trail shouldn't rely on matching each vote to a specific individual voter. If there is fraud involved, it will show up through other patterns, because they don't match what reality would be expected to generate, and tend to stand out as massive statistical outliers.
That's still pretty hard to come back from.
I mean, it'd take a miracle.