I find it harder to read the comment threads with the redesign. As I'm scrolling down I can't tell which comments lead to long threads and which don't, so I find myself skimming through a lot fewer comments and am less tempted to post myself.
I think most HR folk's don't necessarily look down on Tech or vocational schools. In fact most of the folks I know in Recruitment & Selection roles speak very highly of such schools.
The problem is though that those schools are inherently extremely focused. In two years a person can learn all they need for careers in nursing, auto repair, electrical contracting, etc. Those people will be highly technically proficient in their program (much more so than a 4 year Liberal Arts grad). The downside is that their education is a lot less generalizable. 4 year schools have those miserable gen-ed requirements that we all hate, but really do equip students with valuable skill sets like sentence composition and punctuation.
Highly motivated Tech school students can pick up the other stuff on their own. In my experience, unfortunately, many don't. They leave their program as highly skilled technicians with little ability to take on other responsibilities outside of their immediate knowledge area. This really, really limits their value to some organizations.
But if you need a mechanic, you take your car to an auto shop staffed mostly by Tech school graduates. There is something to be said there.
But that's a problem with the organization or with program management, not the individual salesman. If his boss expects him to sign deals and lets him go on making promises that can't be kept, you can't blame him for doing that. If it's his job to sign deals then he's going to go out there to sign deals. It's not his fault that his managers are incentivizing him to win unprofitable contracts.
Also keep in mind that the scenario you outlined is a fairly common business strategy. Why not sign the customer to a contract you may not be able to fully satisfy? By the time they figure it out they have already committed to the relationship and can't break away, and could be locked into some kind of long term service contract. This could be profitable in the long run.
And it is pronounced "Fraternity". Mine kept a house mean GPA that was higher than the campus male mean. We also threw epic parties and networked the crap out of our alumni for sweet jobs. There is great deal of skill and intelligence required to effectively network. People that are good at it tend to self-organize. There's nothing wrong with that.
And the best salesman in the world is useless if he has nothing to sell. You think that the salesman is valuable enough to be paid so much? That's fine, but your engineers are just as valuable as your sales people.
This depends on your industry and the quality of your product though. As an extremely simplified example, if you are the only, or one of a very few, vendor(s) offering a product in a given market then your primary interest could be in engineering a widget with the highest possible quality. You won't need to worry about sales because anyone who needs such a widget will be buying from you anyway.
If your market has lots of competition then your interests could shift to making your widget stand out against the other widgets. Specifically making sure that your customers see your widget as being superior. This requires sales reps to forge relationships as well as competent engineers to design widgets.
The question then becomes which position contributes more value to the company, the Engineer or the Sales rep. It's easy to look at sales figures to guesstimate how much value a Sales rep brings, but it is hard to compare that (meaningfully) against the value an Engineer brings.
This is unrelated, but Sales reps also by nature of their trade are better equipped for salary negotiations and making themselves appear valuable to the company.
Utilities and telco's are required to string power and telephone lines to rural homes. It's still super expensive though. They diffray that cost through 'rural surchages' to other users, but they still take a loss. AFAIK none of the States in the US require telco's provide broadband acces to the home.
I have absolutely zero citations to back this up, but I seem to recall a story a few years back about the drones used in Iraq/Afghanistan would transmit their video data over an unencrypted signal.
From what I remember the control systems were encrypted of course, but the video data was just openly broadcast so facilitate troops on the ground getting real time video. Basically anyone with a laptop and a dish could listen on the right frequency and see the video. That's not something I want flying over my home.
The headline should read "A poll indicates that Bill Gates may be more admired than the Pope. Polls are based on the often ill-considered responses of a few randomly called individuals.
According to the article, respondents are all adults living in the continental US and (obviously) have a telephone.
In general, I've always though Gallup's polling methodology is very sound. But some sampling biases are inevitable with telephone polling. What I didn't know until just now, is that Gallup pollsters will randomize respondents within the household by asking to speak with the person with the most recent birthday. That's a neat method of pseudo-randomization, but not perfect.
A downside to that solution, though otherwise very elegant, is that it would effectively duplicate the power and drive train systems of the vehicles. The overall system would have one set of motors for the road, and get loaded onto another set of motors for the rail. This rail vehicle is then stuck carrying around the weight of the redundant equipment.
Something similar would be to standardize wheel dimensions to allow such vehicles to line up and actually form a train themselves. Then they are simply powering themselves along the shared rail line.
To be fair, the carrier still pays for the infrastructure to connect the call/sms to your phone whether you answer it or not. If you want to be able to receive calls you need to pay to be able to receive calls. The alternative would be to allow carriers to screen out 'unwanted' calls, but that seems like the first step down a very slippery slope.
they should just release the gps data to the public so WE can 'keep an eye' on them
Because you're not a law enforcement officer, and when the individual is paroled and reintegrated back to society they deserve just as much privacy protection as you and I.
When you put "'keep an eye' on them" in quotes like that it very strongly implies that you will 'take matters into your own hands' and 'make sure they don't hurt anyone again'. Modern America is no place for paranoid vigilante mob justice.
... i have 2 kids and yes, i should know who they are and if they are preying on my children.
Not all sex offenders predate on children. Some of them are on that list for no other reason than they got drunk and took a leak in a playground. The list is fundamentally broken. In large part because people fail to see sex offenders as being capable of rehabilitation, and feel like they need to 'keep an eye' on them. We have a justice system that includes rehabilitation and parole. If you think people are being released that are a continued threat to your children, your problem is just as much with the parole board as it is with the individual.
My GF watches Oprah, and I've developed kind of a mixed opinion of her (Oprah).
She clearly devotes a great deal of energy to spreading medical information. As an example, she's built up the wildly successful real-life character Dr. Oz, who is a very hunky and charismatic guy that gets on TV and gives people some generally very very good medical advice.
A problem with Oprah's brand of medical and lifestyle advice is that she doesn't encourage independent investigation. She doesn't really encourage people to go out and do the research themselves. She hands out medical opinions but rarely empowers people with the tools to make their own medical decisions. Just like her book clubs, people fall in line with the Oprah diet and exercise guides (seriously, I've got one on my coffee table right now). Unfortunately, this is exactly what most of her viewers want.
I wish that she would do more to encourage science and medical education, rather than simply telling women what she thinks about medicine.
To think it has some cause effect relationship with dead bits of virii or proteins is asinine.
...to people that are educated enough to understand what autism is and how vaccines work. There are a lot of people that have not had the benefit of such an education, and lack some critical tools for pursuing their own research.
Not that we need to coddle people that are willfully ignorant, but I think that society has an obligation to provide all of its members with the information they need to make informed choices. When charismatic people willfully spread misinformation to push some personal agenda I think society has an obligation to push back.
Also, it doesn't help that we keep using the word 'Autism' to describe what is likely a very large spectrum of different disorders with potentially different causes.
Eye trackers are getting a lot better. I've always wondered about the feasibility of using a couple of IR cameras on the top corners of the monitor to track gaze direction. Seems like it would be workable, even if it is only practical in certain environments.
They are 100 people to be named later when Sony figures out who they are. You know, the ones who were harder to identify before filing the lawsuit.
That description makes it sound a little more shady than it is. It's more that Sony suspects activity from what they think are 100 different people. Sony needs the lawsuit in process before they can subpoena to figure out who these people are.
Of course, the oddly round number of exactly 100 does make that sound very shady.
They also know that by suing this guy into oblivion, they make it slightly less likely that someone else will want to release similar exploits / keys for things in the future.
Geohot, as douchy as he is, serves as sort of a figurehead for a theoretical 'community' of hackers. He sort of serves to legitimize console hacks to lot of the more mainstream community. And by posting instructions and details he allows and encourages copycat behavior from people who wouldn't have otherwise hacked their hardware. (When I say 'he' I'm only partially referring to Geohot himself, mainly the type of hacktivist that he represents)
These lawsuits won't stop homebrew types, or really anyone with gumption, from hacking their hardware. But I think they may serve to deter more mainstream types from following someone else's instructions and doing it themselves. The only reason I ever hacked my original Xbox was because I could buy a chip on Ebay and follow an instructional video. I never would have sat down with a soldering iron to figure it out myself. That's the kind of hack that I think a lawsuit like this is trying to stop.
Of course they would. But they also disagree on the characteristics of life. Biosemiotics on the other hand has no question about it.
...right. Because biosemiotics is a field dedicated to studying how living organisms processes and interpret data. Your statement is tautological. Biosemioticists have no question because their field is predicated on it.
Making the claim that anything is the 'defining'g characteristic of life is a little rash, because the definition of life is still kind of up in the air. Clearly, there is some disagreement as to what constitutes life.
Hey, if you don't like the terms of the contract you are free to change the terms before you sign it, or decline to sign it altogether.
If you feel Verizon is being intentionally shady on how it defines "unlimited" and "excessive" use, have your sales rep outline it for you on paper before you sign anything. If they refuse to define their terms, don't sign into any agreement with them.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it harder to read the comment threads with the redesign. As I'm scrolling down I can't tell which comments lead to long threads and which don't, so I find myself skimming through a lot fewer comments and am less tempted to post myself.
I think most HR folk's don't necessarily look down on Tech or vocational schools. In fact most of the folks I know in Recruitment & Selection roles speak very highly of such schools.
The problem is though that those schools are inherently extremely focused. In two years a person can learn all they need for careers in nursing, auto repair, electrical contracting, etc. Those people will be highly technically proficient in their program (much more so than a 4 year Liberal Arts grad). The downside is that their education is a lot less generalizable. 4 year schools have those miserable gen-ed requirements that we all hate, but really do equip students with valuable skill sets like sentence composition and punctuation.
Highly motivated Tech school students can pick up the other stuff on their own. In my experience, unfortunately, many don't. They leave their program as highly skilled technicians with little ability to take on other responsibilities outside of their immediate knowledge area. This really, really limits their value to some organizations.
But if you need a mechanic, you take your car to an auto shop staffed mostly by Tech school graduates. There is something to be said there.
But that's a problem with the organization or with program management, not the individual salesman. If his boss expects him to sign deals and lets him go on making promises that can't be kept, you can't blame him for doing that. If it's his job to sign deals then he's going to go out there to sign deals. It's not his fault that his managers are incentivizing him to win unprofitable contracts.
Also keep in mind that the scenario you outlined is a fairly common business strategy. Why not sign the customer to a contract you may not be able to fully satisfy? By the time they figure it out they have already committed to the relationship and can't break away, and could be locked into some kind of long term service contract. This could be profitable in the long run.
And it is pronounced "Fraternity". Mine kept a house mean GPA that was higher than the campus male mean. We also threw epic parties and networked the crap out of our alumni for sweet jobs. There is great deal of skill and intelligence required to effectively network. People that are good at it tend to self-organize. There's nothing wrong with that.
And the best salesman in the world is useless if he has nothing to sell. You think that the salesman is valuable enough to be paid so much? That's fine, but your engineers are just as valuable as your sales people.
This depends on your industry and the quality of your product though. As an extremely simplified example, if you are the only, or one of a very few, vendor(s) offering a product in a given market then your primary interest could be in engineering a widget with the highest possible quality. You won't need to worry about sales because anyone who needs such a widget will be buying from you anyway.
If your market has lots of competition then your interests could shift to making your widget stand out against the other widgets. Specifically making sure that your customers see your widget as being superior. This requires sales reps to forge relationships as well as competent engineers to design widgets.
The question then becomes which position contributes more value to the company, the Engineer or the Sales rep. It's easy to look at sales figures to guesstimate how much value a Sales rep brings, but it is hard to compare that (meaningfully) against the value an Engineer brings.
This is unrelated, but Sales reps also by nature of their trade are better equipped for salary negotiations and making themselves appear valuable to the company.
Utilities and telco's are required to string power and telephone lines to rural homes. It's still super expensive though. They diffray that cost through 'rural surchages' to other users, but they still take a loss. AFAIK none of the States in the US require telco's provide broadband acces to the home.
I have absolutely zero citations to back this up, but I seem to recall a story a few years back about the drones used in Iraq/Afghanistan would transmit their video data over an unencrypted signal.
From what I remember the control systems were encrypted of course, but the video data was just openly broadcast so facilitate troops on the ground getting real time video. Basically anyone with a laptop and a dish could listen on the right frequency and see the video. That's not something I want flying over my home.
The headline should read "A poll indicates that Bill Gates may be more admired than the Pope. Polls are based on the often ill-considered responses of a few randomly called individuals.
According to the article, respondents are all adults living in the continental US and (obviously) have a telephone.
In general, I've always though Gallup's polling methodology is very sound. But some sampling biases are inevitable with telephone polling. What I didn't know until just now, is that Gallup pollsters will randomize respondents within the household by asking to speak with the person with the most recent birthday. That's a neat method of pseudo-randomization, but not perfect.
A downside to that solution, though otherwise very elegant, is that it would effectively duplicate the power and drive train systems of the vehicles. The overall system would have one set of motors for the road, and get loaded onto another set of motors for the rail. This rail vehicle is then stuck carrying around the weight of the redundant equipment.
Something similar would be to standardize wheel dimensions to allow such vehicles to line up and actually form a train themselves. Then they are simply powering themselves along the shared rail line.
What about a comically over-sized trebuchet?
To be fair, the carrier still pays for the infrastructure to connect the call/sms to your phone whether you answer it or not. If you want to be able to receive calls you need to pay to be able to receive calls. The alternative would be to allow carriers to screen out 'unwanted' calls, but that seems like the first step down a very slippery slope.
Do you realize how retarded it makes you look to use multiple accounts to rail against people for hiding behind pseudonymity?
You understand that nobody takes you seriously, right?
Your cute
His cute what?
Condescension fail.
they should just release the gps data to the public so WE can 'keep an eye' on them
Because you're not a law enforcement officer, and when the individual is paroled and reintegrated back to society they deserve just as much privacy protection as you and I.
When you put "'keep an eye' on them" in quotes like that it very strongly implies that you will 'take matters into your own hands' and 'make sure they don't hurt anyone again'. Modern America is no place for paranoid vigilante mob justice.
... i have 2 kids and yes, i should know who they are and if they are preying on my children.
Not all sex offenders predate on children. Some of them are on that list for no other reason than they got drunk and took a leak in a playground. The list is fundamentally broken. In large part because people fail to see sex offenders as being capable of rehabilitation, and feel like they need to 'keep an eye' on them. We have a justice system that includes rehabilitation and parole. If you think people are being released that are a continued threat to your children, your problem is just as much with the parole board as it is with the individual.
It's not really. But it is a fairly suitable method for making people to feel like they're safe.
My GF watches Oprah, and I've developed kind of a mixed opinion of her (Oprah).
She clearly devotes a great deal of energy to spreading medical information. As an example, she's built up the wildly successful real-life character Dr. Oz, who is a very hunky and charismatic guy that gets on TV and gives people some generally very very good medical advice.
A problem with Oprah's brand of medical and lifestyle advice is that she doesn't encourage independent investigation. She doesn't really encourage people to go out and do the research themselves. She hands out medical opinions but rarely empowers people with the tools to make their own medical decisions. Just like her book clubs, people fall in line with the Oprah diet and exercise guides (seriously, I've got one on my coffee table right now). Unfortunately, this is exactly what most of her viewers want.
I wish that she would do more to encourage science and medical education, rather than simply telling women what she thinks about medicine.
To think it has some cause effect relationship with dead bits of virii or proteins is asinine.
...to people that are educated enough to understand what autism is and how vaccines work. There are a lot of people that have not had the benefit of such an education, and lack some critical tools for pursuing their own research.
Not that we need to coddle people that are willfully ignorant, but I think that society has an obligation to provide all of its members with the information they need to make informed choices. When charismatic people willfully spread misinformation to push some personal agenda I think society has an obligation to push back.
Also, it doesn't help that we keep using the word 'Autism' to describe what is likely a very large spectrum of different disorders with potentially different causes.
As a Chiropractor, I'm not allowed to make prescriptions but can recommend such treatments.
- Don't visit MDs, they are quacks.
Good luck!
I think there are very good reasons that you aren't allowed to write prescriptions.
Eye trackers are getting a lot better. I've always wondered about the feasibility of using a couple of IR cameras on the top corners of the monitor to track gaze direction. Seems like it would be workable, even if it is only practical in certain environments.
I don't think Slashdot is interested in descriptions of your masturbation experiences...
Speak for yourself!
GP, please continue.
They are 100 people to be named later when Sony figures out who they are. You know, the ones who were harder to identify before filing the lawsuit.
That description makes it sound a little more shady than it is. It's more that Sony suspects activity from what they think are 100 different people. Sony needs the lawsuit in process before they can subpoena to figure out who these people are.
Of course, the oddly round number of exactly 100 does make that sound very shady.
They also know that by suing this guy into oblivion, they make it slightly less likely that someone else will want to release similar exploits / keys for things in the future.
Geohot, as douchy as he is, serves as sort of a figurehead for a theoretical 'community' of hackers. He sort of serves to legitimize console hacks to lot of the more mainstream community. And by posting instructions and details he allows and encourages copycat behavior from people who wouldn't have otherwise hacked their hardware. (When I say 'he' I'm only partially referring to Geohot himself, mainly the type of hacktivist that he represents)
These lawsuits won't stop homebrew types, or really anyone with gumption, from hacking their hardware. But I think they may serve to deter more mainstream types from following someone else's instructions and doing it themselves. The only reason I ever hacked my original Xbox was because I could buy a chip on Ebay and follow an instructional video. I never would have sat down with a soldering iron to figure it out myself. That's the kind of hack that I think a lawsuit like this is trying to stop.
Just make sure that second guy gets extra tinfoil for his hat.
I jest. The rational part of me hopes that this kind of thing could never happen, but our government has done similar things in the past.
I'm guessing most biologists would disagree.
Of course they would. But they also disagree on the characteristics of life. Biosemiotics on the other hand has no question about it.
...right. Because biosemiotics is a field dedicated to studying how living organisms processes and interpret data. Your statement is tautological. Biosemioticists have no question because their field is predicated on it.
Making the claim that anything is the 'defining'g characteristic of life is a little rash, because the definition of life is still kind of up in the air. Clearly, there is some disagreement as to what constitutes life.
That is one sad, sad basement...
Hey, if you don't like the terms of the contract you are free to change the terms before you sign it, or decline to sign it altogether.
If you feel Verizon is being intentionally shady on how it defines "unlimited" and "excessive" use, have your sales rep outline it for you on paper before you sign anything. If they refuse to define their terms, don't sign into any agreement with them.