Well put. I hadn't thought of this at all; I fell right into the language trap.
I notice a fair amount of this coming out of the US Feds lately, e.g., Commander-in-Chief as someone in charge of all citizens, or using the military term "General" to refer to the Attorney General.
Yeah. Thanks, really. What a wakeup call--only, I don't like what I've woken up to. Still, it's far, far better to be awake than asleep and dreaming.
Bingo. The current laws simply do not cover the tech, and the gap continues to grow.
If the theater managers can't be educated, surely the public cannot. Most readers here completely grok the situation, and we pride ourselves on holding and maintaining distinctions like these. They set us apart from the general public. We know not to get a video recording device anywhere near a movie theater--whereas the people being charged with piracy had little or no idea what risk they were taking.
It's a mess--and messes tend to raise awareness. Perhaps this one will cause more people to be aware of the loose definitions of media piracy--as opposed to raising that special brand of awareness we know as FUD.
The only problem is, [whether or not to share some or all of licensed content is] not your decision to make. That's the content owner's decision.
I assert that the owner's decision to distribute his/her/its content in such a way as to allow unauthorized copying voids their claim to ownership. In the same way that the suspects in this case were ignorant of the law, the owners are ignorant of the demand for their content outside of what they're willing to provide.
I'm shocked--shocked!--that no one has pointed out the meta-case, that associating with other people can cause one to adopt their beliefs and habits. TFA is over-simplified and seems to provide, or at least to be susceptible to misinterpretation.
Surely most readers have decided to spend time with someone else in order to acquire his/her skills, then discovered that the desired skills weren't the only ones that traversed the interpersonal gap. My first UNIX mentor is one of those guys that can eat anything and stay thin, and he loves to eat cinnamon rolls. Twenty years later, I still must take a moment to recognize that what I think is a craving is just a subconscious association.
Or the guy who has shown me all kinds of interesting things over the years: Perl, Tcl, BSD, graphics programming,... the list goes on. That guy also likes to smoke pot, and it seems to work for him. It took a long time to figure out that it doesn't work for me--and it seemed sooo muuuuuuuuuch looooooonger.
Then there's the guy that I don't hang out with any more. He showed me how to hand-optimize C (I believed in that for nearly two years), made fun of what I thought was important, took me to a gun range (cool), tried to get me to buy some illegal guns (way uncool), and is now living in a remote compound with the proceeds from some corporate stock sale converted to Krugerands buried underground. He watches FOX News 24/7 on a 60" projection TV and calls at least once a month to remind me that he has still has room for two more families in his bomb shelter. That's the exception to the rule, e.g., there are some "fat" people whose company prevents you from being/becoming/staying "fat".
"Nobody's perfect," right? Like no one is perfect from my point of view, but I'm willing to compromise for as long as it seems as though the trade-offs are invisible, or at least acceptable.
Noodle bake: What memes are you passing to your associates--and where did you get them?
I once worked for an incredibly successful consulting firm: 2 to 1500 employees in five years, $1M to $500M in revenue, true employment (not "as long as we have a customer for you"), many other examples of goodness and light. It was bought for cash by a huge telecom, who thought that we could deliver on such a vague promise as "remotely managed software services."
In fairness, the idea was already being floated about, that we could just set up NOCs/ROCs all over the place and somehow, magically, deliver as many services as a demand existed for. The telecom just drooled over it; circa 1997, they were all watching the biscuit wheels falling off of the long-distance gravy train.
Of course, the behemoth telecom sealed the coffin by demanding that we try to make their broken attempts at non-remote service offerings work. I left when they decreed that Windows NT would be the only OS running on any of their machines. They sold off little pieces of the original firm. Last I heard, a few ex-managers got together and bought what was left of it in order to use the brand name.
I'm not saying that M$ can't eventually pull this off. If any existing entity could make it work, they could. I base this on their mind-numbing ability to handle huge problems that, you know, "no one could have expected." That is, if they really try to do this, it will fail, over and over again. Only M$, IMO, has the resources to survive these failures. And only M$ could command such a vast array of excellent talent and manage to turn out such mediocre products.
It looks to me more like they're trying to imitate what they think Google is.
I'm 100% befuddled by this gang's insistence on spying on us, while they want to hide everything. Now that the Congress is finally exercising some oversight, they cite "executive privilege."
It is my opinion that people who want to be elected or appointed to public office ought to agree to be monitored as a primary condition of the position. I'm far more interested in people who can perform demonstrably than I am in someone who looks good on the telly.
It looks to me like the terrorists won. Our rights are disappearing, the state has spent all of the tax money and more, and we seem to be returning to a feudal system.
"Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn by no other."
The older meaning of "dear" was "expensive." This may explain the conflation with "best," e.g., the most expensive option is often considered to be the best one, even if practically unattainable.
Yes. These are two separate effects, which are still being actively conflated. The dot-com bust was all about irrational exuberance, e.g., anything with a trailing ".com" became a target for the extra capital floating about in the late 90s. You didn't even need a business plan, just a catchy name. The absence of a plan, in turn, led to silly work environments, with a few extremes that got press (recall that there was a whole new press industry being born at the same time, e.g., online publication).
The other effect mentioned, the one that seems to have led to massive layoffs and restructuring--and the shift from offers for FTE to contract-to-hire becoming the norm--seems to have been a reaction to the lost investments in dot-com firms. That is, in the wake of major market adjustments, corporations of all sizes turned to the dreaded Short-Sighted Efficiency Experts. Add to that a sharp increase in health care costs and I think you have most, if not all of the factors responsible for tech jobs losing their allure. And by allure I mean high pay, stellar benefits, and possible perqs (even for non-management types).
The thing that we as employees really want, though, seems to be making a comeback. I'm hearing more and more from my colleagues who chose the management route that "Maximizing the return on cost-per-hire" is a fully-revived meme. This is the harbinger of "Increasing and maintaining employee retention," which the experienced folk among us will recognize as bottom-line justification for perquisites reaching even the newest of new hires.
The dark side of this revival is that it's employee-focused, e.g., the commodification of our industry has led to highly populated ranks of contractors. Whether corporations will see fit to maintain the present balance of employees and contractors remains to be seen, but don't look for any change in the invisible-but-known-to-everyone line between employees and guest workers.
...people would be able to take just about anything that burns to the Sociedade Municipal de Iluminaçao e Traçao and exchange it for electricity meter tokens!
One of the biggest issues with blogging is that there is no separation between the person who is writing, and the person who is trying to make money. Most other media outlets have separate departments for those things to create a division between content and advertising.
Excellent point, but I notice that you qualify the distinction with the word "most." Recent experience suggests that this separation can be blurred by the outlet's perceived threat or opportunity to enhance said outlet's bottom line.
It remains to be seen what further erosion of this division will occur if Rupert Murdoch successfully acquires control of the Wall Street Journal.
IMHO, news is entertainment which can sometimes be counted on as reliable information, not the other way around.
Oh, they have plenty of funds. They just happen to be incompetent.
Lots of that going around in the Federal Government lately. I surmise that this is the consequence of assignments based on fundraising, rather than talent or, better yet, interest in the subject at hand.
Consider that the way that the US is set up, the President of the United States will not make money, e.g., when you only consider the salary, the office operates at a loss because it takes hundreds, if not thousands of times as much money to get elected.
The positions are all about power and influence. For as long as the music industry survives in its present configuration, having the RIAA on one's resume makes for excellent connections, and not only in the actual part of the American music industry that produces and distributes music. It's an excellent springboard to lobbying and other high-paying gigs.
Further, I'm pretty sure that the positions in the RIAA map pretty well to positions in the Federal Government: the higher-ups are already wealthy, and the grunts are the ones who actually take risks. If this woman's case makes a difference, it's not the RIAA executives who'll pay the price. It'd be the people who'd be looking for a job who would be inconvenienced.
Something tells me that the hedge that the RIAA's power and influence will win out include lucrative speaking fees for the potential winners, and book deals in case the whole thing falls apart. Kind of like the way that the loser of a professional boxing match still comes out of it with millions of dollars--unless he misbehaves and is fined and/or sued.
I think they didn't seriously consider the risk of countersuits; they almost certainly thought they'd be greeted as liberators.
...and by extension, the size and composition of the firms that notice you.
There's no way to predict; I agree with those who say you'll master the curriculum, but of what use is it in the real world? I picked a company that preached Software Methodology, vs. the ones who wanted a truck routing system written in COBOL, all of their PL/I code converted to COBOL, or custom-built software for their airport parking garage with no specifications in sight. I relocated, scored very above-average pay, only to find that Ferranti International Controls Corporation played at Software Engineering. Any code review might feature the VP of Engineering, who was a pompous know-it-all who'd apparently never heard about leaving one's ego at the door. It would have been Hell, except that I caught a break and was tapped to fill a sudden opening on the UNIX Systems Support team, circa 1987. On top of that bonus, I got to work alongside Peter da Silva and Karl Lehenbauer, both of whom I still count as close friends. BTW, Peter and Karl were both dropouts; Peter makes quite the comfortable living, and Karl's a millionaire.
Go with your instincts, they're 100% correct. It's your conscious mind that'll steer you astray--or keep you standing still, wondering what to do. I presume that you're still young enough to recover from a mistake.
It's for one day, to draw attention and/or cause action. We Americans do tend to respond most forcefully to any of our conveniences being interrupted.
I think it'd be more effective to do follow Madonna's example from a few years back. Instead of going silent, they could spoken word broadcasts to summarize the problem and outline actions that citizens could take.
In fact, I'd like to see news organizations do the same. Of course, I'd also like to see pigs fly. Independent operators are looking at the destruction of their businesses; newscasters worry about their jobs.
Close, but no cookie. When people like him run for political office, they'll be handily defeated by the fundraisers who dominate American politics. It costs big bucks to get elected, and along the way, it's de rigeur to include lurid and sensational content like you see in the Mainstream Media.
As Borat called it--erroneously and accurately--this is a War of Terror.
"Destroying human life in order to save human lives is immoral," said GWB yesterday. I guess he forgot about the present justification for, you know, war.
How do you ask a blastocyst to be the last one to die for stem cell research? Oh, wait, that's right--they can't hear you. Never mind.
The issue isn't with Cheney owning guns. It's not even with him having had a hunting accident. Like every other political scandal, the problem is with the cover-up. The incident wasn't properly reported, the early stories conflicted, and the victim apologized.
Really, if politicians would somehow generate the intestinal fortitude to talk straight, many of the present problems/issues/concerns would disappear. The first to go would be the alarming lack of trust, followed closely by lack of respect for public servants.
Seriously: Name any other servant who receives monies from you whom you would continue to retain after s/he so much as tried to mislead you about any of his/her actions on the job?
I just experienced a recruiting attempt for iREIT in Houston; I thought it was for a hosting company (FreeBSD + Windows or Linux), but the career consultant must have read even further down into the job req as I kept asking questions and divulged the company name acronym: internet Real Estate Investment Trust. As it slowly dawned on me that I might be looking at the dubious opportunity to work for a cybersquatter (see below), I just went for details. Apparently their model is to gather tons of unclaimed domain names (40k new domains in Q2 2006) with nothing but a gaggle of underpaid sysadmins and a murder of crows--er, lawyers to stave off the inevitable legal challenges (Verizon v. iREIT and Domain Marketplace, March 2007)
This isn't the first time I found snarkiness by being recruited. In late 1999, a spammer called me at a new job, thinking I was someone else who was about to pay $295 for 1M "electronic ads"; I begged off, saying I was a sysadmin, and he went right into an excited pitch. When I asked, "Is it legal?" he seamlessly launched a "not yet" diatribe, complete with the "forest industry conspiracy," e.g., they'd lost so much money with the lowered paper sales since the introduction of computers into the workplace...
I happened to actually do some piece work for a search engine manipulator shortly after that, fixing code that was supposed to generate doorway pages. Between realizing what I was contributing to and finding an interesting (not to mention full time) gig, I had about ten peeks into what they were doing and how they did it. The guy claimed to be getting $5K/month to keep one particular doctor at the top of "houston plastic surgeon" searches, and he said he'd learned everything he knew by attending quarterly seminars sponsored by the big pre-Google search engine concerns.
I seriously doubt that fingerprinting is going on as part of pre-employment screening. As a contractor to financial institutions, I've been fingerprinted by the employer. This has sometimes been performed by licensed contractors who also work for the sheriff's department.
That is, I don't buy for a second that anyone, anywhere in these United States has to register with local law enforcement before s/he can go to work. If this has really happened, Slashdot isn't the appropriate forum for discussion. Notify your state and Federal representatives, and the MSM while you're at it.
I completely agree that pre-employment screens are complete and utter bull$#!+. I don't do them. I ask about them up front, and I turn the tables: If you want me to do this work for you, don't subject me to meaningless invasions of my privacy. Find a waiver for me, or find someone else.
IMHO, it's another matter completely once they're paying me. I don't do drug tests, but I'll yield my fingerprints IFF I get assurance that I get to take any and all records when I leave.
Whatever happened to leaving one's ego at the door? Is it just not possible to have a technical discussion any more without someone taking it personally?
Time to let this go, lefties.
WTFIU with pejorative labels applied to those who simply ask questions?
Yes, I presume that "lefties" is meant as an insult.
Sure. Okay. The title of the discussion about the article is "Bush Causes Cell Phone Ban." Surely everyone knows that George W. Bush most certainly did not say, "...and make sure them cell phones are turned off."
It's the government that deserves the insults--specifically the appointed fools who jump to conclusions like "Let's jam the mobile phone frequencies, that'll absolve us of any responsibility in case... you know" and then allow these paltry tactics to be leaked to the media. And it's not just the inconvenience of jamming signals or turning off towers. It's the foolish attempts to foil terrorism that are easily shown not to have any deterrent effect. As someone has already pointed out, the Australian government--whose "conservative" candidate is pulling out more and more terrorFUD stops lately--is the entity responsible.
Maybe a better title would have been "Fear Over Bush Visit Causes Cell Phone Ban".
Maybe even something a little more...errr...honest:
You mean "Time to stop asking questions and just cooperate," then.
"What do you want me to do, Thiokol? Launch in April?? ~another guy who didn't want any more questions asked.
AMD aren't doing this because it makes their customers happy.
For sure they aren't doing it to make us happy.
You and I know that the content providers aren't their customers, but they must be getting something substantially gratuitous in return. Kind of like the way that many supermarkets get part of their profits from product placement, even agreements not to carry competitors' products.
The subtle difference between this scheme and that of commercial media--where the customers are the advertisers--is left as an exercise to the reader.
Given the choice between two identically performing chips, one of which restricts your ability to do something, I'd bet most people would choose to get the unrestricted one.
I'm a BOA customer, and I've been upset with their security for years, but it keeps getting better, which is kind of a problem in itself.
What I don't like is how they're lax like this with their web presence, and draconian with their credit/check cards. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to call their fraud department to get my card turned back on, and for really lame reasons: Gas station doesn't close transaction properly; Grocer improperly labels credit transaction as debit (and vice versa); Hotel doesn't follow correct protocol when requesting block debit...
Of course, as a workaround, I have the direct number to their fraud department memorized, plus I know which keys to press to jump over the prompts, and I've recognized the analyst's voice several times. They're all very helpful, they'll even tell you which vendors are causing trouble lately. The problem is that they're not online 24/7, only 8-to-5 Central time.
While I'd never waste mod points on an AC post, I'll reply...
My kids are in public school, and (sigh) this pretty much sums it up. Add to this the fundie teachers who use the classroom to echo superstition, e.g., they have Time For Kids (a Time Magazine joint) handouts, meant to provide talking points in a Letter to the President--but instead, give their own twisted narratives, e.g., "The Iraqis want to blow themselves up so they can be with their false gods," and "It would be a sin not to finish God's War." Add to this the attendant anxiety that my nerdy kids are already experiencing in elementary school, and...
My approach is to get the entire curriculum up front, and to review it with the teachers every six weeks. I teach my kids most evenings, and every weekend. I teach them what I believe, and I explain where and why it differs from what is said at school. We play a game whose object is to master the proffered subject matter and regurgitate appropriately at school on tests and in class--while realizing that it's only one of many possible views.
So I'm essentially home schooling inside of the state's educational structure. It's actually way more fun that I thought it would be. I have an extraordinary relationship with my kids, and I get to see what they're being sold as The Truth. The major benefit is that the one child who has the high IQ with low performance has blossomed beyond anyone's expectations. He gets the game better than I do, and he spontaneously extrapolated how children-oriented TV is the same con game. He's the oldest, and has taken to finding more perspectives.
The trade-off is that I don't get enough sleep. I'm hoping that their summer vacation will make this easier, but they seem to expect the game to continue. I also notice a smugness about them, but I think this would have been inevitable in, say, middle school or high school when they realize or at least see evidence that they're more intelligent than some of their teachers, and all of their administrative staff. Maybe the summertime is for non-school subjects, like building and testing PCs.
To the AC's point: I want for them to understand that there are those who believe that my children should know their place, and I want for them to know what that is--in order for them to know the workarounds.
Slashdot Mirror
Well put. I hadn't thought of this at all; I fell right into the language trap.
I notice a fair amount of this coming out of the US Feds lately, e.g., Commander-in-Chief as someone in charge of all citizens, or using the military term "General" to refer to the Attorney General.
Yeah. Thanks, really. What a wakeup call--only, I don't like what I've woken up to. Still, it's far, far better to be awake than asleep and dreaming.
Bingo. The current laws simply do not cover the tech, and the gap continues to grow.
If the theater managers can't be educated, surely the public cannot. Most readers here completely grok the situation, and we pride ourselves on holding and maintaining distinctions like these. They set us apart from the general public. We know not to get a video recording device anywhere near a movie theater--whereas the people being charged with piracy had little or no idea what risk they were taking.
It's a mess--and messes tend to raise awareness. Perhaps this one will cause more people to be aware of the loose definitions of media piracy--as opposed to raising that special brand of awareness we know as FUD.
I assert that the owner's decision to distribute his/her/its content in such a way as to allow unauthorized copying voids their claim to ownership. In the same way that the suspects in this case were ignorant of the law, the owners are ignorant of the demand for their content outside of what they're willing to provide.
I'm shocked--shocked!--that no one has pointed out the meta-case, that associating with other people can cause one to adopt their beliefs and habits. TFA is over-simplified and seems to provide, or at least to be susceptible to misinterpretation.
... the list goes on. That guy also likes to smoke pot, and it seems to work for him. It took a long time to figure out that it doesn't work for me--and it seemed sooo muuuuuuuuuch looooooonger.
Surely most readers have decided to spend time with someone else in order to acquire his/her skills, then discovered that the desired skills weren't the only ones that traversed the interpersonal gap. My first UNIX mentor is one of those guys that can eat anything and stay thin, and he loves to eat cinnamon rolls. Twenty years later, I still must take a moment to recognize that what I think is a craving is just a subconscious association.
Or the guy who has shown me all kinds of interesting things over the years: Perl, Tcl, BSD, graphics programming,
Then there's the guy that I don't hang out with any more. He showed me how to hand-optimize C (I believed in that for nearly two years), made fun of what I thought was important, took me to a gun range (cool), tried to get me to buy some illegal guns (way uncool), and is now living in a remote compound with the proceeds from some corporate stock sale converted to Krugerands buried underground. He watches FOX News 24/7 on a 60" projection TV and calls at least once a month to remind me that he has still has room for two more families in his bomb shelter. That's the exception to the rule, e.g., there are some "fat" people whose company prevents you from being/becoming/staying "fat".
"Nobody's perfect," right? Like no one is perfect from my point of view, but I'm willing to compromise for as long as it seems as though the trade-offs are invisible, or at least acceptable.
Noodle bake: What memes are you passing to your associates--and where did you get them?
Thank you for bringing attention to this important issue. And thanks for proving [again] that no one here feels the need to read TFA before posting.
I once worked for an incredibly successful consulting firm: 2 to 1500 employees in five years, $1M to $500M in revenue, true employment (not "as long as we have a customer for you"), many other examples of goodness and light. It was bought for cash by a huge telecom, who thought that we could deliver on such a vague promise as "remotely managed software services."
In fairness, the idea was already being floated about, that we could just set up NOCs/ROCs all over the place and somehow, magically, deliver as many services as a demand existed for. The telecom just drooled over it; circa 1997, they were all watching the biscuit wheels falling off of the long-distance gravy train.
Of course, the behemoth telecom sealed the coffin by demanding that we try to make their broken attempts at non-remote service offerings work. I left when they decreed that Windows NT would be the only OS running on any of their machines. They sold off little pieces of the original firm. Last I heard, a few ex-managers got together and bought what was left of it in order to use the brand name.
I'm not saying that M$ can't eventually pull this off. If any existing entity could make it work, they could. I base this on their mind-numbing ability to handle huge problems that, you know, "no one could have expected." That is, if they really try to do this, it will fail, over and over again. Only M$, IMO, has the resources to survive these failures. And only M$ could command such a vast array of excellent talent and manage to turn out such mediocre products.
It looks to me more like they're trying to imitate what they think Google is.
I'm 100% befuddled by this gang's insistence on spying on us, while they want to hide everything. Now that the Congress is finally exercising some oversight, they cite "executive privilege."
It is my opinion that people who want to be elected or appointed to public office ought to agree to be monitored as a primary condition of the position. I'm far more interested in people who can perform demonstrably than I am in someone who looks good on the telly.
It looks to me like the terrorists won. Our rights are disappearing, the state has spent all of the tax money and more, and we seem to be returning to a feudal system.
"Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn by no other."
The older meaning of "dear" was "expensive." This may explain the conflation with "best," e.g., the most expensive option is often considered to be the best one, even if practically unattainable.
Yes. These are two separate effects, which are still being actively conflated. The dot-com bust was all about irrational exuberance, e.g., anything with a trailing ".com" became a target for the extra capital floating about in the late 90s. You didn't even need a business plan, just a catchy name. The absence of a plan, in turn, led to silly work environments, with a few extremes that got press (recall that there was a whole new press industry being born at the same time, e.g., online publication).
The other effect mentioned, the one that seems to have led to massive layoffs and restructuring--and the shift from offers for FTE to contract-to-hire becoming the norm--seems to have been a reaction to the lost investments in dot-com firms. That is, in the wake of major market adjustments, corporations of all sizes turned to the dreaded Short-Sighted Efficiency Experts. Add to that a sharp increase in health care costs and I think you have most, if not all of the factors responsible for tech jobs losing their allure. And by allure I mean high pay, stellar benefits, and possible perqs (even for non-management types).
The thing that we as employees really want, though, seems to be making a comeback. I'm hearing more and more from my colleagues who chose the management route that "Maximizing the return on cost-per-hire" is a fully-revived meme. This is the harbinger of "Increasing and maintaining employee retention," which the experienced folk among us will recognize as bottom-line justification for perquisites reaching even the newest of new hires.
The dark side of this revival is that it's employee-focused, e.g., the commodification of our industry has led to highly populated ranks of contractors. Whether corporations will see fit to maintain the present balance of employees and contractors remains to be seen, but don't look for any change in the invisible-but-known-to-everyone line between employees and guest workers.
Excellent point, but I notice that you qualify the distinction with the word "most." Recent experience suggests that this separation can be blurred by the outlet's perceived threat or opportunity to enhance said outlet's bottom line.
It remains to be seen what further erosion of this division will occur if Rupert Murdoch successfully acquires control of the Wall Street Journal.
IMHO, news is entertainment which can sometimes be counted on as reliable information, not the other way around.
Oh, they have plenty of funds. They just happen to be incompetent.
Lots of that going around in the Federal Government lately. I surmise that this is the consequence of assignments based on fundraising, rather than talent or, better yet, interest in the subject at hand.
We get what we tolerate.
Your point is well taken.
Consider that the way that the US is set up, the President of the United States will not make money, e.g., when you only consider the salary, the office operates at a loss because it takes hundreds, if not thousands of times as much money to get elected.
The positions are all about power and influence. For as long as the music industry survives in its present configuration, having the RIAA on one's resume makes for excellent connections, and not only in the actual part of the American music industry that produces and distributes music. It's an excellent springboard to lobbying and other high-paying gigs.
Further, I'm pretty sure that the positions in the RIAA map pretty well to positions in the Federal Government: the higher-ups are already wealthy, and the grunts are the ones who actually take risks. If this woman's case makes a difference, it's not the RIAA executives who'll pay the price. It'd be the people who'd be looking for a job who would be inconvenienced.
Something tells me that the hedge that the RIAA's power and influence will win out include lucrative speaking fees for the potential winners, and book deals in case the whole thing falls apart. Kind of like the way that the loser of a professional boxing match still comes out of it with millions of dollars--unless he misbehaves and is fined and/or sued.
I think they didn't seriously consider the risk of countersuits; they almost certainly thought they'd be greeted as liberators.
...and by extension, the size and composition of the firms that notice you.
There's no way to predict; I agree with those who say you'll master the curriculum, but of what use is it in the real world? I picked a company that preached Software Methodology, vs. the ones who wanted a truck routing system written in COBOL, all of their PL/I code converted to COBOL, or custom-built software for their airport parking garage with no specifications in sight. I relocated, scored very above-average pay, only to find that Ferranti International Controls Corporation played at Software Engineering. Any code review might feature the VP of Engineering, who was a pompous know-it-all who'd apparently never heard about leaving one's ego at the door. It would have been Hell, except that I caught a break and was tapped to fill a sudden opening on the UNIX Systems Support team, circa 1987. On top of that bonus, I got to work alongside Peter da Silva and Karl Lehenbauer, both of whom I still count as close friends. BTW, Peter and Karl were both dropouts; Peter makes quite the comfortable living, and Karl's a millionaire.
Go with your instincts, they're 100% correct. It's your conscious mind that'll steer you astray--or keep you standing still, wondering what to do. I presume that you're still young enough to recover from a mistake.
It's for one day, to draw attention and/or cause action. We Americans do tend to respond most forcefully to any of our conveniences being interrupted.
I think it'd be more effective to do follow Madonna's example from a few years back. Instead of going silent, they could spoken word broadcasts to summarize the problem and outline actions that citizens could take.
In fact, I'd like to see news organizations do the same. Of course, I'd also like to see pigs fly. Independent operators are looking at the destruction of their businesses; newscasters worry about their jobs.
As Borat called it--erroneously and accurately--this is a War of Terror.
"Destroying human life in order to save human lives is immoral," said GWB yesterday. I guess he forgot about the present justification for, you know, war.
How do you ask a blastocyst to be the last one to die for stem cell research? Oh, wait, that's right--they can't hear you. Never mind.
I think that's the dominant config nowadays :-)
I had exactly the same problem. Upgraded router firmware, no more sputtering (unless it happens while I'm asleep).
The issue isn't with Cheney owning guns. It's not even with him having had a hunting accident. Like every other political scandal, the problem is with the cover-up. The incident wasn't properly reported, the early stories conflicted, and the victim apologized.
Really, if politicians would somehow generate the intestinal fortitude to talk straight, many of the present problems/issues/concerns would disappear. The first to go would be the alarming lack of trust, followed closely by lack of respect for public servants.
Seriously: Name any other servant who receives monies from you whom you would continue to retain after s/he so much as tried to mislead you about any of his/her actions on the job?
We get what we tolerate.
This isn't the first time I found snarkiness by being recruited. In late 1999, a spammer called me at a new job, thinking I was someone else who was about to pay $295 for 1M "electronic ads"; I begged off, saying I was a sysadmin, and he went right into an excited pitch. When I asked, "Is it legal?" he seamlessly launched a "not yet" diatribe, complete with the "forest industry conspiracy," e.g., they'd lost so much money with the lowered paper sales since the introduction of computers into the workplace...
I happened to actually do some piece work for a search engine manipulator shortly after that, fixing code that was supposed to generate doorway pages. Between realizing what I was contributing to and finding an interesting (not to mention full time) gig, I had about ten peeks into what they were doing and how they did it. The guy claimed to be getting $5K/month to keep one particular doctor at the top of "houston plastic surgeon" searches, and he said he'd learned everything he knew by attending quarterly seminars sponsored by the big pre-Google search engine concerns.
I seriously doubt that fingerprinting is going on as part of pre-employment screening. As a contractor to financial institutions, I've been fingerprinted by the employer. This has sometimes been performed by licensed contractors who also work for the sheriff's department.
That is, I don't buy for a second that anyone, anywhere in these United States has to register with local law enforcement before s/he can go to work. If this has really happened, Slashdot isn't the appropriate forum for discussion. Notify your state and Federal representatives, and the MSM while you're at it.
I completely agree that pre-employment screens are complete and utter bull$#!+. I don't do them. I ask about them up front, and I turn the tables: If you want me to do this work for you, don't subject me to meaningless invasions of my privacy. Find a waiver for me, or find someone else.
IMHO, it's another matter completely once they're paying me. I don't do drug tests, but I'll yield my fingerprints IFF I get assurance that I get to take any and all records when I leave.
WTFIU with pejorative labels applied to those who simply ask questions?
Yes, I presume that "lefties" is meant as an insult.
Sure. Okay. The title of the discussion about the article is "Bush Causes Cell Phone Ban." Surely everyone knows that George W. Bush most certainly did not say, "...and make sure them cell phones are turned off."
It's the government that deserves the insults--specifically the appointed fools who jump to conclusions like "Let's jam the mobile phone frequencies, that'll absolve us of any responsibility in case... you know" and then allow these paltry tactics to be leaked to the media. And it's not just the inconvenience of jamming signals or turning off towers. It's the foolish attempts to foil terrorism that are easily shown not to have any deterrent effect. As someone has already pointed out, the Australian government--whose "conservative" candidate is pulling out more and more terrorFUD stops lately--is the entity responsible.
Maybe a better title would have been "Fear Over Bush Visit Causes Cell Phone Ban".
You mean "Time to stop asking questions and just cooperate," then.
"What do you want me to do, Thiokol? Launch in April?? ~another guy who didn't want any more questions asked.
Of course, as a workaround, I have the direct number to their fraud department memorized, plus I know which keys to press to jump over the prompts, and I've recognized the analyst's voice several times. They're all very helpful, they'll even tell you which vendors are causing trouble lately. The problem is that they're not online 24/7, only 8-to-5 Central time.
While I'd never waste mod points on an AC post, I'll reply...
My kids are in public school, and (sigh) this pretty much sums it up. Add to this the fundie teachers who use the classroom to echo superstition, e.g., they have Time For Kids (a Time Magazine joint) handouts, meant to provide talking points in a Letter to the President--but instead, give their own twisted narratives, e.g., "The Iraqis want to blow themselves up so they can be with their false gods," and "It would be a sin not to finish God's War." Add to this the attendant anxiety that my nerdy kids are already experiencing in elementary school, and...
My approach is to get the entire curriculum up front, and to review it with the teachers every six weeks. I teach my kids most evenings, and every weekend. I teach them what I believe, and I explain where and why it differs from what is said at school. We play a game whose object is to master the proffered subject matter and regurgitate appropriately at school on tests and in class--while realizing that it's only one of many possible views.
So I'm essentially home schooling inside of the state's educational structure. It's actually way more fun that I thought it would be. I have an extraordinary relationship with my kids, and I get to see what they're being sold as The Truth. The major benefit is that the one child who has the high IQ with low performance has blossomed beyond anyone's expectations. He gets the game better than I do, and he spontaneously extrapolated how children-oriented TV is the same con game. He's the oldest, and has taken to finding more perspectives.
The trade-off is that I don't get enough sleep. I'm hoping that their summer vacation will make this easier, but they seem to expect the game to continue. I also notice a smugness about them, but I think this would have been inevitable in, say, middle school or high school when they realize or at least see evidence that they're more intelligent than some of their teachers, and all of their administrative staff. Maybe the summertime is for non-school subjects, like building and testing PCs.
To the AC's point: I want for them to understand that there are those who believe that my children should know their place, and I want for them to know what that is--in order for them to know the workarounds.