The job of HR is to screen people for employment. On one level that means getting rid of candidates that can't do the job. However, there are often a number of people that in all likely hood could do a similar job. Then the screening process goes into a popularity contest. For the most part, the 'best person for the job' is a fantasy. It more or less falls into who will fit best into corporate culture and who the hiring agent 'likes'.
Some things are illegal to screen on. In the US we can't not hire a person just because they are too old to do the job, or are not culturally matching to the rest of the employees, or are not a man. It is not reasonable to say that anyone who would hire a qualified person because they are not a man is an idiot, or that would not be a place one would want to work. We simply don't allow that to be used as a discriminator.
Which is why other things are used as a discriminator. There is not really enough information to go on, but perhaps there are other reasons why this person is not hired, and the college situation is just used as an excuse. After all, the previous president of the US was not the model college student, or the model national guard member, but that did not stop him from many opportunities. It is not always about what is out in the open. It is often about what people feel underneath. And yes, one might not like to work with people who hate you, but if means a lot more money, many of us would tolerate it. And yes, it might be wrong to force someone to hire an employee they hate, but that is why so many people keep their firms small.
Both of these are correct. I was exposed to a good amount of what would be called inappropriate content, but most of it was either through my parent of my peer group. My parents took me to museums and classical performances. At both, sometime the content was kind of explicit. My peer group had various materials as well which we all looked at. What we did not have was all this content which I allowed to viewed as a replacement for parenting. TV was much less graphic, and we did not have cable. I did not watch a lot of late night tv until I was well into high school. I did not watch the evening soaps alone. I was sent outside to play and learn about the graphic nature of the world for real, not in virtual reality. It was way more fun.
The liquor and other poisonous ingestibles are the same. All sane parents keep the kids away from these things.All sane parents make sure small children cannot get to the alcohol, drugs, or drain cleaner. Most of these have child proof caps for as a backup.
At some age, most kids will learn not to OD on drugs or drain cleaner. I think we all agree that some don't. Also, many parents will teach children about the proper dosage of drugs, alcohol, and the such. This is the serving you get of wine. This is the serving you get of beer. This is when you drink cognac. If you need an asprin, this is what you should take. Clearly not all parent teach such civility, just like not all parent teach how to set a table, which fork to use, or to open doors for others, but the many do.
But learning and teaching takes time, which is why children can just be set out on their own and be expected to make long term best decisions, which may not be spending 10 hours a day playing the video games, or for a 14 year old trolling for facebook to find an older man to go out with in hope of impregnation, then a house and child support.
Can't say why I would use this. If we get to the point where google is not longer standard compliant, and will not work equally well with any standard complete browser, then much of why I use google will be moot. Already the lame google definitions require me to use another service. In any case, I stopped using google apps when it became difficult to get to my free account.
Sure, it might be cool on MS Windows, where IE really sucks and there is not free widely used stripped down browser, but on OS X we have safari and camino, and on Linux Opera seems pretty good.
I fear that Google is leading us into a MS like single vendor lock in. Your data is on the google cloud, your OS is google, you personal information is owned by google. Which is fine as long as we don't do anything that that we shouldn't. But who among us are never naughty online.
No one would have thought that laptops would overtake the desktop market, but here we are. The reason for this is not just smaller size, but often dramatically reduced costs over desktops. Sure you can't upgrade, but the laptop can be a very inexpensive machine.
This is what i think will happen to the tablet. We are talking about a solid state machine, no movable parts. This increases reliability, and decreases costs. As long as the machine can do what people want, there would be no reason to pay more.
I am looking at a time in the not too distance future when tablets are $200. Not running Mac OS, because Apple is going to build a pretty tablet, and not running MS Windows, because the license to windows will be too costly, but custom *nix varients, or even android. Of course at some point MS will move in and subsidize to gain market share, but unless MS Windoes runs on non x86 kit, this might even be a challenge.
There is a notion in science that any single data point is a guess. If one takes one measurement, it is a guess. If one takes several measurement, and then develops a trend, one has something useful. Journals like Nature have historically contained very interesting science, which is not to say that every conclusion has been exactly true. What is the case is that many of the articles have been interesting, and the conclusions useful.
The mistake that many people, who have little understanding of science, make is to judge conclusions on personal beliefs. For instance, we want to live longer, we want it to be easy, so we want to believe this article. It sells copy, so it is good mass media. But all that is hardly the point. This study is one data point, which may or may not, may or not become, part of a trend. Just like so much written about on/., truth is not the issue. The issue will be if it becomes a trend, ir it becomes real, or if it does not.
Those who are not scientists will try to cloud the issue by pointing to individual data points that do not fit. While such is very useful in science, such pointing is used to push science forward not achieve some retrograde state. It is interesting that those who are not religious do the same thing with religion, for, by instance, saying that because certain arbitrary statement contradict their holy text, science must therefore be invalid. This always confused me because while science tries to observe creation and thereby understand the creator, these so-called holy text merely impose a human fabricated will upon the creator.
This is one of those changes that makes me lose confidence in Google. It seems that Google wants to control all the resources instead of being part of an internet. As if it is playing the zero sum game of war rather than the non-zero sum game that allows businesses to exist and grow together.
By doing this, Google may have wrested control over third parties, but has significantly degraded the user experience. Prior to this, each word would have a hyperlink to a definition. Now it appears that one has a link to "definition" for one word. Furthermore, in my sampling the definitions are very basic and not of competitive quality. For instance, the word cricket has for the first definition the sport, the second a slang use, and then finally a first grade definition as an insect. No etymology. No context.
I can only imagine they are doing this to in some way differentiate themselves from Bing, which could also use freeonlinedictionary or the like. Unfortunately for Google, MS has encata, which tends to not have slightly more sophisticated definitions.
The primary difference between movies and music is that movies are most often released to the retail chain as a stale product, i.e. they have already made most of the money they are going to make and are only released to make additional profits. OTOH, music has to make expenses and profits sold at this level.
Another difference is that music is still produced as an 'album', with al the related expenses, but is now often sold as tracks. This means that some tracks probably are required to cover some of the expenses of other tracks. OTOH, movies as still sold as complete units, and are sometimes bundled with other units to generate additional profits, not cover basic expenses.
The other difference is that music has been sold directly to masses for a few generations, so the incumbents has gotten used to this as the normal situation. OTOH, movies has only been sold to the masses at the retail level for a generation or two. Prior to the 80's, movies were sold to first run theaters, then a series of lower priced venues, then to TV. Even in the 80's, with VCRs, there was still an debate whether a movie should be 'priced to sell' or 'priced to rent'. It was not uncommon for a movie to be priced $50-$100.
I do not see that bluray is going to be a big format. We have music players which changed the music industry, and we are not going to be told what we must have to watch a movie. I think the anti-piracy push of the industry shows they get this. They want to keep video cameras out of movie theaters, to protect the real profit centers. They want to stop free video streaming, so they can develop that profit center. An amazing number of movies and tv are available for streaming. This, of course is made possible by extremely tight DRM, another thing the music biz does not have, and something, I think, the video biz will have to give up in time.
To me is seems like that articles are just sitting there on a server, and the only thing protecting them is that users don't know the fully qualified URL. However, as publishers want google to search the headlines so as bring readers to article, Google does know the URL. So if one can bring up the article in Google, then one can get to the article. This is a dilemma for publishers, since they do get the ad revenue, but they have unregistered user, sometime viewing paid content. Therefore the need to register is severely reduced.
I sympathize with this issue. On way to deal with it would be to have headlines and a snippet of free text available for the search engines, while the full article would be dynamically generated only for registered users. This type of strategy was used on the site I used to work for. Obviously it increases the cost to the publisher, which is why they would rather have Google incur the costs through this hack.
Of course Murdoch goes a bit further by saying no content should ever be free, even if it includes advertising as most of his properties. This is way out there. Even expensive journals will have some short articles that is free, and of course usually abstracts to be viewed for free. This would basically require Google to pay for create a mechanism to prevent users for what is otherwise available content. This would be like placing a gold brick in the front yard of each person house, then required them to sign an agreement that they have no ownership of the brick, will be required to pay for securing the brick, will be liable if the brick is stolen, and can only receive revenue by having firms who wish to place ads around the brick. Pretty silly.
What everyone but Murdoch knows, or maybe he does, is that if google really prevented access to otherwise publicly accessible content other search engines will appear that do. The reason he may know this is that he may be hoping MS deep pockets will be willing to pay for what is otherwise publicly available content in a effort to drive Google out of business. If Bing is the only provider with Page 3, then maybe everyone will use Bing instead of Google, even though Page 3 is freely available.
I think it will be more likely that a third party will enter and begin to index pages that Google does not and that Bing pays money for. Eventually, Bing will likely tire of paying for free content, and Google will either cave to the publishers and die or continue with the current business model. In any case, without court ruling against deep linking, of which there are none, I believe, other than bandwidth intensive content, there is no way to prevent a website from linking to publicly served file except to remove the content or declare the content illegal.
This is not the greatest example, but the element of truth is there. Many people want to separate the church of scientology from mainstream religions because the scientology people highlight so much of the corruption inherent in the system. For instance, the catholic church has clearly been abusing boys for a very long time. We recently saw a report saying some of the irish church and police knew this to be true,
We now have mega churches controlled by a single family, not owned by the congregation. In such cases, it is very unclear how much of the volunteer work benefits the family, not the church, and how much is actually church related. We have profit making bookstores in location that are supposed to on tax exempt property. We have no transparency, and so do not know how many so-called holy people are, for all practical intents and purposes, enslaving congregants for personal gain. Or how many continue to demand sexual favors.
Cloud computing is not advertising based broadcasting. What google does, for the most part, is sell advertising. It gains eyeballs for it's ads through search and content delivery. In this model, a single end user has a marginal of losing a single end user is essentially zero. The potential cost for hosting content that generates negative publicity or DCMA notices is relatively huge. Like all broadcasting, the end user is not the customer, and therefore the expectation for a high level of customer service is illogical. Even in the $50 paid models, because Google core business is advertising, not application support, the focus will not be on the end user, but on the advertising partner. In particular, since most of the data the public sees is not critical, Google probably does not have a culture of six nines reliability for customer data or access.
What I see cloud computing as is a return to the good old days of terminal access to applications. In this world the user is not continuously downloading updates, rebooting the machine, or fighting viruses. Instead the user is doing the tasks for which they actually bought the computing device. This requires the significant bits to be centralized, which requires the dreaded keepers of the sacred hardware. Techies rebel against this idea, and techies should have their own hardware, but the average person not really want the responsibility of maintaining all hardware, software and data if there is a competitive alternative. This is a culture shift from the currently prevailing individual standalone PC scenario, but as we become more networked it will move towards it, in the same way we moved away from mainframes as microcomputers became cheaper.
Only if no one else is willing to do it for the same rate, or if they are willing to give up the service.
I have seen this quite a bit. Usually there is no way for the incumbent to make such drastic changes in the contract. The employer will generally take the risk of allowing the incumbent to leave rather than establishing a possibly negative precedent.
Many will state the obvious that they will likely have to hire two people to replace this tech. That may be true, and may well increase costs, but not alway. I have seen, and have been in the situation once or twice, where two people, or a much more expensive person, had to be hired to replace a single person. From the outside it looks like costs are increased, but often the new hires are completing other tasks for providing additional competencies.
I suppose it wold be ok to ask for a per-incident rate of pay during certain time frames. I would also be on the lookout for other work if this is such a huge burden. Perhaps some people reading the post is desperate enough to do the job.
No,PC was just the latest incarnation of the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have then do unto you, and all that socialist new age radical thinking.
Some might think fag, feminazi, devil worshipper, traitor, and all those names are all in fun, but ask yourself if you like to be called names. Even Rush,that bastion of free speech, has gotten to the point where he can no longer has the courage to stay in the kitchen. Some of y'all may say that the truth matters, but really, what is the slogan, we report, you decide?
In any case,insulting professors and teachers is not a huge thing. It is really a response to the perceived powerlessness that the adolescent, and too many adults, feel in response to an authority figure. It is the only way that these people know to react. They do not yet have the maturity, or intellegence, to know how the world works. For instance in High School and college they are rules, and one can do well by following the rules and learning. Yet most in high school, and too many in college, still see grades as arbitrarily given by the authority figures. This then leads to comments made our anger and ignorance.
College is supposed to help people move beyond such lack of control. Understand that by planning and research on can have some control. That one does not have to react,but can in fact somewhat deterministically act to maximize one's own position, instead of always maximizing other's position. One expects maturity to help everyone else. Unfortunately, college, maturity,even the holy scripture, cannot stop the name calling that has seems to characterize certain parts of our media.
Call it PC or whatever. It is simply matter of proper social behavior. Some people got it. Others don't.
A year or two ago, when the US status quo was for a third party to customize phones for the network, and the top provider was still Nokia and Sony-Ericson, this might have been possible. The US wireless providers would have been united in keeping the user as far away as the manufacturer as possible, and guarantee their financial stream.
Now, however, Apple has created a device that is manufactured for the end user, not the network. Verizon, et al has tried to sue to make this not the case, to limit end user choice, but these lawsuits did not stop the change in status. Now we have providers supplying phones for the end user. RIM, Palm, and HTC all have end user centric phones, and each are primarily distributed by one cell carrier.
Google can play this many ways. All Google really cares about is collected data and selling ads. They don't care about code, which is why they release code after the application is public. They don't really worry about moving into other markets, as long as they get the ad revenue.
This is why i think they will play with the cell carriers, just like they do with advertisers, and create the phone, once again, that the carriers want, not that the consumers want. Google will build that the phone the consumer like, but phones that are created to generate revenue for google and the cell carriers. Which is why the cariers will like it. Consumers will like it because it will be cheap.
I am sick and tired of everyone whining about apps. First, stop being lazy and call them applications. By calling them apps you are just feeding into the Apple marketing machines.
Second, there are a shitload of applications out there, the vast majority are shit, but some are really useful. I never care about a machine that can't do what I don't want it to do. I don't care that my care can't go 100 miles an hour. I don't care that my fridge isn't cooled by NO2. I don't care that my pencil is not self powered. Sure these things would be cool, but why go online and whine about it. If it is an issue, buy or build a machine that does what you want. If it is not, then move onto things we can fix.
Third, writing stuff for the newton was non trivial. I did some playing with it. It was not ultimately something I wanted to get invovled with. OTOH, the iPhone development process seems quite easy. If it were possible to write personal applications to run on personal devices I would do so. Fortunately, as mentioned, the iPhone has applications that can do most anything, for a very resonable cost. And multiple personal devices are licensed.
In the end there is only one critical difference that matters here. The newton has limited sync ability with other machines. You had your data on your newton. You had your data on your desktop. Both machines were wonderful on their on. Both were gully networked, both had good, but diffrent filesystems. They did not work well together, at least not out of the box.
Palm was the company that solved this problem. A machine that was a assistant to the user, an intermidiary between your computer and the rest of the world. The iPhone took the best parts of the newton, the palm, with a phone hacked in.
Connectivity is they key. It is why the Kindle is the tablet, and everyone one else is just a reader. Even if ther is no app for that.
Reminds me the first episode of Leverage this season. People who rob us blind, like the senator from alaska and bank executives and middle management, get of nearly scott free, while this guy, who made "thousands of dollars" is going to probably be nailed to the wall. It is like spending billions fighting street drug dealers, while letting the high level drug users off the hook.
What scares me is the rise in the use of sanitizing lotions and sprays. I believe the limited use of these to clean households and the like is what has caused the rise in allergies and relative decline in natural defenses Imagine what an entire generation raised with the constant killing of germs, beneficial and otherwise, is going to look like. They are going to have to live in freaking bubbles. We already can't have peanuts around because some maladapated child might die. What is next? Real vegetables because they cannot be sanitized of all naturally occurring bacteria? Itisnot that It want the kids to die, or even get really sick. It is that I think we can see what this fear based living is doing to us, and it would be nice to put some rational perspective in the argument. I mean, look at it this way. We know that car exhaust does kill us,and therefore any one with a family should drive low emission vehicles. But families often drive emission spouting SUVs believing they are 'safer',even though the kids breathe the fumes and get injured. Risk assesment is not the high skill of the average human.
One way to make science pay more, is to make non productive jobs pay less. For instance, a person who figures out who to take a 1 cent cut of some item that is transacted 1 million times a day is going to make over 2 million dollars for year, for doing nothing more than being annoying. These are the people who are making money. Not the people who create value, but those middle workers.
In fact most scientists make ok money. The only reason that it does not look like it is there are a few people with little ethics that huge amounts of money, and these people often have no education beyond a bought and paid for MBA, which is nothing in comparison to a PhD.
The other issue are those scientist that are trained in fields that do not have work. I know a number of people that have been in this position. The only way to save them is to specifically have positions set aside for people who have degrees that are currently out of fashion. I don't know how to do this without encouraging people to get degrees that are out of fashion, but I don't see that as a problem. After all, we have farm subsidies that pay people to grow nothing, so why can't we have similar science subsidies.
Another issue, which has been raised recently, is that we have a good pipeline of scientist up to the college level when they leave. Certainly some leave because they are not going to be able to get a good job, but many more leave because they don't want to do the work. And this should be our message to the president. People who do not work, just collect a pay check, should not be paid large sums of money
For instance under the current stimulus bill, unemployment benefits and even health care are being paid for people who are not working. This is a good thing for those who would otherwise starve, but how does this help. We are paying a middle manager until a firm has enough money to waste on another useless middle manager. We are paying the buggy whip worker money until the buggy whip factory goes back into production. Why not pay them to go to school and get a rigorous degree instead? Don't have a job, enroll in a real four year college and get unemployment benefits. Why not? It is better than paying people to sit on the sofa and watch Fox News, blaming all their problems not on lack of will, but on those people who took our jobs.
Science is messy. Anything that has to do with large and sometimes ambiguous data sets is even more messy. Anything in which we do not have the technology to be precise is even more messy. For instance, look at the recent proclamation by some on need for mammograms and Pap smears. For many women, such procedures are not pleasant, and they would not like to do them. We are now at a point where we see that they may have been overdone. In the case of Pap smears, it is hard to justify subjecting a 17 year old girl to such a test given that the odds are only 1 in a million that she will have cancer. However, both of these have political ramifications in terms of wealth transfer from the taxpayers to the clinics and hospitals. Given that the science seems to be good, one might think that most people, especially conservatives, would be happy with the new guidelines. But science is messy, and data imperfect, so some attack it, not perhaps on the basis of real science, but they see tax dollars being saved and are scared so they pick at minutiae.
But doing so indicates a profound lack of understanding of the scientific process. For instance, we now know that the Millikan oil drop experiment was deeply flawed. The value he derived for the charge on the electron was nowhere close to the value we accept now. Those who focus on results will laugh at the follow of science and go live in their electricity free cave. But those who focus on process see this as a lesson learned, appreciate the process, and take it as a lesson learned. Eventually things got sorted out and we now a new accepted value. Not that we have no absolute proof that it is really more correct than the Milikin number, but we really think it is.
In climate change, we have a process just like any other. The data indicates a risk, that may be exaggerated. Much like lead in paint and gasoline, the solution is expensive but not prohibitively so. We were very imprudent with the lead issue. The data supporting the that wild assertion that anyone actually is harmed by lead, and we must question the evolutionary benefit of children that would eat paint. But we did ban lead, and it many would say it is a good thing. I suppose that a very few children were exposed to high levels of lead, but one must wonder if the death of an industry was worth those few injuries. Of course, data questioning the idea of lead and children are not going to be a hot item for journals
And such is the issue of climate change. A few people may be harmed, but the data is ambiguous. Based on this ambiguous data we are going to kill many industries, and force people to give up their hummers and air conditioners, all because a few islanders are going to die. It is ludicrous.
On a more serious note, most science is about new methods and new data. Science likes to discover new things. Articles that deny climate change, or claim that oil is available forever, based, for instance, the idea that the earth is only a few thousand years old an oil is created by the magma, are simply boring.
I use SVN with my Latex and oo.org files. The only, well known, issue with SVN is iWorks, which may or may not be an issue for this situation. I am told git is functional. I am thinking of migrating to git just because of the local overhead.
Which I why I just upgraded all my computer to MS Windows 7. I assume that someone somewhere has a licensee. We are a big origination with many disparate computer locations. We can't be expected to micromanage all the licenses. If it turns out we don't have the license, it is not like anyone will get a huge reward and we will have to pay punitive settlements, in addition to inflated licensing costs. MS, being the nice company they are, will just allow us to buy the license from the current price sheets and let us go on our way.
As I have been told many times by my conservative friends, liberals attack the person, conservatives attack the issue.
Someone has to pay for stuff. We want stuff, as is shown by the increase in the national debt as a percentage of gross national product since the year 2000. As mentioned by the foundation way back in 2003. We say we want to cut costs, but in reality the best we can do it keep costs about the same percentage, about 20% at the federal level I believe, or the productivity of the United States.
As more people buy online, and states that rely on sales tax find that money going away, something will happen because taxes do pay for stuff we want, and we won't give it up. Everyone has their pet pigs.
So what can happen. Internet retailers may have to pay the sales tax, since local residents will not do so voluntarily. This will not be an issue for the big guys like Amazon, but may kil some of the smaller shops. We can go to income tax, which is deemed as less progresive so is opposed to persons who are opposed to transferring wealth. We can call in states like North and South Dakota and Alaska that tend to use the Federal budget s their personal expense account and make them support themselves. This will free up biliions of dollars that states can then use as transfers from federal taxes. For instance, on of the Dakotas had a billion dollar surplus, presumably from a 3 billion dollar federal payment in excess of federal taxes. This itself will solve most problems.
But to solve this exact problem we bought an large screen iMac. Use large system fonts, larger fonts in mail and safari. The mouse can make things bigger and smaller, or simply magnify.
I have also solved this problem by using an LCD projector. One day when I left my glasses at home, I spent the day reading off the wall instead of my laptop.
Most of these have a modicum of truth. There are many non-teaching positions, many of which are staffed by friends and family. Some of this is a problem. Some of it is the nature of the beast. For instance, many of the non-teachers based at schools make half as much as most teachers. This often translates into the 10-15K range. To get someone to work for this, and who is reliable, one often has to pull from a local circle. At off-site levels, this local pull is often much less. Many of these positions are filled by teachers who no longer wish to be in the classroom. On site non-teaching professional positions are often partially funded by grants.
Some teachers are paid generously. Some teachers start at the 40's, which average to $30/hour, but there are some caveats which have to do with why it may be ok to sell plans. These are the exception, in the more difficult positions to staff. A more typical hourly rate is $15-$20 to start. After thirty years you might be above $30 hour. In the few higher paying districts, after 40 years on may be approaching $50/hour. Non performance seniority raises are an issue. Most districts are moving, to some extent, to performance based raises. One should also note that sometimes these seniority raises are instead of COLA raises.
Administrators are over price, but that is hardly an issue isolated to education, or the public sector. Financial companies extorted billions of dollars from the American taxpayer, and then paid billions of dollars of bonuses to those that brought the financial industry to the point of collapse.
Unreasonable pension plans no longer exist. Unlike other government workers, teachers cannot get social security. That means if one is like many teachers, and worked in industry for 20 years, All that money put in now goes to welfare recipients who did not work, or the working poor who did not work enough to fund their retirement. The responsible teach does not get the full Social Security that was promised during pay in. As far as the pension, for 25 years of work it is around 50% of income. That works out right now to 25K a year after paying fees. Hardly a huge pension. At 40 years one can get close to 100% of salary, three year average.
Teachers are often on contract. The contract specifies a certain number of hours per day, a certain number of days a year. Outside of these times, unless the school is paying, the time is the teachers. The teacher may volunteer time. The law clearly states that school may nor force the teacher to work. The only reason tax increases come about is because the government imposes more busy work. NCLB is best example of this, imposes the French model of education on the american public, along with a French level of taxes. Otherwise teachers have the freedom to advance, take other jobs, tutor, or generate content to achieve desired income levels.
Most of the crony jobs come about when people want more accountability. For instance, all teachers may be teaching, and seniority raises may not be a huge issue, but tax payers want more supervision. So we hire several people, at a cost of a million dollars. These are largely non-functional jobs. We may save half a million, but at a net loss, which increases over time.
The fact is we don't respect productive worker enough. Those that do nothing, the crony jobs, are what get respect.
So I see that Gates and Buffet said recently that the economy is picking back up and all is well and there is no reason for anyone to be worried and the free market is perfect.
But how can it be perfect if the we cannot protect those who need protection most from those who would steal their money. If $1 gets spent by ACORN in a questionable manner, an act of congress is immediately enacted,but when those not so well off are robbed, we can't even make the criminal parties stop, much less put them in jail.
Or look at Verizon. They are stealing from their customers in $1.99 increments. And don't tell me it is not stealing. If you went to store and got charged for everything you put in your shopping cart before you checked out and left the store, and the store refused to refund you money if you did not actually want the merchandise, I am sure the cops would be called.
Of course Billg loves the free market. If a contractor installs unlicensed versions of MS Office on a clients computer, that contractor can earn a million dollars bounty forreporting the company, and then the BSA has every right to put the company out of business with exorbitant and irrational penalties. But if MS steals software, they can just blame it on a contractor and then apologize.
People are decrying the direction of the US, but I think after the past several years of pretty constant theft of tax dollars and personal property by the elite, a change was and is necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Some things are illegal to screen on. In the US we can't not hire a person just because they are too old to do the job, or are not culturally matching to the rest of the employees, or are not a man. It is not reasonable to say that anyone who would hire a qualified person because they are not a man is an idiot, or that would not be a place one would want to work. We simply don't allow that to be used as a discriminator.
Which is why other things are used as a discriminator. There is not really enough information to go on, but perhaps there are other reasons why this person is not hired, and the college situation is just used as an excuse. After all, the previous president of the US was not the model college student, or the model national guard member, but that did not stop him from many opportunities. It is not always about what is out in the open. It is often about what people feel underneath. And yes, one might not like to work with people who hate you, but if means a lot more money, many of us would tolerate it. And yes, it might be wrong to force someone to hire an employee they hate, but that is why so many people keep their firms small.
The liquor and other poisonous ingestibles are the same. All sane parents keep the kids away from these things.All sane parents make sure small children cannot get to the alcohol, drugs, or drain cleaner. Most of these have child proof caps for as a backup.
At some age, most kids will learn not to OD on drugs or drain cleaner. I think we all agree that some don't. Also, many parents will teach children about the proper dosage of drugs, alcohol, and the such. This is the serving you get of wine. This is the serving you get of beer. This is when you drink cognac. If you need an asprin, this is what you should take. Clearly not all parent teach such civility, just like not all parent teach how to set a table, which fork to use, or to open doors for others, but the many do.
But learning and teaching takes time, which is why children can just be set out on their own and be expected to make long term best decisions, which may not be spending 10 hours a day playing the video games, or for a 14 year old trolling for facebook to find an older man to go out with in hope of impregnation, then a house and child support.
Sure, it might be cool on MS Windows, where IE really sucks and there is not free widely used stripped down browser, but on OS X we have safari and camino, and on Linux Opera seems pretty good.
I fear that Google is leading us into a MS like single vendor lock in. Your data is on the google cloud, your OS is google, you personal information is owned by google. Which is fine as long as we don't do anything that that we shouldn't. But who among us are never naughty online.
This is what i think will happen to the tablet. We are talking about a solid state machine, no movable parts. This increases reliability, and decreases costs. As long as the machine can do what people want, there would be no reason to pay more.
I am looking at a time in the not too distance future when tablets are $200. Not running Mac OS, because Apple is going to build a pretty tablet, and not running MS Windows, because the license to windows will be too costly, but custom *nix varients, or even android. Of course at some point MS will move in and subsidize to gain market share, but unless MS Windoes runs on non x86 kit, this might even be a challenge.
The mistake that many people, who have little understanding of science, make is to judge conclusions on personal beliefs. For instance, we want to live longer, we want it to be easy, so we want to believe this article. It sells copy, so it is good mass media. But all that is hardly the point. This study is one data point, which may or may not, may or not become, part of a trend. Just like so much written about on /., truth is not the issue. The issue will be if it becomes a trend, ir it becomes real, or if it does not.
Those who are not scientists will try to cloud the issue by pointing to individual data points that do not fit. While such is very useful in science, such pointing is used to push science forward not achieve some retrograde state. It is interesting that those who are not religious do the same thing with religion, for, by instance, saying that because certain arbitrary statement contradict their holy text, science must therefore be invalid. This always confused me because while science tries to observe creation and thereby understand the creator, these so-called holy text merely impose a human fabricated will upon the creator.
By doing this, Google may have wrested control over third parties, but has significantly degraded the user experience. Prior to this, each word would have a hyperlink to a definition. Now it appears that one has a link to "definition" for one word. Furthermore, in my sampling the definitions are very basic and not of competitive quality. For instance, the word cricket has for the first definition the sport, the second a slang use, and then finally a first grade definition as an insect. No etymology. No context.
I can only imagine they are doing this to in some way differentiate themselves from Bing, which could also use freeonlinedictionary or the like. Unfortunately for Google, MS has encata, which tends to not have slightly more sophisticated definitions.
Another difference is that music is still produced as an 'album', with al the related expenses, but is now often sold as tracks. This means that some tracks probably are required to cover some of the expenses of other tracks. OTOH, movies as still sold as complete units, and are sometimes bundled with other units to generate additional profits, not cover basic expenses.
The other difference is that music has been sold directly to masses for a few generations, so the incumbents has gotten used to this as the normal situation. OTOH, movies has only been sold to the masses at the retail level for a generation or two. Prior to the 80's, movies were sold to first run theaters, then a series of lower priced venues, then to TV. Even in the 80's, with VCRs, there was still an debate whether a movie should be 'priced to sell' or 'priced to rent'. It was not uncommon for a movie to be priced $50-$100.
I do not see that bluray is going to be a big format. We have music players which changed the music industry, and we are not going to be told what we must have to watch a movie. I think the anti-piracy push of the industry shows they get this. They want to keep video cameras out of movie theaters, to protect the real profit centers. They want to stop free video streaming, so they can develop that profit center. An amazing number of movies and tv are available for streaming. This, of course is made possible by extremely tight DRM, another thing the music biz does not have, and something, I think, the video biz will have to give up in time.
I sympathize with this issue. On way to deal with it would be to have headlines and a snippet of free text available for the search engines, while the full article would be dynamically generated only for registered users. This type of strategy was used on the site I used to work for. Obviously it increases the cost to the publisher, which is why they would rather have Google incur the costs through this hack.
Of course Murdoch goes a bit further by saying no content should ever be free, even if it includes advertising as most of his properties. This is way out there. Even expensive journals will have some short articles that is free, and of course usually abstracts to be viewed for free. This would basically require Google to pay for create a mechanism to prevent users for what is otherwise available content. This would be like placing a gold brick in the front yard of each person house, then required them to sign an agreement that they have no ownership of the brick, will be required to pay for securing the brick, will be liable if the brick is stolen, and can only receive revenue by having firms who wish to place ads around the brick. Pretty silly.
What everyone but Murdoch knows, or maybe he does, is that if google really prevented access to otherwise publicly accessible content other search engines will appear that do. The reason he may know this is that he may be hoping MS deep pockets will be willing to pay for what is otherwise publicly available content in a effort to drive Google out of business. If Bing is the only provider with Page 3, then maybe everyone will use Bing instead of Google, even though Page 3 is freely available.
I think it will be more likely that a third party will enter and begin to index pages that Google does not and that Bing pays money for. Eventually, Bing will likely tire of paying for free content, and Google will either cave to the publishers and die or continue with the current business model. In any case, without court ruling against deep linking, of which there are none, I believe, other than bandwidth intensive content, there is no way to prevent a website from linking to publicly served file except to remove the content or declare the content illegal.
We now have mega churches controlled by a single family, not owned by the congregation. In such cases, it is very unclear how much of the volunteer work benefits the family, not the church, and how much is actually church related. We have profit making bookstores in location that are supposed to on tax exempt property. We have no transparency, and so do not know how many so-called holy people are, for all practical intents and purposes, enslaving congregants for personal gain. Or how many continue to demand sexual favors.
What I see cloud computing as is a return to the good old days of terminal access to applications. In this world the user is not continuously downloading updates, rebooting the machine, or fighting viruses. Instead the user is doing the tasks for which they actually bought the computing device. This requires the significant bits to be centralized, which requires the dreaded keepers of the sacred hardware. Techies rebel against this idea, and techies should have their own hardware, but the average person not really want the responsibility of maintaining all hardware, software and data if there is a competitive alternative. This is a culture shift from the currently prevailing individual standalone PC scenario, but as we become more networked it will move towards it, in the same way we moved away from mainframes as microcomputers became cheaper.
I have seen this quite a bit. Usually there is no way for the incumbent to make such drastic changes in the contract. The employer will generally take the risk of allowing the incumbent to leave rather than establishing a possibly negative precedent.
Many will state the obvious that they will likely have to hire two people to replace this tech. That may be true, and may well increase costs, but not alway. I have seen, and have been in the situation once or twice, where two people, or a much more expensive person, had to be hired to replace a single person. From the outside it looks like costs are increased, but often the new hires are completing other tasks for providing additional competencies.
I suppose it wold be ok to ask for a per-incident rate of pay during certain time frames. I would also be on the lookout for other work if this is such a huge burden. Perhaps some people reading the post is desperate enough to do the job.
Some might think fag, feminazi, devil worshipper, traitor, and all those names are all in fun, but ask yourself if you like to be called names. Even Rush,that bastion of free speech, has gotten to the point where he can no longer has the courage to stay in the kitchen. Some of y'all may say that the truth matters, but really, what is the slogan, we report, you decide?
In any case,insulting professors and teachers is not a huge thing. It is really a response to the perceived powerlessness that the adolescent, and too many adults, feel in response to an authority figure. It is the only way that these people know to react. They do not yet have the maturity, or intellegence, to know how the world works. For instance in High School and college they are rules, and one can do well by following the rules and learning. Yet most in high school, and too many in college, still see grades as arbitrarily given by the authority figures. This then leads to comments made our anger and ignorance.
College is supposed to help people move beyond such lack of control. Understand that by planning and research on can have some control. That one does not have to react,but can in fact somewhat deterministically act to maximize one's own position, instead of always maximizing other's position. One expects maturity to help everyone else. Unfortunately, college, maturity,even the holy scripture, cannot stop the name calling that has seems to characterize certain parts of our media.
Call it PC or whatever. It is simply matter of proper social behavior. Some people got it. Others don't.
Now, however, Apple has created a device that is manufactured for the end user, not the network. Verizon, et al has tried to sue to make this not the case, to limit end user choice, but these lawsuits did not stop the change in status. Now we have providers supplying phones for the end user. RIM, Palm, and HTC all have end user centric phones, and each are primarily distributed by one cell carrier.
Google can play this many ways. All Google really cares about is collected data and selling ads. They don't care about code, which is why they release code after the application is public. They don't really worry about moving into other markets, as long as they get the ad revenue.
This is why i think they will play with the cell carriers, just like they do with advertisers, and create the phone, once again, that the carriers want, not that the consumers want. Google will build that the phone the consumer like, but phones that are created to generate revenue for google and the cell carriers. Which is why the cariers will like it. Consumers will like it because it will be cheap.
Second, there are a shitload of applications out there, the vast majority are shit, but some are really useful. I never care about a machine that can't do what I don't want it to do. I don't care that my care can't go 100 miles an hour. I don't care that my fridge isn't cooled by NO2. I don't care that my pencil is not self powered. Sure these things would be cool, but why go online and whine about it. If it is an issue, buy or build a machine that does what you want. If it is not, then move onto things we can fix.
Third, writing stuff for the newton was non trivial. I did some playing with it. It was not ultimately something I wanted to get invovled with. OTOH, the iPhone development process seems quite easy. If it were possible to write personal applications to run on personal devices I would do so. Fortunately, as mentioned, the iPhone has applications that can do most anything, for a very resonable cost. And multiple personal devices are licensed.
In the end there is only one critical difference that matters here. The newton has limited sync ability with other machines. You had your data on your newton. You had your data on your desktop. Both machines were wonderful on their on. Both were gully networked, both had good, but diffrent filesystems. They did not work well together, at least not out of the box.
Palm was the company that solved this problem. A machine that was a assistant to the user, an intermidiary between your computer and the rest of the world. The iPhone took the best parts of the newton, the palm, with a phone hacked in.
Connectivity is they key. It is why the Kindle is the tablet, and everyone one else is just a reader. Even if ther is no app for that.
Reminds me the first episode of Leverage this season. People who rob us blind, like the senator from alaska and bank executives and middle management, get of nearly scott free, while this guy, who made "thousands of dollars" is going to probably be nailed to the wall. It is like spending billions fighting street drug dealers, while letting the high level drug users off the hook.
What scares me is the rise in the use of sanitizing lotions and sprays. I believe the limited use of these to clean households and the like is what has caused the rise in allergies and relative decline in natural defenses Imagine what an entire generation raised with the constant killing of germs, beneficial and otherwise, is going to look like. They are going to have to live in freaking bubbles. We already can't have peanuts around because some maladapated child might die. What is next? Real vegetables because they cannot be sanitized of all naturally occurring bacteria? Itisnot that It want the kids to die, or even get really sick. It is that I think we can see what this fear based living is doing to us, and it would be nice to put some rational perspective in the argument. I mean, look at it this way. We know that car exhaust does kill us,and therefore any one with a family should drive low emission vehicles. But families often drive emission spouting SUVs believing they are 'safer',even though the kids breathe the fumes and get injured. Risk assesment is not the high skill of the average human.
In fact most scientists make ok money. The only reason that it does not look like it is there are a few people with little ethics that huge amounts of money, and these people often have no education beyond a bought and paid for MBA, which is nothing in comparison to a PhD.
The other issue are those scientist that are trained in fields that do not have work. I know a number of people that have been in this position. The only way to save them is to specifically have positions set aside for people who have degrees that are currently out of fashion. I don't know how to do this without encouraging people to get degrees that are out of fashion, but I don't see that as a problem. After all, we have farm subsidies that pay people to grow nothing, so why can't we have similar science subsidies.
Another issue, which has been raised recently, is that we have a good pipeline of scientist up to the college level when they leave. Certainly some leave because they are not going to be able to get a good job, but many more leave because they don't want to do the work. And this should be our message to the president. People who do not work, just collect a pay check, should not be paid large sums of money
For instance under the current stimulus bill, unemployment benefits and even health care are being paid for people who are not working. This is a good thing for those who would otherwise starve, but how does this help. We are paying a middle manager until a firm has enough money to waste on another useless middle manager. We are paying the buggy whip worker money until the buggy whip factory goes back into production. Why not pay them to go to school and get a rigorous degree instead? Don't have a job, enroll in a real four year college and get unemployment benefits. Why not? It is better than paying people to sit on the sofa and watch Fox News, blaming all their problems not on lack of will, but on those people who took our jobs.
But doing so indicates a profound lack of understanding of the scientific process. For instance, we now know that the Millikan oil drop experiment was deeply flawed. The value he derived for the charge on the electron was nowhere close to the value we accept now. Those who focus on results will laugh at the follow of science and go live in their electricity free cave. But those who focus on process see this as a lesson learned, appreciate the process, and take it as a lesson learned. Eventually things got sorted out and we now a new accepted value. Not that we have no absolute proof that it is really more correct than the Milikin number, but we really think it is.
In climate change, we have a process just like any other. The data indicates a risk, that may be exaggerated. Much like lead in paint and gasoline, the solution is expensive but not prohibitively so. We were very imprudent with the lead issue. The data supporting the that wild assertion that anyone actually is harmed by lead, and we must question the evolutionary benefit of children that would eat paint. But we did ban lead, and it many would say it is a good thing. I suppose that a very few children were exposed to high levels of lead, but one must wonder if the death of an industry was worth those few injuries. Of course, data questioning the idea of lead and children are not going to be a hot item for journals
And such is the issue of climate change. A few people may be harmed, but the data is ambiguous. Based on this ambiguous data we are going to kill many industries, and force people to give up their hummers and air conditioners, all because a few islanders are going to die. It is ludicrous.
On a more serious note, most science is about new methods and new data. Science likes to discover new things. Articles that deny climate change, or claim that oil is available forever, based, for instance, the idea that the earth is only a few thousand years old an oil is created by the magma, are simply boring.
no rumor is officially true until it is officially denied.
I use SVN with my Latex and oo.org files. The only, well known, issue with SVN is iWorks, which may or may not be an issue for this situation. I am told git is functional. I am thinking of migrating to git just because of the local overhead.
Which I why I just upgraded all my computer to MS Windows 7. I assume that someone somewhere has a licensee. We are a big origination with many disparate computer locations. We can't be expected to micromanage all the licenses. If it turns out we don't have the license, it is not like anyone will get a huge reward and we will have to pay punitive settlements, in addition to inflated licensing costs. MS, being the nice company they are, will just allow us to buy the license from the current price sheets and let us go on our way.
Someone has to pay for stuff. We want stuff, as is shown by the increase in the national debt as a percentage of gross national product since the year 2000. As mentioned by the foundation way back in 2003. We say we want to cut costs, but in reality the best we can do it keep costs about the same percentage, about 20% at the federal level I believe, or the productivity of the United States.
As more people buy online, and states that rely on sales tax find that money going away, something will happen because taxes do pay for stuff we want, and we won't give it up. Everyone has their pet pigs.
So what can happen. Internet retailers may have to pay the sales tax, since local residents will not do so voluntarily. This will not be an issue for the big guys like Amazon, but may kil some of the smaller shops. We can go to income tax, which is deemed as less progresive so is opposed to persons who are opposed to transferring wealth. We can call in states like North and South Dakota and Alaska that tend to use the Federal budget s their personal expense account and make them support themselves. This will free up biliions of dollars that states can then use as transfers from federal taxes. For instance, on of the Dakotas had a billion dollar surplus, presumably from a 3 billion dollar federal payment in excess of federal taxes. This itself will solve most problems.
I have also solved this problem by using an LCD projector. One day when I left my glasses at home, I spent the day reading off the wall instead of my laptop.
Some teachers are paid generously. Some teachers start at the 40's, which average to $30/hour, but there are some caveats which have to do with why it may be ok to sell plans. These are the exception, in the more difficult positions to staff. A more typical hourly rate is $15-$20 to start. After thirty years you might be above $30 hour. In the few higher paying districts, after 40 years on may be approaching $50/hour. Non performance seniority raises are an issue. Most districts are moving, to some extent, to performance based raises. One should also note that sometimes these seniority raises are instead of COLA raises.
Administrators are over price, but that is hardly an issue isolated to education, or the public sector. Financial companies extorted billions of dollars from the American taxpayer, and then paid billions of dollars of bonuses to those that brought the financial industry to the point of collapse.
Unreasonable pension plans no longer exist. Unlike other government workers, teachers cannot get social security. That means if one is like many teachers, and worked in industry for 20 years, All that money put in now goes to welfare recipients who did not work, or the working poor who did not work enough to fund their retirement. The responsible teach does not get the full Social Security that was promised during pay in. As far as the pension, for 25 years of work it is around 50% of income. That works out right now to 25K a year after paying fees. Hardly a huge pension. At 40 years one can get close to 100% of salary, three year average.
Teachers are often on contract. The contract specifies a certain number of hours per day, a certain number of days a year. Outside of these times, unless the school is paying, the time is the teachers. The teacher may volunteer time. The law clearly states that school may nor force the teacher to work. The only reason tax increases come about is because the government imposes more busy work. NCLB is best example of this, imposes the French model of education on the american public, along with a French level of taxes. Otherwise teachers have the freedom to advance, take other jobs, tutor, or generate content to achieve desired income levels.
Most of the crony jobs come about when people want more accountability. For instance, all teachers may be teaching, and seniority raises may not be a huge issue, but tax payers want more supervision. So we hire several people, at a cost of a million dollars. These are largely non-functional jobs. We may save half a million, but at a net loss, which increases over time.
The fact is we don't respect productive worker enough. Those that do nothing, the crony jobs, are what get respect.
But how can it be perfect if the we cannot protect those who need protection most from those who would steal their money. If $1 gets spent by ACORN in a questionable manner, an act of congress is immediately enacted,but when those not so well off are robbed, we can't even make the criminal parties stop, much less put them in jail.
Or look at Verizon. They are stealing from their customers in $1.99 increments. And don't tell me it is not stealing. If you went to store and got charged for everything you put in your shopping cart before you checked out and left the store, and the store refused to refund you money if you did not actually want the merchandise, I am sure the cops would be called.
Of course Billg loves the free market. If a contractor installs unlicensed versions of MS Office on a clients computer, that contractor can earn a million dollars bounty forreporting the company, and then the BSA has every right to put the company out of business with exorbitant and irrational penalties. But if MS steals software, they can just blame it on a contractor and then apologize.
People are decrying the direction of the US, but I think after the past several years of pretty constant theft of tax dollars and personal property by the elite, a change was and is necessary.