It's still a bogus argument, as I hope you're well aware. Those data packets contain our data, not theirs. Claiming free speech is required to manage the network is absurd. It's like someone saying that they need free speech to half shut a valve in a plumbing system. We're talking control functions, not speech.
You know their network engineers are cringing every time someone reminds them that their management and lawyers have chosen to make such a specious statement.
...I also noticed that my harddisk on "linux.cs.helsinki.fi" (which is where I keep the primary development sources) seems to be going, so keep your fingers crossed. I thought I'd better upload what I have now, rather than notice that I lost everything when I get back to work on Monday..
(Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it;)
There is English, and there is English, yes. I lived in Hawaii for 3 years where the locals speak pidgin; a mash of English, Hawaiian, and Japanese with loan words borrowed from Samoan, Yap, Palau, and elsewhere. Even there I never really had any trouble understanding anyone.
Speaking of dialects, a long time ago during the glory days of UseNet, someone put together "You Might be a Minnesotan If..." that included the lines
-you never had to rewind any part of "Fargo" because you missed some of the dialogue.
-the first time you saw "Grumpy Old Men" you thought it was a documentary.
-you think that "UFF DA" is a standard English phrase.
-your dog dies, your spouse leaves you, you lose your job, and your car breaks down, all on the same day, and the first thought that comes to your mind is, "It could be worse".
-it gets worse.
If you're from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or western Ontario, you probably didn't have to rewind "Fargo," either!:-)
First, delete the word intelligent from your queries because lack of intelligence has never been a legitimate reason for police to engage in unconstitutional actions.
Second, the answer to the rest of your questions can be summed up this way:
1-3: Fashion combined with a lack of taste.
4: You're assuming that because you can't understand a particular dialect or accent, the person is choosing to do so voluntarily. So?
I grew up in northern Minnesota in a town so white bread the only black family was the Army recruiter's. I've traveled over a good portion of the world. Served in the Navy with guys from the Philippines, Mexico, blacks from the worst slums of cities like Chicago and LA, and rednecks from the deepest South. I know I've heard just about every kind of accent and dialect of English imaginable. I never had a problem understanding anything anybody said to me in English, whether they were brown, black, red, yellow, or white; rich or poor; highly educated or illiterate. What's your problem? Lack of concentration?
5: Maybe because they think the police don't deserve their respect based upon past actions? And this requires a "stop and frisk", why?
Baen and O'Reilly are both low to mid-range publishers specializing in production runs from 1,000 to say, 25,000. 100,000? Now you're talking close to bestseller status.
And yet, Baen Publishing has proven for more than a decade that they can sell MORE ebooks and MORE dead tree books if they keep ebook prices cheap and don't use DRM. Smashwords is letting authors set their own prices and seeing the average price for an e-book drop to around $3.00 the last time I checked. O'Reilly has been selling a librar subscription model for e-books online through their Safari Books Online outlet for at least as long as Baen has been working their model. Lulu has moved into editorial services for e-books as well as print on demand.
The fact is that the Big Six still haven't figured out how to sell ebooks successfully while the smaller, more nimble players are eating their lunch. Here's a couple of clues, fellas. Drop DRM and drop your prices. You'll make MORE money.:-)
We won't lose the industry, we'll lose the dinosaurs. Companies like Baen Publishing, Smashwords, Lulu, and dozens of others are making money hand over fist while the Big Six continue to follow outmoded models. Frankly, I think it's great that we're moving away from the highly consolidated market that we have today back towards a more traditional, dispersed one with many smaller players.
Heck, I'd love to see HP go back to its real roots as an engineering driven firm. They got their start building the most rock solid test equipment on the planet, and they did it for a reasonable price, after all. Whatever happened to that kind of thinking?
600 miles??? Most gas vehicles sold in the U.S. have a range of maybe 400 miles if you stretch every last drop. I've been buying gas about every 250 miles for more than thirty years, regardless if I was driving a Honda CVCC with a 600cc motorcycle engine bolted onto tiny car body or a Ford F150 half ton pickup. (Well, there was that F150 I had that had a 2nd tank, but that was an option bought by a farmer who later backed out of the purchase, not me.)
You need to study our political history more. (I'm assuming that you're an American as well.)
Virtually every major shift in Federal policy was initially driven by a third party introducing an idea or set of ideas that were inimical to the entrenched interests of the two dominating parties. In the past couple of hundred years, successful third parties have either become powerful enough to displace one of the two major players or they have seen their ideas co-opted by one or both of the two major parties. In the past, we've seen strong third parties show up every twenty to fifty years. It looks to me that we're long, LONG overdue for a real challenge to the two ruling parties.
The real weakness with a two party system is that really does divide us artificially into just two camps. Almost everyone has to pretty much accept a lot of crap that they disagree with in order to advance their own agenda. (Look at what the Tea Party has done to the Republicans in the past few years, for example.)
By contrast, multiparty systems allow a citizen the opportunity to vote for a paty that aligns much more closely with their own political views. This means that a much stronger political voice is granted to minority views because it is much more difficult for one strong minority to suppress debate. This in turn means that you end up with a government that is much more responsive to its citizenry. As long as you have a well educated nation, a multiparty system is inherently more flexible and paradoxically, more stable than a more rigid system like ours.
That, in a nutshell, is why so many of us would like to see us move to a multiparty system.
Given China's well known dumping tactics in this market, it made sense for the U.S. to increase tariffs to match it in order to preserve the domestic industry.
But in all honesty, this really doesn't matter a whole lot because the evidence indicates that solar cells have been following an exponential efficiency curve for 30 years. At this rate it won't be too long before solar power becomes a viable alternative for some large scale uses. It already is plenty cheap enough for small scale use.
Bill Gates, a visionary??? Please. He missed the single biggest, most obvious trend of the 90s.
By the mid-90s anybody with half a brain who was paying any attention at all to computer and communications technology related industries understood that the Internet was well on its way to becoming THE dominant communications medium. The only question was what form it was going to take. Even so, by 1995 it was pretty clearly going to be led by Web based technologies. Yet Gates missed all of this and had to put out a revised edition of his own book to include it.
Want to read what a true visionary wrote? Take a gander at Alvin Toffler's books from the '70s. Go read Future Shock (published in 1970) and The Third Wave (published in 1980).
Heck, go read William Gibson's Neuromancer (published in 1984). Or, for earlier descriptions of how the Web might work, read James H. Schmitz's Hub stories, some of which date back to the '40s and '50s.
Bill Gates, a hacker? Of a sort, although there were and are FAR more talented people hacking away on a variety of stuff. IMO he was always too self centered to really be a good hacker. (This, from a guy who used computer time on a system that he may not have had authorization to use to create his version of BASIC.)
Good hackers want to share. Great hackers know that it's absolutely mandatory to share.
Nobody, but NOBODY, can afford to turn off IT any more. I don't care if you're Fortune 500 or a poor farmer scratching out a living in the middle of Kenya. If you can't reach the market, you're at a HUGE disadvantage compared to your competition. Guess how those poor farmers are doing it these days?
One thing that almost all of the suggestions to date (with the exception of Lego) is that they don't show how programming can affect the real world. Arduino projects, OTOH, will give him the opportunity to get immediate feedback. Arduino kits are used successfully by many teachers and camp counselors at the elementary and junior high levels. The base kits are cheap, the programming language is simple, easy to graps, yet powerful enough to get the kits to do an amazing amount of stuff.
4) Abandon the old platform and migrate to a new one. (Granted, not always a feasible option. It is, however, a real one that more governmental agencies are beginning to take seriously.)
I did have a sales experience where they asked for the keys to my current car to evaluate it for trade in. While their technician was examining the car, they presented me with a finance offer on the purchase of the vehicle I wanted. It was too high. I refused, and asked for my car keys. They said the technician had my car out for a test drive, and since I had no choice but to wait for him to return they would revise their finance offer.
At which point, all negotiations should have stopped. Personally, I would have picked up the phone and asked information for the number to the local police department. If the sales force continued their abusive tactics, I would have hit 911 and told the 911 operator I was being held hostage against my will. Because that's EXACTLY what they did to you.
And we want the Government to do MORE of this? Medicare doesn't work well enough to qualify our Government to expand it to all of us.
This expresses my 'Republican' views, and many agree with me. We haven't even touched on whether the Government has the right, Constitutionally, to take over healthcare financing, which would De Facto be a takeover of the industry.
Before you get too excited about choosing a position about how to manage healthcare costs under various plans, I strongly, STRONGLY urge you to spend some time at Gapminder.Org.
The U.S. spends nearly twice as much as other industrialized nations for a demonstrably worse result in almost every measure. I've chosen to graph life expectancy versus % of GDP as the most obvious way of highlighting the point, but there are dozens if not hundreds of other variables available to use.
I strongly urge you to spend some time looking at some of the other variables. Watch what happens over time. There is very clearly a correlation between overall health and wellbeing of a nation and its internal politics. Another example that clearly demonstrates this is maternal mortality ratio (per 100,000 live births) versus GDP per capita. Watch what happens in the U.S. after the 1980 and 1996 elections. These are both elections when so-called 'lesser government' ideologues gained additional political power and were able to push their agendas through legislation and manipulating political appointments. Pretty damning results, I'd say.
What are the facts? Again and again and again â" what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what the stars foretell, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable verdict of history â" what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts! -- Robert A. Heinlein
Look, I'm NOT saying that Obamacare is the right approach. However, it's pretty clear that what we've been doing for the past 30 years isn't working anywhere near as efficiently as what every other developed and (and many developing) countries are doing.
One thing that they all share in common? Some sort of nationalized healthcare system. Isn't it way past time that we took a long, hard look at what actually works and figure out how to adapt it for our own use?
That sounds like a good summation of how they screwed up. I'll add one observation, though... They should have put the radio in the Playbook, not required tethering to an existing Blackberry. Why buy and carry two devices when so many single device products are available on the market?
You're missing a key point, though. If I work for you, you have every right to ask me for my SSN so you can properly withhold the appropriate taxes. If I don't work for you, then you have no need to know my SSN. So, asking for my SSN during an interview is inappropriate.
Simply asking me if I have one? It may be legal to ask it prior to making an employment offer. However, for me it would be a flag that maybe I shouldn't accept any forthcoming job offer from you because I would be concerned about the company's apparent lack of trust in their employees.
Remember, the interview process is a two way conversation. I'm evaluating your company based upon my interaction with you while you evaluate me for possible inclusion on your staff.
At 2 A.M. From HIS OWN HOME! How is any of the school's business what he's doing at that hour when he's not on school property, even it was from a school owned laptop????
Slashdot Mirror
It's still a bogus argument, as I hope you're well aware. Those data packets contain our data, not theirs. Claiming free speech is required to manage the network is absurd. It's like someone saying that they need free speech to half shut a valve in a plumbing system. We're talking control functions, not speech.
You know their network engineers are cringing every time someone reminds them that their management and lawyers have chosen to make such a specious statement.
Yeah, minimum wage is a modern idea all right. It's only 4,000 years old after all.
Tell you what, why don't you go live in a government free zone like Somalia for a while. I think you'll find the experience enlightening.
Linus Torvalds, July 20, 1996
There is English, and there is English, yes. I lived in Hawaii for 3 years where the locals speak pidgin; a mash of English, Hawaiian, and Japanese with loan words borrowed from Samoan, Yap, Palau, and elsewhere. Even there I never really had any trouble understanding anyone.
Speaking of dialects, a long time ago during the glory days of UseNet, someone put together "You Might be a Minnesotan If..." that included the lines
If you're from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or western Ontario, you probably didn't have to rewind "Fargo," either! :-)
Says the guy who never used a Model M.
First, delete the word intelligent from your queries because lack of intelligence has never been a legitimate reason for police to engage in unconstitutional actions.
Second, the answer to the rest of your questions can be summed up this way:
1-3: Fashion combined with a lack of taste.
4: You're assuming that because you can't understand a particular dialect or accent, the person is choosing to do so voluntarily. So?
I grew up in northern Minnesota in a town so white bread the only black family was the Army recruiter's. I've traveled over a good portion of the world. Served in the Navy with guys from the Philippines, Mexico, blacks from the worst slums of cities like Chicago and LA, and rednecks from the deepest South. I know I've heard just about every kind of accent and dialect of English imaginable. I never had a problem understanding anything anybody said to me in English, whether they were brown, black, red, yellow, or white; rich or poor; highly educated or illiterate. What's your problem? Lack of concentration?
5: Maybe because they think the police don't deserve their respect based upon past actions? And this requires a "stop and frisk", why?
All true. But at least O'Reilly has been doing something other than complaining that they can't compete!
Baen and O'Reilly are both low to mid-range publishers specializing in production runs from 1,000 to say, 25,000. 100,000? Now you're talking close to bestseller status.
And yet, Baen Publishing has proven for more than a decade that they can sell MORE ebooks and MORE dead tree books if they keep ebook prices cheap and don't use DRM. Smashwords is letting authors set their own prices and seeing the average price for an e-book drop to around $3.00 the last time I checked. O'Reilly has been selling a librar subscription model for e-books online through their Safari Books Online outlet for at least as long as Baen has been working their model. Lulu has moved into editorial services for e-books as well as print on demand.
The fact is that the Big Six still haven't figured out how to sell ebooks successfully while the smaller, more nimble players are eating their lunch. Here's a couple of clues, fellas. Drop DRM and drop your prices. You'll make MORE money. :-)
We won't lose the industry, we'll lose the dinosaurs. Companies like Baen Publishing, Smashwords, Lulu, and dozens of others are making money hand over fist while the Big Six continue to follow outmoded models. Frankly, I think it's great that we're moving away from the highly consolidated market that we have today back towards a more traditional, dispersed one with many smaller players.
Not any longer.
Heck, I'd love to see HP go back to its real roots as an engineering driven firm. They got their start building the most rock solid test equipment on the planet, and they did it for a reasonable price, after all. Whatever happened to that kind of thinking?
600 miles??? Most gas vehicles sold in the U.S. have a range of maybe 400 miles if you stretch every last drop. I've been buying gas about every 250 miles for more than thirty years, regardless if I was driving a Honda CVCC with a 600cc motorcycle engine bolted onto tiny car body or a Ford F150 half ton pickup. (Well, there was that F150 I had that had a 2nd tank, but that was an option bought by a farmer who later backed out of the purchase, not me.)
You need to study our political history more. (I'm assuming that you're an American as well.)
Virtually every major shift in Federal policy was initially driven by a third party introducing an idea or set of ideas that were inimical to the entrenched interests of the two dominating parties. In the past couple of hundred years, successful third parties have either become powerful enough to displace one of the two major players or they have seen their ideas co-opted by one or both of the two major parties. In the past, we've seen strong third parties show up every twenty to fifty years. It looks to me that we're long, LONG overdue for a real challenge to the two ruling parties.
The real weakness with a two party system is that really does divide us artificially into just two camps. Almost everyone has to pretty much accept a lot of crap that they disagree with in order to advance their own agenda. (Look at what the Tea Party has done to the Republicans in the past few years, for example.)
By contrast, multiparty systems allow a citizen the opportunity to vote for a paty that aligns much more closely with their own political views. This means that a much stronger political voice is granted to minority views because it is much more difficult for one strong minority to suppress debate. This in turn means that you end up with a government that is much more responsive to its citizenry. As long as you have a well educated nation, a multiparty system is inherently more flexible and paradoxically, more stable than a more rigid system like ours.
That, in a nutshell, is why so many of us would like to see us move to a multiparty system.
Given China's well known dumping tactics in this market, it made sense for the U.S. to increase tariffs to match it in order to preserve the domestic industry.
But in all honesty, this really doesn't matter a whole lot because the evidence indicates that solar cells have been following an exponential efficiency curve for 30 years. At this rate it won't be too long before solar power becomes a viable alternative for some large scale uses. It already is plenty cheap enough for small scale use.
Bill Gates, a visionary??? Please. He missed the single biggest, most obvious trend of the 90s.
By the mid-90s anybody with half a brain who was paying any attention at all to computer and communications technology related industries understood that the Internet was well on its way to becoming THE dominant communications medium. The only question was what form it was going to take. Even so, by 1995 it was pretty clearly going to be led by Web based technologies. Yet Gates missed all of this and had to put out a revised edition of his own book to include it.
Want to read what a true visionary wrote? Take a gander at Alvin Toffler's books from the '70s. Go read Future Shock (published in 1970) and The Third Wave (published in 1980).
Heck, go read William Gibson's Neuromancer (published in 1984). Or, for earlier descriptions of how the Web might work, read James H. Schmitz's Hub stories, some of which date back to the '40s and '50s.
Bill Gates, a hacker? Of a sort, although there were and are FAR more talented people hacking away on a variety of stuff. IMO he was always too self centered to really be a good hacker. (This, from a guy who used computer time on a system that he may not have had authorization to use to create his version of BASIC.)
Good hackers want to share. Great hackers know that it's absolutely mandatory to share.
Nobody, but NOBODY, can afford to turn off IT any more. I don't care if you're Fortune 500 or a poor farmer scratching out a living in the middle of Kenya. If you can't reach the market, you're at a HUGE disadvantage compared to your competition. Guess how those poor farmers are doing it these days?
One thing that almost all of the suggestions to date (with the exception of Lego) is that they don't show how programming can affect the real world. Arduino projects, OTOH, will give him the opportunity to get immediate feedback. Arduino kits are used successfully by many teachers and camp counselors at the elementary and junior high levels. The base kits are cheap, the programming language is simple, easy to graps, yet powerful enough to get the kits to do an amazing amount of stuff.
A good list, but you forgot one:
4) Abandon the old platform and migrate to a new one. (Granted, not always a feasible option. It is, however, a real one that more governmental agencies are beginning to take seriously.)
At which point, all negotiations should have stopped. Personally, I would have picked up the phone and asked information for the number to the local police department. If the sales force continued their abusive tactics, I would have hit 911 and told the 911 operator I was being held hostage against my will. Because that's EXACTLY what they did to you.
Before you get too excited about choosing a position about how to manage healthcare costs under various plans, I strongly, STRONGLY urge you to spend some time at Gapminder.Org.
The U.S. spends nearly twice as much as other industrialized nations for a demonstrably worse result in almost every measure. I've chosen to graph life expectancy versus % of GDP as the most obvious way of highlighting the point, but there are dozens if not hundreds of other variables available to use.
I strongly urge you to spend some time looking at some of the other variables. Watch what happens over time. There is very clearly a correlation between overall health and wellbeing of a nation and its internal politics. Another example that clearly demonstrates this is maternal mortality ratio (per 100,000 live births) versus GDP per capita. Watch what happens in the U.S. after the 1980 and 1996 elections. These are both elections when so-called 'lesser government' ideologues gained additional political power and were able to push their agendas through legislation and manipulating political appointments. Pretty damning results, I'd say.
Look, I'm NOT saying that Obamacare is the right approach. However, it's pretty clear that what we've been doing for the past 30 years isn't working anywhere near as efficiently as what every other developed and (and many developing) countries are doing.
One thing that they all share in common? Some sort of nationalized healthcare system. Isn't it way past time that we took a long, hard look at what actually works and figure out how to adapt it for our own use?
That sounds like a good summation of how they screwed up. I'll add one observation, though... They should have put the radio in the Playbook, not required tethering to an existing Blackberry. Why buy and carry two devices when so many single device products are available on the market?
You're missing a key point, though. If I work for you, you have every right to ask me for my SSN so you can properly withhold the appropriate taxes. If I don't work for you, then you have no need to know my SSN. So, asking for my SSN during an interview is inappropriate.
Simply asking me if I have one? It may be legal to ask it prior to making an employment offer. However, for me it would be a flag that maybe I shouldn't accept any forthcoming job offer from you because I would be concerned about the company's apparent lack of trust in their employees.
Remember, the interview process is a two way conversation. I'm evaluating your company based upon my interaction with you while you evaluate me for possible inclusion on your staff.
At 2 A.M. From HIS OWN HOME! How is any of the school's business what he's doing at that hour when he's not on school property, even it was from a school owned laptop????
This. Oh, so very much THIS!