Remember, not all states have sales taxes. Montana, Arizona(?), and Vermont or Oregon don't have sales taxes so they wouldn't participate in this.
Speaking of this...we should be examining why some states rely upon a sales tax, an income tax, and property tax where other states just use an income tax and property tax.
While I don't support a pure govermental drug research program, I do not believe a pure corporate research programs suits our needs because they will only focus on curing those diseases that will earn them a profit.
Government and academic labs at least are able to do 'pure' research which may not have a financially viable outcome.
Sadly, you are wrong. Math as applied to social convention. Just because some people wish to start their calendar on the birth of Christ while some of us happen to choose to start the calendar elsewhen which gives us a year 0.
And you may still get nailed if the DMCA is applied retroactively. You with your TRS-80 disk and the half a million of us with our pirated C-64 disks. Make room in the jails.
But it will never fly. Too many basic human conventions are based around our current calendar, no matter how annoying it is. Something like this would go into effect only if there was an overriding authority in control, like the Catholic Church or the Roman Empire of the olden days.
And back then, there weren't entire industries based around the calendar, so the change only effected the literate minority. Today, the majority of business requires a consistent calendar.
I'll chalk this up with Napolean's 10-hour day and calendar geeks being upset that the world isn't having a giant bash for the 'correct' beginning of the new millennium.
Damn. After all this time you'd think we'd find at least one alien species that is talkative.
Or maybe the underlying premise of SETI is flawed.
Or our concept of communication is too primative for the advanced alien armada now flying towards us after seeing the final episode of M*A*S*H yesterday.
I've been bothered by the eGrail thing too. I went to the site looking for examples, screen shots, even a listing of sites that currently use eGrail. It was bothersome to say the least.
The reason ads get ignored is they don't sell the things I am looking for. I don't give an ounce of care about iwon.com or pets.com or insert branding campaign here.
The other reason ads get ignored is because they are one of a dozen on a website. To kiss a little Slashdot ass here, at least their one banner ad per page pertains to the content and is the only one. I will never ever begrudge someone from making an honest living and support ads on websites so long as the website isn't one big billboard.
Why don't people click on banner ads? Because they have come to a website for the content and aren't interested in being sidetracked to a different site. If they are just surfing around, they might click on a banner ad but that also signifies they really aren't interested in making a purchase.
When I am shopping on the internet, I already know the sites I am comfortable buying from. Ads are more about awareness which is almost impossible to calculate the efficiency of. Just because I didn't click on the banner ad doesn't mean it didn't have an impact on me. When I started to explore tools for a professional content site, I recalled a banner ad for eGrail as seen here on Slashdot. I didn't originally click on the banner ad but only know about it because of the banner ad.
The same goes for many other banner ads I have seen.
Know, with that being said, I guarantee any website that superimposes ads on content or forces the surfer to click through the ad space to get to the content will suffer a dramatic decrease in traffic. Even if the content is golden, anything that complicates the now very simple process of getting that content now, will deter visitors.
The web is not TV. It is not a medium that gets fed to the people. Although it could be forced into that mold, it would be cutting off a significant portion of its potential. Because of that potential we must explore more passive ad placement, not more annoying ad placement.
If you teach a person something, you are actually teaching them your view of that thing. This is dangerous because your are erecting walls, forming that proverbial box that needs to be 'thought out of' later in life.
It is far better to present sources of information and how to use these sources. From their intellectual curiousity will drive the student to areas that are stimulating. The teacher then becomes a guide to raise questions for consideration and to make sure there is some focus.
I am simply shocked, shocked I say, that these 30 PhD's aren't doing this out of 'pure love' for the internet community.
Why does earning money have to play a role?
At no point in time will I begrudge Google from earning money, so long as they keep their priorities straight. If they have to bow to the 'pay-for-top-link' crowd, then make the paid links a different color so we know which link was the commercial link and which was the information link. When the two actually coincide . . . cool, do something special.
The reason I use Google isn't because it lacks banner ads, it is because it gives me good results. The fact I don't have to wade through banner ads is just a wonderful bonus. Let them please make a good living doing this, let Google set the example for other businesses to follow.
This brought back the very fond memory of my first computer, a TI-994a. I was thrilled after writing my first program and saving it to tape that I could play the program and hear what I had written.
No one else in my family appreciated the screeches like I did.
People come to a government website to get the info they need and leave to have more time to download mp3's.
Make sure all information can be printed in a nice format.
When developing the search system, make sure the results page returns valuable information. I hate going to a site that is filled with articles, laws, or other non-bite sized information and doing a search where the results page only gives me a generic title and a relevency score (GovDoc#134, 83%). 20 plus of these documents means a page of useless information where I have to visit each one, do a find in page search to see it that document is what I need. If the search results page gave back a summary of each link and offered a meaningful title, I'd at least be able to weed out the documents that I know won't apply.
I do agree access is important so if you have a place where people can submit email forms, make sure there is an autoreply and tracking number system. If there is not a person assigned to respond or triage those emails, it is better not to offer that option. For me, emails are 'fire-and-forget'. If the form is provided for me, and I use it, I expect timely action from it.
If the governmental agency is suited for that kind of interaction then let the website visitor know up front that a phonecall is the best way contact the agency.
The other thing that annoys me is a governmental website that tries to look pretty. Flash is great, but it makes me wonder, as I wait for the site to load, how much of my tax money went to design it. Utilitarian design and navigation is the answer with enough graphical verve to look interesting but not too much to make me forget I am on a government website.
And in response to the hacking issue, I know the US government has two types of security, absolute and none. If personal information is collected from the website, I want tons of guarantees of privacy. If you cannot provide the security necessary, don't provide a service that collects personal information.
When you have a limited budget and several projects, blowing it all on a switchover to *nix systems means the department goes from technical support to HR training, the highly paid LAN administrator is now spending his time assisting help desk support.
The 'short-term' investment isn't a 'short-term' investment. It is difficult enough to get a new employee from a Mac environment caught up to a Windows environment. If the office spent the money, tanked all the other projects (losing several contracts with clients because the resources wouldn't be there to fulfil the needs), and then each and every employee would have to have to be specifically trained. Local temp agencies don't recruit StarOffice users and the local city colleges don't have convenient night courses in StarOffice and Linux. Basic jobs, like Department clerk, now require someone with more specialized knowledge instead of someone who had to write their papers on a word processor in school. The hidden costs could be staggering. Try to convince the VP-IS and the PotC to do this. In a mainstream company I'll tell you this proposal would go over like a brick.
This can't be a new theory, but since I haven't studied linguistics I can't indicate whose theory it is. Simply put, language is subject to the forces of natural selection. When two words meaning the same thing are used in the same society, one word will become dominant.
This really doesn't have a lot to do with the number of speakers (otherwise Mandarin and Hindi would be the be all/end all of languages) but more about ease of use.
p.s. Replacing all of their systems with LInux/StarOffice?!? bahahahahaha - obviously some of you have never dealt with government employees - they couldn't handle linux/bsd in GUI mode or CLI mode - admit to yourself that *nix isn't ready for the home/little-knowledge user yet, will ya?
I have to strongly agree with this statement. Last year we had to move our users from a non-Y2K compliant Lotus to Excel. Most of these users just use spreadsheets so we thought this would be a fairly easy change. WRONG. Never underestimate the 'comfortable' aspect of software. If you try to switch from a MS office to a *nix office, you may save money in the long run, but the costs in training and last productivity would bury your budget for the quarter and most likely the year.
Re:I don't understand the geek angle
on
Geek Charities?
·
· Score: 2
As a geek that makes contributions to standard charities, I at time want to give to charities that also represent *my* ideals. If the digital divide is something I'm twitchin' to get resolved (it isn't) then I want to locate charities that sponsor net-mobiles in inner cities. If population control is a big issue for me (it is) then I want to locate the charities that work on education and other preventative measures.
These may not be 'geek charities' per-se but they are charites that geeks are interested in.
I can think of many key items I'd like in a calendar program but a few that are immediately relevant to what my department is trying to accomplish right now:
1. Document sharing. It is becoming increasingly important that we can share our notes from different meetings. This is mainly due to the fact personnel are meeting with different vendors, but all the information needs to be known to the entire department. A quick, easy way to upload note files for the entire department to reference, particularly through a search function, would be great.
2. Basic project management. A lot of our meetings are based on projects. If the calendar program could have a simple to-do list (with the option of a more advance system) that can assign tasks to specific people, that would be good.
2.
Censorship is the first step of fascism. In an effort to stop fascists from taking over, they are giving fuel to their movement.
French nationalism is dangerous. Language laws and culture laws abound, but in the end, they do support a liberal democracy and it is their misguided concept of prohibiting nazi symbology from reaching the masses that leads them to these mistakes. Hatred isn't a symbol, it is a cultural value. Destroy the symbol, the hatred remains. To destroy hatred, you must wither the root. The Nazi paraphenalia being auctioned is but a side-effect of the hatred.
I support France's right to control every aspect of French culture and the behavior of French citizenry. The direct issue, beyond mere censorship, is forcing a company that was not formed under French laws to comply to French laws.
Yahoo.fr complies to French laws. Yahoo.com doesn't. If every website has to conform to every local law, then everything will be regulated by the strictest standards. If we follow this logic all the way through, no website will be able to support Taiwan as a seperate country from China because Chinese law forbids it.
Unfortunately, censorship cannot occur on a case-by-case basis. To go through and say this is bad and this is good opens up issues of content control, 'this defames the government, it gets censored, this promotes the government, it doesn't' And who draws the line? Who gets to decide?
France and its citizens can pass any kind of law they want. Yahoo is not a French company and accesses French citizens only through the CHOICE of the citizens. Nobody forces the French to visit Yahoo.com over Yahoo.fr.
While understandable, your lambasting CmdrTaco for saying this stuff annoys him, is unwarranted. At no point in time did I see him advocating Nazis. The issue at hand is a stupid bureaucratic law that doesn't even do the thing France is trying to accomplish.
France has full right to pass laws against its citizens from trafficking in Hate symbols. But in trying to enforce them on a global scale, France has fallen into a myopic point-of-view that by tweaking a parameter, its citizens will magically be spared the hate symbols on the internet.
Fascism is on the rise in Europe. Yahoo auctions aren't going to impede or help at all. Anti-Hate legislation in these countries will.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of this...we should be examining why some states rely upon a sales tax, an income tax, and property tax where other states just use an income tax and property tax.
Government and academic labs at least are able to do 'pure' research which may not have a financially viable outcome.
In our obsession to make everything fit neatly we tend to miss the fact Nature has an order we'll never fully understand.
Ta Da
Subjectivity will always win out.
And you may still get nailed if the DMCA is applied retroactively. You with your TRS-80 disk and the half a million of us with our pirated C-64 disks. Make room in the jails.
And back then, there weren't entire industries based around the calendar, so the change only effected the literate minority. Today, the majority of business requires a consistent calendar.
I'll chalk this up with Napolean's 10-hour day and calendar geeks being upset that the world isn't having a giant bash for the 'correct' beginning of the new millennium.
Damn. After all this time you'd think we'd find at least one alien species that is talkative. Or maybe the underlying premise of SETI is flawed. Or our concept of communication is too primative for the advanced alien armada now flying towards us after seeing the final episode of M*A*S*H yesterday.
I've been bothered by the eGrail thing too. I went to the site looking for examples, screen shots, even a listing of sites that currently use eGrail. It was bothersome to say the least.
Alas, my favorite hangout when off duty. And I've lately had a hankering for a Spy's Demise.
The other reason ads get ignored is because they are one of a dozen on a website. To kiss a little Slashdot ass here, at least their one banner ad per page pertains to the content and is the only one. I will never ever begrudge someone from making an honest living and support ads on websites so long as the website isn't one big billboard.
Why don't people click on banner ads? Because they have come to a website for the content and aren't interested in being sidetracked to a different site. If they are just surfing around, they might click on a banner ad but that also signifies they really aren't interested in making a purchase.
When I am shopping on the internet, I already know the sites I am comfortable buying from. Ads are more about awareness which is almost impossible to calculate the efficiency of. Just because I didn't click on the banner ad doesn't mean it didn't have an impact on me. When I started to explore tools for a professional content site, I recalled a banner ad for eGrail as seen here on Slashdot. I didn't originally click on the banner ad but only know about it because of the banner ad.
The same goes for many other banner ads I have seen.
Know, with that being said, I guarantee any website that superimposes ads on content or forces the surfer to click through the ad space to get to the content will suffer a dramatic decrease in traffic. Even if the content is golden, anything that complicates the now very simple process of getting that content now, will deter visitors.
The web is not TV. It is not a medium that gets fed to the people. Although it could be forced into that mold, it would be cutting off a significant portion of its potential. Because of that potential we must explore more passive ad placement, not more annoying ad placement.
It is far better to present sources of information and how to use these sources. From their intellectual curiousity will drive the student to areas that are stimulating. The teacher then becomes a guide to raise questions for consideration and to make sure there is some focus.
Why does earning money have to play a role?
At no point in time will I begrudge Google from earning money, so long as they keep their priorities straight. If they have to bow to the 'pay-for-top-link' crowd, then make the paid links a different color so we know which link was the commercial link and which was the information link. When the two actually coincide . . . cool, do something special.
The reason I use Google isn't because it lacks banner ads, it is because it gives me good results. The fact I don't have to wade through banner ads is just a wonderful bonus. Let them please make a good living doing this, let Google set the example for other businesses to follow.
Hmmm...wonder how durable this Compaq Mouse is...okay, this Microsoft Mouse, damn.
Hey, betchya these Dell Laptops are pretty durable....nope.
*scans office for other things to drop out window*
No one else in my family appreciated the screeches like I did.
Make sure all information can be printed in a nice format.
When developing the search system, make sure the results page returns valuable information. I hate going to a site that is filled with articles, laws, or other non-bite sized information and doing a search where the results page only gives me a generic title and a relevency score (GovDoc#134, 83%). 20 plus of these documents means a page of useless information where I have to visit each one, do a find in page search to see it that document is what I need. If the search results page gave back a summary of each link and offered a meaningful title, I'd at least be able to weed out the documents that I know won't apply.
I do agree access is important so if you have a place where people can submit email forms, make sure there is an autoreply and tracking number system. If there is not a person assigned to respond or triage those emails, it is better not to offer that option. For me, emails are 'fire-and-forget'. If the form is provided for me, and I use it, I expect timely action from it.
If the governmental agency is suited for that kind of interaction then let the website visitor know up front that a phonecall is the best way contact the agency.
The other thing that annoys me is a governmental website that tries to look pretty. Flash is great, but it makes me wonder, as I wait for the site to load, how much of my tax money went to design it. Utilitarian design and navigation is the answer with enough graphical verve to look interesting but not too much to make me forget I am on a government website.
And in response to the hacking issue, I know the US government has two types of security, absolute and none. If personal information is collected from the website, I want tons of guarantees of privacy. If you cannot provide the security necessary, don't provide a service that collects personal information.
The 'short-term' investment isn't a 'short-term' investment. It is difficult enough to get a new employee from a Mac environment caught up to a Windows environment. If the office spent the money, tanked all the other projects (losing several contracts with clients because the resources wouldn't be there to fulfil the needs), and then each and every employee would have to have to be specifically trained. Local temp agencies don't recruit StarOffice users and the local city colleges don't have convenient night courses in StarOffice and Linux. Basic jobs, like Department clerk, now require someone with more specialized knowledge instead of someone who had to write their papers on a word processor in school. The hidden costs could be staggering. Try to convince the VP-IS and the PotC to do this. In a mainstream company I'll tell you this proposal would go over like a brick.
This really doesn't have a lot to do with the number of speakers (otherwise Mandarin and Hindi would be the be all/end all of languages) but more about ease of use.
These may not be 'geek charities' per-se but they are charites that geeks are interested in.
I can think of many key items I'd like in a calendar program but a few that are immediately relevant to what my department is trying to accomplish right now: 1. Document sharing. It is becoming increasingly important that we can share our notes from different meetings. This is mainly due to the fact personnel are meeting with different vendors, but all the information needs to be known to the entire department. A quick, easy way to upload note files for the entire department to reference, particularly through a search function, would be great. 2. Basic project management. A lot of our meetings are based on projects. If the calendar program could have a simple to-do list (with the option of a more advance system) that can assign tasks to specific people, that would be good. 2.
French nationalism is dangerous. Language laws and culture laws abound, but in the end, they do support a liberal democracy and it is their misguided concept of prohibiting nazi symbology from reaching the masses that leads them to these mistakes. Hatred isn't a symbol, it is a cultural value. Destroy the symbol, the hatred remains. To destroy hatred, you must wither the root. The Nazi paraphenalia being auctioned is but a side-effect of the hatred.
In a recent ruling, France outlaws all attempts to thwart the law. It is now illegal to find ways of doing illegal things legally.
I support France's right to control every aspect of French culture and the behavior of French citizenry. The direct issue, beyond mere censorship, is forcing a company that was not formed under French laws to comply to French laws.
Yahoo.fr complies to French laws. Yahoo.com doesn't. If every website has to conform to every local law, then everything will be regulated by the strictest standards. If we follow this logic all the way through, no website will be able to support Taiwan as a seperate country from China because Chinese law forbids it.
Unfortunately, censorship cannot occur on a case-by-case basis. To go through and say this is bad and this is good opens up issues of content control, 'this defames the government, it gets censored, this promotes the government, it doesn't' And who draws the line? Who gets to decide?
France and its citizens can pass any kind of law they want. Yahoo is not a French company and accesses French citizens only through the CHOICE of the citizens. Nobody forces the French to visit Yahoo.com over Yahoo.fr.
France has full right to pass laws against its citizens from trafficking in Hate symbols. But in trying to enforce them on a global scale, France has fallen into a myopic point-of-view that by tweaking a parameter, its citizens will magically be spared the hate symbols on the internet.
Fascism is on the rise in Europe. Yahoo auctions aren't going to impede or help at all. Anti-Hate legislation in these countries will.