What especially annoys me is stuff like this; ... will quickly give way to voice commands... How long have people been claiming this now? Not sure if it's been quite 20 years or just 15. Be that as it may: for most applications voice input is a stupid idea. It hasn't become widespread in all these years because nobody likes to use it, and there is no reason to expect that to change.
he needs to be sued for academic misconduct in denying his students an efficient study method
Well give him a break, he is obligated to do that! The article states that Ryerson's academic misconduct policy defines misconduct as:
any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage, [...].
So clearly - since learning would give you an academic advantage - it would have to be treated as misconduct. Same for any study method which has the potential to be efficient.
See, instead of everyone looking at their navel, people will start raising their head and will start looking at the stars. Instead of having most people working for their own goals, people will start to share a dream. Instead of fighting each other, people will start to work as a team.
I think your expectations for this are far too high. Even here on Slashdot you don't find a lot of people who are all that enthusiastic about it. Essentially people will realize that someone's mars landing makes no difference whatsoever to their own lives. Why wouldn't they?
Won't that just replace the problem with "what time do you guys start work over there?" If I call a colleague in Australia or India now, and they till me it's "11am here" I at least know what that means in relation to their normal daily routine.
Why do people think Diebold is primarily election systems-based?
I'm not sure we think that - it's just that their election systems cause us to be interested in them. "United Tech Bids $2.6B for some boring ATM manufacturer" probably wouldn't have been posted on Slashdot - and rightly so IMHO.
Well, I think despite Constantine objection that the company is actually based in Hartford, CT - this is really the heart of the matter. If you wouldn't trust the machines if they were delivered by a Russian company, then you shouldn't trust them at all. Even if Diebold were a company of excellent reputation, impartial and known to deliver the best quality - how could you be sure that there wasn't at least one engineer working for them who could be bribed by a foreign power? Who is to say they don't have a sleeper agent on their workforce? Why wouldn't a hostile government attempt to gain control of the voting process? Maybe their push to avoid paper records is not just motivated by a desire to cover up problems in a shoddy product - maybe it's really because someone in that company needs to make sure that there can't be a trace?
I don't really think Diebold is controlled by a foreign power currently, but it seems like a rather high risk to take - combined with a rather low chance of finding out if it were to happen.
I don't understand your argument there - an illegal immigrant brings in her 1 year old daughter to the US. The child grows up there, but remains illegal. Ok, so she isn't a criminal from birth, just a criminal from age 1. That doesn't strike me as a huge improvement.
Or consider some poor guy in his twenties - he flees from his homeland because he'd starve otherwise. His only viable choice is to enter a developed country illegally. Now he's considered to be a criminal just because he wants to work for food. How is that moral? On the other hand, people living somewhere also have a right not to be overrun by immigrants, so what can you do? You need to draw the line somewhere, you can't just hand out citizenship to everyone who wants it - if you'd do it your own country would soon collapse.
I my mind it makes a lot more sense to try and help that country they are trying to escape from, rather than handing out citizenship to a few of it's inhabitants, or it's inhabitants' children.
Now if you had an immigration policy without any moral ambiguouity, then I think it would make sense to ask that this be applied to Germany, too. However that is plainly not the case, and probably it's not even possible to define such a policy.
As for the minor differences in the actual policy, I suspect this has historic causes. For Americans it's very important to think that being born within a country constitutes a right to be there - because they know that they've immigrated a few generations back, at best. Europeans are more likely think of their country as something which belongs to their people.
That's an important question, but trade sanctions did help to end apartheid in South Africa. So why does it work sometimes and not at other times? Looking at Cuba - having trading partners left which are willing to help you (like Russia, and several Latin American countries) could be one factor. Another could be whether you have segments of the population which have some economical and political power and stand to lose from the embargo. The central government of China is relatively weak - e.g. often local authorities break the law for their own benefit. One of the stabilizing elements China relies on is continual economic growth.
*both* the Indians performing labor to examine the patents and the USPTO paying dollars to save examining costs would both be benefiting
The point for the government is not solely whether the patent office benefits, but whether the US economy benefits as a whole.
You'll find the same kind of situation within a company - what's beneficial for one department may be detrimental for the company as a whole. To illustrate with a simplified extreme example: Let's say you have one department providing telephone services for other departments, their performance is measured only in terms of costs - the fewer phones they need to replace the less costs they have. So they decide to only give one phone to every 20 employees of their sales department. The result is obvious in this case: sales plummet, the phone department gets rewarded for reducing their costs.
If you have some industry experience you'll find that this sort of thing happens regularly in companies - sometimes not as obvious as described here, but sometimes (unfortunately) real companies behave even more stupidly. This happens because the departments themselves do not actually behave stupidly, they just value their own interest higher than those of the company.
Companies often try to mitigate this problem by tying bonuses to overall performances giving out shares and so on. They wouldn't need to do this if the interests of all involved were always aligned, but obviously that can never happen.
That if you are a Catholic, but don't want to pay the tax, you have to lie to the government and say you aren't. In which case you are "removed" from the church and can't have a church wedding.
That's the church's choice - if they wanted they could collect the tithe themselves and keep a membership register then exclude everyone who doesn't pay. Alternatively they could let people choose whether they want to pay the tax and still allow church weddings if you've told the state you aren't catholic. There is nothing there which is by force of state - the church could setup things differently if they wanted. It's completely under their control.
That you have to tell the government when you move (police station, town hall, whatever)
Same in most US states - you typically have 30 days to update the address info on your driver's license. At least the Germans are honest about what they are doing there.
Assigned an official religion by the state, based on what you parent were/are
Only applies to those churches which decide to let the state collect their membership fees. Most churches inflict membership on minors based on the parents religion, btw. If you are Jewish you have your bar mitzvah and circumcision, if you are Catholic you have confimation etc. Just something which comes unavoidably with freedom of religion, I suppose.
This whole topic is something which seems wierd to Americans, but completely irrelevant to Germans. Typically Germans don't give a crap whether you are an atheist or not, but in the US that matters to many people.
There is something similar in the US which would be wierd to many Germans: in the US churches can actually marry people. In Germany they can have a celebration if they like, but legally you can only marry at the town hall. So a church can not change the legal state of people in Germany, but in the US they have that power.
Outsourcing to India may have benefits for companies, but is typically not ideal for governments. All the money they spend for employees in their own country stays in the country. With the money the employees get they buy cars and houses, eat in restaurants etc - all this fuels the local economy and provides return in taxes. Money which goes outside of the country boosts another countries economy. The benefit from outsourcing would need to be very large to compensate for that.
Why does the meme persist in which brilliance can only go hand in hand with eccentricity?
Well, if you live in a society which values outward appearances and sports, someone intellectual and bookish would likely be excluded and thus not socialize so well. Or someone who was excluded or naturally reclusive for whatever reason, would focus his energy on activities which don't require interaction with others. In any case, the result would be someone whose behaviour differs from the normal.
In addition depending how brilliant you actually are, you can get away with many things which otherwise people would object to. So maybe some people are eccentric, merely because their brilliance affords them to be.
This whole idea of the mail-order bride who only marries to get US citizenship and then runs away seems a bit exaggerated. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail-order_bride the divorce rate US citizen + mail-order brides seems to be a lot lower than average. The story seems to alternate between "poor exploited foreign girl" and "stupid US guy looses his house to foreign scammer" - at least one of these can't be representative. It seems a huge investment to have two children and spend years of your live with someone you dislike, just to get citizenship in the US - especially for someone with a professional education who could probably find a less stressful way to leave Russia.
Well it's a strange coincidence, granted. And I don't really see a reasonable explanation either. On the other hand his wife's boyfriend confessed to killing 8 people. Obviosuly it may be possible that you date an eight times murderer, and then are murdered by someone else. But dating a murderer then being murdered is a slightly more strange coincidence than the one about the car seat, surely? http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/05/reiser
Wouldn't it be ridiculously easy to intercept the information sent out by the RFID tag? Just walk by the house owner with a portable reader and record. Or install another reader outside the guy's house. Seems to me that a challenge/response system would be much safer, if it really needs to be wireless.
Re:As a fellow MBA Student Ill give some insight.
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
I think there are a lot more interesting ethical questions in IT: building software which allows Burma to restrict information access for their people, building software which allow China to evesdrop on dissidents, bullying people to get insane amounts of free overtime etc.
Oft repeated rhetoric here is that a companies only purpose is to make money.
Yes, the point is though - making money in which timescale? That's important because if you spend money for a project which takes three years to complete, you may not get any money until that time - still that could seem to be a fairly sensible way to invest money and make money in the long term. Alternatively you could just stop buying raw materials - as this reduces costs for your factory, and suddenly you make more money. Until the raw materials run out that is - usually a fairly stupid strategy (not considering exceptional circumstances).
Being ethical can be an investment - you are building a brand name, customer and supplier relationships etc. You could well argue that this is the best strategy for long-term growth - seems to have worked pretty well for google, after all.
Well "moronic argument" could be modded as "overrated", "calling people names" would be "flamebait". The category "factually incorrect" is difficult - but I think slashdot discussions wouldn't necessarily benefit if posts were just modded "wrong" (no matter how appropriate that may be in some cases...). Currently you need to check replies and see if someone explains why the post is wrong - then mod that reply up. I think reading the comments slashdot benefits from this - gives me a chance to learn something if I've been laboring under the same misapprehension as the guy who has been posting.
how legally enforceable are all those disclaimers I get in the footers of e-mails
Actually, they are absolutely watertight. Nothing you can do if you get one of those.
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if you ever held a penny, the government has your fingerprints
A collection of fingerprints doesn't strike me as particularly valuable. Now if you had a collection of fingerprints associated with people's names, that would be something interesting. Even if you found a way to record the name of the last person who held a penny before it returned to the bank - what exactly is so interesting about supermarket cashiers?
Slashdot Mirror
I think he understands perfectly - read the sentence you quoted again with emphasis on "even though" and "only".
What especially annoys me is stuff like this; ... will quickly give way to voice commands ... How long have people been claiming this now? Not sure if it's been quite 20 years or just 15. Be that as it may: for most applications voice input is a stupid idea. It hasn't become widespread in all these years because nobody likes to use it, and there is no reason to expect that to change.
Well give him a break, he is obligated to do that! The article states that Ryerson's academic misconduct policy defines misconduct as:
any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage, [...].
So clearly - since learning would give you an academic advantage - it would have to be treated as misconduct. Same for any study method which has the potential to be efficient.
I think your expectations for this are far too high. Even here on Slashdot you don't find a lot of people who are all that enthusiastic about it. Essentially people will realize that someone's mars landing makes no difference whatsoever to their own lives. Why wouldn't they?
Won't that just replace the problem with "what time do you guys start work over there?" If I call a colleague in Australia or India now, and they till me it's "11am here" I at least know what that means in relation to their normal daily routine.
I'm not sure we think that - it's just that their election systems cause us to be interested in them. "United Tech Bids $2.6B for some boring ATM manufacturer" probably wouldn't have been posted on Slashdot - and rightly so IMHO.
I don't really think Diebold is controlled by a foreign power currently, but it seems like a rather high risk to take - combined with a rather low chance of finding out if it were to happen.
Or consider some poor guy in his twenties - he flees from his homeland because he'd starve otherwise. His only viable choice is to enter a developed country illegally. Now he's considered to be a criminal just because he wants to work for food. How is that moral? On the other hand, people living somewhere also have a right not to be overrun by immigrants, so what can you do? You need to draw the line somewhere, you can't just hand out citizenship to everyone who wants it - if you'd do it your own country would soon collapse.
I my mind it makes a lot more sense to try and help that country they are trying to escape from, rather than handing out citizenship to a few of it's inhabitants, or it's inhabitants' children. Now if you had an immigration policy without any moral ambiguouity, then I think it would make sense to ask that this be applied to Germany, too. However that is plainly not the case, and probably it's not even possible to define such a policy.
As for the minor differences in the actual policy, I suspect this has historic causes. For Americans it's very important to think that being born within a country constitutes a right to be there - because they know that they've immigrated a few generations back, at best. Europeans are more likely think of their country as something which belongs to their people.
Yep, there is a reason for all these Dilbert cartoons.
That's an important question, but trade sanctions did help to end apartheid in South Africa. So why does it work sometimes and not at other times? Looking at Cuba - having trading partners left which are willing to help you (like Russia, and several Latin American countries) could be one factor. Another could be whether you have segments of the population which have some economical and political power and stand to lose from the embargo. The central government of China is relatively weak - e.g. often local authorities break the law for their own benefit. One of the stabilizing elements China relies on is continual economic growth.
Sorry I didn't realize this was your religion.
The point for the government is not solely whether the patent office benefits, but whether the US economy benefits as a whole.
You'll find the same kind of situation within a company - what's beneficial for one department may be detrimental for the company as a whole. To illustrate with a simplified extreme example: Let's say you have one department providing telephone services for other departments, their performance is measured only in terms of costs - the fewer phones they need to replace the less costs they have. So they decide to only give one phone to every 20 employees of their sales department. The result is obvious in this case: sales plummet, the phone department gets rewarded for reducing their costs.
If you have some industry experience you'll find that this sort of thing happens regularly in companies - sometimes not as obvious as described here, but sometimes (unfortunately) real companies behave even more stupidly. This happens because the departments themselves do not actually behave stupidly, they just value their own interest higher than those of the company.
Companies often try to mitigate this problem by tying bonuses to overall performances giving out shares and so on. They wouldn't need to do this if the interests of all involved were always aligned, but obviously that can never happen.
That's the church's choice - if they wanted they could collect the tithe themselves and keep a membership register then exclude everyone who doesn't pay. Alternatively they could let people choose whether they want to pay the tax and still allow church weddings if you've told the state you aren't catholic. There is nothing there which is by force of state - the church could setup things differently if they wanted. It's completely under their control.
That you have to tell the government when you move (police station, town hall, whatever)
Same in most US states - you typically have 30 days to update the address info on your driver's license. At least the Germans are honest about what they are doing there.
Assigned an official religion by the state, based on what you parent were/are
Only applies to those churches which decide to let the state collect their membership fees. Most churches inflict membership on minors based on the parents religion, btw. If you are Jewish you have your bar mitzvah and circumcision, if you are Catholic you have confimation etc. Just something which comes unavoidably with freedom of religion, I suppose.
This whole topic is something which seems wierd to Americans, but completely irrelevant to Germans. Typically Germans don't give a crap whether you are an atheist or not, but in the US that matters to many people.
There is something similar in the US which would be wierd to many Germans: in the US churches can actually marry people. In Germany they can have a celebration if they like, but legally you can only marry at the town hall. So a church can not change the legal state of people in Germany, but in the US they have that power.
Outsourcing to India may have benefits for companies, but is typically not ideal for governments. All the money they spend for employees in their own country stays in the country. With the money the employees get they buy cars and houses, eat in restaurants etc - all this fuels the local economy and provides return in taxes. Money which goes outside of the country boosts another countries economy. The benefit from outsourcing would need to be very large to compensate for that.
Well, if you live in a society which values outward appearances and sports, someone intellectual and bookish would likely be excluded and thus not socialize so well. Or someone who was excluded or naturally reclusive for whatever reason, would focus his energy on activities which don't require interaction with others. In any case, the result would be someone whose behaviour differs from the normal.
In addition depending how brilliant you actually are, you can get away with many things which otherwise people would object to. So maybe some people are eccentric, merely because their brilliance affords them to be.
This whole idea of the mail-order bride who only marries to get US citizenship and then runs away seems a bit exaggerated. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail-order_bride the divorce rate US citizen + mail-order brides seems to be a lot lower than average. The story seems to alternate between "poor exploited foreign girl" and "stupid US guy looses his house to foreign scammer" - at least one of these can't be representative. It seems a huge investment to have two children and spend years of your live with someone you dislike, just to get citizenship in the US - especially for someone with a professional education who could probably find a less stressful way to leave Russia.
Well it's a strange coincidence, granted. And I don't really see a reasonable explanation either. On the other hand his wife's boyfriend confessed to killing 8 people. Obviosuly it may be possible that you date an eight times murderer, and then are murdered by someone else. But dating a murderer then being murdered is a slightly more strange coincidence than the one about the car seat, surely? http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/05/reiser
Wouldn't it be ridiculously easy to intercept the information sent out by the RFID tag? Just walk by the house owner with a portable reader and record. Or install another reader outside the guy's house. Seems to me that a challenge/response system would be much safer, if it really needs to be wireless.
I think there are a lot more interesting ethical questions in IT: building software which allows Burma to restrict information access for their people, building software which allow China to evesdrop on dissidents, bullying people to get insane amounts of free overtime etc.
Yes, the point is though - making money in which timescale? That's important because if you spend money for a project which takes three years to complete, you may not get any money until that time - still that could seem to be a fairly sensible way to invest money and make money in the long term. Alternatively you could just stop buying raw materials - as this reduces costs for your factory, and suddenly you make more money. Until the raw materials run out that is - usually a fairly stupid strategy (not considering exceptional circumstances).
Being ethical can be an investment - you are building a brand name, customer and supplier relationships etc. You could well argue that this is the best strategy for long-term growth - seems to have worked pretty well for google, after all.
Well "moronic argument" could be modded as "overrated", "calling people names" would be "flamebait". The category "factually incorrect" is difficult - but I think slashdot discussions wouldn't necessarily benefit if posts were just modded "wrong" (no matter how appropriate that may be in some cases...). Currently you need to check replies and see if someone explains why the post is wrong - then mod that reply up. I think reading the comments slashdot benefits from this - gives me a chance to learn something if I've been laboring under the same misapprehension as the guy who has been posting.
Actually, they are absolutely watertight. Nothing you can do if you get one of those.
--
LEGAL NOTICE: if you are the intended reader of this slashdot post, or indeed any other person reading this post, you owe me $100,000. Contact me in a mail without any footer so we can arrange the payment details.
Hmmm - good point. Puts a new perspective on customerssuck.com ...
Not really - they wouldn't leave traces of the tattoo around.
A collection of fingerprints doesn't strike me as particularly valuable. Now if you had a collection of fingerprints associated with people's names, that would be something interesting. Even if you found a way to record the name of the last person who held a penny before it returned to the bank - what exactly is so interesting about supermarket cashiers?