No contract with the station, writer, producer or record label when I wander through the airwaves, find a tune I like and hit Record.
No contract with similar when I buy an obscure LP from a charity shop, digitise it and upload the work to my friends.
No contract with the tree outside my window to compensate it after admiring its beauty, taking a cutting, splicing with a good root stock and growing another stronger tree.
A few words on the sleve of something I am buying do not cause an implied contract. (Not even a clickwrap EULA is a contract by any reasonable definition.)
I like being able to listen to it whenever I want. That is worth paying for.
And you're welcome to choose to pay for it.
I don't know about where you live, but there's a vague (and in some places fairly well regulated) practice of busking in this country - i.e. live street performance. Everyone's welcome to watch and everyone's welcome to contribute money, but equally anyone can watch without paying a penny. The best performers stationed in the right places earn a good wage. I see no reason why an artist can't similarly ask nicely for a contribution toward work which is primarily enjoyed via reproductions.
What is not right is for someone else to copy those CDs without paying for it.
No, it's absolutely fine. Seeing and remembering a beautiful sculpture with your own eyes is as using your computer to see and remember a beautiful arrangement of 0s and 1s.
You can create whatever you want as long as it is sufficiently unique.
This is the kind of vague everyone's-breaking-the-law specification which makes for a restrictive, mundane, uncreative society. What is sufficiently unique? Everything produced today will have involved far more technological/artistic/cultural input from people who aren't even alive any more than from the person who likes to identify himself as "the creator".
Your partner is a chef. She loves doing it. Is your neighbor entitled to her cooking whenever he wants it? If she puts some left overs in the fridge, is he entitled to come over and enjoy them whenever he wants?
I haven't argued this. Neither (i) taking the physical fruits of labour; nor (ii) forcing someone to perform an expression are the same as observing some willing expression and deriving something from it yourself.
On the other hand, when you steal music, you're stripping the artist, composer, sound engineer, et al of their right to make a living from their labor.
According to capitalists, people have a right to trade, which means that I don't have the right to take something away from you unless you agree to it.
According to communists, people have a right to what they need, which means people have a right to live comfortably but also a responsibility to contribute what they can.
But there's not a reasonable political or social philosophy which says that someone has a right to some form of compensation as a consequence of putting effort into anything. No-one has the "right to make a living from their labor". For space reasons, I hereby suggest we call it the slaver philosophy, because the basis of argument is that you have a right to control others if you feel you can describe some benefit arising from it.
When I'm willing to cooperate? You're the uncooperative one who apparently believes that you do not need to compensate people for their time.
Perhaps there is a misunderstanding. I'm nowhere stating that I should be able to force you to take up your time doing a list of things I specify.
The problem arises when you believe that I should compensate you just because you expressed yourself and I heard what you said.
I don't owe you some financial sum any more than I owe Euler's heirs for his mathematics, the good weather today for inspiring me to work, my neighbour for giving me a friendly "good morning" instead of (say) playing loud music, or the universe in general for evolving me. It is there, I perceive it, and I enjoy it. It is yours as much as it is mine and you may enjoy it too.
I notice how you conveniently left out of your reply any mention to all of the people who make a living producing music, and their entitlement to be compensated for their time.
They're welcome to try to make a living producing music, but they're not entitled to be compensated just because I can hear them. What is it with entitlement culture?
You have zero right to re-produce anything you did not create.
There I was, enjoying my life, caring and sharing... until you came along and stuck some tape over my mouth because I was saying the wrong thing.
But let us analyse your assertion as you have phrased it. We end up with a world where no-one may produce anything at all - because every expression is a reproduction, amalgamation and re-expression of previous expressions.
The reality is that nobody needs you. If you are not going to contribute to society, and instead just leech off of others, you're dead weight. You're the worthless member of the group.
Yes, yes. Man got nowhere before copyright and patents. All productive research is done by arch-capitalist benevolent enterprise which only exists - and has only ever existed - thanks to intellectual property law. If I share and share alike then I am a worthless member of the group. A communist. A dirty fucking hippie. A traitor. Why do I hate America? Why am I hypocritically making use of all these servers and routers built on God's own secret proprietary code just to communicate with you... oh.
If you don't like the middlemen, the socially responsible solution is to come up with a different method, a different process to get the music / videos / etc into the hands of the consumer.
You mean like iTunes, streaming, torrents, downloading from friends, etc.? Many options already exist, with varying degrees of middleman.
Theft does not solve the "problem" that you are taking issue with.
There was no problem.
But you want to initiate force against peaceful people, thus creating a new problem of you, the thug.
figure out what it really takes to offer a 99 cent song to the public, then you can talk.
Let's see. When I was in a concert band, it cost me... oh, the cost of the instrument and time to rehearse and to learn musical theory, which I wanted to do anyway; venues were paid for by ticket revenue and the recording was part of it. CDs were sold, usually to raise money for charity, but no-one gave a fuck about copies. My mother's in her local town choir - she enjoys it so much that she pays a subscription to help fund the conductor and the occasional professional soloist. Same deal with music recordings. My cousin has been credited with sound work on several movies which you'll recognise the names of, and all he needs to attract an audience is a few seconds' concentration to prepare his improv and access to a keyboard. An old schoolfriend reached the finals of a certain prestigious national composition competition, and guess how much he was paid? Further, guess what his job wasn't.
If a person has the talent to produce music that you want to listen to, is it unreasonable for that person to wants to be compensated for his or her time? Or do you feel that you are some sort of monarch, who deserves to be serenaded for free?
What strawman is this? No-one is forcing you to produce music that I want to listen to. The force only appears when you try to stop me, having listened to your production, from using what I have heard as I please.
If we lived in a morally just society where people treated each other fairly
OK: I will not stop you from expressing any ideas by voice, pen or keyboard, even when I may have the physical or financial strength to do so, and even when your ideas may be scary to me. Are you going to treat me fairly by allowing me to do the same?
People think that because they can easily copy it from one place to another, it should be nearly free.
Not per se - after all, I can easily steal candy from a baby but that doesn't make it reasonable to go around indiscriminately taking sweets from children. The ease of copying information is a symptom of the nature of information: giving it to me doesn't take it away from you.
If an MP3 is so easy to produce, then instead of copying it, go ahead and put a band together and record your own copy of the song.
If you don't want to "create content" (i.e. build on other people's expressions) because some people are copying your stuff and that makes you sad, well... stop creating. No-one needs you. We've learnt that we don't need to be jealous cavemen any more, although there may be archaic special interests - non-productive, leeching middlemen who usually end up taking the bulk proportion of any alleged production cost - which want to keep us that way.
Go away and come back when you're willing to cooperate.
(1) Do you already have a creative reputation or prominent contacts in the field? If so, stop here and come and work for us - though your talents will probably go to waste.
(2) Did you go to a top school, regardless of your background? If so, you'll still have to take the steps below, but please look out for the wink at each stage as a prompt to reminisce on shared school experiences.
(3) Straight out of college as you are, can you answer some inane questions on undergraduate computer science? You know, the sort of stuff asked in your exams. Emphasis on the memorisation - after all, we got this job straight out of school too, so this is all^Wwhat we know about the academic side.
(4) Now what about some silly puzzles to prove your geekiness? You've surely seen the format for a few of them before. Nothing long. Think of it like an attempt to emulate an IQ test but requiring a bit of programming knowledge and without any of the expert input and quality control of a real IQ test.
(5) How about Unicode? Do you know some obscure facts about Unicode? What about HTTP? Have you memorised enough of the RFC? There's nothing to be more proud about than knowledge of obscure details in a standard. (Incidentally, if you defend simplicity and accessibility, you're just defending your own simplicity!)
(6) How would you improve ______? No need to produce a workable plan or demonstrate anything. Just wave your hands and ramble enthusiastically. Bonus points for an answer which sounds technical but actually is neatly aligned with the political/business aims of your potential employer - even while your brain is drawing big red circles around all the problems you'd confront.
(7) Do you have the same attitude as us? We want people who will rock the boat, sure. But only when we say "push!" And these laurels are so comfortable...
Anyway, that's been my experience with the hiring process of the established-but-still-trendy.
No, I'm applying reductio to dismiss GooberToo's absurd argument. If the mere existence of "countless chunks of the world economy, including businesses of all sizes, ranging from one man shops to multi-billion dollar corporations" is moral justification for an underlying principle on which the countless chunks rely... then we can justify slavery.
Of course, hoarding information is not equivalent to owning a whole human being, but it is a constituent part of human ownership. If you control how a human may express himself then you own some part of him. Copyright and patents are, in practice, enforced assertions of control over other people's actions, even while those people are neither causing you harm nor threatening to do so.
It may have had something to do with my father being a partner, and me saying 'these guys are awesome, you should hire them'.
Yes. Even at the "unskilled" (I hate that word, so I'm using it as it's commonly used rather than implying anything from it) level, taking stats of people in the UK looking for work at government job centres, around half end up finding something from friends/family.
It sort of goes: family friends reputation experience qualifications
And that fucker Clegg, having got his foot in the door through his father's connections, is now talking about creating a fairer society... by discouraging families from helping their offspring in this way. Yeah, sorry buddy, but as long as the family unit exists, parents and other relations will help the younger members of the family like this. And old schoolfriends will give each other jobs. Any social species will support its own group and any species at all will promote its own genes.
The best you can do is strengthen groupings which have other priorities and criteria for cooperation - such as unions or professional bodies. In some fields this works fairly well: no matter how rich and important a doctor you are, you don't get to offer your son a job as a trainee doctor straight out of high school. In most others, not so well.
Ive applied to some financial analyst type positions as well as actuarial.
I was thinking of becoming an actuary in the past. In the UK an actuary will have passed a specific set of exams administered by the professional body and my assumption at the time was that the obvious prerequisite an employer would be looking for (except in an employee's market) would be someone who has passed at least some of these exams. The lower level exams aren't impossible to do via self-study, either - certainly not beyond the good mathematics graduate.
Otherwise anyone completely new would come in via a graduate training programme which, in the current environment, would be a highly challenging option unless you've entered some scheme through your university while still studying.
The alternative would be to give people time to think.
Better instead to teach workers that they should be proud to be exploited, and that those who do not accept exploitation are just workshy spongers - regardless of whether those in employment are really engaged in productive, constructive work.
I've found that the more I've been paid, the less good I've actually done for society. And the most useful work I've been engaged in has always been unpaid. The people who preach about the laziness of the unemployed are usually doing less than nothing.
I get out competed in almost every one because a specialist already exists that was taught that discipline in school.
That's the thing with mathematics (speaking also as a mathematics graduate) - in the commercial world, you can only use it as a springboard to specialise. "I have a good mathematics degree" is not interesting per se unless you've been to a particularly prestigious university - and then it doesn't matter which degree you got. But it's very useful if you want to take your next highly numerate step, not just because you're more likely to get a training/learning position but because you already have the mathematical maturity to endure the challenge.
my experience was based on when I was considering my MS terminal.
(Translating from US to UK language) if that means you hadn't actually graduated yet, you'd be very unlikely to find anything interesting. Unless the market is in the jobseeker's favour, it's a long way between having something and saying you're likely to be about to have something.
I have a good GPA and I have been published twice in computer vision research at reasonable conferences
Again, I'm not sure it's relevant except for the springboard. If you want a good commercial research position you need a PhD (or experience), and if you're doing something more hands-on then having been published academically is less likely to be relevant.
At my new school for the PhD I wasn't even offered a TA position which was totally unexpected since I actually am enrolled in doctoral classes right now and, once again, I have a good gpa.
Is it that the subjects in demand are more aligned with other people's qualifications? Is it simply policy to rarely offer TA positions to new entrants? I'd much prefer to offer a teaching job to someone who is known within the community he/she'll be teaching - maybe you need to spend a few months proving yourself. Good grades aren't necessarily indicators of teaching aptitude, and starting out on a first PhD programme necessarily means you're suddenly around people who are similarly skilled - but with as much or more experience in the institution and academic environment.
Right now I have more of a problem then before since part time jobs that are not at a university in my discipline are even rarer.
A family friend who recently completed an PhD in EE spent some free hours taking a job giving tours of an old cinema or something - and, frankly, his English is not very clear! But it was something obscure enough that he wasn't exactly facing much competition, and it simply required general competence. He's done fine academically and has been running around at conferences and eased nicely into a commercial research position - what mattered was the quality of his research, not the part time stuff he messed around with.
Have your own motivation, like being able to pay your rent and bills and feed yourself?
Escape from total destruction, otherwise subtitled Arbeit macht frei, is the worst possible motivation for work. Also, work done out of desperation never sets you free.
The only truly productive motivation for work is enjoyment of the work on offer. There are sufficient resources in the Western world to keep everyone fed and sheltered. Work only needs to be done out of enjoyment, becoming a synonym for productive leisure. The initiation of force by hoarders against people who want access to available resources stops this.
Not enough jobs? Technology is serving its purpose. Cut the working week to four days.
Well, the only jobs "in applied mathematics" are research jobs, so unless you have a PhD, that's what you want to get next.
Otherwise, your applied mathematics is a springboard and you'll need to specialise in some highly numerate skill. There are lots of such jobs, from the obvious teacher/tutor to advisor (lots of commercial and research places need an expert mathematician) to actuary to financial analyst to statistician to *cringe* accountant. But few of these jobs will be attainable unless you go for some specialist training - unless you've been to an Ivy League/Oxbridge, in which case you'll get a job even if you're ignorant of the general field (because it's assumed you'll catch on very quickly, though it's not always true).
I know it's fun to claim that the National Health Service is being privatised - but that doesn't make it true and it's not.
Perhaps when you were studying the government's plans you skipped over the privatisation of management (including resource allocation) and use of private healthcare providers. Worse, perhaps you're so young that you forget what it was like before the proto-marketplace of "trusts".
The NHS is a (1) national (2) health (3) service. Trusts eroded (1) but the GP consortia plan destroys the notion entirely. (3) does not apply if the government merely allocates funds but does not actually provide a service. As for (2), good health is primarily about good nutrition, good sanitation and good observation. They are social goals - the first two countering the "squalor" of Beveridge's five giants, the last countering "ignorance" - not goals for individuals.
There is currently a strong focus in cancer care in the UK on early detection, which saves lives as well as money
There is currently a strong focus on early detection for specific cancers for specific risk groups.
though in some cases aggressive screening programmes have been found to do neither
You're probably thinking of a problem like this one which manifests itself particularly in the fashionable alarm-inducing cancers. Unfortunately, certain groups are misinterpreting (and I use that word inappropriately generously) the problem as being one of too much screening, rather than an understanding that sometimes the best approach is watch and wait rather than immediately aggressively treat. IOW, the aggression is in the response to screening.
Aside from breast, do you have any other "aggressive screening programmes" you have on your mind to criticise?
Buying from a country with fewer freedoms and labour protections than your own is morally equivalent to implementing those conditions in your own country. The moment this fact is codified in some legal principle, the world will be a much better place to live.
And, if you ignore deaths of infants and young children, has not increased by much since WW1. We somewhat overestimate the efficacy of modern healthcare at prolonging adult life (though it can do great things for improving quality of life) - the best policies involve mostly simple rules about good nutrition, sanitation and observation.
Yet we are crap at implementing programmes for detecting cancer early. It is only partly a tech problem - the main stumbling block is the requirement for a socialised solution: free and frequent testing. The UK is in the process of privatising its health service, and is pretty much a lost cause if the current coalition government does not collapse.
When I waved good bye to the Mayflower on that uneventful day in 1620, I just wished them luck and quietly lamented their loss of reason to absurd religious pecadillo.
Sky News is basically a British Fox News - same owner and same agenda - slightly toned down to adjust for the slightly more refined tastes of the British public.
The sad thing is the number of people who whine about Murdoch and his propaganda while still paying him to produce it (via a Sky or newspaper subscription).
If that is the case, then I would prefer it be done with computers and done fairly and uniformly.
The first thing you do with any automated process is learn how to game the system. It's much easier to game a system which relies on simplistic computerised parameters than the thorough review of well-trained humans.
Just as with DRM, or any technical solution to a social problem, only the honest user loses out.
And who do you think builds the software which performs the "automated decision making process"?
Centralisation leads to corruption. All automation does is centralise the decision-making process so the (often intentional) bias of one small, elite group becomes the whole system's prejudice.
It's not that I don't trust computers - any more or less than I "trust" any tool or weapon. It's that I don't trust humans.
I'm fed up with decisions being made by questionnaires and computers. I think we should stop tolerating analyses of health, fitness, credit, intelligence, etc based on simplistic tests and numbers. The expert system is one of the most horrible simplifications of human judgement ever to grace the confused world of AI, and is almost without exception implemented with some bias to fulfil a pre-determined aim and reinforce some prejudice.
Looking at the flip side, TEPCO are a bunch of lying bastards and a journalist wouldn't be doing his job - or any job at all, really - if all he did was echo their words and not provide any sort of analysis. The Japanese aren't some magical honourable super-race, despite the fantasies of some Japanophiles. They're a bunch of humans and most humans in the shit (especially when they're running big businesses) will lie or mislead no matter where they come from.
Secondly, the tsunami is awful and all, but from the PoV of the BBC's audience - i.e. the world, but predominantly the UK - the outcome of Fukushima is more relevant. A general message of hope from the Emperor to the Japanese people isn't very interesting, but anything he says about Fukushima may be interesting. The Emperor also spends most time not giving speeches at all, but we don't see this non-news reported from time to time across the world.
But, then, despite TEPCO's previous cover-ups and the fact that they understated and underreported events throughout this incident, you say that they had "little reason to lie" and talk about how "lying is much more serious for Japanese people", so I think you already enjoy the prejudice I mentioned above.
Slashdot Mirror
No contract with the station, writer, producer or record label when I wander through the airwaves, find a tune I like and hit Record.
No contract with similar when I buy an obscure LP from a charity shop, digitise it and upload the work to my friends.
No contract with the tree outside my window to compensate it after admiring its beauty, taking a cutting, splicing with a good root stock and growing another stronger tree.
A few words on the sleve of something I am buying do not cause an implied contract. (Not even a clickwrap EULA is a contract by any reasonable definition.)
Finally, art and culture are human needs.
I'm done repeating myself. Ta ta.
I like being able to listen to it whenever I want. That is worth paying for.
And you're welcome to choose to pay for it.
I don't know about where you live, but there's a vague (and in some places fairly well regulated) practice of busking in this country - i.e. live street performance. Everyone's welcome to watch and everyone's welcome to contribute money, but equally anyone can watch without paying a penny. The best performers stationed in the right places earn a good wage. I see no reason why an artist can't similarly ask nicely for a contribution toward work which is primarily enjoyed via reproductions.
What is not right is for someone else to copy those CDs without paying for it.
No, it's absolutely fine. Seeing and remembering a beautiful sculpture with your own eyes is as using your computer to see and remember a beautiful arrangement of 0s and 1s.
You can create whatever you want as long as it is sufficiently unique.
This is the kind of vague everyone's-breaking-the-law specification which makes for a restrictive, mundane, uncreative society. What is sufficiently unique? Everything produced today will have involved far more technological/artistic/cultural input from people who aren't even alive any more than from the person who likes to identify himself as "the creator".
Your partner is a chef. She loves doing it. Is your neighbor entitled to her cooking whenever he wants it? If she puts some left overs in the fridge, is he entitled to come over and enjoy them whenever he wants?
I haven't argued this. Neither (i) taking the physical fruits of labour; nor (ii) forcing someone to perform an expression are the same as observing some willing expression and deriving something from it yourself.
On the other hand, when you steal music, you're stripping the artist, composer, sound engineer, et al of their right to make a living from their labor.
According to capitalists, people have a right to trade, which means that I don't have the right to take something away from you unless you agree to it.
According to communists, people have a right to what they need, which means people have a right to live comfortably but also a responsibility to contribute what they can.
But there's not a reasonable political or social philosophy which says that someone has a right to some form of compensation as a consequence of putting effort into anything. No-one has the "right to make a living from their labor". For space reasons, I hereby suggest we call it the slaver philosophy, because the basis of argument is that you have a right to control others if you feel you can describe some benefit arising from it.
When I'm willing to cooperate? You're the uncooperative one who apparently believes that you do not need to compensate people for their time.
Perhaps there is a misunderstanding. I'm nowhere stating that I should be able to force you to take up your time doing a list of things I specify.
The problem arises when you believe that I should compensate you just because you expressed yourself and I heard what you said.
I don't owe you some financial sum any more than I owe Euler's heirs for his mathematics, the good weather today for inspiring me to work, my neighbour for giving me a friendly "good morning" instead of (say) playing loud music, or the universe in general for evolving me. It is there, I perceive it, and I enjoy it. It is yours as much as it is mine and you may enjoy it too.
I notice how you conveniently left out of your reply any mention to all of the people who make a living producing music, and their entitlement to be compensated for their time.
They're welcome to try to make a living producing music, but they're not entitled to be compensated just because I can hear them. What is it with entitlement culture?
You have zero right to re-produce anything you did not create.
There I was, enjoying my life, caring and sharing... until you came along and stuck some tape over my mouth because I was saying the wrong thing.
But let us analyse your assertion as you have phrased it. We end up with a world where no-one may produce anything at all - because every expression is a reproduction, amalgamation and re-expression of previous expressions.
The reality is that nobody needs you. If you are not going to contribute to society, and instead just leech off of others, you're dead weight. You're the worthless member of the group.
Yes, yes. Man got nowhere before copyright and patents. All productive research is done by arch-capitalist benevolent enterprise which only exists - and has only ever existed - thanks to intellectual property law. If I share and share alike then I am a worthless member of the group. A communist. A dirty fucking hippie. A traitor. Why do I hate America? Why am I hypocritically making use of all these servers and routers built on God's own secret proprietary code just to communicate with you... oh.
If you don't like the middlemen, the socially responsible solution is to come up with a different method, a different process to get the music / videos / etc into the hands of the consumer.
You mean like iTunes, streaming, torrents, downloading from friends, etc.? Many options already exist, with varying degrees of middleman.
Theft does not solve the "problem" that you are taking issue with.
There was no problem.
But you want to initiate force against peaceful people, thus creating a new problem of you, the thug.
figure out what it really takes to offer a 99 cent song to the public, then you can talk.
Let's see. When I was in a concert band, it cost me... oh, the cost of the instrument and time to rehearse and to learn musical theory, which I wanted to do anyway; venues were paid for by ticket revenue and the recording was part of it. CDs were sold, usually to raise money for charity, but no-one gave a fuck about copies. My mother's in her local town choir - she enjoys it so much that she pays a subscription to help fund the conductor and the occasional professional soloist. Same deal with music recordings. My cousin has been credited with sound work on several movies which you'll recognise the names of, and all he needs to attract an audience is a few seconds' concentration to prepare his improv and access to a keyboard. An old schoolfriend reached the finals of a certain prestigious national composition competition, and guess how much he was paid? Further, guess what his job wasn't.
Then there's m
If a person has the talent to produce music that you want to listen to, is it unreasonable for that person to wants to be compensated for his or her time? Or do you feel that you are some sort of monarch, who deserves to be serenaded for free?
What strawman is this? No-one is forcing you to produce music that I want to listen to. The force only appears when you try to stop me, having listened to your production, from using what I have heard as I please.
If we lived in a morally just society where people treated each other fairly
OK: I will not stop you from expressing any ideas by voice, pen or keyboard, even when I may have the physical or financial strength to do so, and even when your ideas may be scary to me. Are you going to treat me fairly by allowing me to do the same?
People think that because they can easily copy it from one place to another, it should be nearly free.
Not per se - after all, I can easily steal candy from a baby but that doesn't make it reasonable to go around indiscriminately taking sweets from children. The ease of copying information is a symptom of the nature of information: giving it to me doesn't take it away from you.
If an MP3 is so easy to produce, then instead of copying it, go ahead and put a band together and record your own copy of the song.
If you don't want to "create content" (i.e. build on other people's expressions) because some people are copying your stuff and that makes you sad, well... stop creating. No-one needs you. We've learnt that we don't need to be jealous cavemen any more, although there may be archaic special interests - non-productive, leeching middlemen who usually end up taking the bulk proportion of any alleged production cost - which want to keep us that way.
Go away and come back when you're willing to cooperate.
(1) Do you already have a creative reputation or prominent contacts in the field? If so, stop here and come and work for us - though your talents will probably go to waste.
(2) Did you go to a top school, regardless of your background? If so, you'll still have to take the steps below, but please look out for the wink at each stage as a prompt to reminisce on shared school experiences.
(3) Straight out of college as you are, can you answer some inane questions on undergraduate computer science? You know, the sort of stuff asked in your exams. Emphasis on the memorisation - after all, we got this job straight out of school too, so this is all^Wwhat we know about the academic side.
(4) Now what about some silly puzzles to prove your geekiness? You've surely seen the format for a few of them before. Nothing long. Think of it like an attempt to emulate an IQ test but requiring a bit of programming knowledge and without any of the expert input and quality control of a real IQ test.
(5) How about Unicode? Do you know some obscure facts about Unicode? What about HTTP? Have you memorised enough of the RFC? There's nothing to be more proud about than knowledge of obscure details in a standard. (Incidentally, if you defend simplicity and accessibility, you're just defending your own simplicity!)
(6) How would you improve ______? No need to produce a workable plan or demonstrate anything. Just wave your hands and ramble enthusiastically. Bonus points for an answer which sounds technical but actually is neatly aligned with the political/business aims of your potential employer - even while your brain is drawing big red circles around all the problems you'd confront.
(7) Do you have the same attitude as us? We want people who will rock the boat, sure. But only when we say "push!" And these laurels are so comfortable...
Anyway, that's been my experience with the hiring process of the established-but-still-trendy.
No, I'm applying reductio to dismiss GooberToo's absurd argument. If the mere existence of "countless chunks of the world economy, including businesses of all sizes, ranging from one man shops to multi-billion dollar corporations" is moral justification for an underlying principle on which the countless chunks rely... then we can justify slavery.
Of course, hoarding information is not equivalent to owning a whole human being, but it is a constituent part of human ownership. If you control how a human may express himself then you own some part of him. Copyright and patents are, in practice, enforced assertions of control over other people's actions, even while those people are neither causing you harm nor threatening to do so.
I recall similar arguments when people tried to outlaw slavery. Anyway, it's for the market to decide who counts as a free human!
Any other idiocy you want to share?
It may have had something to do with my father being a partner, and me saying 'these guys are awesome, you should hire them'.
Yes. Even at the "unskilled" (I hate that word, so I'm using it as it's commonly used rather than implying anything from it) level, taking stats of people in the UK looking for work at government job centres, around half end up finding something from friends/family.
It sort of goes:
family
friends
reputation
experience
qualifications
And that fucker Clegg, having got his foot in the door through his father's connections, is now talking about creating a fairer society... by discouraging families from helping their offspring in this way. Yeah, sorry buddy, but as long as the family unit exists, parents and other relations will help the younger members of the family like this. And old schoolfriends will give each other jobs. Any social species will support its own group and any species at all will promote its own genes.
The best you can do is strengthen groupings which have other priorities and criteria for cooperation - such as unions or professional bodies. In some fields this works fairly well: no matter how rich and important a doctor you are, you don't get to offer your son a job as a trainee doctor straight out of high school. In most others, not so well.
Ive applied to some financial analyst type positions as well as actuarial.
I was thinking of becoming an actuary in the past. In the UK an actuary will have passed a specific set of exams administered by the professional body and my assumption at the time was that the obvious prerequisite an employer would be looking for (except in an employee's market) would be someone who has passed at least some of these exams. The lower level exams aren't impossible to do via self-study, either - certainly not beyond the good mathematics graduate.
Otherwise anyone completely new would come in via a graduate training programme which, in the current environment, would be a highly challenging option unless you've entered some scheme through your university while still studying.
a concerted effort to keep people busy
The alternative would be to give people time to think.
Better instead to teach workers that they should be proud to be exploited, and that those who do not accept exploitation are just workshy spongers - regardless of whether those in employment are really engaged in productive, constructive work.
I've found that the more I've been paid, the less good I've actually done for society. And the most useful work I've been engaged in has always been unpaid. The people who preach about the laziness of the unemployed are usually doing less than nothing.
I get out competed in almost every one because a specialist already exists that was taught that discipline in school.
That's the thing with mathematics (speaking also as a mathematics graduate) - in the commercial world, you can only use it as a springboard to specialise. "I have a good mathematics degree" is not interesting per se unless you've been to a particularly prestigious university - and then it doesn't matter which degree you got. But it's very useful if you want to take your next highly numerate step, not just because you're more likely to get a training/learning position but because you already have the mathematical maturity to endure the challenge.
my experience was based on when I was considering my MS terminal.
(Translating from US to UK language) if that means you hadn't actually graduated yet, you'd be very unlikely to find anything interesting. Unless the market is in the jobseeker's favour, it's a long way between having something and saying you're likely to be about to have something.
I have a good GPA and I have been published twice in computer vision research at reasonable conferences
Again, I'm not sure it's relevant except for the springboard. If you want a good commercial research position you need a PhD (or experience), and if you're doing something more hands-on then having been published academically is less likely to be relevant.
At my new school for the PhD I wasn't even offered a TA position which was totally unexpected since I actually am enrolled in doctoral classes right now and, once again, I have a good gpa.
Is it that the subjects in demand are more aligned with other people's qualifications? Is it simply policy to rarely offer TA positions to new entrants? I'd much prefer to offer a teaching job to someone who is known within the community he/she'll be teaching - maybe you need to spend a few months proving yourself. Good grades aren't necessarily indicators of teaching aptitude, and starting out on a first PhD programme necessarily means you're suddenly around people who are similarly skilled - but with as much or more experience in the institution and academic environment.
Right now I have more of a problem then before since part time jobs that are not at a university in my discipline are even rarer.
A family friend who recently completed an PhD in EE spent some free hours taking a job giving tours of an old cinema or something - and, frankly, his English is not very clear! But it was something obscure enough that he wasn't exactly facing much competition, and it simply required general competence. He's done fine academically and has been running around at conferences and eased nicely into a commercial research position - what mattered was the quality of his research, not the part time stuff he messed around with.
Have your own motivation, like being able to pay your rent and bills and feed yourself?
Escape from total destruction, otherwise subtitled Arbeit macht frei, is the worst possible motivation for work. Also, work done out of desperation never sets you free.
The only truly productive motivation for work is enjoyment of the work on offer. There are sufficient resources in the Western world to keep everyone fed and sheltered. Work only needs to be done out of enjoyment, becoming a synonym for productive leisure. The initiation of force by hoarders against people who want access to available resources stops this.
Not enough jobs? Technology is serving its purpose. Cut the working week to four days.
Well, the only jobs "in applied mathematics" are research jobs, so unless you have a PhD, that's what you want to get next.
Otherwise, your applied mathematics is a springboard and you'll need to specialise in some highly numerate skill. There are lots of such jobs, from the obvious teacher/tutor to advisor (lots of commercial and research places need an expert mathematician) to actuary to financial analyst to statistician to *cringe* accountant. But few of these jobs will be attainable unless you go for some specialist training - unless you've been to an Ivy League/Oxbridge, in which case you'll get a job even if you're ignorant of the general field (because it's assumed you'll catch on very quickly, though it's not always true).
No?
I know it's fun to claim that the National Health Service is being privatised - but that doesn't make it true and it's not.
Perhaps when you were studying the government's plans you skipped over the privatisation of management (including resource allocation) and use of private healthcare providers. Worse, perhaps you're so young that you forget what it was like before the proto-marketplace of "trusts".
The NHS is a (1) national (2) health (3) service. Trusts eroded (1) but the GP consortia plan destroys the notion entirely. (3) does not apply if the government merely allocates funds but does not actually provide a service. As for (2), good health is primarily about good nutrition, good sanitation and good observation. They are social goals - the first two countering the "squalor" of Beveridge's five giants, the last countering "ignorance" - not goals for individuals.
There is currently a strong focus in cancer care in the UK on early detection, which saves lives as well as money
There is currently a strong focus on early detection for specific cancers for specific risk groups.
though in some cases aggressive screening programmes have been found to do neither
You're probably thinking of a problem like this one which manifests itself particularly in the fashionable alarm-inducing cancers. Unfortunately, certain groups are misinterpreting (and I use that word inappropriately generously) the problem as being one of too much screening, rather than an understanding that sometimes the best approach is watch and wait rather than immediately aggressively treat. IOW, the aggression is in the response to screening.
Aside from breast, do you have any other "aggressive screening programmes" you have on your mind to criticise?
Buying from a country with fewer freedoms and labour protections than your own is morally equivalent to implementing those conditions in your own country. The moment this fact is codified in some legal principle, the world will be a much better place to live.
Life expectency in the UK is just short of 80.
And, if you ignore deaths of infants and young children, has not increased by much since WW1. We somewhat overestimate the efficacy of modern healthcare at prolonging adult life (though it can do great things for improving quality of life) - the best policies involve mostly simple rules about good nutrition, sanitation and observation.
Yet we are crap at implementing programmes for detecting cancer early. It is only partly a tech problem - the main stumbling block is the requirement for a socialised solution: free and frequent testing. The UK is in the process of privatising its health service, and is pretty much a lost cause if the current coalition government does not collapse.
good fucking riddance to yet more british scum.
When I waved good bye to the Mayflower on that uneventful day in 1620, I just wished them luck and quietly lamented their loss of reason to absurd religious pecadillo.
But I guess there's some value in being blunt.
What is the point of buying out competitors, when their products are not even in the same ballpark of quality?
Because people are paid bonuses, and bonuses are based on short term gains.
This applies to modern capitalism in general.
Sky News is basically a British Fox News - same owner and same agenda - slightly toned down to adjust for the slightly more refined tastes of the British public.
The sad thing is the number of people who whine about Murdoch and his propaganda while still paying him to produce it (via a Sky or newspaper subscription).
If that is the case, then I would prefer it be done with computers and done fairly and uniformly.
The first thing you do with any automated process is learn how to game the system. It's much easier to game a system which relies on simplistic computerised parameters than the thorough review of well-trained humans.
Just as with DRM, or any technical solution to a social problem, only the honest user loses out.
And who do you think builds the software which performs the "automated decision making process"?
Centralisation leads to corruption. All automation does is centralise the decision-making process so the (often intentional) bias of one small, elite group becomes the whole system's prejudice.
It's not that I don't trust computers - any more or less than I "trust" any tool or weapon. It's that I don't trust humans.
Oh great, NASA's turned into another conduit for corporate welfare.
I'm fed up with decisions being made by questionnaires and computers. I think we should stop tolerating analyses of health, fitness, credit, intelligence, etc based on simplistic tests and numbers. The expert system is one of the most horrible simplifications of human judgement ever to grace the confused world of AI, and is almost without exception implemented with some bias to fulfil a pre-determined aim and reinforce some prejudice.
Looking at the flip side, TEPCO are a bunch of lying bastards and a journalist wouldn't be doing his job - or any job at all, really - if all he did was echo their words and not provide any sort of analysis. The Japanese aren't some magical honourable super-race, despite the fantasies of some Japanophiles. They're a bunch of humans and most humans in the shit (especially when they're running big businesses) will lie or mislead no matter where they come from.
Secondly, the tsunami is awful and all, but from the PoV of the BBC's audience - i.e. the world, but predominantly the UK - the outcome of Fukushima is more relevant. A general message of hope from the Emperor to the Japanese people isn't very interesting, but anything he says about Fukushima may be interesting. The Emperor also spends most time not giving speeches at all, but we don't see this non-news reported from time to time across the world.
But, then, despite TEPCO's previous cover-ups and the fact that they understated and underreported events throughout this incident, you say that they had "little reason to lie" and talk about how "lying is much more serious for Japanese people", so I think you already enjoy the prejudice I mentioned above.