Oh please. If Mozilla hired a KKK member for CEO who went around telling everyone that black people should be returned to slavery, and that Mozilla is a KKK backer, would you feel the same way?
Tolerance doesn't mean you need to tolerate intolerant, bigoted people.
And, before anyone pipes up that an individual belief is not the same as a corporate belief, a corporation is made up of humans.
Not exactly. A corporation is a hierarchy, and the CEO is the public face of that corporation. No one cares if some corporation has a janitor who holds questionable views and donates to bigoted causes (and if that became public, the corporation would likely fire the janitor if he was giving them bad press). But the CEO is the voice of the company, so if the CEO is an avowed bigot, then the rest of the company is seen that way too.
And moreover, if Mozilla hired a CEO who said that women shouldn't be allowed to vote, and that black people should be returned to slavery, is it wrong to call for a boycott?
As much as the religionists try to spin it, Prop 8 isn't much different.
I call BS on this. My religious says that unbelievers should be stoned to death. Any laws which punish me for murdering people because I disagree with their religion are denying my religious freedom! (/s)
Yes, but it shows they're both bald-faced liars. The insurance thing, while relatively small, wasn't the only thing Obama lied about. The whole NSA scandal is a much bigger one, and who knows what else he's lied to us about.
What you say about "gratifying work" doesn't just apply to start-ups, it applies to any smaller organization. Generally, the smaller, the more opportunity you have to be integral to the success/failure of the company and have a say in things and do interesting work. You don't have to go for a start-up to get this, just focus on small-to-midsize companies. Not all small companies are start-ups.
So I agree, find a decent company. However, that's MUCH easier said than done. My experience has been that smaller companies generally have more interesting work and you get more influence, but the pay is crap and the work environment is highly variable (some companies are horrible, others are great). Whereas at large corporations, the pay is generally good, and the work environment is predictable (not usually horrible, don't have to worry about harassment, not a lot of weird rules), but the work itself usually sucks, you're just a small cog and your work probably won't amount to anything.
Glassdoor.com can be a good way of seeing what other employees think of a company. I turned down a job interview recently with this after reading about how it was standard practice at this (mid-size) company to have cameras monitoring employees, even monitoring the bathrooms, to see how much time they spent away from their desks.
One thing I've found in the work world that they don't prepare you for at all in college is the work environment. In college, you take CS or engineering classes, and you do the work on your own, frequently in the solitude of your own apartment, or at the library where it's quiet. Then, when it's time for an exam, you take it in the classroom, and talking and discussion and other noises are not allowed. This should all be changed, because it doesn't reflect the modern work environment.
First off, students should be required to do all their programming assignments and exercises together in one large room, at rows of open tables with no dividers between them. A class full of business majors or better yet marketing majors should be brought in and sat right next to them, so they can do their collaborative projects next to the CS/engr majors. The business/marketing majors can talk loudly all they want, and interrupt the CS/engr majors while they're working with various useless comments ("How's it going!"). The CS/engr majors should not be allowed to take their work anywhere else; they have to do it only in this environment.
When it's test time, the test should be held in a busy corridor. Put all the students at long tables together on the side of the corridor, so that all the foot traffic passes right next to them.
If you can't do your programming work with lots of noise and commotion and people talking to you and walking by you constantly, you have NO business being a programmer in today's corporate world where open-plan work areas are now the norm.
Startups are generally known for expecting ridiculously long hours, and then shafting employees when the company hits pay dirt. I don't know why you'd recommend him to go that route.
It isn't just technically true, and it applies to more people than just John Travolta.
Travolta owns a 707 passenger jet. There aren't many private pilots with aircraft this large.
Private pilots also fly multi-engine aircraft that were built in the last five years. If I wanted to, and had the money, I could drop a few million (at least 5.25 according to this [wikipedia.org], and 9-11 pax) on a King Air and fly it as a private pilot.
How many pilots do you know with that kind of cash? And even here, the King Air can probably only hold about a dozen people, not hundreds.
More to the point, how many private pilots own aircraft the size of the 737? Zero?
The private pilot's license does not limit the pilot to "50-year-old Cessnas", and making that kind of statement shows you are ignorant of the reality of general aviation.
If you think the majority of private pilots are flying King Airs, or anything made in the past 5 or 10 years, then you're a complete moron.
The fact that you seem to think that "commercial" flight is limited to "commercial airlines" is also a clear sign of ignorance.
I never said any such thing.
You know them, and that will give you some indication of whether they are casual or rigorous about their standards of maintenance.
I'm sorry, I don't spy on my neighbors and relatives enough to know how they maintain their cars. If you do, then you have some serious issues.
The number of passengers, contrary to what you write, is a huge point. There's a reason bus drivers have totally different licenses and testing/training than cab drivers.
Were there no standards at all, then your point would have some merit.
There ARE no standards at all in most states. If you disagree, then you are woefully ignorant.
Folders are a subset of tagging. You can replicate folder functionality with tagging, but not vice versa. Gmail even has folder hierarchies built-in, using the "/" separator: you can create tags like "Personal/PersonA" and "Personal/PersonB", giving you a "Personal" folder with two sub-folders "PersonA" and "PersonB", and you can expand or collapse that "Person" folder. Of course, it's not really a folder, but you can't tell the difference, except that one email thread can be tagged with both "Personal/PersonA" and "Personal/PersonB" tags, so that that conversation will show up in a search limited to either "folder".
Gmail certainly allowed you to file things, in fact I've been using it that way since the beginning. Gmail did it better, too, since it had tagging instead of regular folders (many times, an email or conversation will apply to more than one of my tags; you can't do that with folders).
The main "killer features" of Gmail when it came out were: 1) tagging instead of folders 2) extremely fast search (keyword here is "fast") 3) message threading/conversations 4) lots of storage space, far far more than competing services
Of course, not all of these are advantages any more; competing services seem to have caught up on #4 for instance.
This is exactly right. Gmail was pretty innovative when it came out (most mailreaders couldn't handle conversation threading then, and tagging is much more useful than folders), but what have they done since then? Nothing really, other that slap an uglier UI on it.
The other responder is correct: this seems to be the new trend in software. Nothing really innovative or better is done much any more, instead features are removed and things are dumbed down, and on top of that UIs have gotten much uglier.
The thing that doesn't make sense here is: why would other companies not want to touch these employees? What time period was this anyway? Yeah, if this all happened during the time when this illegal collusion was going on, I can see how someone at Google wouldn't be able to get interviewed at Apple or vice versa, but there's far more companies out there than that, especially smaller and esp. medium-size companies that pay just fine.
Also, I used to work for Intel, one of the companies who colluded, and I had no trouble at all being recruited while I was still working there, or getting a job elsewhere after I was laid off during their downsizing.
Star Trek explained the changing warp speed and direction bit with "inertial dampers", apparently some sort of force-field, probably the same as the artificial gravity but in other directions besides vertical, used to counteract the huge accelerative forces experienced during maneuvers which would othewise cause people to become splats on the bulkheads.
Tie fighters and X-wing fighters didn't make that much sense, but I believe the official explanation for those was that the wings were necessary for keeping the guns far from the cockpit, though this doesn't explain why the X-wing's wings had to move.
It was explained just fine. They had artificial gravity. They could turn it on and off at will (though it was usually left on); remember in the TNG shuttlecraft bay, there was a big warning that said "Variable Gravity Area".
While "me driving to work" and "me driving someone else to work for compensation" are the same physical actions, they have very different intents and motives, so they are NOT the same.
But they happen on the very same roads, in the very same cars.
As another posted wrote (and I have friends who confirm) - as a private pilot you CANNOT take passengers on flights for compensation, even if you are flying the same aircraft you normally fly alone (or with non-paying passengers).
While technically true perhaps, in reality it isn't unless you're talking about John Travolta. Private pilots fly very small (and comparatively inexpensive) aircraft, like 50-year-old Cessnas, which can't hold more than 4 people (and if you think commercial airline seats are small and uncomfortable, they're positively luxurious compared to the back seats on a Cessna 172). Commercial airlines fly very large and complex modern airplanes such as the Boeing 7[3-8]7 series, with hundreds of passengers. It simply isn't possible, in practice, for a private pilot to have the lives of hundreds of people in his hands.
However, even here there's a big difference. Even the lowly private pilots still have to endure fairly rigorous training and testing, which is quite expensive. The bare minimum for a private pilot is 40 hours of flight time, which costs quite a lot between aircraft rental and instructor pay. Not just any moron can become a private pilot: you have to be able to afford training, and you have to be capable of passing independent FAA examination. And that's just so you can fly some crappy little plane with 4 (very tiny) seats around, because not only can you kill yourself and up to 3 people, you could kill someone on the ground too. Not so with cars. Any complete idiot is allowed to get behind the wheel of any car (without any training at all for that particular model) and drive it anywhere they want to go, with zero real training and zero real testing to show they know how the car works, how to operate it, or how to deal with other drivers on the roads, or if they can even understand the road signs (you don't have to be able to read English to drive, even though the signs are all in English).
As for your point #2, I don't see how it's any different if I hop in my friend's or neighbor's or relative's car as a passenger. I don't actually know that they've been maintaining their car properly. Also, it's pretty unusual for cabs to have more than 2 passengers, and frequently just 1. This isn't like planes at all. There aren't any cabs with 100+ passengers in them. There are buses, but bus drivers have their own special license (just like truck drivers do), and they do have to get special training and testing in order to be a bus driver, which makes sense because they're very large vehicles (just like 777s), holding lots of people (usually several dozen), so that driver has many more lives in his hands, plus his vehicle can do far more damage than a 3000lb car.
So my whole point here is: if we're not going to bother having ANY standards on the roads at all, for our drivers or our cars, then why should cabs?
Cab companies don't generally keep cars around for 20-30 years or more. Yet I see private cars like that all the time. People usually call them "beaters". There's no laws preventing people from driving falling-apart old jalopies. If bad maintenance can can cause an accident, then why aren't jalopies banned or regulated?
As for skimping on maintenance, if a cab company skimps on maintenance, they run the risk of their car not working. A dead car means no fare revenue for every single minute that car is out of service; in effect, it costs them a lot of money to have a car out of service. With private car owners, they can just drive their second car, or take the bus if they really have to. I don't see how the cab company is more likely to skimp on maintenance than regular people.
They may not be subjected to beatings but they are certainly subject to economic ruin if they try to change or improve their station. I've seen it happen. I've seen good engineers leave engineering altogether because they became untouchable simply because of who they once worked for.
A law which is never, ever enforced might as well not exist.
In addition, selective enforcement is morally wrong. Cab companies shouldn't have this law enforced for them without it also being enforced for all other cars.
Apples and oranges. Are you cooking all day, every day, for anyone who wants to stop by, along with a big sign advertising "free food here!!"?
Regular cars operate on the exact same roads that cabs do. Why shouldn't regular cars be subject to the same standards? If a cab has a mechanical failure causing a fatal crash, how is that different than someone's Chevy having a mechanical failure due to poor maintenance causing a crash? So why do private car owners get a pass but the cabs get inspections?
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Oh please. If Mozilla hired a KKK member for CEO who went around telling everyone that black people should be returned to slavery, and that Mozilla is a KKK backer, would you feel the same way?
Tolerance doesn't mean you need to tolerate intolerant, bigoted people.
People like Steve Ballmer are smart enough to not get involved with controversial political issues and polarize customers of his company.
And, before anyone pipes up that an individual belief is not the same as a corporate belief, a corporation is made up of humans.
Not exactly. A corporation is a hierarchy, and the CEO is the public face of that corporation. No one cares if some corporation has a janitor who holds questionable views and donates to bigoted causes (and if that became public, the corporation would likely fire the janitor if he was giving them bad press). But the CEO is the voice of the company, so if the CEO is an avowed bigot, then the rest of the company is seen that way too.
And moreover, if Mozilla hired a CEO who said that women shouldn't be allowed to vote, and that black people should be returned to slavery, is it wrong to call for a boycott?
As much as the religionists try to spin it, Prop 8 isn't much different.
I call BS on this. My religious says that unbelievers should be stoned to death. Any laws which punish me for murdering people because I disagree with their religion are denying my religious freedom! (/s)
Yes, but it shows they're both bald-faced liars. The insurance thing, while relatively small, wasn't the only thing Obama lied about. The whole NSA scandal is a much bigger one, and who knows what else he's lied to us about.
What you say about "gratifying work" doesn't just apply to start-ups, it applies to any smaller organization. Generally, the smaller, the more opportunity you have to be integral to the success/failure of the company and have a say in things and do interesting work. You don't have to go for a start-up to get this, just focus on small-to-midsize companies. Not all small companies are start-ups.
So I agree, find a decent company. However, that's MUCH easier said than done. My experience has been that smaller companies generally have more interesting work and you get more influence, but the pay is crap and the work environment is highly variable (some companies are horrible, others are great). Whereas at large corporations, the pay is generally good, and the work environment is predictable (not usually horrible, don't have to worry about harassment, not a lot of weird rules), but the work itself usually sucks, you're just a small cog and your work probably won't amount to anything.
Glassdoor.com can be a good way of seeing what other employees think of a company. I turned down a job interview recently with this after reading about how it was standard practice at this (mid-size) company to have cameras monitoring employees, even monitoring the bathrooms, to see how much time they spent away from their desks.
One thing I've found in the work world that they don't prepare you for at all in college is the work environment. In college, you take CS or engineering classes, and you do the work on your own, frequently in the solitude of your own apartment, or at the library where it's quiet. Then, when it's time for an exam, you take it in the classroom, and talking and discussion and other noises are not allowed. This should all be changed, because it doesn't reflect the modern work environment.
First off, students should be required to do all their programming assignments and exercises together in one large room, at rows of open tables with no dividers between them. A class full of business majors or better yet marketing majors should be brought in and sat right next to them, so they can do their collaborative projects next to the CS/engr majors. The business/marketing majors can talk loudly all they want, and interrupt the CS/engr majors while they're working with various useless comments ("How's it going!"). The CS/engr majors should not be allowed to take their work anywhere else; they have to do it only in this environment.
When it's test time, the test should be held in a busy corridor. Put all the students at long tables together on the side of the corridor, so that all the foot traffic passes right next to them.
If you can't do your programming work with lots of noise and commotion and people talking to you and walking by you constantly, you have NO business being a programmer in today's corporate world where open-plan work areas are now the norm.
Startups are generally known for expecting ridiculously long hours, and then shafting employees when the company hits pay dirt. I don't know why you'd recommend him to go that route.
Congrats, you've proved that the two aren't really significantly different.
It isn't just technically true, and it applies to more people than just John Travolta.
Travolta owns a 707 passenger jet. There aren't many private pilots with aircraft this large.
Private pilots also fly multi-engine aircraft that were built in the last five years. If I wanted to, and had the money, I could drop a few million (at least 5.25 according to this [wikipedia.org], and 9-11 pax) on a King Air and fly it as a private pilot.
How many pilots do you know with that kind of cash? And even here, the King Air can probably only hold about a dozen people, not hundreds.
More to the point, how many private pilots own aircraft the size of the 737? Zero?
The private pilot's license does not limit the pilot to "50-year-old Cessnas", and making that kind of statement shows you are ignorant of the reality of general aviation.
If you think the majority of private pilots are flying King Airs, or anything made in the past 5 or 10 years, then you're a complete moron.
The fact that you seem to think that "commercial" flight is limited to "commercial airlines" is also a clear sign of ignorance.
I never said any such thing.
You know them, and that will give you some indication of whether they are casual or rigorous about their standards of maintenance.
I'm sorry, I don't spy on my neighbors and relatives enough to know how they maintain their cars. If you do, then you have some serious issues.
The number of passengers, contrary to what you write, is a huge point. There's a reason bus drivers have totally different licenses and testing/training than cab drivers.
Were there no standards at all, then your point would have some merit.
There ARE no standards at all in most states. If you disagree, then you are woefully ignorant.
Folders are a subset of tagging. You can replicate folder functionality with tagging, but not vice versa. Gmail even has folder hierarchies built-in, using the "/" separator: you can create tags like "Personal/PersonA" and "Personal/PersonB", giving you a "Personal" folder with two sub-folders "PersonA" and "PersonB", and you can expand or collapse that "Person" folder. Of course, it's not really a folder, but you can't tell the difference, except that one email thread can be tagged with both "Personal/PersonA" and "Personal/PersonB" tags, so that that conversation will show up in a search limited to either "folder".
Gmail certainly allowed you to file things, in fact I've been using it that way since the beginning. Gmail did it better, too, since it had tagging instead of regular folders (many times, an email or conversation will apply to more than one of my tags; you can't do that with folders).
The main "killer features" of Gmail when it came out were:
1) tagging instead of folders
2) extremely fast search (keyword here is "fast")
3) message threading/conversations
4) lots of storage space, far far more than competing services
Of course, not all of these are advantages any more; competing services seem to have caught up on #4 for instance.
This is exactly right. Gmail was pretty innovative when it came out (most mailreaders couldn't handle conversation threading then, and tagging is much more useful than folders), but what have they done since then? Nothing really, other that slap an uglier UI on it.
The other responder is correct: this seems to be the new trend in software. Nothing really innovative or better is done much any more, instead features are removed and things are dumbed down, and on top of that UIs have gotten much uglier.
The thing that doesn't make sense here is: why would other companies not want to touch these employees? What time period was this anyway? Yeah, if this all happened during the time when this illegal collusion was going on, I can see how someone at Google wouldn't be able to get interviewed at Apple or vice versa, but there's far more companies out there than that, especially smaller and esp. medium-size companies that pay just fine.
Also, I used to work for Intel, one of the companies who colluded, and I had no trouble at all being recruited while I was still working there, or getting a job elsewhere after I was laid off during their downsizing.
Also, 2001 did make an error: when Bowman exited the pod and jumped into the airlock, the pod should have been propelled backwards.
Star Trek explained the changing warp speed and direction bit with "inertial dampers", apparently some sort of force-field, probably the same as the artificial gravity but in other directions besides vertical, used to counteract the huge accelerative forces experienced during maneuvers which would othewise cause people to become splats on the bulkheads.
Tie fighters and X-wing fighters didn't make that much sense, but I believe the official explanation for those was that the wings were necessary for keeping the guns far from the cockpit, though this doesn't explain why the X-wing's wings had to move.
It was explained just fine. They had artificial gravity. They could turn it on and off at will (though it was usually left on); remember in the TNG shuttlecraft bay, there was a big warning that said "Variable Gravity Area".
We could just replace their hearts with artificial models.
No problem, we'll just require everyone to be surgically altered so they can't kick!
While "me driving to work" and "me driving someone else to work for compensation" are the same physical actions, they have very different intents and motives, so they are NOT the same.
But they happen on the very same roads, in the very same cars.
As another posted wrote (and I have friends who confirm) - as a private pilot you CANNOT take passengers on flights for compensation, even if you are flying the same aircraft you normally fly alone (or with non-paying passengers).
While technically true perhaps, in reality it isn't unless you're talking about John Travolta. Private pilots fly very small (and comparatively inexpensive) aircraft, like 50-year-old Cessnas, which can't hold more than 4 people (and if you think commercial airline seats are small and uncomfortable, they're positively luxurious compared to the back seats on a Cessna 172). Commercial airlines fly very large and complex modern airplanes such as the Boeing 7[3-8]7 series, with hundreds of passengers. It simply isn't possible, in practice, for a private pilot to have the lives of hundreds of people in his hands.
However, even here there's a big difference. Even the lowly private pilots still have to endure fairly rigorous training and testing, which is quite expensive. The bare minimum for a private pilot is 40 hours of flight time, which costs quite a lot between aircraft rental and instructor pay. Not just any moron can become a private pilot: you have to be able to afford training, and you have to be capable of passing independent FAA examination. And that's just so you can fly some crappy little plane with 4 (very tiny) seats around, because not only can you kill yourself and up to 3 people, you could kill someone on the ground too. Not so with cars. Any complete idiot is allowed to get behind the wheel of any car (without any training at all for that particular model) and drive it anywhere they want to go, with zero real training and zero real testing to show they know how the car works, how to operate it, or how to deal with other drivers on the roads, or if they can even understand the road signs (you don't have to be able to read English to drive, even though the signs are all in English).
As for your point #2, I don't see how it's any different if I hop in my friend's or neighbor's or relative's car as a passenger. I don't actually know that they've been maintaining their car properly. Also, it's pretty unusual for cabs to have more than 2 passengers, and frequently just 1. This isn't like planes at all. There aren't any cabs with 100+ passengers in them. There are buses, but bus drivers have their own special license (just like truck drivers do), and they do have to get special training and testing in order to be a bus driver, which makes sense because they're very large vehicles (just like 777s), holding lots of people (usually several dozen), so that driver has many more lives in his hands, plus his vehicle can do far more damage than a 3000lb car.
So my whole point here is: if we're not going to bother having ANY standards on the roads at all, for our drivers or our cars, then why should cabs?
Cab companies don't generally keep cars around for 20-30 years or more. Yet I see private cars like that all the time. People usually call them "beaters". There's no laws preventing people from driving falling-apart old jalopies. If bad maintenance can can cause an accident, then why aren't jalopies banned or regulated?
As for skimping on maintenance, if a cab company skimps on maintenance, they run the risk of their car not working. A dead car means no fare revenue for every single minute that car is out of service; in effect, it costs them a lot of money to have a car out of service. With private car owners, they can just drive their second car, or take the bus if they really have to. I don't see how the cab company is more likely to skimp on maintenance than regular people.
They may not be subjected to beatings but they are certainly subject to economic ruin if they try to change or improve their station. I've seen it happen. I've seen good engineers leave engineering altogether because they became untouchable simply because of who they once worked for.
Can you elaborate on this please?
A law which is never, ever enforced might as well not exist.
In addition, selective enforcement is morally wrong. Cab companies shouldn't have this law enforced for them without it also being enforced for all other cars.
Apples and oranges. Are you cooking all day, every day, for anyone who wants to stop by, along with a big sign advertising "free food here!!"?
Regular cars operate on the exact same roads that cabs do. Why shouldn't regular cars be subject to the same standards? If a cab has a mechanical failure causing a fatal crash, how is that different than someone's Chevy having a mechanical failure due to poor maintenance causing a crash? So why do private car owners get a pass but the cabs get inspections?