This is completely unacceptable. We really ought to have laws in place to smack down people that try to use the legal system to suppress protected speech -- this type of prosecution, regardless of the ultimate outcome, causes great harm to the people that are caught up in it.
The crime is called "barratry" and there are numerous state laws as well as the federal SLAPP act.
I'm sure this will get modded down, but I believe the only "fair and just" way to implement a tax is to divide the federal budget by the number of citizens. Everyone pays their fair share and there is no way to dodge it.
That would be fair, but only if the world were fair to start with. That is to say 100% inheritance tax and everyone given an equal share of all wealth at birth. Of course that is impractical, so we try to create a somewhat fair and sustainable system by progressive taxation, where those that make more and have more pay more. This ostensibly prevents the wealth consolidation principal from kicking in so hard all the wealth is owned by a few aristocrats until the peasants revolt and we start the cycle again. Realistically these days the taxation has been shifted such that wealth is constantly consolidating into fewer and fewer hands and is leading towards an inevitable revolution unless corrected (military, political, or economic revolution: the new deal was a revolution of sorts).
You[sic] annual tax bill would be only $4,417.88.
Okay, put on your economist hat. 50% of the citizenry of the US has zero net wealth. Their assets and debts collectively balance out to nothing. Moreover, there is no realistic hope of this changing (as a group) over the course of their lifetimes. Those people pay an effective tax rate of about 5% now and make under $26K. So you just quadrupled their taxes. What do you think is going to happen? 50% of the US is now rapidly racking up debt and being denied loans since the banks know they have no hope of paying them.
What will happen is obvious. They'll pick up guns and knives and clubs and containers of gasoline. They'll murder you and take your stuff. They'll kill the rich and redistribute the wealth, probably in a very inequitable way while creating a new government, likely less stable and less just than the one we have now.
There are several variations that can be made on this tax scheme but it's the only way to ensure taxes are truly "fair and just".
Taxes can only be fair and just in a world that is relatively fair and just. That's not even close to this one. Your scheme is just a pie in the sky road to revolution, suffering, death, and instability.
You can demonstrate to a blind person that a certain wavelength of light, measurable by scientific equipment, can be filtered and that it has different effects upon both manmade and biological sensors. Thus even a blind person can understand and verify the existence of the color red, even if they may not understand the ramifications of how it is perceived by others.
Not even! Without being able to SEE it, you could not demonstrate ANY of that.
You clearly don't know any blind people. They are not as helpless as you seem to imagine. Blind people can set up gear by feel and they can certainly operate much computerized gear using braille boards, screen readers, etc. They don't need a person (and more importantly any specific person) to set up an experiment for them. They can order parts online, stick a red laser in front of a sensor/filter/etc.
Those cynics are idiots. His dividend/capital gains are going to be the same whether he has a salary or not. So yeah, he'd have to pay more taxes if he made more money, but he'd... wait for it... make more money! The cynics are right in cases where the employee takes a salary cut but is instead compensated in some other way which is taxed at a lower level.
Bonuses in shares instead of salary are just such compensation taxed at a very low rate and the employee can borrow against the stocks and still come out ahead of paying taxes. The executive is happy. The bank is happy. The government and the people who expect taxation to be fair and just... screwed.
Then let's use the case of someone who lived in the past assuming that since atoms could not be seen, that they also have no meaning. If anything is clear from science, it's that observation is not required for something to exist. We have ample proof of at least that much.
There are indeed lots of things we can't directly observe with our eyes that are supported by scientific evidence. That doesn't mean there is not scientific evidence and that's the difference here. There is scientific evidence for the existence of atoms and as soon as we started forming hypothesis about atoms and experimenting to provide evidence for or against the hypothesis, belief in atoms ceased to be an irrational belief and became a rational one founded on evidence. As soon as you form a hypothesis about the existence of some god, then perform a repeatable experiment that would falsify that hypothesis, belief in said god also becomes a rational belief. We've had a couple thousand years so far and no one has managed it. Good luck.
Yes, but to an atheist, you can show him a mainliner opium addict being cured of his addiction, but it makes no difference. You can show him a person who was cured of one leg being shorter than another, but he remains blind. You can show him a person who was healed of rage, but the atheist denies it.
Maybe you misunderstand my example. I showed that even a blind person can perceive a wavelength of light using equipment, and observe effects of that wavelength of light, experimenting to perceive differences of that wavelength from others.
What you've mentioned is observing results, which one can tie through experimentation, perhaps, to belief, but not to that actual existence of any god. Can you, through experimentation show that belief in a particular god (as opposed to one of many religions) has positive effects? Can you demonstrate that the god of that religion exists? Can you show scientifically that the effects are derived from the god through hypothesis and experimentation?
It takes faith to be an atheist.
Not really. The null hypothesis cannot be proved. A scientist or logical person does not just believe everything by default. Do you believe there are tiny goblins in your ears that hide if anyone looks? Do you not believe that because you have faith, or do you have another reason?
That's the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. For the atheist, it is an article of faith that there must be no other god, for the atheist himself wants to be that god, and in the end, all that denies him is a threat to his existence.
I could just as easily redefine a christian as, "someone who has an article of faith that not only is there a god, but his name is 'Jeebus' and he will give us dinosaurs some day". Thus you are not a christian. If you insist on redefining generic words it is impossible to have a rational discourse. An atheist is a person who has no belief in a god. That is all.
Until someone documents scientific evidence of a god, belief in a god is not rational. That's fine and we all believe irrational things, but don't deceive yourself about it or try to paint others with a desperate equivocation. And before you try to cite anecdotes as evidence, I mean real, scientific experimentation that would disprove the hypothesis, and is repeatable and stands up to methodological and logical scrutiny. Please apply some logical rigor here.
You talk like to blind person stating that since the colour red cannot be seen, it has no meaning.
You can demonstrate to a blind person that a certain wavelength of light, measurable by scientific equipment, can be filtered and that it has different effects upon both manmade and biological sensors. Thus even a blind person can understand and verify the existence of the color red, even if they may not understand the ramifications of how it is perceived by others.
Wait, this study shows 3.66% crash on launch rate on iOS? I realize maybe my personal experience will not align with the data and all, but I have had iOS crash on me once and six times I've seen apps crash or screw up to the point I had to relaunch them. That is over a period of several years. I'm guessing there is something weird with the methodology here, perhaps not a representative sample? Am I truly that much of an outlier?
The only Office-like tool I still use is Visio. There isn't any substitute for that and I don't see one on the way either.
If you use a Mac, OmniGraffle is much, much nicer its main drawback being, yeah its Mac only. One of the teams I worked with also used a Web based Visio replacement and seemed to like it, although it was software as a service with a subscription.
Older versions of Office can read and write docx, xlsx etc just fine. Head to microsoft.com/downloads and fetch the free Office Compatibility Pack. Done and done. Docx for me has time and again proven more robust than doc, which is why I've started to use it more or less exclusively.
Heh, a manager came to me the other day and said she got another.docx file and asked what she should do. I said, "Open it and see if the formatting is okay". She just laughed and said that course of action NEVER works. She was right too, it was all messed up in Word 2003. I'm not sure why your experience is so diametrically opposed to mine, but it sure seems to be.
Really? Because I have the ancient MS Office 2K and it reads docX just fine with the converter pack which is free. hell I can even save in DocX if I wanted, but I prefer plain old.doc which seems to work on every version I've encountered. I even had to deal with a 6.5Mb doc that had headers, footers, tables and graphs, and we had MS Office 2K, 2K3, 2K7, and the one for the Mac at the time, 2K6 i think.
I'm currently on a project with a lot of paperwork, all in MS Office formats. The main client is using Word 2003 and 2000 and has no choice about it because they are a huge corporation with strict rules. The high priced consulting firm uses Word 2007. The independent contractors have a mishmash of OO/LO versions of word, etc. The regulatory expert is using Word 2000 on a Mac. I have access to all of these versions, albeit across several workstations.
I regularly get.docx files saved out of some version of Word and get to hunt through all the versions for the one that will display it properly because only one will get it close to correct for the numbering, TOC, headers, and page numbers and that is NOT trivial when you're talking about this kind of work. Sometimes, I get versions out of Word 2007 that have been edited in Word 2003 and the only solution we've found is to go back to plain text and start all the formatting again from scratch. The documents are simply so FUBAR we can't fix them. Don't even get me started on the incompatibilities with the Mac versions of Word.
On this project we've mostly pushed for Word 2000.doc format as the most readable across versions, and it is still a pain in the ass, but doable. On a previous project we just said "screw it" and mandated LibreOffice for everyone and gave everyone a copy. One company referred to it as "The compliance documents software" but whatever they didn't have any problems using it. Everything saved in default LO formats and everyone had the same version even across OS's and we had no problems. This saved us a metric crapton of money and time on the project and became my model for good software project planning thereafter.
In previous jobs I had the fun task of maintaining very large documents and let me tell you, Word is by no means sufficient. OO used to be a work around as it would open many that Word failed on (even though they had been created in Word). Very large documents did, and the last time I checked, still do regularly corrupt themselves on save. LibreOffice certainly has problems, but it is our best hope right now to bring real, strong competition into this market. A few corporations contributing could iron out the bugs and suddenly I would have a path to no longer dealing with all of MS's broken, lousy formats, and MS might start making something of quality in order to compete instead of constantly redoing the UI in bizarre, poorly tested ways.
I've found that the LO docs just don't play nice with MS Office and vice versa and when you get your grade dinged because the teacher opens your LO doc and gets word salad or you send in a resume and it gets tossed because of formatting being wonked suddenly that MS Office Student copy don't look so bad.
This is going to happen anyway. You don't know what version of software will be opening your document. It might be LibreOffice or Word 2000 for the Mac or Pages or Google Docs. If you're not using a standard, there is a good chance it will be messed up. Having sorted through at least a hundred resumes over the years, I don't expect them to work properly unless they are PDF.
Oh and before someone uses the "Just send PDF" meme PDF is for PRINTING and most places will file 13 if you send PDF. The software the HR depts use doesn't parse PDF and teachers want to be able to write notes in the doc which cuts PDF right out.
In the real world if and HR department can't open PDFs, I really don't want to work there. If your teacher c
Except that with the other manufacturers, it probably has been a patent cross licensing, something that Apple has refused to do from the start.
Apple does cross license their FRAND patents which are included in the standards. They don't cross license their other patents such as UI and proprietary hardware. That's the whole point, Motorola seems to be trying to use their FRAND patents (which were included in standards only because of their promises) to leverage against Apple to get licensing to patents that aren't part of any standard. It is exactly why there are rules in the first place about how you can use patents once you agree they are to be used in a standard.
FRAND doesn't apply to payments that have been missed.
FRAND applies to licensing costs. Apple claims to have a license for the patents in question through their suppliers, so if anything it then becomes an issue for the courts to decide liability and, potentially, damages, not for a company to retroactively license under terms that contradict their legal and contractual obligations to standards bodies and the EU government.
You use something someone created, you pay them for it. Then why is it when the situation is reversed, Apple says: "F*ck you! I'm going to ban it.". Just makes them seem like hypocrites and frankly, douches.
Do you have any references to Apple refusing to license patents they included in a standard with FRAND promises or trying to charge a competitor a higher rate than other companies?
Okay, They want 2.25% from Apple. How much did they license their patents to other manufacturers for? Since these are FRAND patents they can't charge more than they do competitors in order to try to wring non-FRAND patent licenses out of Apple. So, anyone? Without this information, none of us can have an educated opinion on this topic. Perhaps that is what other companies are paying or perhaps Motorola are trying to abuse the system the way it seems Samsung did.
The problem is that those corporations who have money (I work in such a company) could not be bothered to use resources on development and doing extensive work on specifying improvements or changes.
But those companies do just that when it comes to Apache or SQL or Linux. I've certainly been paid by corporations to make needed improvements to OSS software and lots of staff at corporations spend time working on OSS the company uses.
Those corporations who have money want something that works NOW, not something that (maybe) works in 2 - 3 - 4 years.
And for those companies, the Office license is not a major expense that management will divert attention and resources to save.
MS Office is a significant expense, just not one many major companies or organizations have learned to expunge yet. LibreOffice does work now and many businesses do use it. It simply doesn't have the market yet where the development is shared by enough parties to make it super-cheap and development rapid. That is slowly improving, as noted in the article, but one or two big corporations would really push it over the edge.
Then add that those companies with money also will have the full Microsoft suite like Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync. Not having Office with those would be pretty stupid, as they work best together (yes, you may call it lockin, but I just tell it like it is).
Clearly you are a liar. You used the word "Sharepoint" in conjunction with "works". Seriously though Lots of corporations don't use Exchange. Many do but just as many do not. There are plenty of corporations reliant on OSS servers, Web mail, etc. where Libre Office would not have any compatibility problems with their other, internal systems.
The companies of any size who would want to save money, would do that by using LibreOffice or one of its cousins without paying.
Companies can and do use it without paying, but major corporations sometimes need some improvement and the cost of having a developer helping to guide the project is very small considering the returns are shared across every desktop in the company. It is just like how many companies use Apache without paying, but then some do pay for development because they are a huge user and have needs that others have not already taken care of.
The biggest dealbreaker for me is that LibreOffice will friggin' mulch Office files. I've opened up a.docx with it, modified it, and then saved. What I got was a mess.
I have the same problem with various versions of MS Word. My solution is, sans one client, avoiding the hell out of docx files. They are awful and older versions of Word can't read them either. They are simply a bad idea.
I really think Libre Office could take off and become a huge OSS success story on the order of Webkit or Apache. It just needs a few extremely large installations by companies or organizations with the funding and will to constantly improve it. Just a few major corporations that currently license MS office, dumping Word and moving to Libre Office while still investing say half or a third of the same budget into targeted improvements for their needs would tip the scales.
I find it about on par with MS Office now, which is to say buggy, erratic, unable to consistently read MS Office formats, and with some really poor UI choices. When used only with the native format, however, it pulls ahead and such a course of action is fairly doable at least within a company, whereas it never seems to be with MS Office (someone is always stuck using a different version, even if it is just a Mac version, and then the documents get messy and weird). Also, I really like the PDF editing. I'm surprised no one else has jumped on that particular gem of functionality.
Which again points to an important point about any process you follow: it must match your reality. If you are working in products, you have the luxury to aim for a relatively well defined set of requirements for a given release.
I've worked in product development for over decade. I've never seen well defined requirements for a release that anything like what ended up shipping. You're very right though about Agile and changing requirements. With Agile the "client" is in charge. If they constantly change what they want it will take forever, the same as any other process. Agile doesn't solve that problem, it just makes it transparent to everyone involved. Yep, changing things back, that will take approximately this long, again, on top of the rest of the schedule and pushes completion back into the year 2015. And yes, here is a summary of how many years you wasted and how many taxpayer dollars, overall, we have the figures right here.
How often do you check you mail every day? One of the first things I do at work. Definitely check my email more than once a day.
If you can get people to attend stand-up meeting, why can't you get people to check their email/mailing list for status updates, and to send status updates?
We could, but it takes a lot more time. That is sort of the point, to save time and reduce the clutter caused by traditional IT based communications.
I'm assuming the people you hire can read faster than most people can speak or listen (with actual retention) - which hopefully is true for your team.
With a stand up meeting you know who is there and who is not. You know they are paying attention and not "multitasking". You know everyone will be very brief and not go on and on as some people do in e-mail. You also know when you can meet about the topic with everyone without having to use some time management software to schedule a meeting, everyone can meet NOW right after the stand up without any scheduling cruft.
Most of our team NEVER checks their mail. How much time do you think that saves?
Depends on how you use email. Just like it depends on how you use meetings. After all you could use a very similar statement against meetings: "Most of our team NEVER attend meetings. How much time do you think that saves?".
It saves 15 minutes. Here's an idea, actually keep track of how long you spend in other meetings and checking e-mail, chat, etc. during the day. I haven't seen a study yet that does not award a huge win to the 15 minute stand up. I've certainly done both methods myself and I even advocate for a running chat for the whole team especially with remote team members, but in my experience the stand up has been a HUGE time saving win. Maybe you should try it.
So, as a team lead I KNOW already what the fuck everyone else is doing and during standups, especially in this companies that like to share and get everyone from cross-projects to come join the circle I find myself listening to stuff I already know or don't give a rats ass about.
If you don't give a rat's ass about what people are doing on other projects, ever, you're probably not a very good team lead or developer, but more importantly not a very good co-worker. And even if you know, does that mean everyone else on the project does? Everyone else in the company? Does IT know this afternoon would be the 100% worst time to update the servers? Does the designer doing a videophone assessment with Slovenia know the network is going to be saturated at 2:00?
And if I get an issue, I deal with it then and there not wait for a standup where I can only speak for a short time and not have any papers or screenshots handy.
What if no one on your immediate team or in the building can help just then and you're still researching a solution or a good solution the next day? You don't think opening it up to a larger audience one of whom might know something is a good idea? I've done it.
But what if you got some problem that someone else might know a solution too... THIS NEVER HAPPENS.
This happens to me about once every two weeks in standup.
the rules of the standup (short) prohibit anyone detailing a problem they are having and inviting others to think about a better way to solve it...
You're doing it wrong. In stand up you say you're having a problem with a particular issue and ask others that are good at that topic or who are just waiting on tests to come help you brainstorm it on a whiteboard after the standup.
and basic nature of the adult male does the rest. Have you EVER said during a meeting or standup "gosh, I have this project and it asks me to do X and I wondered if any of you could think with me on this"? Yes, you did? Then hand over you man card right now, you balls will be collected later.
Our team is not all men and I don't think any of us feels like less of a man for pulling the team in for brainstorming. That's how good brainstorming is done, with a group. If you feel you manhood is threatened maybe you should talk to someone or, well man up and get over your fear of talking to people.
another fucking idiotic thing about standing up, how are you supposed to make good readable notes, oh wait most never bother with that, so everything is forgotten and you got to mention it again after the standup
Fucking notes? Its a 15 minute meeting to see if you need to have other meetings and to promote situational awareness, who needs notes? The only note I've ever taken was in my phone and was something like, "team foo is going to bar X tomorrow night at 7, should swing by".
...or it becomes techno babble that confuses anyone who ever had a date.
Do you only know stereotypes or something? Some of the best coders I know are also smooth talkers and go on lots of dates, and they lift weights or enjoy sports or are part time auto-mechanic/bartenders. You need to meet more interesting people.
In your development team, EVERYONE has the same exact skill set, is equally experienced and has the same knowledge of not just the task but the product? How can they then possibly agree on a time?
Again, you're doing it wrong. A consolidated estimate is given to the client, but individual estimates are retained by management who is laying out the plan, so if one pair is really good at something and times are tight, they get that task. On the other hand, if time is not as tight, pairing someone really good at something with someone lacking in that area will slow development in the short term but build the team out to
You are talking like good engineers are growing on trees. In reality they are very hard to find, and they *will* quit on the spot if you pull a stunt like that.
Good. Good engineers are not necessarily good team members. I can teach people to be good engineers a lot more readily than I can teach them to be good team players.
Besides, what is a good reason? A car broken down? A traffic jam? A child who was sick all night? A family problem? A developer who read an important technical book all night and overslept in the morning? A cell phone with a bad battery? Who is there to decide?
The team. The people they work with should be the ones deciding who is hired and who is fired. That is one area where democracy really works well in a dev team.
Performance of employees is a multi-edged graph, of course. One employee may be rude; another is always late; another's code is not even refactorable, let alone compilable. There could be all kinds of problems.
All those things happen. Usually the rude ones are fine so long as they are not mean or abusive. I work with lots of rude people and make allowances. Some are late and that is more of a problem for some people and less for others. It is a team call overall and everyone knows it. The same goes for code quality, enough people are tired of cleaning up after someone's code and they are let go (or not hired in the first place).
Manager's job is quite messy. He has to deal with "human factor" more than he deals with hardware. Engineers will take care of the hardware; the manager's duty is to take care of engineers. Firing them left and right for disrespecting your meeting times will leave you all alone in the department.
Maybe I'm spoiled but while the manager's job is people it is not necessarily the employees. They manage resource planning and client relations and basically are there to make sure the team has what it needs and make sure the clients obey the rules. The team can fire the manager and for that matter the team can fire the client. We've done it before.
It really depends on the team size. You just cannot afford to have a daily stand up meeting, if 20+ people need to report updates everyday. On the other hand, if your team size is small, you are doing it wrong.
If your team is larger than 10 then you are doing it wrong.
We do all company stand up meetings. These meeting one day included both a middle school class in for a tour of the shop and a "regular adult" class learning development techniques. Everyone spoke (50-80 people). The meeting took 16 minutes and was still useful to me.
My current workplace does stand ups and I've become a fan. Lets see if I can answer some of your questions/concerns.
The daily meeting has other advantages:
1. It puts everyone in the same room at the same time and they know what is going on daily. This can stop duplication of effort as sometimes you get multiple requirements across many people but the work is actually nearly the same.
Do you all even talk to each other? Like, getting up and vocalizing rather than fucking off on Facebook all day?
Paired programming, paired design, paired testing, so no, no time on Facebook. Yes, we talk constantly to partners and frequently to the rest of the team, but in an average day you don't have a lot of time to go off task and ask random questions of every single person on every team, especially those out in the field. The stand up lets us know what accounting is doing, what other projects are working on, what team members we don't know are doing, and hell who that guy with the mustache chatting with the CTO is and why he's here.
2. It helps focus on what your tasks are for the day. Let's face it, there are days that you slack off on not because you don't have enough work but because your daily goal wasn't there. A quick meeting where you need to state your goal keeps you honest and helps you know your goal is for the day.
You should probably hire less microcephalics and other unmotivated, underpaid interns to do the actual work.
While your response is rude an insulting, I more or less agree that I don't see it as a motivator or way to keep me from being lazy.
3. It is informal and no notes, nothing gets fixed in stone, allows for more of an honest assessment.
None of you have the balls to say that daily meetings are redundant and stupid, so you're all lazy, underpaid, or dumb.
Redundant with what? I rarely look at my e-mail or go to any other meetings in a day. If I want people to know I'm playing in a punk band at a shithole bar that night and they should stop by and support me, I feel free to do so where I would no in a formal meeting. This builds a sense of community and makes for a stronger team.
4. Team lead is informed on what is going on, and when pressed by management he has the answer.
Why does the lead have to be pressed to know the answer? Once again, your company is full of idiots.
Clearly you've never managed a team of more than four. Knowing every day what subtask every person is working on and how it is going (on time or behind or ahead or needing a scope change) is NOT easy.
5. Simple problems can get solved easier. After the meeting people's schedules can disconnect and it could take days to answer a simple question.
Schedules can disconnect? Anybody who can't walk to another cube and "connect" should be fired.
If you have cubes you're doing it wrong. And it can be difficult to connect with people who are not on site or who have priorities that don't include your task. Disconnecting refers to everyone going their own way UNLESS someone requests their help or they feel they have something to contribute. It lets another short meeting appear that is self organized by the team and does not waste anyone's time.
6. It keeps your team together.
Sure, when the meetings happen because of one idiot's shortcomings and it brings us together to insult the idiot. Shit, son, I think you may be on to something.
You sound very sad. Does someone need a hug? Too bad because your team doesn't care about you because you're rude and insulting and they have no reason or motivation or mechanism to get past that. If only there were a simple, short team building method:)
* I did this yesterday
* I'm doing this today
* Here are my impediments (if any).
If you try and fix problems (impediments) in the stand-up - you're doing it wrong.
If that's all you're doing then it seems a waste of time. That's the sort of thing that would be better off done by getting people to email updates or do something similar.
I think you're missing the point of stand up meetings. You should read some of the studies on them. Stand up meetings are really, really time efficient. How often do you check you mail every day? Most of our team NEVER checks their mail. How much time do you think that saves? The point of a stand up is to stand up. No one wants to stand around so everyone is brief. Everyone tells people what they're doing, what they've done, and if they have needs. You can't imagine the number of times this has saved huge amounts of time on a project.
"Crap I don't know how to do that in Windows," I'll ask at stand up and after someone invariably comes over that knows. Then there are the, "holy crap he's modifying that" moments where you catch an architectural flaw before it becomes an issue. Not to mention the, "She found out the design is changing to incorporate that kind of input, well shit I should probably implement this differently". For 15 minutes a day it removes the need for almost all e-mail and removes the need for numerous meetings that invariable don't have everyone they should while waste the time of someone that shouldn't be there. I've become a huge fan in the last few years. You should really try it, but read about how to do it right first, a strict, short time limit, one person at a time talking, quick and fast information that can lead to collaboration AFTER the meeting. Oh, and it also builds a sense of community where you know everyone and what they look like and what they're doing, even if they're the new guy or the intern or the clients who happen to be on site that day.
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This is completely unacceptable. We really ought to have laws in place to smack down people that try to use the legal system to suppress protected speech -- this type of prosecution, regardless of the ultimate outcome, causes great harm to the people that are caught up in it.
The crime is called "barratry" and there are numerous state laws as well as the federal SLAPP act.
I'm sure this will get modded down, but I believe the only "fair and just" way to implement a tax is to divide the federal budget by the number of citizens. Everyone pays their fair share and there is no way to dodge it.
That would be fair, but only if the world were fair to start with. That is to say 100% inheritance tax and everyone given an equal share of all wealth at birth. Of course that is impractical, so we try to create a somewhat fair and sustainable system by progressive taxation, where those that make more and have more pay more. This ostensibly prevents the wealth consolidation principal from kicking in so hard all the wealth is owned by a few aristocrats until the peasants revolt and we start the cycle again. Realistically these days the taxation has been shifted such that wealth is constantly consolidating into fewer and fewer hands and is leading towards an inevitable revolution unless corrected (military, political, or economic revolution: the new deal was a revolution of sorts).
You[sic] annual tax bill would be only $4,417.88.
Okay, put on your economist hat. 50% of the citizenry of the US has zero net wealth. Their assets and debts collectively balance out to nothing. Moreover, there is no realistic hope of this changing (as a group) over the course of their lifetimes. Those people pay an effective tax rate of about 5% now and make under $26K. So you just quadrupled their taxes. What do you think is going to happen? 50% of the US is now rapidly racking up debt and being denied loans since the banks know they have no hope of paying them.
What will happen is obvious. They'll pick up guns and knives and clubs and containers of gasoline. They'll murder you and take your stuff. They'll kill the rich and redistribute the wealth, probably in a very inequitable way while creating a new government, likely less stable and less just than the one we have now.
There are several variations that can be made on this tax scheme but it's the only way to ensure taxes are truly "fair and just".
Taxes can only be fair and just in a world that is relatively fair and just. That's not even close to this one. Your scheme is just a pie in the sky road to revolution, suffering, death, and instability.
You can demonstrate to a blind person that a certain wavelength of light, measurable by scientific equipment, can be filtered and that it has different effects upon both manmade and biological sensors. Thus even a blind person can understand and verify the existence of the color red, even if they may not understand the ramifications of how it is perceived by others.
Not even! Without being able to SEE it, you could not demonstrate ANY of that.
You clearly don't know any blind people. They are not as helpless as you seem to imagine. Blind people can set up gear by feel and they can certainly operate much computerized gear using braille boards, screen readers, etc. They don't need a person (and more importantly any specific person) to set up an experiment for them. They can order parts online, stick a red laser in front of a sensor/filter/etc.
Those cynics are idiots. His dividend/capital gains are going to be the same whether he has a salary or not. So yeah, he'd have to pay more taxes if he made more money, but he'd... wait for it... make more money! The cynics are right in cases where the employee takes a salary cut but is instead compensated in some other way which is taxed at a lower level.
Bonuses in shares instead of salary are just such compensation taxed at a very low rate and the employee can borrow against the stocks and still come out ahead of paying taxes. The executive is happy. The bank is happy. The government and the people who expect taxation to be fair and just... screwed.
Then let's use the case of someone who lived in the past assuming that since atoms could not be seen, that they also have no meaning. If anything is clear from science, it's that observation is not required for something to exist. We have ample proof of at least that much.
There are indeed lots of things we can't directly observe with our eyes that are supported by scientific evidence. That doesn't mean there is not scientific evidence and that's the difference here. There is scientific evidence for the existence of atoms and as soon as we started forming hypothesis about atoms and experimenting to provide evidence for or against the hypothesis, belief in atoms ceased to be an irrational belief and became a rational one founded on evidence. As soon as you form a hypothesis about the existence of some god, then perform a repeatable experiment that would falsify that hypothesis, belief in said god also becomes a rational belief. We've had a couple thousand years so far and no one has managed it. Good luck.
Yes, but to an atheist, you can show him a mainliner opium addict being cured of his addiction, but it makes no difference. You can show him a person who was cured of one leg being shorter than another, but he remains blind. You can show him a person who was healed of rage, but the atheist denies it.
Maybe you misunderstand my example. I showed that even a blind person can perceive a wavelength of light using equipment, and observe effects of that wavelength of light, experimenting to perceive differences of that wavelength from others.
What you've mentioned is observing results, which one can tie through experimentation, perhaps, to belief, but not to that actual existence of any god. Can you, through experimentation show that belief in a particular god (as opposed to one of many religions) has positive effects? Can you demonstrate that the god of that religion exists? Can you show scientifically that the effects are derived from the god through hypothesis and experimentation?
It takes faith to be an atheist.
Not really. The null hypothesis cannot be proved. A scientist or logical person does not just believe everything by default. Do you believe there are tiny goblins in your ears that hide if anyone looks? Do you not believe that because you have faith, or do you have another reason?
That's the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. For the atheist, it is an article of faith that there must be no other god, for the atheist himself wants to be that god, and in the end, all that denies him is a threat to his existence.
I could just as easily redefine a christian as, "someone who has an article of faith that not only is there a god, but his name is 'Jeebus' and he will give us dinosaurs some day". Thus you are not a christian. If you insist on redefining generic words it is impossible to have a rational discourse. An atheist is a person who has no belief in a god. That is all.
Until someone documents scientific evidence of a god, belief in a god is not rational. That's fine and we all believe irrational things, but don't deceive yourself about it or try to paint others with a desperate equivocation. And before you try to cite anecdotes as evidence, I mean real, scientific experimentation that would disprove the hypothesis, and is repeatable and stands up to methodological and logical scrutiny. Please apply some logical rigor here.
You talk like to blind person stating that since the colour red cannot be seen, it has no meaning.
You can demonstrate to a blind person that a certain wavelength of light, measurable by scientific equipment, can be filtered and that it has different effects upon both manmade and biological sensors. Thus even a blind person can understand and verify the existence of the color red, even if they may not understand the ramifications of how it is perceived by others.
Wait, this study shows 3.66% crash on launch rate on iOS? I realize maybe my personal experience will not align with the data and all, but I have had iOS crash on me once and six times I've seen apps crash or screw up to the point I had to relaunch them. That is over a period of several years. I'm guessing there is something weird with the methodology here, perhaps not a representative sample? Am I truly that much of an outlier?
The only Office-like tool I still use is Visio. There isn't any substitute for that and I don't see one on the way either.
If you use a Mac, OmniGraffle is much, much nicer its main drawback being, yeah its Mac only. One of the teams I worked with also used a Web based Visio replacement and seemed to like it, although it was software as a service with a subscription.
Older versions of Office can read and write docx, xlsx etc just fine. Head to microsoft.com/downloads and fetch the free Office Compatibility Pack. Done and done. Docx for me has time and again proven more robust than doc, which is why I've started to use it more or less exclusively.
Heh, a manager came to me the other day and said she got another .docx file and asked what she should do. I said, "Open it and see if the formatting is okay". She just laughed and said that course of action NEVER works. She was right too, it was all messed up in Word 2003. I'm not sure why your experience is so diametrically opposed to mine, but it sure seems to be.
Really? Because I have the ancient MS Office 2K and it reads docX just fine with the converter pack which is free. hell I can even save in DocX if I wanted, but I prefer plain old .doc which seems to work on every version I've encountered. I even had to deal with a 6.5Mb doc that had headers, footers, tables and graphs, and we had MS Office 2K, 2K3, 2K7, and the one for the Mac at the time, 2K6 i think.
I'm currently on a project with a lot of paperwork, all in MS Office formats. The main client is using Word 2003 and 2000 and has no choice about it because they are a huge corporation with strict rules. The high priced consulting firm uses Word 2007. The independent contractors have a mishmash of OO/LO versions of word, etc. The regulatory expert is using Word 2000 on a Mac. I have access to all of these versions, albeit across several workstations.
I regularly get .docx files saved out of some version of Word and get to hunt through all the versions for the one that will display it properly because only one will get it close to correct for the numbering, TOC, headers, and page numbers and that is NOT trivial when you're talking about this kind of work. Sometimes, I get versions out of Word 2007 that have been edited in Word 2003 and the only solution we've found is to go back to plain text and start all the formatting again from scratch. The documents are simply so FUBAR we can't fix them. Don't even get me started on the incompatibilities with the Mac versions of Word.
On this project we've mostly pushed for Word 2000 .doc format as the most readable across versions, and it is still a pain in the ass, but doable. On a previous project we just said "screw it" and mandated LibreOffice for everyone and gave everyone a copy. One company referred to it as "The compliance documents software" but whatever they didn't have any problems using it. Everything saved in default LO formats and everyone had the same version even across OS's and we had no problems. This saved us a metric crapton of money and time on the project and became my model for good software project planning thereafter.
In previous jobs I had the fun task of maintaining very large documents and let me tell you, Word is by no means sufficient. OO used to be a work around as it would open many that Word failed on (even though they had been created in Word). Very large documents did, and the last time I checked, still do regularly corrupt themselves on save. LibreOffice certainly has problems, but it is our best hope right now to bring real, strong competition into this market. A few corporations contributing could iron out the bugs and suddenly I would have a path to no longer dealing with all of MS's broken, lousy formats, and MS might start making something of quality in order to compete instead of constantly redoing the UI in bizarre, poorly tested ways.
I've found that the LO docs just don't play nice with MS Office and vice versa and when you get your grade dinged because the teacher opens your LO doc and gets word salad or you send in a resume and it gets tossed because of formatting being wonked suddenly that MS Office Student copy don't look so bad.
This is going to happen anyway. You don't know what version of software will be opening your document. It might be LibreOffice or Word 2000 for the Mac or Pages or Google Docs. If you're not using a standard, there is a good chance it will be messed up. Having sorted through at least a hundred resumes over the years, I don't expect them to work properly unless they are PDF.
Oh and before someone uses the "Just send PDF" meme PDF is for PRINTING and most places will file 13 if you send PDF. The software the HR depts use doesn't parse PDF and teachers want to be able to write notes in the doc which cuts PDF right out.
In the real world if and HR department can't open PDFs, I really don't want to work there. If your teacher c
Except that with the other manufacturers, it probably has been a patent cross licensing, something that Apple has refused to do from the start.
Apple does cross license their FRAND patents which are included in the standards. They don't cross license their other patents such as UI and proprietary hardware. That's the whole point, Motorola seems to be trying to use their FRAND patents (which were included in standards only because of their promises) to leverage against Apple to get licensing to patents that aren't part of any standard. It is exactly why there are rules in the first place about how you can use patents once you agree they are to be used in a standard.
FRAND doesn't apply to payments that have been missed.
FRAND applies to licensing costs. Apple claims to have a license for the patents in question through their suppliers, so if anything it then becomes an issue for the courts to decide liability and, potentially, damages, not for a company to retroactively license under terms that contradict their legal and contractual obligations to standards bodies and the EU government.
You use something someone created, you pay them for it. Then why is it when the situation is reversed, Apple says: "F*ck you! I'm going to ban it.". Just makes them seem like hypocrites and frankly, douches.
Do you have any references to Apple refusing to license patents they included in a standard with FRAND promises or trying to charge a competitor a higher rate than other companies?
Okay, They want 2.25% from Apple. How much did they license their patents to other manufacturers for? Since these are FRAND patents they can't charge more than they do competitors in order to try to wring non-FRAND patent licenses out of Apple. So, anyone? Without this information, none of us can have an educated opinion on this topic. Perhaps that is what other companies are paying or perhaps Motorola are trying to abuse the system the way it seems Samsung did.
The problem is that those corporations who have money (I work in such a company) could not be bothered to use resources on development and doing extensive work on specifying improvements or changes.
But those companies do just that when it comes to Apache or SQL or Linux. I've certainly been paid by corporations to make needed improvements to OSS software and lots of staff at corporations spend time working on OSS the company uses.
Those corporations who have money want something that works NOW, not something that (maybe) works in 2 - 3 - 4 years. And for those companies, the Office license is not a major expense that management will divert attention and resources to save.
MS Office is a significant expense, just not one many major companies or organizations have learned to expunge yet. LibreOffice does work now and many businesses do use it. It simply doesn't have the market yet where the development is shared by enough parties to make it super-cheap and development rapid. That is slowly improving, as noted in the article, but one or two big corporations would really push it over the edge.
Then add that those companies with money also will have the full Microsoft suite like Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync. Not having Office with those would be pretty stupid, as they work best together (yes, you may call it lockin, but I just tell it like it is).
Clearly you are a liar. You used the word "Sharepoint" in conjunction with "works". Seriously though Lots of corporations don't use Exchange. Many do but just as many do not. There are plenty of corporations reliant on OSS servers, Web mail, etc. where Libre Office would not have any compatibility problems with their other, internal systems.
The companies of any size who would want to save money, would do that by using LibreOffice or one of its cousins without paying.
Companies can and do use it without paying, but major corporations sometimes need some improvement and the cost of having a developer helping to guide the project is very small considering the returns are shared across every desktop in the company. It is just like how many companies use Apache without paying, but then some do pay for development because they are a huge user and have needs that others have not already taken care of.
The biggest dealbreaker for me is that LibreOffice will friggin' mulch Office files. I've opened up a .docx with it, modified it, and then saved. What I got was a mess.
I have the same problem with various versions of MS Word. My solution is, sans one client, avoiding the hell out of docx files. They are awful and older versions of Word can't read them either. They are simply a bad idea.
I really think Libre Office could take off and become a huge OSS success story on the order of Webkit or Apache. It just needs a few extremely large installations by companies or organizations with the funding and will to constantly improve it. Just a few major corporations that currently license MS office, dumping Word and moving to Libre Office while still investing say half or a third of the same budget into targeted improvements for their needs would tip the scales.
I find it about on par with MS Office now, which is to say buggy, erratic, unable to consistently read MS Office formats, and with some really poor UI choices. When used only with the native format, however, it pulls ahead and such a course of action is fairly doable at least within a company, whereas it never seems to be with MS Office (someone is always stuck using a different version, even if it is just a Mac version, and then the documents get messy and weird). Also, I really like the PDF editing. I'm surprised no one else has jumped on that particular gem of functionality.
Which again points to an important point about any process you follow: it must match your reality. If you are working in products, you have the luxury to aim for a relatively well defined set of requirements for a given release.
I've worked in product development for over decade. I've never seen well defined requirements for a release that anything like what ended up shipping. You're very right though about Agile and changing requirements. With Agile the "client" is in charge. If they constantly change what they want it will take forever, the same as any other process. Agile doesn't solve that problem, it just makes it transparent to everyone involved. Yep, changing things back, that will take approximately this long, again, on top of the rest of the schedule and pushes completion back into the year 2015. And yes, here is a summary of how many years you wasted and how many taxpayer dollars, overall, we have the figures right here.
How often do you check you mail every day? One of the first things I do at work. Definitely check my email more than once a day.
If you can get people to attend stand-up meeting, why can't you get people to check their email/mailing list for status updates, and to send status updates?
We could, but it takes a lot more time. That is sort of the point, to save time and reduce the clutter caused by traditional IT based communications.
I'm assuming the people you hire can read faster than most people can speak or listen (with actual retention) - which hopefully is true for your team.
With a stand up meeting you know who is there and who is not. You know they are paying attention and not "multitasking". You know everyone will be very brief and not go on and on as some people do in e-mail. You also know when you can meet about the topic with everyone without having to use some time management software to schedule a meeting, everyone can meet NOW right after the stand up without any scheduling cruft.
Most of our team NEVER checks their mail. How much time do you think that saves?
Depends on how you use email. Just like it depends on how you use meetings. After all you could use a very similar statement against meetings: "Most of our team NEVER attend meetings. How much time do you think that saves?".
It saves 15 minutes. Here's an idea, actually keep track of how long you spend in other meetings and checking e-mail, chat, etc. during the day. I haven't seen a study yet that does not award a huge win to the 15 minute stand up. I've certainly done both methods myself and I even advocate for a running chat for the whole team especially with remote team members, but in my experience the stand up has been a HUGE time saving win. Maybe you should try it.
So, as a team lead I KNOW already what the fuck everyone else is doing and during standups, especially in this companies that like to share and get everyone from cross-projects to come join the circle I find myself listening to stuff I already know or don't give a rats ass about.
If you don't give a rat's ass about what people are doing on other projects, ever, you're probably not a very good team lead or developer, but more importantly not a very good co-worker. And even if you know, does that mean everyone else on the project does? Everyone else in the company? Does IT know this afternoon would be the 100% worst time to update the servers? Does the designer doing a videophone assessment with Slovenia know the network is going to be saturated at 2:00?
And if I get an issue, I deal with it then and there not wait for a standup where I can only speak for a short time and not have any papers or screenshots handy.
What if no one on your immediate team or in the building can help just then and you're still researching a solution or a good solution the next day? You don't think opening it up to a larger audience one of whom might know something is a good idea? I've done it.
But what if you got some problem that someone else might know a solution too... THIS NEVER HAPPENS.
This happens to me about once every two weeks in standup.
the rules of the standup (short) prohibit anyone detailing a problem they are having and inviting others to think about a better way to solve it...
You're doing it wrong. In stand up you say you're having a problem with a particular issue and ask others that are good at that topic or who are just waiting on tests to come help you brainstorm it on a whiteboard after the standup.
and basic nature of the adult male does the rest. Have you EVER said during a meeting or standup "gosh, I have this project and it asks me to do X and I wondered if any of you could think with me on this"? Yes, you did? Then hand over you man card right now, you balls will be collected later.
Our team is not all men and I don't think any of us feels like less of a man for pulling the team in for brainstorming. That's how good brainstorming is done, with a group. If you feel you manhood is threatened maybe you should talk to someone or, well man up and get over your fear of talking to people.
another fucking idiotic thing about standing up, how are you supposed to make good readable notes, oh wait most never bother with that, so everything is forgotten and you got to mention it again after the standup
Fucking notes? Its a 15 minute meeting to see if you need to have other meetings and to promote situational awareness, who needs notes? The only note I've ever taken was in my phone and was something like, "team foo is going to bar X tomorrow night at 7, should swing by".
...or it becomes techno babble that confuses anyone who ever had a date.
Do you only know stereotypes or something? Some of the best coders I know are also smooth talkers and go on lots of dates, and they lift weights or enjoy sports or are part time auto-mechanic/bartenders. You need to meet more interesting people.
In your development team, EVERYONE has the same exact skill set, is equally experienced and has the same knowledge of not just the task but the product? How can they then possibly agree on a time?
Again, you're doing it wrong. A consolidated estimate is given to the client, but individual estimates are retained by management who is laying out the plan, so if one pair is really good at something and times are tight, they get that task. On the other hand, if time is not as tight, pairing someone really good at something with someone lacking in that area will slow development in the short term but build the team out to
You are late. Have a good reason? No? FIRED!
You are talking like good engineers are growing on trees. In reality they are very hard to find, and they *will* quit on the spot if you pull a stunt like that.
Good. Good engineers are not necessarily good team members. I can teach people to be good engineers a lot more readily than I can teach them to be good team players.
Besides, what is a good reason? A car broken down? A traffic jam? A child who was sick all night? A family problem? A developer who read an important technical book all night and overslept in the morning? A cell phone with a bad battery? Who is there to decide?
The team. The people they work with should be the ones deciding who is hired and who is fired. That is one area where democracy really works well in a dev team.
Performance of employees is a multi-edged graph, of course. One employee may be rude; another is always late; another's code is not even refactorable, let alone compilable. There could be all kinds of problems.
All those things happen. Usually the rude ones are fine so long as they are not mean or abusive. I work with lots of rude people and make allowances. Some are late and that is more of a problem for some people and less for others. It is a team call overall and everyone knows it. The same goes for code quality, enough people are tired of cleaning up after someone's code and they are let go (or not hired in the first place).
Manager's job is quite messy. He has to deal with "human factor" more than he deals with hardware. Engineers will take care of the hardware; the manager's duty is to take care of engineers. Firing them left and right for disrespecting your meeting times will leave you all alone in the department.
Maybe I'm spoiled but while the manager's job is people it is not necessarily the employees. They manage resource planning and client relations and basically are there to make sure the team has what it needs and make sure the clients obey the rules. The team can fire the manager and for that matter the team can fire the client. We've done it before.
It really depends on the team size. You just cannot afford to have a daily stand up meeting, if 20+ people need to report updates everyday. On the other hand, if your team size is small, you are doing it wrong.
If your team is larger than 10 then you are doing it wrong.
We do all company stand up meetings. These meeting one day included both a middle school class in for a tour of the shop and a "regular adult" class learning development techniques. Everyone spoke (50-80 people). The meeting took 16 minutes and was still useful to me.
My current workplace does stand ups and I've become a fan. Lets see if I can answer some of your questions/concerns.
The daily meeting has other advantages: 1. It puts everyone in the same room at the same time and they know what is going on daily. This can stop duplication of effort as sometimes you get multiple requirements across many people but the work is actually nearly the same.
Do you all even talk to each other? Like, getting up and vocalizing rather than fucking off on Facebook all day?
Paired programming, paired design, paired testing, so no, no time on Facebook. Yes, we talk constantly to partners and frequently to the rest of the team, but in an average day you don't have a lot of time to go off task and ask random questions of every single person on every team, especially those out in the field. The stand up lets us know what accounting is doing, what other projects are working on, what team members we don't know are doing, and hell who that guy with the mustache chatting with the CTO is and why he's here.
2. It helps focus on what your tasks are for the day. Let's face it, there are days that you slack off on not because you don't have enough work but because your daily goal wasn't there. A quick meeting where you need to state your goal keeps you honest and helps you know your goal is for the day.
You should probably hire less microcephalics and other unmotivated, underpaid interns to do the actual work.
While your response is rude an insulting, I more or less agree that I don't see it as a motivator or way to keep me from being lazy.
3. It is informal and no notes, nothing gets fixed in stone, allows for more of an honest assessment.
None of you have the balls to say that daily meetings are redundant and stupid, so you're all lazy, underpaid, or dumb.
Redundant with what? I rarely look at my e-mail or go to any other meetings in a day. If I want people to know I'm playing in a punk band at a shithole bar that night and they should stop by and support me, I feel free to do so where I would no in a formal meeting. This builds a sense of community and makes for a stronger team.
4. Team lead is informed on what is going on, and when pressed by management he has the answer.
Why does the lead have to be pressed to know the answer? Once again, your company is full of idiots.
Clearly you've never managed a team of more than four. Knowing every day what subtask every person is working on and how it is going (on time or behind or ahead or needing a scope change) is NOT easy.
5. Simple problems can get solved easier. After the meeting people's schedules can disconnect and it could take days to answer a simple question.
Schedules can disconnect? Anybody who can't walk to another cube and "connect" should be fired.
If you have cubes you're doing it wrong. And it can be difficult to connect with people who are not on site or who have priorities that don't include your task. Disconnecting refers to everyone going their own way UNLESS someone requests their help or they feel they have something to contribute. It lets another short meeting appear that is self organized by the team and does not waste anyone's time.
6. It keeps your team together.
Sure, when the meetings happen because of one idiot's shortcomings and it brings us together to insult the idiot. Shit, son, I think you may be on to something.
You sound very sad. Does someone need a hug? Too bad because your team doesn't care about you because you're rude and insulting and they have no reason or motivation or mechanism to get past that. If only there were a simple, short team building method :)
* I did this yesterday * I'm doing this today * Here are my impediments (if any). If you try and fix problems (impediments) in the stand-up - you're doing it wrong.
If that's all you're doing then it seems a waste of time. That's the sort of thing that would be better off done by getting people to email updates or do something similar.
I think you're missing the point of stand up meetings. You should read some of the studies on them. Stand up meetings are really, really time efficient. How often do you check you mail every day? Most of our team NEVER checks their mail. How much time do you think that saves? The point of a stand up is to stand up. No one wants to stand around so everyone is brief. Everyone tells people what they're doing, what they've done, and if they have needs. You can't imagine the number of times this has saved huge amounts of time on a project.
"Crap I don't know how to do that in Windows," I'll ask at stand up and after someone invariably comes over that knows. Then there are the, "holy crap he's modifying that" moments where you catch an architectural flaw before it becomes an issue. Not to mention the, "She found out the design is changing to incorporate that kind of input, well shit I should probably implement this differently". For 15 minutes a day it removes the need for almost all e-mail and removes the need for numerous meetings that invariable don't have everyone they should while waste the time of someone that shouldn't be there. I've become a huge fan in the last few years. You should really try it, but read about how to do it right first, a strict, short time limit, one person at a time talking, quick and fast information that can lead to collaboration AFTER the meeting. Oh, and it also builds a sense of community where you know everyone and what they look like and what they're doing, even if they're the new guy or the intern or the clients who happen to be on site that day.