but I still don't understand why people think that Cascading Style Sheets should be used for layout.
It may have something to do with a standard called CSS-P where the P stands for Positional. Weirdest thing, you tell people they can position things and they go all nuts about wanting to, you know, position things.
SD DVR: 40GB HD DVR: 160GB with SATA connector and instructions for hooking up your own HD.
Even if you're actually only watching SD programming on your second box, you get four times the capacity from the HD version plus the inputs to hook up your own SATA drive.
Curiously, when I got my second box last summer, I was told that they were under orders to only give out one per household. I had to fake alarm that my [non-existant] second HD TV would be useless unless I changed to DirectTV and even then they were reluctant to hand over the second box.
This is a joke based on an old anti-Paper troll that used to get posted here on/. a whole lot back in the day by Galileo Galilee (account number 37).
This should be +funny, but I guess a lot of people don't get the joke anymore and think you're serious. Here's the Original BTW:
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you paper fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a piece of paper for about 20 minutes now while I attempt to copy a 17 point annotated image of an ornithopter from one page on the easel to another. 20 minutes. At home, on my papyrus on a simple slanted desk, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this paper, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this image transfer, Guttenberg's press will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even tic-tac-toe is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various pieces of paper, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a paper that has run faster than its papyrus counterpart, despite the paper's higher linen content architecture. My clay tablet with week old clay runs faster than this paper at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that paper is a superior medium.
Paper addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use paper over other faster, cheaper, more stable mediums.
The authentication will be a problem of course; it means I will not be able to make an anonymous purchase on the web - something that people are quite reasonably concerned about being able to do.
Congratulations. You've just admitted to/. that your music collection consists of Kevin Federline's rap and Jessia Simpson videos with the sound turned off. I don't know whether to pity you or take a hot shower with a wire brush to get the ew off.
So, hypothetically, if I had this friend and this friend was having, you know, problems performing... in the uh, bedroom... what would you suggest this friend, hypothetically, did about it?
An interesting tidbit in the article is that the rail gun is only expected to fire ten times or less per day, presumably because of the amount of electricity needed.
If only we knew when lightning was due to strike some sort of a clock tower? Surely, then, we could harness the power needed.
If that doesn't work, perhaps some new technology involving trash?
First, if it was really OSX, why would they need Google's help to implement Google Maps? It would just run.
A version of Google Maps would run. It'd run just like it does on the Mac. You'll notice the Mac version tends not to do things like run full screen without chrome, doesn't pull up a virtual keyboard for text entry, doesn't handle multiple pointer locations for things like fingers moving together or apart to zoom in/out and certainly doesn't make the Mac dial stores you've just searched for.
They need Google's help to do all of the above. Even if the code base was the same, they'd need Google's help to implement hardware specific features.
"This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children..."
One porn site moves to the.xxx domain.
A parent blocks.xxx domains.
That's one more site than would be blocked otherwise. Thus, by definition, easier. Not perfect but better than not at all.
Most porn sites really don't want kids hitting them up - they just suck bandwidth and don't have credit cards to convert in to paying subscribers anyway. If sites like playboy.com then become simple redirects over - with.xxx blocked PCs unable to make the redirect - it does cut down on the number of ways a kid can stumble across porn and thus, even if not perfect, it does make it easier for parents to limit access.
Seatbelts don't prevent car accidents. They don't even save all lives in cars that have accidents. But they do still make surviving "easier". Just because something's not perfect doesn't mean it's not an improvement. The same holds true for.xxx as a tool for limiting porn access.
Our brick and mortar business went through exactly the same thing. Henry bloody Ford and his evil empire released their latest and greatest product on consumers and it really screwed us businesses that had hitching posts and stables.
One of the worst things about "Model T" was that it belched out carbon monoxide. Seriously! Compare this to a horse where the worst you have to worry about is methane! For brick and mortar store owners who didn't want to pay once again to upgrade from barns for their customers, this caused all kinds of ventilation issues. People could actually die from this stuff!
Some people say that keeping up with the times is part of the cost of doing business. But where will it end?!
As a PC gamer from way back, it's curious to see how the "comeback" year has changed.
It used to be that the PC was generally a couple of years behind consoles in power. This made sense because the average PC spec had to accomodate people that hadn't upgraded whereas each new console itteration would reset the bar.
For the first year of a console's life, it was undisputedly more powerful than a PC and it's games were undeniably better. During the second year, it held the lead over PCs because, even though quite a few people had more powerful systems, games weren't able to expect them yet. By about the third or fourth year, the average PC had caught up, was at least as powerful if not more powerful, games were taking advantage of it and it was taking the lead. By the final year of a console itteration, the PC was now fairly significantly more powerful and held the lead by a good margin - which it promptly lost with the next release cycle a year later.
Thus it was with the NES, SNES, PS1 and PS2/XBox generations.
The interesting thing has been the effect of add in gaming graphics cards. Circa NES/SNES and even PS1 to a degree, there was an incremental step from 386 to 486 to earlier pentiums and from EGA to VGA to SVGA to the early 3DFX cards. In those days, PC gamers couldn't disperse that far from the mid point and games didn't have that much potential to vary for different system specs.
By the PS2/XBox launch of five years ago, just about every gamer was running a GeForce or better card which allowed games companies to make games much more scalable to different hardware setups. The XBox could have great hardware (NV2A) but the GeForce 3 (NV20) had already been in gamers hands for six months and the GeForce 4 (NV25) followed within three or four months. Almost right away, the richest gamers could have just as powerful hardware and so mainstream PC games caught the technical lead up within a year.
With the PS3/XBox360, undeniably exciting things are happening with the processors. The interesting thing is that no one seems to have really figured out how to write good multi-threaded code for the XBox's three processors - let alone the PS3's 7. In the year they've been working that out on the 360, almost every home gamer has a dual core system and quad cores are already an option. Add in DirectX 10 cards with their relative speed boosts and it's little wonder PCs have closed the gap to the point where they easily matched the 360's launch and can handle going up against the PS3's launch year.
Yes, a pair of $600 graphics cards and a $1,000 processor in a $3,500 gaming rig is still WAY more than a console. The curious thing is that $300 graphics cards and a $300 processor in a $1,000 rig now have most of that power whilst a new console has gone up from $200 to $400 to $600 and availability problems in the first six months likely mean you'll pay over the cost of the $1,000 PC to get a console on EBay anyway.
Powerwise, the war's over. Of course one problem remains: we get to see if PC game makers can harness all that power and compete against the simple ease of installation/use of the consoles.
It should be an interesting year: Now the playing field's equal in terms of power, can the flexibility of PCs along with their availability vs. limited console releases allow them to finally take over?
The company has apparently doubled in size in each of the last three years.
The company boasts that only 4 percent of its work force leaves each year, less than other Silicon Valley companies.
Let's think about this for a moment:
4% of current numbers leave each year.
Except the overal job pool was only half that size a year ago... So 8% turnover in a year relative to the size of company it was at the start of the year?
Go back two years and it was half the size again... So 16% turnover relative to the number of people that were there only two years earlier?
And they say it's doubled every one of the last three years so we know 4% of current numbers is actually relative to 32% of all those who were actually there three years ago.
Now, to be fair, not everyone necessarily stays a full three years. So maybe half of the last year's 4% (making 2%) is people who were hired within the last three years and the other 2% is people who were hired at least three years ago (when the pool size was 1/8th current levels). So we're looking at, what 16% turnover for people who've been there 3+ years as well as those who simply didn't make three years.
Sure, these numbers are pulled out of my ass. They still illustrate that the stellar 4% turnover claim really isn't worth that much when you're conveniently glossing over 50% of the people here this year haven't even put in a full year's work yet, 75% haven't put in two years and almost 90% haven't yet been there for three years - about the time most people with an eye on their careers and wanting to avoid a reputation as job hoppers would consider looking anyway. All of a sudden, that 4% really isn't much to boast about.
If you think about it, it's a lot like failing to grasp compound interest. Maybe they should ask simpler questions in their intereviews rather than the legendary entertainingly abstract ones that evidently miss out on basics.;)
Thirty-one percent of respondents reported that their employee gave them the "silent treatment" in the past year.
Thirty-seven percent reported that their employee failed to give credit when due.
Thirty-nine percent noted that their employee failed to keep promises.
Twenty-seven percent noted that their employee made negative comments about them to other employees or managers.
Twenty-four percent reported that their employee invaded their privacy.
Twenty-three percent indicated that their employee blames others to cover up mistakes or to minimize embarrassment.
The truth is, we're all like that.
I'm pretty certain everyone has experienced a boss not give them credit where it's due - and I'm pertty certain, whether we want to admit it or even recognize it ourselves, others have complained about us doing exactly the same.
Bosses fail to keep promises? And no employee has ever failed to deliver a project they swore they'd deliver? They've never cut corners on something they promised would be thorough?
Bosses make negative comments to other colleagues? How dare they? Don't they realize that no employee has ever bitched about the boss?
The sad truth is: we all do things that people consider negative. It's not a boss quirk, it's not an employee quirk, it's a human quirk.
Then again, it's always easier to judge others than look at ourselves.
Another great set of films to have its legacy tarnished by trying to cash in on it one... last... time...
It can be avoided.
Crazy at it may sound, just about every review of Rocky Balboa observes that it's easily the best since the original. OK, not as good as the original but still one to improve the legacy overall and not detract from it.
The secret appears to be:
Act with respect to the legacy of what's gone before.
Respect that the character has aged and tell an appropriate story to that aging
Dispense with the substanceless formulaic elements previous sequels relied upon unless they actually bring new substance.
If Sylvester Stallone is smart enough to figure out how to do it, we can but hope Spielberg is.
Then again, maybe we'll just be confronted with Indy holding a cellphone instead of a whip. *mutter*ET*mutter*
Zeropaid is reporting that as part of its ongoing lawsuit, the RIAA will be seeking the maximum of $150,000 per song for each of the 11 million MP3s downloaded from the Russian AllofMP3.com between June and October last year. This amounts to roughly $1.65 trillion, probably a tad more than AllofMP3 has made in its lifetime.
Everyone gets their panties all caught up over how the amount concerned is ridiculous. There's a simple reason why it's supposed to be ridiculous. I'll see if I can explain.
Say you could commit a crime (let's not debate whether it should be a crime, that's a whole other debate). Say the crime allows you to profit by $1,000 and the risk of getting caught is 20%.
Now let's assume that you're only allowed to be sued for the profits you've made.
One guy is essentially back where he started. It sucks but no great loss. Four other guys are $1,000 up.
The simple mathematician in me says this beats the hell out of Vegas. 20% chance of losing nothing more than what I got from it, 80% chance of keeping my money... Statistically, if I do this enough times, I'll make $800 for every infraction.
People play games at Vegas because sometimes they win many times what they put in, many times they lose, but the chance is enough even if they lose very slightly more than they put in on average. Statistically they know they'll lose overall but they'll take the risk for the big win.
In the above 20%/80% model, you're not even going to lose overall. You're going to win overall and you'll never lose more than you get from it. That's a pretty awesome deal.
So, without arguing whether a given act should be illegal or not, accepting that it is: Simply taking away the benefit of commiting the act, with anything less than a 100% success rate in apprehension, means you've created a model where it's statistically profitable and are, effectively, encouraging it.
How do you discourage it? By making the cost punative.
In this new model, say you only have a 5% chance of being caught but, upon being caught, you lose thirty times what you gained, anyone with a grasp of statistics will realize the average attempt will cost them 150% of what they gain, making it not worthwhile and hence discouraged.
Of course this assumes that people are smart and, as Vegas proves, they're not - most people will take odds where they lose overall if they figure there's a good chance of sometimes coming out on top.
This is the problem with speeding tickets ($100 or $1000, it's semi meaningless if people know that 999 times out of 1,000 they'll get away with it - the large fine just feels unfair at that point as it's something they never really considered they'd be lumbered with).
This is also the problem with the RIAA file sharing lawsuits. $4,000 for one in a hundred thousand violators is just random unfairness. A $100 fine, if you knew you'd absolutely get hammered with it the moment you committed the act, would be far more effective at discouraging people. Not understanding how human minds work means they keep on being perceived as unfair as opposed to changing perception of the act to a bad idea.
Still, accepting they are going after businesses with things like the $150,000 fine, and not individuals, it does shift somewhat back to the statistical effect model. $150,000 per violation seems ridiculous but the whole point is to make it absolutely clear, "If we get you, we won't just take what you've made but we'll take everything you've ever made, will ever make, your investors have ever made and anything associated with it. Still want to play?" It's not supposed to be fair - it's supposed to somewhat balance out the statistical chance of getting away with it.
Curiously, we bitch when we perceive those suing as evil and yet we bitch when large corporations play those same odds. Take a car company that knows it can pay $2m per case to settle 100 fatalities caused by a known safety issue - rather than pay $500m as a recal
Actually this is just phase one. But, without the French-led Corot mission leading the way, how are you going to get the donkey in to orbit? Sticks don't always do it you know.
5% of the 8% of only the percentage of households that are regular interenet users downloaded a movie content file over 10mb with no distinction made as to whether it was a trailer or not? And that's before we consider it's just as likely one kid in the house and everyone else living there never sees it.
Sweet Jesus, how will the U.S. movie industry survive if almost a quarter of one whole percent of Americans refuse to buy in to their revenue model?
That adds up. I mean, think about it. It's a mighty... hmm, still under a million dollars on the biggest movies of all time and the cost of a box of popcorn from the profits of the latest Owen Wilson movie.
It isn't the flying that's the hard part, it's landing with the bones in your body intact.
Which is why he uses a parachute.
Don't get me wrong, it's cool and all... But it requires falling out of a plane for while in order to launch the thing and then still needs a parachute to land. It's a small step beyond the guys who've been jumping for years with flying squirrel type wings stitched in to their jump gear (in that this guy adds a rigid wing and power) but it's a long way from a truly useful jet pack that'll let you take off and land.
There's a reason why most records include being able to return to where you started from for it to count. We would likely celebrate Sir Edmund Hillary, the first guy to the top of Everest, far less if he got dropped off by plane and simply climbed down or Rould Amundsen if he got dropped off at the South pole and simply collected food caches along the way back.
If there's no law against him linking to content, then regardless of how stupidly he argued his case in court, he should still have won the lawsuit. The judge can't simply ignore the law!
A judge isn't paid to know every last law on the books. A judge is paid to know how to weigh up separate legal arguments as they are presented to them and conduct additional research if they deem it appropriate.
The content owner presented the argument, "This is my content. He is circumventing the means I have put in place to control access to it. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act says that any attempt to circumvent access control is against the law."
The idiot defended himself with, "But! But! He's Ghengis Khan!"
The judge didn't ignore any laws that were presented to him. He considered the arguments presented and sided with the coherent one.
Now, had the idiot argued that, "The DMCA applies to circumvention of encryption. This was not encrypted and so that argument is invalid. This guy put his content on the net and I linked to it via standard internet norms. That he wanted people to walk down only one path to his content, so he could profit better, doesn't change the fact that another commonly used path existed that he made no attempt to secure." he might have won. Had he hired a lawyer to put many years of training on how to skillfully craft that argument, he'd have been even more likely to have won.
The fact remains, the judge did exactly what judges are supposed to do - he weighed up the arguments as they were presented to him. That the idiot failed to present a cohesive argument means that, yes, he should have lost under the way the U.S. legal system works.
Now you can argue that judges should be required to be case law experts on any case they hear...
Think about that for a moment. Consider the breadth of case law out there. Consider how lawyers already specialize in specific areas because knowing every area, even if you just have a good grounding and do research in specific cases, is all but impossible. Do we want specialist judges? It's a great ideal. But now consider the cost to every county that have to provide separate divorce judges, patent law judges, business law judges, etc. Now a county needs twenty or thirty judicial variants to support what you're asking for.
How do they pay for this? Well, so far, court costs get passed on to the loser. Slashdot readers regularly bitch that the massive cost of losing already makes a legal defense impossible for the common man to risk - hence things like the RIAA settlements. Do you really want to make this situation even worse?
Yes, in an ideal world, everything would be perfect: Judges would be experts on what they heard and the pure, fabulous truth would be all that mattered - and it would somehow all be for free. Back in the real world, a tradeoff has to be made. To ensure realistic access to justice, that balance point has been chosen as: Judges aren't expected to be case law experts, they're expected to weigh up arguments well. You can hire a lawyer to ensure your argument is well presented.
It's not perfect but it's the best system anyone's come up with so far. Under this system, yes, the guy deserved to lose.
Slashdot Mirror
but I still don't understand why people think that Cascading Style Sheets should be used for layout.
It may have something to do with a standard called CSS-P where the P stands for Positional. Weirdest thing, you tell people they can position things and they go all nuts about wanting to, you know, position things.
Or the simple reason I got two...
SD DVR: 40GB
HD DVR: 160GB with SATA connector and instructions for hooking up your own HD.
Even if you're actually only watching SD programming on your second box, you get four times the capacity from the HD version plus the inputs to hook up your own SATA drive.
Curiously, when I got my second box last summer, I was told that they were under orders to only give out one per household. I had to fake alarm that my [non-existant] second HD TV would be useless unless I changed to DirectTV and even then they were reluctant to hand over the second box.
I'm sitting here in my pottery studio cracking up.
IANAP (I Am Not A Potter) but you may want to try more water in your mix.
no waiting for the system to swap out when switching between major applications
I hear not having any will do that for you.
This is a joke based on an old anti-Paper troll that used to get posted here on
This should be +funny, but I guess a lot of people don't get the joke anymore and think you're serious.
Here's the Original BTW: I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you paper fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a piece of paper for about 20 minutes now while I attempt to copy a 17 point annotated image of an ornithopter from one page on the easel to another. 20 minutes. At home, on my papyrus on a simple slanted desk, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this paper, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this image transfer, Guttenberg's press will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even tic-tac-toe is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various pieces of paper, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a paper that has run faster than its papyrus counterpart, despite the paper's higher linen content architecture. My clay tablet with week old clay runs faster than this paper at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that paper is a superior medium.
Paper addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use paper over other faster, cheaper, more stable mediums.
Long term exposure to magnetic radiation may cause cancer...
Screw that! What about my prince albert?!
The authentication will be a problem of course; it means I will not be able to make an anonymous purchase on the web - something that people are quite reasonably concerned about being able to do.
/. that your music collection consists of Kevin Federline's rap and Jessia Simpson videos with the sound turned off. I don't know whether to pity you or take a hot shower with a wire brush to get the ew off.
Congratulations. You've just admitted to
So, hypothetically, if I had this friend and this friend was having, you know, problems performing... in the uh, bedroom... what would you suggest this friend, hypothetically, did about it?
An interesting tidbit in the article is that the rail gun is only expected to fire ten times or less per day, presumably because of the amount of electricity needed.
If only we knew when lightning was due to strike some sort of a clock tower? Surely, then, we could harness the power needed.
If that doesn't work, perhaps some new technology involving trash?
I hear things get significantly hotter in another 1/2 week. Patience my man, patience.
First, if it was really OSX, why would they need Google's help to implement Google Maps? It would just run.
A version of Google Maps would run. It'd run just like it does on the Mac. You'll notice the Mac version tends not to do things like run full screen without chrome, doesn't pull up a virtual keyboard for text entry, doesn't handle multiple pointer locations for things like fingers moving together or apart to zoom in/out and certainly doesn't make the Mac dial stores you've just searched for.
They need Google's help to do all of the above. Even if the code base was the same, they'd need Google's help to implement hardware specific features.
And all I want are two... One blu-ray, one HD-DVD, both on the same disk. Then this whole stupid war can finish already.
"This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children..."
.xxx domain.
.xxx domains.
.xxx blocked PCs unable to make the redirect - it does cut down on the number of ways a kid can stumble across porn and thus, even if not perfect, it does make it easier for parents to limit access.
.xxx as a tool for limiting porn access.
One porn site moves to the
A parent blocks
That's one more site than would be blocked otherwise. Thus, by definition, easier. Not perfect but better than not at all.
Most porn sites really don't want kids hitting them up - they just suck bandwidth and don't have credit cards to convert in to paying subscribers anyway. If sites like playboy.com then become simple redirects over - with
Seatbelts don't prevent car accidents. They don't even save all lives in cars that have accidents. But they do still make surviving "easier". Just because something's not perfect doesn't mean it's not an improvement. The same holds true for
Our brick and mortar business went through exactly the same thing. Henry bloody Ford and his evil empire released their latest and greatest product on consumers and it really screwed us businesses that had hitching posts and stables.
One of the worst things about "Model T" was that it belched out carbon monoxide. Seriously! Compare this to a horse where the worst you have to worry about is methane! For brick and mortar store owners who didn't want to pay once again to upgrade from barns for their customers, this caused all kinds of ventilation issues. People could actually die from this stuff!
Some people say that keeping up with the times is part of the cost of doing business. But where will it end?!
The chlorine attacks iron even in ally form.
And you should see what it does to it in enemy form!
this will be the year PC games make a comeback
As a PC gamer from way back, it's curious to see how the "comeback" year has changed.
It used to be that the PC was generally a couple of years behind consoles in power. This made sense because the average PC spec had to accomodate people that hadn't upgraded whereas each new console itteration would reset the bar.
For the first year of a console's life, it was undisputedly more powerful than a PC and it's games were undeniably better. During the second year, it held the lead over PCs because, even though quite a few people had more powerful systems, games weren't able to expect them yet. By about the third or fourth year, the average PC had caught up, was at least as powerful if not more powerful, games were taking advantage of it and it was taking the lead. By the final year of a console itteration, the PC was now fairly significantly more powerful and held the lead by a good margin - which it promptly lost with the next release cycle a year later.
Thus it was with the NES, SNES, PS1 and PS2/XBox generations.
The interesting thing has been the effect of add in gaming graphics cards. Circa NES/SNES and even PS1 to a degree, there was an incremental step from 386 to 486 to earlier pentiums and from EGA to VGA to SVGA to the early 3DFX cards. In those days, PC gamers couldn't disperse that far from the mid point and games didn't have that much potential to vary for different system specs.
By the PS2/XBox launch of five years ago, just about every gamer was running a GeForce or better card which allowed games companies to make games much more scalable to different hardware setups. The XBox could have great hardware (NV2A) but the GeForce 3 (NV20) had already been in gamers hands for six months and the GeForce 4 (NV25) followed within three or four months. Almost right away, the richest gamers could have just as powerful hardware and so mainstream PC games caught the technical lead up within a year.
With the PS3/XBox360, undeniably exciting things are happening with the processors. The interesting thing is that no one seems to have really figured out how to write good multi-threaded code for the XBox's three processors - let alone the PS3's 7. In the year they've been working that out on the 360, almost every home gamer has a dual core system and quad cores are already an option. Add in DirectX 10 cards with their relative speed boosts and it's little wonder PCs have closed the gap to the point where they easily matched the 360's launch and can handle going up against the PS3's launch year.
Yes, a pair of $600 graphics cards and a $1,000 processor in a $3,500 gaming rig is still WAY more than a console. The curious thing is that $300 graphics cards and a $300 processor in a $1,000 rig now have most of that power whilst a new console has gone up from $200 to $400 to $600 and availability problems in the first six months likely mean you'll pay over the cost of the $1,000 PC to get a console on EBay anyway.
Powerwise, the war's over. Of course one problem remains: we get to see if PC game makers can harness all that power and compete against the simple ease of installation/use of the consoles.
It should be an interesting year: Now the playing field's equal in terms of power, can the flexibility of PCs along with their availability vs. limited console releases allow them to finally take over?
The company has apparently doubled in size in each of the last three years.
;)
The company boasts that only 4 percent of its work force leaves each year, less than other Silicon Valley companies.
Let's think about this for a moment:
4% of current numbers leave each year.
Except the overal job pool was only half that size a year ago... So 8% turnover in a year relative to the size of company it was at the start of the year?
Go back two years and it was half the size again... So 16% turnover relative to the number of people that were there only two years earlier?
And they say it's doubled every one of the last three years so we know 4% of current numbers is actually relative to 32% of all those who were actually there three years ago.
Now, to be fair, not everyone necessarily stays a full three years. So maybe half of the last year's 4% (making 2%) is people who were hired within the last three years and the other 2% is people who were hired at least three years ago (when the pool size was 1/8th current levels). So we're looking at, what 16% turnover for people who've been there 3+ years as well as those who simply didn't make three years.
Sure, these numbers are pulled out of my ass. They still illustrate that the stellar 4% turnover claim really isn't worth that much when you're conveniently glossing over 50% of the people here this year haven't even put in a full year's work yet, 75% haven't put in two years and almost 90% haven't yet been there for three years - about the time most people with an eye on their careers and wanting to avoid a reputation as job hoppers would consider looking anyway. All of a sudden, that 4% really isn't much to boast about.
If you think about it, it's a lot like failing to grasp compound interest. Maybe they should ask simpler questions in their intereviews rather than the legendary entertainingly abstract ones that evidently miss out on basics.
The truth is, we're all like that.
I'm pretty certain everyone has experienced a boss not give them credit where it's due - and I'm pertty certain, whether we want to admit it or even recognize it ourselves, others have complained about us doing exactly the same.
Bosses fail to keep promises? And no employee has ever failed to deliver a project they swore they'd deliver? They've never cut corners on something they promised would be thorough?
Bosses make negative comments to other colleagues? How dare they? Don't they realize that no employee has ever bitched about the boss?
The sad truth is: we all do things that people consider negative. It's not a boss quirk, it's not an employee quirk, it's a human quirk.
Then again, it's always easier to judge others than look at ourselves.
It can be avoided.
Crazy at it may sound, just about every review of Rocky Balboa observes that it's easily the best since the original. OK, not as good as the original but still one to improve the legacy overall and not detract from it.
The secret appears to be:
If Sylvester Stallone is smart enough to figure out how to do it, we can but hope Spielberg is.
Then again, maybe we'll just be confronted with Indy holding a cellphone instead of a whip. *mutter*ET*mutter*
Clearly you're thinking of beer. Who cares if we're dirty or not? Thirsty... now that's important.
Zeropaid is reporting that as part of its ongoing lawsuit, the RIAA will be seeking the maximum of $150,000 per song for each of the 11 million MP3s downloaded from the Russian AllofMP3.com between June and October last year. This amounts to roughly $1.65 trillion, probably a tad more than AllofMP3 has made in its lifetime.
Everyone gets their panties all caught up over how the amount concerned is ridiculous. There's a simple reason why it's supposed to be ridiculous. I'll see if I can explain.
Say you could commit a crime (let's not debate whether it should be a crime, that's a whole other debate). Say the crime allows you to profit by $1,000 and the risk of getting caught is 20%.
Now let's assume that you're only allowed to be sued for the profits you've made.
One guy is essentially back where he started. It sucks but no great loss. Four other guys are $1,000 up.
The simple mathematician in me says this beats the hell out of Vegas. 20% chance of losing nothing more than what I got from it, 80% chance of keeping my money... Statistically, if I do this enough times, I'll make $800 for every infraction.
People play games at Vegas because sometimes they win many times what they put in, many times they lose, but the chance is enough even if they lose very slightly more than they put in on average. Statistically they know they'll lose overall but they'll take the risk for the big win.
In the above 20%/80% model, you're not even going to lose overall. You're going to win overall and you'll never lose more than you get from it. That's a pretty awesome deal.
So, without arguing whether a given act should be illegal or not, accepting that it is: Simply taking away the benefit of commiting the act, with anything less than a 100% success rate in apprehension, means you've created a model where it's statistically profitable and are, effectively, encouraging it.
How do you discourage it? By making the cost punative.
In this new model, say you only have a 5% chance of being caught but, upon being caught, you lose thirty times what you gained, anyone with a grasp of statistics will realize the average attempt will cost them 150% of what they gain, making it not worthwhile and hence discouraged.
Of course this assumes that people are smart and, as Vegas proves, they're not - most people will take odds where they lose overall if they figure there's a good chance of sometimes coming out on top.
This is the problem with speeding tickets ($100 or $1000, it's semi meaningless if people know that 999 times out of 1,000 they'll get away with it - the large fine just feels unfair at that point as it's something they never really considered they'd be lumbered with).
This is also the problem with the RIAA file sharing lawsuits. $4,000 for one in a hundred thousand violators is just random unfairness. A $100 fine, if you knew you'd absolutely get hammered with it the moment you committed the act, would be far more effective at discouraging people. Not understanding how human minds work means they keep on being perceived as unfair as opposed to changing perception of the act to a bad idea.
Still, accepting they are going after businesses with things like the $150,000 fine, and not individuals, it does shift somewhat back to the statistical effect model. $150,000 per violation seems ridiculous but the whole point is to make it absolutely clear, "If we get you, we won't just take what you've made but we'll take everything you've ever made, will ever make, your investors have ever made and anything associated with it. Still want to play?" It's not supposed to be fair - it's supposed to somewhat balance out the statistical chance of getting away with it.
Curiously, we bitch when we perceive those suing as evil and yet we bitch when large corporations play those same odds. Take a car company that knows it can pay $2m per case to settle 100 fatalities caused by a known safety issue - rather than pay $500m as a recal
'I think the Web 2.0 space will have a higher mortality rate than other segments of the overall media and technology industries.'
Wait a moment, the characteristics of a fast moving segment of the business world is that it moves faster than the other segments?
Wow. I wish I could be an analyst.
My prediction for 2007: Thirsty people will continue to buy water.
Actually this is just phase one. But, without the French-led Corot mission leading the way, how are you going to get the donkey in to orbit? Sticks don't always do it you know.
5% of the 8% of only the percentage of households that are regular interenet users downloaded a movie content file over 10mb with no distinction made as to whether it was a trailer or not? And that's before we consider it's just as likely one kid in the house and everyone else living there never sees it.
Sweet Jesus, how will the U.S. movie industry survive if almost a quarter of one whole percent of Americans refuse to buy in to their revenue model?
That adds up. I mean, think about it. It's a mighty... hmm, still under a million dollars on the biggest movies of all time and the cost of a box of popcorn from the profits of the latest Owen Wilson movie.
It isn't the flying that's the hard part, it's landing with the bones in your body intact.
Which is why he uses a parachute.
Don't get me wrong, it's cool and all... But it requires falling out of a plane for while in order to launch the thing and then still needs a parachute to land. It's a small step beyond the guys who've been jumping for years with flying squirrel type wings stitched in to their jump gear (in that this guy adds a rigid wing and power) but it's a long way from a truly useful jet pack that'll let you take off and land.
There's a reason why most records include being able to return to where you started from for it to count. We would likely celebrate Sir Edmund Hillary, the first guy to the top of Everest, far less if he got dropped off by plane and simply climbed down or Rould Amundsen if he got dropped off at the South pole and simply collected food caches along the way back.
If there's no law against him linking to content, then regardless of how stupidly he argued his case in court, he should still have won the lawsuit. The judge can't simply ignore the law!
A judge isn't paid to know every last law on the books. A judge is paid to know how to weigh up separate legal arguments as they are presented to them and conduct additional research if they deem it appropriate.
The content owner presented the argument, "This is my content. He is circumventing the means I have put in place to control access to it. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act says that any attempt to circumvent access control is against the law."
The idiot defended himself with, "But! But! He's Ghengis Khan!"
The judge didn't ignore any laws that were presented to him. He considered the arguments presented and sided with the coherent one.
Now, had the idiot argued that, "The DMCA applies to circumvention of encryption. This was not encrypted and so that argument is invalid. This guy put his content on the net and I linked to it via standard internet norms. That he wanted people to walk down only one path to his content, so he could profit better, doesn't change the fact that another commonly used path existed that he made no attempt to secure." he might have won. Had he hired a lawyer to put many years of training on how to skillfully craft that argument, he'd have been even more likely to have won.
The fact remains, the judge did exactly what judges are supposed to do - he weighed up the arguments as they were presented to him. That the idiot failed to present a cohesive argument means that, yes, he should have lost under the way the U.S. legal system works.
Now you can argue that judges should be required to be case law experts on any case they hear...
Think about that for a moment. Consider the breadth of case law out there. Consider how lawyers already specialize in specific areas because knowing every area, even if you just have a good grounding and do research in specific cases, is all but impossible. Do we want specialist judges? It's a great ideal. But now consider the cost to every county that have to provide separate divorce judges, patent law judges, business law judges, etc. Now a county needs twenty or thirty judicial variants to support what you're asking for.
How do they pay for this? Well, so far, court costs get passed on to the loser. Slashdot readers regularly bitch that the massive cost of losing already makes a legal defense impossible for the common man to risk - hence things like the RIAA settlements. Do you really want to make this situation even worse?
Yes, in an ideal world, everything would be perfect: Judges would be experts on what they heard and the pure, fabulous truth would be all that mattered - and it would somehow all be for free. Back in the real world, a tradeoff has to be made. To ensure realistic access to justice, that balance point has been chosen as: Judges aren't expected to be case law experts, they're expected to weigh up arguments well. You can hire a lawyer to ensure your argument is well presented.
It's not perfect but it's the best system anyone's come up with so far. Under this system, yes, the guy deserved to lose.