Beg pardon? What are you talking about?? Last time I looked at the newstand (this morning) there were American magazines all over the place. And the last time I surfed the TV channels, there was ABC, CNN, CBS, etc. etc.
Is it just me, or does anyone else see a pattern in US strategic thinking along the lines of "We have bigger and better technology/supply lines/bombs, and that will make final victory inevitable." I don't intend to argue that logistics are not an essential part of military planning, nor that technological advantages don't give an edge. But there seems to be a wide spread feeling in the US government that because they are the biggest guy on the block, they will inevitably win.
With the greatest respect, cod's wallop!
The American high command seems to be infected with this attitude as well. It seems to me that much (if not most or all) of the talk from the US about how the US will win is posited on the massive technological/logistical superiority of America. But far more important is strategy and tactics. (See Wellington's Peninsular campaign to see an example of how superior strategy and tactics can defeat a much larger army.)
There is some evidence that much of the US military is still unwilling to be flexible in its tactical/strategic thinking. See this article in The Guardian for a insightful analysis of a recent, huge US military exercis - in which the American side *lost* and the "Red" (read Iraqi) side won.
I'm a Canadian and the reek of hubris from across the 49th parallel is stunning!
Re:Condolances Can Be Sent Here
on
Columbia Coverage
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hmmm. . . How does one define a hero? From reading your post, I get the impression that your argument goes as follows:
(1) The crew were not heros because they were simply in a widely publicized accident, which is tragic, but not necessarily heroic. (2) Soldiers in WWII were heros because they willingly accepted the risk of death or maiming in order to serve their country.
I agree with the premises which are, if I follow your reasoning properly,
(a) Just because you get a lot of publicity, it doesn't follow that you are a hero. (b) Putting yourself at risk to serve your fellow man is a heroic act.
But if these are the premises, we could still consider the crew to be heros. Were they not volunteers? Did they not accept high risk? Wasn't their work/job in the service of humanity?
IMHO (YMMV), it is not inappropriate to apply the title to the crew.
You wrote: France also did not see most of the army as Germany considered the invasion of France to be tying up loose ends as they went for Russia. From my recollection of history, France was invaded by the Nazi attack that began on May 10th, 1940. (France surrendered June 10th.) The German invasion of Russia did not begin until the 22nd of June 1941. I don't know where you got the idea that the German army was tied up with the Russans while they invaded France, but really, it's wrong. France had surrendered a year before the invasion of Russia.
There is a lot of discussion in this thread about the consumers' rights, market forces, censorship, etc.
However, one point seems to be missed. If I create something (a song, a book, a movie) and publish it, I have copyright on that (unless I sell it - some of it such as English market only - to someone else). You are not supposed to change my work without my permission.
And the reason for this has not so much to do with market value as with whether or not the published work is my vision. If you change my work and then publish it, you are promulgating a false view of my work, my views, my ethos.
Before someone says it, slapping a label on it that you've modified it doesn't help. What was left out? By removing some of my content you may be changing the meaning of my work. In a sense, the modifier of the work is presenting a false view of the author's work.
Now if you were to get permission from the creator, that is a different story. The author can make an informed decision on whether or not the modifications are acceptable.
As for the rights of people to watch my work without the icky bits, pfui! Just because you want something does not confer any obligation on me.
I take your point, but I regularly have pages hang on commercial sites and it's almost invariably a wait on some d*** ad. This is on a corporate LAN and it usually occurs during the lunch hour (natch).
Sure, it may not impede your surfing, but it sure affects mine!:-)
Back in the Good Old Days whan I ran a NeXT network, the web browser I used was Omniweb. It had one feature that I just adored. You could open a window that showed the status of all the file downloads that the browser was requesting. And if some unimportant file was taking an inordinate amount of time to load [COUGH]doubleclick ads[COUGH], then you could kill that download right then and there and let the rest of the page load.
Does'nt it bug you when some dolt puts a banner ad on his pages without the height and width parameters coded? The page can't display until the image arrives because there is no information to tell the browser how much space to allocate. And insult is added to injury when you get a timeout on the download of the bloody ad. Y'unnerstand what I'm saying here?
[FURY ON] You can't see the bloody page, because the BLOODY AD WON'T LOAD!! [FURY OFF]
(Pant, pant, pant!)
If there is one feature that is missing in IE or Netscape or 'Zilla that would be a boon to all, the ability to kill the download of some ad, or button graphic would so enchance my web browsing, that I'd . . . I'd . . . Gawd! I'd even pay money for that!! (And I'm of Scottish descent!)
Indeed, I remember seeing on TV the diesel get dragged down the street of one town. (This isn't the first time you Yanks have copied a good Canadian idea!);-)
Re:Only thirty destinations? Use pneumatic tubes?
on
Hospital Robots
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· Score: 2
Well, there is the cost of inserting the pneumatic tubes. And if you expand the hospital or rebuild a wing the tubes are an extra cost. Also, physical apparatus is more difficult and costly to modify than a robot's programmed path.
Does anyone know what it costs to lay cable? I suspect that laying pneumatic tubes would be even more expensive.
And when comparing costs, it is worth noting that the article says it costs the hospital less than $5.00 per hour. I suspect that minimum wage is greater than that. (Cost of labour, don't forget, is wage, plus administrative and benefits costs.) So, no capital costs, a low onging expense (which is less than hiring someone) to cover off a low-urgency, brain-dead, boring, simple task.
This form of argument reminds me of the "Iron Law of Economics" which said that the proper and natural rate of pay for unskilled labour was one that was *just* above starvation level. David Ricardo's view was that nothing but stark need limits the numbers of people who are propagated and who endure. As a result, humans will forever live on the verge of starvation and the inevitability of mass poverty. In Ricardo's view, profits and wages were in flat conflict for the rest of the product. An increase in profits, other things being equal, meant a reduction in wages; an increase in wages must always come out of profits. Increasing profits necessarily meant an increase in population, leading to an increase in the price of things. The producer/landowner/capitalist must necessarily reap the rewards. The natural price of labor is that price which is necessary to enable the laborers, one with another to subsist and perpetuate their race, without either increase or decrease. [excerpted from Family Dynamics 7400.608-001, U of Akron (?), David D. Witt, Ph.D.]
More simply put, it was assumed for a long time that if the minimum wage were raised beyond basic subsistence levels, then the population would increase, leading to sharper competition for jobs which would depress the wage rate, until starvation occurred then the drop in population would make labour scarce and thus cause a rise in salary according to the law of supply and demand. So for the better part of two centuries, it was believed that it was not possible to raise the minimun wage more than bare subsistence - the "Iron Law of Economics".
Funny how most western countries have managed to mandate minimum wage scales over the past half century without plunging us all into economic chaos.
So what's my point. My point is that just because an economic theory is logical and consistent doesn't necessarily mean that it is correct. Your assumption, sir, appears to be that people are replaceable machines to be purchased at the minimum cost. But you are leaving out a number of factors. Morale in any team of workers is not a factor to be despised. A happy worker is normally a better and more efficient worker.
It also leaves out the moral question. An enterprise does not exist in order to make a profit. No, really, it doesn't. A company *needs* to make a profit in order to exist, but that's not its function. "A company exists in order to fulfill some market segments needs or wants." And dare I suggest that taking care of the clients - who provide you with the income - is no less important that taking care of the workers who produce whatever it is that you are producing. (All my management texts suggest that that is the more efficient paradigm.)
I suppose what girned me the most was the assumption implicit in the post that labour issues were only an economic matter. IMHO, piffle!
Good arguments but they don't support Mr Andrew Dalke's conclusions. (Mr. Dalke took the anti position if you haven't read his paper.)
Granted, if the idea is that *all* software written which is funded by public money were to be open sourced, then Mr. Dalke has a point. But surely, it is a trivial exercise to modify the proposal to say, for example, that all software that is derived from proprietary software cannot fall under this order.
IMHO, if an idea is unworkable in its present form, see if you can modify the idea to fit reality before tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
Who really wants the Xbox? The answer is . . .
on
XBox Released
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· Score: 2
Found this late in the day, so probably too late, but since it amused me. . .
"Executives... 15 percent said they wanted an Xbox.... Interestingly, executives were the only category of professionals who requested the much-hyped gaming console from software giant Microsoft."
"Certain phrases, for example, in bin Laden's statements quite possible are intended to send an additional pre-defined meaning."
My only exception to stwilwebm's comment above is the phrase "quite possibly". IMNSHO, "not bloody likely" is the correct adverbial phrase.
Let's all stop and think about this for a meaning. I wish to send an important secret message to my evil henchmen on another continent. Do I send an encrypted letter? Do I send a human messenger by plane to carry the message? Do I phone them and use secret phrases with hidden meanings to convey the message to them?
Apparently not, if we are to believe the Security Experts who don't want us to hear Bin-Laden. Apparently the best way to send secret messages, is to tape yourself and hope that the corporate minions of the Great Satan will transmit your message, complete, clear (no poorly translated voice-overs, if you please) and in a timely fashion.
Am I the only one who thinks that if Bin-Laden really is that stupid, that we have little to worry about?
So are you saying that it's all right for a company to lie to you as long as it helps them to make money?
Many people believe that the purpose of a company is to make money. Actually this is not correct.
When I took Business Administration in college, one point that got hammered home in first year was that the function of business was to serve the market segment's needs and/or wants. If you can do that at a price that the market is willing to pay and that allows you to make a profit, then the business will succeed/survive.
Saying that the purpose of a business is to make money is like saying that the purpose of humans is to produce carbon dioxide. Making money is a necessity of a company's continued existence, it is not the reason that it exists.
And yes, I do believe that it is the proper function of government to protect its citizens from predatory business practices. A search engine that promises to give objective reports and then shoves in advertisements instead is lying to me. I don't mind the ads if they are labelled as ads. (This is no different from existing print standards.)
If you can heal a soldier that would have died, temporarily so he can kill 5 more of the enemy, before dying a more excruciating death than the otherwise would have, do you do that?
Well, you have to consider this from the military point of view. One of the primary issues involved in military planning is the question of Morale! This is of extreme importance to a commanding officer because troops with bad morale do not fight well -- if at all.
You also have to consider that wounded men going back are, when all is said and done, trained killers.
Doctor: Here son. Let me slap some of this Wound-Be-Gone (TM) goo on that big ol' hole in you, and you'll be healed up, lickety-split!
Wounded Soldier: What?! No way, man! I saw what that s*** did to Danny! Four days after he got back from the MASH, he was scramin', man, SCREAMIN! . . . Mutha- - -
[S.E.]"BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA!!"
As I used to tell my Corporals when I was a Sergeant, "You can't just throw your weight around. You need them to believe in you. After all, if we go in the dill, you will have men following you who all all carrying loaded weapons!"
You are aware, are you not, that along with all the other union members, you have the right to vote on whether or not you will strike? It isn't a dictat handed down from Union HQ. (And you elect your union officials as well.)
I have seen offers of 1% or 2% (per year), but that's just a bargaining position on the part of the corporation. Unions normally start off at a higher level. Talking about losing a weeks wages for.2% raise is merely 'poisoning the well'. And do you really think that any increase in union dues is going to offset the wage gains you get through negotiation?? Hell, in your bracket, sunshine, your entire union dues wouldn't equal the usual salary increase.
Pfui!
Well, I see the usual anti-union bushwah
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 5
Every time the topic of unionization comes up, I hear the same type of nonsense.
"I'm so skilled/important/eL337 that the company will treat me with respect/pay me what I'm worth/never fire me."
"All unions are filled with thugs and crooks who just want to take your union dues and are effectively useless."
etc. . .
(sigh)
To begin with, being skilled does not guarantee you proper treatment by the company.There are a number of circumstances where your skills will not save you, for example:
You get a new boss who is:
Stupifyingly dumb (It happens.)
a sadist
a technological illiterate (and therefore doesn't understand how Very Important you are.
and is therefore quite willing to let you go/treat you miserably/etc.
the industry you are in suffers a panic in the stock market. To keep the stock price from tanking, Upper Management hands down the diktat, "Lay off 10%! So let it be written, so let it be done!"
Oh heck, I could go on and on . . .
. . . but the point is there are lots of circumstances where if you are being mistreated by management, you will be unable to defend yourself despite your Mighty Coding Prowess. The company is bigger than you. It has more money than you. It does *not*, I repeat *Not!* give a Flying Fiddler's F**** about you.
In which case, it would be nice for you to have a nice big organisation backing you up.
As to the point about the honesty of unions, they vary. I speak from my own experience. When I was fired by one employer (because of my political activities), the union I belonged to at that time said, effectively, "Tough luck!" The next union I belonged to had the motto, "Nobody Goes For Free!" (Which meant that if you were fired, and wanted the union to take your side, they would automatically go as far as second step grievance. After that, the union would have to spend money on lawyers, so there was an evaluation on how likely we were to win before we went to the next level of the grievance procedure.) Some unions are good and some stink -- sorta like corporations that you work for.
Re:Valley startup syndrome. My life in a bucket.
on
Coder on the Cross
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· Score: 4
Ah this is so typical of bad-to-middling managers. The problem is that when a problem presents itself to them, their immediate reaction is to go and find someone to fix it. They never stop to think about what you may already have on your plate. (Bad managers won't have a *clue* what tasks you are already busy with.)
How to handle Managers to whom the Latest Crisis is the one with Top Priority
Put a prioritized list of your tasks in a prominent position in your office.
When your Clueless Boss rushes in screaming "Emergency!! Emergency!! Drop everything and handle this Right Away!!!", point over your shoulder to your taks list and say, "Put it on my list where you think it should go."
Most common result of the above strategy: Boss looks at your task list for a couple of minutes, then goes, "Ummm. . . ahh, ohhhh nevermind," then departs looking for someone less busy.
As usual, some people are writing in to say, "Well, if you signed the contract, ya can't complain if the other guy upholds it?"
(Sigh!)
No, you can't be surprised at that. However, one point raised in the article is (if I may be allowed to paraphrase) is that trying to understand the terms of the MS license for your software is somewhat akin to trying to derive a sommon sense meaning from a Scientology manual.
(Sigh, sigh!)
Just because something is legal, doesn't mean that is moral - or practical - or good business sense - or reasonable!
(Unfortunately my copy is at home, so I'm not certain about the wording of the title.)
This book (which is a collection of advisory articles by Canadian writers) advises the writer to be careful about what rights they sign away. For example, you can sell 'first printing rights only' - which means that after the purchaser publishes your article/book/whatever, you then have the right to sell it again. You can also stipulate "English" rights only. (In Canada, that means you can sell it then to the French market for another fee.)
Now, the publisher may not want those terms, in which case you have to negotiate. But the point is, don't just sign the contract the publisher offers you. Of course he will draw the terms as widely as possible. And if you are willing to sign it, then there they go.
The ability of a writer to resell his work to another market is an important aspect of the writing business. The problem here as another poster said is really only the question of how much negotiating muscle you have. And how much you value your words.
'sconeu' is right about the bulkiness of radios on the battlefield. But another major reason that individual soldiers don't have a radio has to do with the limitations of radio fequencys available.
I first read about this in the second volume of John Master's autobiography, "The Road Past Mandalay". He wrote about an excercise he took place in when he was at Staff College where they used multi-coloured ribbons representing different frequencies stringing them across a map between communicating units. He described how complex the result was, and how quickly you ran out of frequencies. (Remember, if frequencies are too close together, you will get bleed-over and garbled signals which is Not A Good Thing.)
TCP/IP packets, on the other hand, as we all know, can resolve this problem. Which is why they are investigating this I presume.
First off, let me say thanks for some good ideas. I'll not comment in detail because I don't know which ones would work. I suspect that the only real way of know what will work is to try them out on a test audience or in the wild.
I suspect that the karma idea might not work. Maybe. My gut feeling is that the simpler the idea, the more effective. I suspect the response rate to the karma idea might make it unfeasible.
However, my main complaint about banner ads is the fact that (A) the html code for the banner ad rarely, in my experience, has the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes filled in. This means, naturally, that the page can't really start to load properly until it has received that gif image from the ad server. (B) It would appear that many ad servers are running very slow machines ["No, no. They can't be running on a '286! It just feels that way!"] or have a narrow pipe or whatever, because the ad is frequently the last bloody file to load to my browser!
I think the point is that the principal's authority extends only to the school property and does not extend beyond those borders.
Do you really want a civil servant to have control over what you say or do in your private time?
If the principal feels he has a beef about the content of the student's web site, he can get a lawyer and sue for libel and/or slander. (IANAL) But to deny the student his education, well where in law does that authority come from?
Slashdot Mirror
blocking all of our media at the border
????????
Beg pardon? What are you talking about?? Last time I looked at the newstand (this morning) there were American magazines all over the place. And the last time I surfed the TV channels, there was ABC, CNN, CBS, etc. etc.
And where do you get your drugs?
Is it just me, or does anyone else see a pattern in US strategic thinking along the lines of "We have bigger and better technology/supply lines/bombs, and that will make final victory inevitable." I don't intend to argue that logistics are not an essential part of military planning, nor that technological advantages don't give an edge. But there seems to be a wide spread feeling in the US government that because they are the biggest guy on the block, they will inevitably win.
With the greatest respect, cod's wallop!
The American high command seems to be infected with this attitude as well. It seems to me that much (if not most or all) of the talk from the US about how the US will win is posited on the massive technological/logistical superiority of America. But far more important is strategy and tactics. (See Wellington's Peninsular campaign to see an example of how superior strategy and tactics can defeat a much larger army.)
There is some evidence that much of the US military is still unwilling to be flexible in its tactical/strategic thinking. See this article in The Guardian for a insightful analysis of a recent, huge US military exercis - in which the American side *lost* and the "Red" (read Iraqi) side won.
I'm a Canadian and the reek of hubris from across the 49th parallel is stunning!
Hmmm. . . How does one define a hero? From reading your post, I get the impression that your argument goes as follows:
(1) The crew were not heros because they were simply in a widely publicized accident, which is tragic, but not necessarily heroic.
(2) Soldiers in WWII were heros because they willingly accepted the risk of death or maiming in order to serve their country.
I agree with the premises which are, if I follow your reasoning properly,
(a) Just because you get a lot of publicity, it doesn't follow that you are a hero.
(b) Putting yourself at risk to serve your fellow man is a heroic act.
But if these are the premises, we could still consider the crew to be heros. Were they not volunteers? Did they not accept high risk? Wasn't their work/job in the service of humanity?
IMHO (YMMV), it is not inappropriate to apply the title to the crew.
You wrote:
France also did not see most of the army as Germany considered the invasion of France to be tying up loose ends as they went for Russia.
From my recollection of history, France was invaded by the Nazi attack that began on May 10th, 1940. (France surrendered June 10th.)
The German invasion of Russia did not begin until the 22nd of June 1941. I don't know where you got the idea that the German army was tied up with the Russans while they invaded France, but really, it's wrong. France had surrendered a year before the invasion of Russia.
There is a lot of discussion in this thread about the consumers' rights, market forces, censorship, etc.
However, one point seems to be missed. If I create something (a song, a book, a movie) and publish it, I have copyright on that (unless I sell it - some of it such as English market only - to someone else). You are not supposed to change my work without my permission.
And the reason for this has not so much to do with market value as with whether or not the published work is my vision. If you change my work and then publish it, you are promulgating a false view of my work, my views, my ethos.
Before someone says it, slapping a label on it that you've modified it doesn't help. What was left out? By removing some of my content you may be changing the meaning of my work. In a sense, the modifier of the work is presenting a false view of the author's work.
Now if you were to get permission from the creator, that is a different story. The author can make an informed decision on whether or not the modifications are acceptable.
As for the rights of people to watch my work without the icky bits, pfui! Just because you want something does not confer any obligation on me.
I take your point, but I regularly have pages hang on commercial sites and it's almost invariably a wait on some d*** ad. This is on a corporate LAN and it usually occurs during the lunch hour (natch).
:-)
Sure, it may not impede your surfing, but it sure affects mine!
Does'nt it bug you when some dolt puts a banner ad on his pages without the height and width parameters coded? The page can't display until the image arrives because there is no information to tell the browser how much space to allocate. And insult is added to injury when you get a timeout on the download of the bloody ad. Y'unnerstand what I'm saying here?
[FURY ON]
You can't see the bloody page, because the BLOODY AD WON'T LOAD!!
[FURY OFF]
(Pant, pant, pant!)
If there is one feature that is missing in IE or Netscape or 'Zilla that would be a boon to all, the ability to kill the download of some ad, or button graphic would so enchance my web browsing, that I'd . . . I'd . . . Gawd! I'd even pay money for that!! (And I'm of Scottish descent!)
Here is one story that mentions in in paragraph 8: Railways of Canada Archives
The study by Mr. Godfrey and Mr. Tu can be found at http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~migod/papers/iwpse01.pdf . (4 pages in a PDF file).
Does anyone know what it costs to lay cable? I suspect that laying pneumatic tubes would be even more expensive.
And when comparing costs, it is worth noting that the article says it costs the hospital less than $5.00 per hour. I suspect that minimum wage is greater than that. (Cost of labour, don't forget, is wage, plus administrative and benefits costs.) So, no capital costs, a low onging expense (which is less than hiring someone) to cover off a low-urgency, brain-dead, boring, simple task.
Seems like a no brainer to me.
More simply put, it was assumed for a long time that if the minimum wage were raised beyond basic subsistence levels, then the population would increase, leading to sharper competition for jobs which would depress the wage rate, until starvation occurred then the drop in population would make labour scarce and thus cause a rise in salary according to the law of supply and demand. So for the better part of two centuries, it was believed that it was not possible to raise the minimun wage more than bare subsistence - the "Iron Law of Economics".
Funny how most western countries have managed to mandate minimum wage scales over the past half century without plunging us all into economic chaos.
So what's my point. My point is that just because an economic theory is logical and consistent doesn't necessarily mean that it is correct. Your assumption, sir, appears to be that people are replaceable machines to be purchased at the minimum cost. But you are leaving out a number of factors. Morale in any team of workers is not a factor to be despised. A happy worker is normally a better and more efficient worker.
It also leaves out the moral question. An enterprise does not exist in order to make a profit. No, really, it doesn't. A company *needs* to make a profit in order to exist, but that's not its function. "A company exists in order to fulfill some market segments needs or wants." And dare I suggest that taking care of the clients - who provide you with the income - is no less important that taking care of the workers who produce whatever it is that you are producing. (All my management texts suggest that that is the more efficient paradigm.)
I suppose what girned me the most was the assumption implicit in the post that labour issues were only an economic matter. IMHO, piffle!
Granted, if the idea is that *all* software written which is funded by public money were to be open sourced, then Mr. Dalke has a point. But surely, it is a trivial exercise to modify the proposal to say, for example, that all software that is derived from proprietary software cannot fall under this order.
IMHO, if an idea is unworkable in its present form, see if you can modify the idea to fit reality before tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
From an article at Cnet.com about techie Christmas gifts and who wants what:
"Executives
Weellll . .
We're not surprised, are we?
My only exception to stwilwebm's comment above is the phrase "quite possibly". IMNSHO, "not bloody likely" is the correct adverbial phrase.
Let's all stop and think about this for a meaning. I wish to send an important secret message to my evil henchmen on another continent. Do I send an encrypted letter? Do I send a human messenger by plane to carry the message? Do I phone them and use secret phrases with hidden meanings to convey the message to them?
Apparently not, if we are to believe the Security Experts who don't want us to hear Bin-Laden. Apparently the best way to send secret messages, is to tape yourself and hope that the corporate minions of the Great Satan will transmit your message, complete, clear (no poorly translated voice-overs, if you please) and in a timely fashion.
Am I the only one who thinks that if Bin-Laden really is that stupid, that we have little to worry about?
Well, thank you kindly!
Many people believe that the purpose of a company is to make money. Actually this is not correct.
When I took Business Administration in college, one point that got hammered home in first year was that the function of business was to serve the market segment's needs and/or wants. If you can do that at a price that the market is willing to pay and that allows you to make a profit, then the business will succeed/survive.
Saying that the purpose of a business is to make money is like saying that the purpose of humans is to produce carbon dioxide. Making money is a necessity of a company's continued existence, it is not the reason that it exists.
And yes, I do believe that it is the proper function of government to protect its citizens from predatory business practices. A search engine that promises to give objective reports and then shoves in advertisements instead is lying to me. I don't mind the ads if they are labelled as ads. (This is no different from existing print standards.)
Well, you have to consider this from the military point of view. One of the primary issues involved in military planning is the question of Morale! This is of extreme importance to a commanding officer because troops with bad morale do not fight well -- if at all.
You also have to consider that wounded men going back are, when all is said and done, trained killers.
As I used to tell my Corporals when I was a Sergeant, "You can't just throw your weight around. You need them to believe in you. After all, if we go in the dill, you will have men following you who all all carrying loaded weapons!"I have seen offers of 1% or 2% (per year), but that's just a bargaining position on the part of the corporation. Unions normally start off at a higher level. Talking about losing a weeks wages for .2% raise is merely 'poisoning the well'. And do you really think that any increase in union dues is going to offset the wage gains you get through negotiation?? Hell, in your bracket, sunshine, your entire union dues wouldn't equal the usual salary increase.
Pfui!
"I'm so skilled/important/eL337 that the company will treat me with respect/pay me what I'm worth/never fire me."
"All unions are filled with thugs and crooks who just want to take your union dues and are effectively useless."
etc. . .
(sigh)
To begin with, being skilled does not guarantee you proper treatment by the company.There are a number of circumstances where your skills will not save you, for example:
- You get a new boss who is:
- the industry you are in suffers a panic in the stock market. To keep the stock price from tanking, Upper Management hands down the diktat, "Lay off 10%! So let it be written, so let it be done!"
- Oh heck, I could go on and on . . .
. . . but the point is there are lots of circumstances where if you are being mistreated by management, you will be unable to defend yourself despite your Mighty Coding Prowess. The company is bigger than you. It has more money than you. It does *not*, I repeat *Not!* give a Flying Fiddler's F**** about you.- Stupifyingly dumb (It happens.)
- a sadist
- a technological illiterate (and therefore doesn't understand how Very Important you are.
and is therefore quite willing to let you go/treat you miserably/etc.In which case, it would be nice for you to have a nice big organisation backing you up.
As to the point about the honesty of unions, they vary. I speak from my own experience. When I was fired by one employer (because of my political activities), the union I belonged to at that time said, effectively, "Tough luck!" The next union I belonged to had the motto, "Nobody Goes For Free!" (Which meant that if you were fired, and wanted the union to take your side, they would automatically go as far as second step grievance. After that, the union would have to spend money on lawyers, so there was an evaluation on how likely we were to win before we went to the next level of the grievance procedure.) Some unions are good and some stink -- sorta like corporations that you work for.
How to handle Managers
to whom the Latest Crisis is the one with Top Priority
Most common result of the above strategy:
Boss looks at your task list for a couple of minutes, then goes, "Ummm. . . ahh, ohhhh nevermind," then departs looking for someone less busy.
(Sigh!)
No, you can't be surprised at that. However, one point raised in the article is (if I may be allowed to paraphrase) is that trying to understand the terms of the MS license for your software is somewhat akin to trying to derive a sommon sense meaning from a Scientology manual.
(Sigh, sigh!)
Just because something is legal, doesn't mean that is moral - or practical - or good business sense - or reasonable!
This book (which is a collection of advisory articles by Canadian writers) advises the writer to be careful about what rights they sign away. For example, you can sell 'first printing rights only' - which means that after the purchaser publishes your article/book/whatever, you then have the right to sell it again. You can also stipulate "English" rights only. (In Canada, that means you can sell it then to the French market for another fee.)
Now, the publisher may not want those terms, in which case you have to negotiate. But the point is, don't just sign the contract the publisher offers you. Of course he will draw the terms as widely as possible. And if you are willing to sign it, then there they go.
The ability of a writer to resell his work to another market is an important aspect of the writing business. The problem here as another poster said is really only the question of how much negotiating muscle you have. And how much you value your words.
I first read about this in the second volume of John Master's autobiography, "The Road Past Mandalay". He wrote about an excercise he took place in when he was at Staff College where they used multi-coloured ribbons representing different frequencies stringing them across a map between communicating units. He described how complex the result was, and how quickly you ran out of frequencies. (Remember, if frequencies are too close together, you will get bleed-over and garbled signals which is Not A Good Thing.)
TCP/IP packets, on the other hand, as we all know, can resolve this problem. Which is why they are investigating this I presume.
I suspect that the karma idea might not work. Maybe. My gut feeling is that the simpler the idea, the more effective. I suspect the response rate to the karma idea might make it unfeasible.
However, my main complaint about banner ads is the fact that (A) the html code for the banner ad rarely, in my experience, has the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes filled in. This means, naturally, that the page can't really start to load properly until it has received that gif image from the ad server. (B) It would appear that many ad servers are running very slow machines ["No, no. They can't be running on a '286! It just feels that way!"] or have a narrow pipe or whatever, because the ad is frequently the last bloody file to load to my browser!
Do you really want a civil servant to have control over what you say or do in your private time?
If the principal feels he has a beef about the content of the student's web site, he can get a lawyer and sue for libel and/or slander. (IANAL) But to deny the student his education, well where in law does that authority come from?