I work in a Big Company with a genuine technical advancement track. It is not uncommon for a senior engineer with key skills to be paid more than his supervisor. (But not more than his manager, of course, since middle management is so important!) These positions tend to involve a lot of technical leadership: coordinating the activities of a project team, mentoring younger engineers, and providing input into the resource planning and budgeting process. But they have nobody "reporting" to them, and they make schedules happen (as opposed to simply making schedules).
It is my experience that most big companies who are serious about attracting key technical people are structured this way. Small companies are too busy working to worry about how they're structured.
Fun fact: The "Rent is Too High" party in New York State is actually called the "Rent Is Too Damn High" party, but the State made them change their name....
I've found the exact opposite. In my experience, a "Mgr. of Tech" is more likely to be bamboozled by bright, shiny schedules that bear no resemblance to reality (and by people who are better at smooth talking then getting their work done), while a "Tech Mgr." is more likely to create reasonable schedules because they've done the death march before, and can smell bullshit a mile away because they've slung some themselves at tome point.
It's all a matter of personality, I think. A good techie is not necessarily cut out for management, and not all managers are cut out to understand the underlying technology they're managing in any real depth.
Although my prior post was needlessly snarky, my point was that exit polls are not going to do very much to find possible fraud, because people are more likely to believe the poll is flawed than the vote count.
While I agree with the general point of your post, I disagree on one key point: the scenarios that are going around right now for hacking the vote are not really all that complex at all, someone who is adept at social engineering can make a huge impact on the outcome with a small number of actions. "Mucking up polling places" is effective also, but is quite visible, Even if the fradulent nature of the tactic is not immediately apparent, the casual observer will know that something is not quite right. By contrast, if someone sucessfully alters the program in a voting machine in an intelligent manner, we'll never know that anything was wrong!
However, their ability to execute a fraud is limited by the media polls (we will suspect something if the results are inexplicably different than polled) and knowledge of precinct history.
IIRC, the last two Presidential elections had results in particular states (especially Ohio and the ever-problematic Florida) that differed by the media exit polling data by a significant margin. This is why Florida was originally called for Gore in 2000, after all, because that's what the Exit Poll data said. Luckily, as we all know after six years of analyzing the issue, that election was not fradulent at all. So I'm not sure if media polls really can help us in finding fraud at all, since there must be fundamental flaws in their methodology if they're so consistently wrong in key battleground states....
There are several things going on here, a series of little things that escalate into this absurdity:
The cost of health care skyrocketing in general.
The litigiousness of the American Public, who view any injury as a chance to Get Rich Quick via personal injury and liability lawsuits.
The increasing cost of health and liability insurance, due to the increasing cost of health care and more exposure to liability suits.
An educational system that puts so much of an emphasis on test scores in funding that they can't afford to spend money on anything that won't directly increase test scores. (like ever-increasing liability insurance premiums).
We're going to see more absurd stuff happening unless some of these trends get reversed.
That is, everyone you knew was very careful about not admitting that they cheated. Good luck in the Business world, son. It eats honest people like you for breakfast.
Safari doesn't render page 4 correctly. I had to use Firefox on the Mac. The site claims to only work with IE.
Re:Sounds great ... but.
on
Vonage going IPO
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm out of mod points, so I'd like to reiterate that I looked into this, and I'm not going to touch it with a 10-foor pole. They spend almost every dollar in revenue they make on marketing, and borrow money to keep their business running. IIRC ( I don't have the prospectus in front of me), but they made $250 mil last year and spent close to $400 mil. When you combine their assets and their debts together, the company is worth less than zero. But this IPO will raise something like $400 mil, and since they're offering about 20% of their outstanding stock they're effectively valuing the company at $2 billion.
It's not 1999, folks. It might be possible to buy in at the IPO price, and then flip it for a gain that day. But I like my odds in Vegas better. If you like the long-term prospects, wait a little while and I htink the price will dip below the IPO price....
Remember that the U.S. has not signed on to the International Criminal Court for roughly the same reasons. If the US had signed on, then US servicemen or polititians could be hauled into the ICC on suspicion of war crimes and not given all the safeguards that the U.S. court system has. I guess that bit about "All men are created equal" needs revision now.
It would be better for an entire city's worth of innocent civilians to die in screaming agony, than for the law to be broken. If the law says property is more important than life, then property is more important than life. In fact, US law is quite explicit that is is OK to kill a human being in order to protect {real, physical} property.
Actually, that's not quite correct. This topic came up during a discussion I had recently with some lawyers over a man in the news recently who is facing murder charges for shooting a trespasser on his property. He claimed that he had a lot of problems with teens walking across his lawn in recent years, and the last onw to walk across just made him snap. The kid was, in fact, trespassing, but the guy is facing charges anyway.
Generally, there must be a proportional response to any threat. A threat to property is not justification enough to kill someone, but it might be enough justification to forcibly stop him and remove him from the area using non-lethal force. In the U.S., there needs to be a percieved threat of violence associated with the situation to justify killing in self-defense.
My understanding is that you basically get the benefit of the doubt in the U.S. if someone is doing something that is a serious threat (like invading your home) that could turn lethal, and you don't know their intentions. While you never have grounds to kill someone just becasue they're stealing your stereo, if you try to forcefully stop someone who you think is going to hurt you or your family and happen to kill them in the process, you probably won't be charged.
I Disagree. When Lucas said that he had planned all along to make nine... um... six movies, I believe him. The Star Wars Universe is, after all, incredibly detailed, much more so than the movies can ever get across. (At least, that's what the fanboys who have the time to read all the books tell me).
Lucas's problem, IMHO, is that all he had was the talent to write was the backstory, but the commercial success of the original Star Wars trilogy convinced him that he had the talent to actually write and direct the rest on his own. To paraphrase the guy from that other trilogy that Lucas was involved in (but was smart enough to get someone else to direct), "He has chosen... poorly."
(BTW, the parent doesn't deserve a Flamebait mod. His opinion is perfetly valid, even if it is wrong. )
The problem is that the prequals were full of crap like this that could have been done in 1/4th the time and with heightened mood in the hands of a college-level competent filmmaker.
I won't dispute that at all. They could have been so much better had someone else been involved. George Lucas came up with this universe in the first place, so he's not a total idiot, but I think he's proven with these last three films that his creative output needs a lot of filtering through other creative people in order to not be total crap. (I don't think it's an accident that the movie that's critically acclaimed to be the best of the bunch -- Empire Strikes Back -- was also one of the two he didn't direct and the one he had the most writing help on.)
In fact, I'd wager that my interpretation of the miti-chlorian stuff was probably what George intended all along, but it didn't come across as clearly because we couldn't see past the piles and piles of turds that George built up around it.
Are people still worked up about this midi-chlorian shit? That's the part of the prequels that bothered me the least. I do at least understand why you're all pissed. Who would have ever thought that a mystic bad-ass Jedi Knight would have essentially whipped out a tricorder and punched a few buttons to get the answer? It just seems wrong, right?
You see, that's the whole point -- it was wrong. The Jedi Order from the prequels was getting a little too big for its britches, a little too political, a little too technical. They were starting to abandon the mystical connection to the Force in favor of things that they could see and measure. As a result of this, they started to miss the whole point of this Force business, and the only way to rescue things and "bring balance" was to fucking kill them all, and start over from scratch.
The last time I was at the movies (which admittedly was quite a few months ago), I noticed that every single preview was either a sequel, a re-make of an older book or movie, or a movie which was virtually identical to the last one that particular screenplay writer wrote. Pixar is the only company putting out original stuff right now. That, and the gay cowboy movie, I suppose.
Believe it or not,.5 cents is a perfectly valid amount. A Mill is defined as 1/1000 of a dollar. Nowadays, the only place it is used in practice is at the gas station....
As I see it, the issue is really that the term "Intelligent Design" has been co-opted by the creationists in America in order to find a back-door way to put a literal interpretation of the bible in schools. Take a look at what the Catholics call "Intelligent Design" -- they hold that God did play a role in our development, but that there's nothing in the classical theory of evolution that contradicts this notion. The "Intelligent Designer" could have been working through the mechanism of evolution, for all we know. To a Catholic who is familiar with official church teaching, there is a fundamental difference between creationism and ID. Then again, Catholics are not required to interpret the bible literally, so they're under no obligation to think the world was created in 144 hours, unlike the fundamentalists who are pushing ID in America.
Either way, under whichever definition of "Intelligent Design" you go by, the people who are not batshit crazy concede that intelligent design is not science, and is no replacement for any scientific theory. Science and religion answer fundamentally different questions, and can co-exist side by side. Intelligent Design should be taught from the pulpit, and not in schools. It's as simple as that.
Simple: it's called e-mail. Instead wasting time on some stupid phone call or face-to-face meeting, where there's absolutely no record of what was communicated, send an email. Of course, the previous poster pointed out the problem there: many managers don't want to be accountable to what they say, so they prefer to use a medium that's not easily recorded.
Our management has solved the problem of the paper trail: they've configured our mail servers to delete all mail older than 45 days unless the retention period is explicitly extended, and there's a business justification for every extension on every e-mail. They call it an "e-mail retention policy". Slick, huh? Now they can be unaccountable in any medium!
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It is my experience that most big companies who are serious about attracting key technical people are structured this way. Small companies are too busy working to worry about how they're structured.
Fun fact: The "Rent is Too High" party in New York State is actually called the "Rent Is Too Damn High" party, but the State made them change their name....
It's all a matter of personality, I think. A good techie is not necessarily cut out for management, and not all managers are cut out to understand the underlying technology they're managing in any real depth.
Nonsense. Every geek has a secret wish to one day become a dork.
Although my prior post was needlessly snarky, my point was that exit polls are not going to do very much to find possible fraud, because people are more likely to believe the poll is flawed than the vote count.
While I agree with the general point of your post, I disagree on one key point: the scenarios that are going around right now for hacking the vote are not really all that complex at all, someone who is adept at social engineering can make a huge impact on the outcome with a small number of actions. "Mucking up polling places" is effective also, but is quite visible, Even if the fradulent nature of the tactic is not immediately apparent, the casual observer will know that something is not quite right. By contrast, if someone sucessfully alters the program in a voting machine in an intelligent manner, we'll never know that anything was wrong!
IIRC, the last two Presidential elections had results in particular states (especially Ohio and the ever-problematic Florida) that differed by the media exit polling data by a significant margin. This is why Florida was originally called for Gore in 2000, after all, because that's what the Exit Poll data said. Luckily, as we all know after six years of analyzing the issue, that election was not fradulent at all. So I'm not sure if media polls really can help us in finding fraud at all, since there must be fundamental flaws in their methodology if they're so consistently wrong in key battleground states....
We're going to see more absurd stuff happening unless some of these trends get reversed.
That is, everyone you knew was very careful about not admitting that they cheated.
Good luck in the Business world, son. It eats honest people like you for breakfast.
How can it be yout third home if there's no Guinness there?
It's cosmic Karma, this is Circuit City's pennance for coming up with the crappy DIVX idea to begin with.
The last thing we need is another pork-barrel project!
Safari doesn't render page 4 correctly. I had to use Firefox on the Mac. The site claims to only work with IE.
I'm out of mod points, so I'd like to reiterate that I looked into this, and I'm not going to touch it with a 10-foor pole. They spend almost every dollar in revenue they make on marketing, and borrow money to keep their business running. IIRC ( I don't have the prospectus in front of me), but they made $250 mil last year and spent close to $400 mil. When you combine their assets and their debts together, the company is worth less than zero. But this IPO will raise something like $400 mil, and since they're offering about 20% of their outstanding stock they're effectively valuing the company at $2 billion. It's not 1999, folks. It might be possible to buy in at the IPO price, and then flip it for a gain that day. But I like my odds in Vegas better. If you like the long-term prospects, wait a little while and I htink the price will dip below the IPO price....
It's almost enough to forgive them for inflicting Celine Dion on us....
Remember that the U.S. has not signed on to the International Criminal Court for roughly the same reasons. If the US had signed on, then US servicemen or polititians could be hauled into the ICC on suspicion of war crimes and not given all the safeguards that the U.S. court system has. I guess that bit about "All men are created equal" needs revision now.
Actually, that's not quite correct. This topic came up during a discussion I had recently with some lawyers over a man in the news recently who is facing murder charges for shooting a trespasser on his property. He claimed that he had a lot of problems with teens walking across his lawn in recent years, and the last onw to walk across just made him snap. The kid was, in fact, trespassing, but the guy is facing charges anyway.
Generally, there must be a proportional response to any threat. A threat to property is not justification enough to kill someone, but it might be enough justification to forcibly stop him and remove him from the area using non-lethal force. In the U.S., there needs to be a percieved threat of violence associated with the situation to justify killing in self-defense.
My understanding is that you basically get the benefit of the doubt in the U.S. if someone is doing something that is a serious threat (like invading your home) that could turn lethal, and you don't know their intentions. While you never have grounds to kill someone just becasue they're stealing your stereo, if you try to forcefully stop someone who you think is going to hurt you or your family and happen to kill them in the process, you probably won't be charged.
Lucas's problem, IMHO, is that all he had was the talent to write was the backstory, but the commercial success of the original Star Wars trilogy convinced him that he had the talent to actually write and direct the rest on his own. To paraphrase the guy from that other trilogy that Lucas was involved in (but was smart enough to get someone else to direct), "He has chosen... poorly."
(BTW, the parent doesn't deserve a Flamebait mod. His opinion is perfetly valid, even if it is wrong. )
I won't dispute that at all. They could have been so much better had someone else been involved. George Lucas came up with this universe in the first place, so he's not a total idiot, but I think he's proven with these last three films that his creative output needs a lot of filtering through other creative people in order to not be total crap. (I don't think it's an accident that the movie that's critically acclaimed to be the best of the bunch -- Empire Strikes Back -- was also one of the two he didn't direct and the one he had the most writing help on.)
In fact, I'd wager that my interpretation of the miti-chlorian stuff was probably what George intended all along, but it didn't come across as clearly because we couldn't see past the piles and piles of turds that George built up around it.
You see, that's the whole point -- it was wrong. The Jedi Order from the prequels was getting a little too big for its britches, a little too political, a little too technical. They were starting to abandon the mystical connection to the Force in favor of things that they could see and measure. As a result of this, they started to miss the whole point of this Force business, and the only way to rescue things and "bring balance" was to fucking kill them all, and start over from scratch.
At least, that's how I would have wrote it.
The last time I was at the movies (which admittedly was quite a few months ago), I noticed that every single preview was either a sequel, a re-make of an older book or movie, or a movie which was virtually identical to the last one that particular screenplay writer wrote. Pixar is the only company putting out original stuff right now. That, and the gay cowboy movie, I suppose.
Believe it or not, .5 cents is a perfectly valid amount. A Mill is defined as 1/1000 of a dollar. Nowadays, the only place it is used in practice is at the gas station....
Either way, under whichever definition of "Intelligent Design" you go by, the people who are not batshit crazy concede that intelligent design is not science, and is no replacement for any scientific theory. Science and religion answer fundamentally different questions, and can co-exist side by side. Intelligent Design should be taught from the pulpit, and not in schools. It's as simple as that.
Our management has solved the problem of the paper trail: they've configured our mail servers to delete all mail older than 45 days unless the retention period is explicitly extended, and there's a business justification for every extension on every e-mail. They call it an "e-mail retention policy". Slick, huh? Now they can be unaccountable in any medium!
Steve's gonna be pissed!
This song sounds great! Is it on iTunes?