Except that there isn't a single company out there whose primary goal is "maximize everyone's salary". And fundamentally, that's not the point of a company in the first place.
...these parents are going to find evidence that they are right: Turning off the Wi-Fi will, I believe, lead to statistically significantly better performance by students.*
*Not by any means directly due to the Wi-Fi, indeed, but because neither kids nor teachers will have the ability to distract themselves by browsing the web during the school day. If they turn off cell access (meaning no texting either) they'll see a similar improvement.
Personally, I'd rather not work for a firm where the quality of my work doesn't equate in the least with the pay calculations. Do I look like some unionist drone (at least in Europe, they are usually paid along the same sort of gridded scale).
Yes, of course, anyone rationalizing it will simply say "well, we only keep exceptional people" - to which, after 30 years in the workplace, I call "bullshit".
In every group there are going to be achievers and slackers. Frankly, I want my compensation*/pay to be the highest I can compel the company to pay me, otherwise yeah, I will go somewhere else.
*note, compensation isn't pay - there are a host of other ways a company can compensate an employee that can be hugely beneficial that aren't cold, hard, taxable cash.
Go to some abandonware site, play a few of these ancient games...frankly, they rather stink. I mean, they were great in the day, no question.
But by today's standards (and no, it's NOT JUST THE GRAPHICS) they usually are very simplistic, clumsy, with limited reflex-based gaming choices at best. Tactical choices are extremely limited, conflict resolution is opaque and arbitrary. Save game? Hahahahaa, no, sorry.
Really, don't let yourself be fooled by your rose colored glasses. There's no reason to punish your kid by making them play old crappy titles so they "appreciate" the new ones more. Don't waste your or their time.
Nota bene: I'm 46. I started playing Oregon trail on a MECC terminal in 3-4th grade at age 9? 10? I've been a dedicated gamer since then, playing everything from the Atari800 Space Vikings from cassette tape, to Apple II space empires, to Ultima (before they had numbers), etc etc and so on. Bought my own first computer (a Zeos 386-20, regrettably without a co-processor, I simply couldn't afford it) in my early 20s, wrote computer game reviews for nearly 15 years, and have been involved in several titles from alpha to release. If there's anyone who could be suffused with nostalgia, it's me.
I doubt I'd have had the courage, honestly, to go as far.
Nevertheless, the idea that future generations "will never know a private thought" is complete histrionic bullshit. In my experience, the people complaining about a lack of privacy today are people that snapchat, twitter, and facebook regularly.
To rephrase then: "Socially-addicted attention whores have no privacy"... Is that a surprise?
It's not either/or. He can be admirable for what he did AND be a drama queen in his comments.
"...They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves â" an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought..."
Bullshit. This is just drama-queen nonsense right here.
No, their complaints aren't private...because they post them immediately to Facebook, snapchat them to someone else, or can't help but tweet their latest crisis to their 465 followers. Surprise, announcing your private thoughts and feelings to hundreds if not thousands makes it unlikely your thought is "private".
Today, any person can have a "private moment". They can have "private thoughts". There are even lots of opportunities for actual privacy, and they're pretty much all the same ways people have done these things through the centuries (unless you choose to avail yourself of modern communications).
There is no (zero, zip,zilch, nada) correlation between a single snapshot (be it anything less than an aggregated sum of. centuries) and climate. Honestly, it's no more relevant than saying "we got more/less snow this year" or "we had a lot of/no hurricanes this year" (yes this is also an error the op made)...that's weather trivia, interesting, and certainly impactful on humans, but not "climate".
I think Science Fiction does occasionally let us all indulge our inner nihilist, with a sort of dystopian future-template somehow graven in our minds by modern culture.
I believe it was in that sense that Iain Banks connected a relatively "hard"-ish science fiction (depending on which of the umpteen definitions you prefer) with a rock-solid core of optimism. His stories could be absolutely bleak on a personal level, with an overlay of brutal, naked realpolitik on a political level, yet he somehow managed to convey that ultimately we - as humanists, as small-l liberal enlightened thinkers, "won" as a species.
Sure, there are probably some surveillance things tossed in mainly "to be found", but the fact is that a break-in like this - where 3/4 of the systems weren't even turned back on is either a) laughably amateur, or b)(more likely) a deliberate message TELLING him he's under surveillance.
If he's practicing even moderately good security measures, he's likely beyond all but governments' ability to crack. And if they're after him, there are few things that he could do to PREVENT such surveillance.
"The government is almost indifferent to voter opinion because they can always play one part of the state off the other part. Which means they never have to do anything anyone wants. They just mommy/daddy the whole thing and then lie when that doesn't work.
Look. It needs to split because its unweldy, inherently corrupt, and incapable of serving the local needs of its residents."
I agree entirely that CA could be split into at least 2 more manageable states. Then again, I'd point out that there are few arguments in favor of this that wouldn't apply exactly and perfectly well to the FEDERAL government and US regions/states.
Yes, sometimes I think the slashdot community is guilty of forgetting that the bulk of the world doesn't function in the somewhat-rarified air of "IT".
The bulk of companies actually make something; in that case, it's a matter of people and machines: who can make it the best (most efficiently, highest quality, etc.), not about some 'secret recipe' that they need to hide from anyone else. Others serve people - forwarders, brokers, any service industry - again, a business where there's no secret recipe but a trade in knowledge, relationships, experience that's worth something.
The fact that the military didn't even know about this snap-decision (after TEN YEARS of "on again, off again" negotiations) shows that Dilma Rousseff is simply stomping her little feet angrily at the US. The US/Brazil relationship has always been touchy - Brazil is hypersensitive, and the US *was* overbearing and arrogant.
Ms Rousseff is either acting or stupid. Let's be absolutely candid: Brazil is NOT a first-world country. I would imagine that *any* first-world security agency that has wanted to spy on Brazil HAS been spying on Brazil. Frankly, the only people not spying on Brazil would be anyone who doesn't give a shit about Brazil, and for Ms Rousseff (or anyone with a brain) to not recognize that is simply ignorant or in denial.
She has public constituencies to salve, and is merely making political capital out of the always-useful-bogeyman, the US. That they decided on SAAB in such a snap decision suggests to me, in fact, that they'd qualified either vendor to their own standards, and were just waiting for the bribes/'compensations' to rise to the level that finally justified selecting one vendor or the other.
As I calculate, the cost to the government is REALLY more like net $70 billion, when you take the $50bn aid, the devaluation, the forgiven loans, and then deduct the small amount that came back to the government as it sold off its shares.
The FACT is that government handouts validate, enstantiate, hell, they ENCOURAGE and reward the sorts of shitty decision-making that caused them to be necessary in the first place. At ALL socioeconomic levels.
....and she mentioned that they had an elderly woman come in for a doctor's visit.
As usual, the woman was told to bring her current medications, so they could make sure about what she was taking, cross reactions, etc.
She came empty handed. The doctor proceeded to gently explain to her (right away) about why it was so important to bring them while the whole time she tried to explain: she doesn't TAKE any meds.
His reply was an astonished, "At all?"
Eventually she got through to this (young) doctor that no, despite being 74 years old, she was on NO ongoing medications, except the occasional aspirin for when she had a headache.
It was this nurse's impression that the doctor was a) disbelieving, and b) absolutely determined that this woman MUST have some sort of undiagnosed malady that she wasn't being treated for. They tested her all over the place - no diabetes (but rather high blood sugar...she said she'd just had coffeecake that morning), high-ish blood pressure but nothing needing treatment, etc. She was just a normal, healthy old person.
Why would you think a heat pump is more efficient?
If I use the 10% light output, and the rest of the energy is coming out as heat (which I definitely need, and directly decreases my heating bill), how could a heat pump be MORE efficient? I'm using all the output of the bulb?
While the whole system is very cool and 200' sounds like a lot, remember that at highway speeds, a car is covering ~100' per second, so 2 seconds to identify, contemplate, and react to that obstacle.
Logically, in oncoming situations (as a worst-case), two highway-speed vehicles 'detecting' at 200' have only about one second (actually less thanks to inertia, given that control-input and -effect isn't instant) to resolve, contemplate, and react.
I have to imagine the guys working on these systems are acutely aware driving home every day of how astonishingly capable our brains are.
Let's be semantically clear: they prove the system can work, not that the law can work. The law includes the federal end, which - despite desperately optimistic coverage and rationalization by all the major media except Fox who swings 180 degrees the other way (that *everything* is a disaster regardless of evidence) - is still pretty badly fucked, to wit: yes, the Federal website is minimally functional. The rest of it? You know, the functional working bit? Not so much.
Depending on who's reporting, something between 33% and 75% of the people "signed up for care" through the website either have no paperwork, wrong paperwork, or something else preventing their insurer from getting that person signed up automagically; further, nothing happens until the insurance companies actually get PAID. And take a wild guess exactly who the bill says is responsible for paying the insurers if they don't get it from those people? Yes, the taxpayers. So in March, we could already be talking about a mitigatory payment from the government to insurers of TARPish proportions. Why do you think the insurance firms were lobbying IN FAVOR of the ACA? They get MILLIONS of new customers and a 'guarantee' they get paid.
...thing takes on a much less catastrophic feel when you recognize that honeybees are an INVASIVE SPECIES, and that this continent was perfectly-well vegetated without them.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that there isn't a single company out there whose primary goal is "maximize everyone's salary". And fundamentally, that's not the point of a company in the first place.
Aside from that, you've nailed it.
...these parents are going to find evidence that they are right: Turning off the Wi-Fi will, I believe, lead to statistically significantly better performance by students.*
*Not by any means directly due to the Wi-Fi, indeed, but because neither kids nor teachers will have the ability to distract themselves by browsing the web during the school day. If they turn off cell access (meaning no texting either) they'll see a similar improvement.
Personally, I'd rather not work for a firm where the quality of my work doesn't equate in the least with the pay calculations. Do I look like some unionist drone (at least in Europe, they are usually paid along the same sort of gridded scale).
Yes, of course, anyone rationalizing it will simply say "well, we only keep exceptional people" - to which, after 30 years in the workplace, I call "bullshit".
In every group there are going to be achievers and slackers. Frankly, I want my compensation*/pay to be the highest I can compel the company to pay me, otherwise yeah, I will go somewhere else.
*note, compensation isn't pay - there are a host of other ways a company can compensate an employee that can be hugely beneficial that aren't cold, hard, taxable cash.
Don't let the lure of nostalgia fool you.
Go to some abandonware site, play a few of these ancient games...frankly, they rather stink. I mean, they were great in the day, no question.
But by today's standards (and no, it's NOT JUST THE GRAPHICS) they usually are very simplistic, clumsy, with limited reflex-based gaming choices at best. Tactical choices are extremely limited, conflict resolution is opaque and arbitrary. Save game? Hahahahaa, no, sorry.
Really, don't let yourself be fooled by your rose colored glasses. There's no reason to punish your kid by making them play old crappy titles so they "appreciate" the new ones more. Don't waste your or their time.
Nota bene: I'm 46. I started playing Oregon trail on a MECC terminal in 3-4th grade at age 9? 10? I've been a dedicated gamer since then, playing everything from the Atari800 Space Vikings from cassette tape, to Apple II space empires, to Ultima (before they had numbers), etc etc and so on. Bought my own first computer (a Zeos 386-20, regrettably without a co-processor, I simply couldn't afford it) in my early 20s, wrote computer game reviews for nearly 15 years, and have been involved in several titles from alpha to release. If there's anyone who could be suffused with nostalgia, it's me.
I *agree* with what he did.
I doubt I'd have had the courage, honestly, to go as far.
Nevertheless, the idea that future generations "will never know a private thought" is complete histrionic bullshit. In my experience, the people complaining about a lack of privacy today are people that snapchat, twitter, and facebook regularly.
To rephrase then: "Socially-addicted attention whores have no privacy"...
Is that a surprise?
It's not either/or. He can be admirable for what he did AND be a drama queen in his comments.
...because right now we're wishing it was in fact "warming" going on...
"...They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves â" an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought..."
Bullshit. This is just drama-queen nonsense right here.
No, their complaints aren't private...because they post them immediately to Facebook, snapchat them to someone else, or can't help but tweet their latest crisis to their 465 followers. Surprise, announcing your private thoughts and feelings to hundreds if not thousands makes it unlikely your thought is "private".
Today, any person can have a "private moment". They can have "private thoughts". There are even lots of opportunities for actual privacy, and they're pretty much all the same ways people have done these things through the centuries (unless you choose to avail yourself of modern communications).
To claim otherwise is pure histrionics.
Yes, because we are talking climate, not weather.
There is no (zero, zip,zilch, nada) correlation between a single snapshot (be it anything less than an aggregated sum of. centuries) and climate. Honestly, it's no more relevant than saying "we got more/less snow this year" or "we had a lot of/no hurricanes this year" (yes this is also an error the op made)...that's weather trivia, interesting, and certainly impactful on humans, but not "climate".
I think Science Fiction does occasionally let us all indulge our inner nihilist, with a sort of dystopian future-template somehow graven in our minds by modern culture.
As a counterpoint, though, I'd like to offer http://www.cracked.com/article_20731_5-amazing-pieces-good-news-nobody-reporting.html which sums neatly the fact that we (as humanity generally) are far more likely on the track of a UFP than a Dark Stellar Empire.
I believe it was in that sense that Iain Banks connected a relatively "hard"-ish science fiction (depending on which of the umpteen definitions you prefer) with a rock-solid core of optimism. His stories could be absolutely bleak on a personal level, with an overlay of brutal, naked realpolitik on a political level, yet he somehow managed to convey that ultimately we - as humanists, as small-l liberal enlightened thinkers, "won" as a species.
We will dearly miss you, Mr Banks.
"how do you make money off a free app that near-instantly vaporizes all content?"
The annual payment you're getting from the NSA to make sure they're permanently on the cc list?
Sure, there are probably some surveillance things tossed in mainly "to be found", but the fact is that a break-in like this - where 3/4 of the systems weren't even turned back on is either a) laughably amateur, or b)(more likely) a deliberate message TELLING him he's under surveillance.
If he's practicing even moderately good security measures, he's likely beyond all but governments' ability to crack. And if they're after him, there are few things that he could do to PREVENT such surveillance.
"The government is almost indifferent to voter opinion because they can always play one part of the state off the other part. Which means they never have to do anything anyone wants. They just mommy/daddy the whole thing and then lie when that doesn't work.
Look. It needs to split because its unweldy, inherently corrupt, and incapable of serving the local needs of its residents."
I agree entirely that CA could be split into at least 2 more manageable states.
Then again, I'd point out that there are few arguments in favor of this that wouldn't apply exactly and perfectly well to the FEDERAL government and US regions/states.
Yes, sometimes I think the slashdot community is guilty of forgetting that the bulk of the world doesn't function in the somewhat-rarified air of "IT".
The bulk of companies actually make something; in that case, it's a matter of people and machines: who can make it the best (most efficiently, highest quality, etc.), not about some 'secret recipe' that they need to hide from anyone else. Others serve people - forwarders, brokers, any service industry - again, a business where there's no secret recipe but a trade in knowledge, relationships, experience that's worth something.
It seems to be working for Iceland, for that matter.
The fact that the military didn't even know about this snap-decision (after TEN YEARS of "on again, off again" negotiations) shows that Dilma Rousseff is simply stomping her little feet angrily at the US. The US/Brazil relationship has always been touchy - Brazil is hypersensitive, and the US *was* overbearing and arrogant.
Ms Rousseff is either acting or stupid. Let's be absolutely candid: Brazil is NOT a first-world country. I would imagine that *any* first-world security agency that has wanted to spy on Brazil HAS been spying on Brazil. Frankly, the only people not spying on Brazil would be anyone who doesn't give a shit about Brazil, and for Ms Rousseff (or anyone with a brain) to not recognize that is simply ignorant or in denial.
She has public constituencies to salve, and is merely making political capital out of the always-useful-bogeyman, the US. That they decided on SAAB in such a snap decision suggests to me, in fact, that they'd qualified either vendor to their own standards, and were just waiting for the bribes/'compensations' to rise to the level that finally justified selecting one vendor or the other.
Not if there are votes to be bought.
...at all levels.
As I calculate, the cost to the government is REALLY more like net $70 billion, when you take the $50bn aid, the devaluation, the forgiven loans, and then deduct the small amount that came back to the government as it sold off its shares.
The FACT is that government handouts validate, enstantiate, hell, they ENCOURAGE and reward the sorts of shitty decision-making that caused them to be necessary in the first place. At ALL socioeconomic levels.
....and she mentioned that they had an elderly woman come in for a doctor's visit.
As usual, the woman was told to bring her current medications, so they could make sure about what she was taking, cross reactions, etc.
She came empty handed. The doctor proceeded to gently explain to her (right away) about why it was so important to bring them while the whole time she tried to explain: she doesn't TAKE any meds.
His reply was an astonished, "At all?"
Eventually she got through to this (young) doctor that no, despite being 74 years old, she was on NO ongoing medications, except the occasional aspirin for when she had a headache.
It was this nurse's impression that the doctor was a) disbelieving, and b) absolutely determined that this woman MUST have some sort of undiagnosed malady that she wasn't being treated for. They tested her all over the place - no diabetes (but rather high blood sugar...she said she'd just had coffeecake that morning), high-ish blood pressure but nothing needing treatment, etc. She was just a normal, healthy old person.
Why would you think a heat pump is more efficient?
If I use the 10% light output, and the rest of the energy is coming out as heat (which I definitely need, and directly decreases my heating bill), how could a heat pump be MORE efficient? I'm using all the output of the bulb?
While the whole system is very cool and 200' sounds like a lot, remember that at highway speeds, a car is covering ~100' per second, so 2 seconds to identify, contemplate, and react to that obstacle.
Logically, in oncoming situations (as a worst-case), two highway-speed vehicles 'detecting' at 200' have only about one second (actually less thanks to inertia, given that control-input and -effect isn't instant) to resolve, contemplate, and react.
I have to imagine the guys working on these systems are acutely aware driving home every day of how astonishingly capable our brains are.
Let's be semantically clear: they prove the system can work, not that the law can work. The law includes the federal end, which - despite desperately optimistic coverage and rationalization by all the major media except Fox who swings 180 degrees the other way (that *everything* is a disaster regardless of evidence) - is still pretty badly fucked, to wit: yes, the Federal website is minimally functional. The rest of it? You know, the functional working bit? Not so much.
Depending on who's reporting, something between 33% and 75% of the people "signed up for care" through the website either have no paperwork, wrong paperwork, or something else preventing their insurer from getting that person signed up automagically; further, nothing happens until the insurance companies actually get PAID. And take a wild guess exactly who the bill says is responsible for paying the insurers if they don't get it from those people? Yes, the taxpayers. So in March, we could already be talking about a mitigatory payment from the government to insurers of TARPish proportions. Why do you think the insurance firms were lobbying IN FAVOR of the ACA? They get MILLIONS of new customers and a 'guarantee' they get paid.
On which basis then, to be logically consistent, we should be talking about water vapor, shouldn't we?
...thing takes on a much less catastrophic feel when you recognize that honeybees are an INVASIVE SPECIES, and that this continent was perfectly-well vegetated without them.
$70bn to save 1 million jobs...so, about $70,000/job?
That's almost as dumb math as "cash for clunkers".
Light duty industrial robot: $60,000.
So, 4000 hours of labor (can work continuously) = about 6 months of 8-hour-day $15/hour labor.