Exactly! I know plenty of people who have taken counter offers with no negative side effects. There are some commonalities though. All of these people were fairly critical to the projects at the time, were all excellent workers in general and they were all getting paid less than they were worth to begin with. They also weren't looking for huge salary jumps, but matching offers. If you enjoy your work and honestly don't want to leave except to get a higher salary (*Especially* after a pay cut) then take the counter offer. If you are fair with your employers, and you don't lord it over your co-workers who might not have the same opportunity, then it shouldn't be too much of a big issue. All these people who got canned after accepting a counter should have expected it based on the management style they worked under, or they likely thought too highly of themselves and either demanded too much or didn't put in the same effort once the decision was made.
Being an athlete doesn't make you stupid. Nor does being smart make you less athletic. The problem is there needs to be balance and there rarely is balance in these things. Schools promote sports because sports activities bring in more money. This is unfortunate but true...sports are more interesting to spectators (from the general population) and therefore, draw more money. It's simple math. Believe it or not you learn a lot more than how to tackle or hit a baseball by playing on some team sports. Maybe you should try being part of a team sometime and see what it's all about. I've played team and individual sports all my life, and I've been a "geek" all my life; I've been pretty successful in both aspects of my life, although I wouldn't be considered a star in either...even at the high school level. I did get something different from both things though, that make me a better, more rounded individual than *I* would have been otherwise. The point is to try and keep balance and unfortunately, that is very hard to do.
First of all, the article said he tried to return them and was told to sell them. Second, not all the parts were required destruction parts. The article doesn't mention whether or not the items sold were, but give the guy the benefit of the doubt here. He at least tried to return them properly (assuming the article is correct) and when told to sell them, he took the advice and made a little profit. The article also said he is cooperating with the Air Force who asked him to return the parts. There is no need to prosecute him for trying to be a decent person and still make his money back.
You've missed a vital piece of information, the UCAV isn't going to be picking its own targets. The targets will be determined by other forms of intelligence which can generally determine to a high degree of accuracy whether that $100 microwave is a real radar site or not. The US uses plenty of signals intelligence and imagery intelligence assets to determine what is a valid target before sending planes in to bomb said targets. These assets can determine power levels, frequencies, and if you've ever looked at a "Jane's" book, you'll know that we have all the information we need about most radars to determine if they are a threat or not. We know what weapons systems they are associated with and how to neutralize them.
Generally these UAVs are given a preset mission that includes targets to "shoot" (with cameras generally but in this case with weapons) at what time. The "pilot" is actually a payload operator who can make target adjustments during flight and there is generally an AV (air vehicle) operator who can take manual control of the aircraft in the event of a malfunction but this is generally only required during landing although automatic take-off and landing (ATOL) is making this much less of a requirement. That is why the pilot (AVO) can fly multiple aircraft at the same time. It isn't really like flying a simulator or even a remote controlled airplane. It's more like watching someone else controlling the thing unless something goes wrong and then stepping in to fix the problem, then give control back to the bird...
So who picks this completely autonomous government? How does this government enforce its laws? Who benefits from fines if there were any place to send fines to--you, some "government officials" that run this virtual governement? Who decides what the laws are--how are they created and implemented? This is an interesting idea, but practically speaking there is no way to implement it. People must be held accountable for the laws they break in the real world, and that means being beholden to the laws of their own country/state/region/whatever. Until we can find a way to accurately and fairly transfer current laws to apply appropriately to internet practice, we will continue battling with MPAA RIAA and everyone else. All we can do now is try to get people with favorable positions into power in current government and push our current governments' awareness about the "people's position" on the issues.
"Pan, the Greek god of herds and shepherds" Is it just me or is this a subtle dig by Intel at the consumer market? If banias is the shepherd, who are the sheep?
Being intelligent doesn't mean you have to be s pimply faced slob with no social skills. It also doesn't mean you have to be physically unhealthy and drink nothing but Jolt or Mountain Dew whilst sitting at a terminal. I will agree completely that *watching* sports is a waste of time, but playing sports (just like playing a musical instrument) can be shown to increase one's intellectual abilities. You ever hear the saying use it or lose it? Your brain is a complex thing and it gets a different type of "workout" from sports than it would from reading a book. Your brain *needs* different types of stimulation. Sports aren't totally useless as long as you participate in the sport itself and not in watching the sport. I don't believe that we have Gravity hardwired into our brains. A baby placed on a glass table will "fear" a situation it has never been in precisely for that reason...it doesn't *know* from its experiences what the outcome will be until something happens. I'm sure if the baby were put on the glass table several times over a few day period it would no longer feel the fear it had on the first trial. Gravity, like most other things, are something we learn how to cope with. Balance is a learned thing, and gravity goes hand in hand with it.
I don't know about hiring someone new but couldn't you just start by compiling comments and formatting them into a reasonable sounding document? Are you looking for user manual type documentation or comment style docs for coders or what? The longer you wait to get this rolling though, the worse it will get, that's for sure.
I just heard on the radio yesterday that one of the airlines will begin offering a "space flight" as one of their mileage rewards beginning sometime around 2004. I figured it would be the Russians providing the vehicle but now I guess it's pretty certain. For those interested, I think it will only cost like a million mileage points...can't remember which airline though.
That was my first impression as well. How can they suggst eating habits and body distinctions (possible tail stinger or large claws) from foot prints right? Or for that matter, how can they be sure the footprints were produced by anything like a scorpion? Far down in the article, it mentions that a fossilized skeleton of one of these was found in the early '80s. "These combs are preserved in a much older giant eurypterid specimen collected near Prince Albert in the 1980s."
That may be where all this hype came from, putting a name with a face so to speak.
I still think that these guys are full of it. Even if you have a fossilized skeleton and foot prints, that doesn't give room for conjecture on subspecies of the same creature. There is no reason to think, for example, that there were some "breeds" that had claws and some that had other methods of capturing prey, as the article suggests.
Also, the article is somewhat contradictory, calling this thing a predator "like these [modern arachnids], eurypterids were almost exclusively predatory in habits, feeding on living prey such as other arthropods, soft-bodied invertebrates, and fish." Further on the article says; "but there is good reason to think that it was not a fearsome predator like many of its smaller terrestrial and aquatic relatives." It can't be both a predator and a non-predator. This article is pure conjecture without further proof in some other form or confirmation by other paleontologists.
Where do you come up with the number of 100 civilians killed versus 10 civilians killed? Also, you arent' taking into account the number of people who are maimed each year but not killed by the mines. I think you will find most people disagree with your view; this is EXACTLY the case where tech is the answer...or should be. Sure you have to design in all-terrain features in the robot but that's not that difficult. And your presumption that the machine will only clear roughly half of the mines that humans would clear is preposterous. There's no reason to believe that at all. If the mine is found by the machine, it is likely to be dispatched appropriately. If the mine isn't found by the robot, then a person can find it and still use the robot to dispose of it in a safe manner. Your math is definitely fictional and doesn't support your case at all.
GPS receivers are plenty accurate enough to tell speed. The military uses them to track all sorts of moving vehicles and even to help land certain aircraft (unmanned). These are more expensive but if your using fines to pay for the system (which isn't absurdly expensive to begin with) then it doesn't really matter because it pays for itself in no time.
A few comments.
1st - if you nearly had an accident you were driving too closely or too fast or both. Your points are therefore mute.
2nd - speeding is not necessarily dangerous. I have areas posted 40 mph near me on a major highway with no housing anywhere near it and no reason for there to be pedestrians around the road. Is going 50 or 60 unsafe in this area just because the sign says 40? What about where the speed limit is 75 or unlimited (there are places in the states with no speed limit during daylight hours)? Who determines what is safe? The driver does. Yes it is breaking the law to speed but some laws are stupid and are meant just as a catch all to use against "real" criminals.
3rd - like one of the other posters mentioned, privatization of the police, or in this case the duties of the police, is not a good thing, in any country. Policing of the populace should be done by the government and no-one else.
If you say this tracking is to prevent theft then why am I required to give a credit card to rent a car? (That was supposed to be for theft prevention too.) Fining me for speeding has nothing to do with preventing theft of the vehicle and it is therefore an unjustified invasion of privacy for you to monitor my activities. Acme is simply using this as a way to scam renters into paying more for the agency's insurance premiums. I will not be renting a car from them in the future that's for sure. That is my advice to anyone who disagrees with this practice, whether it was enforced or not. Don't rent from Acme on the basis that they have made this decision and had to be told by a court of law that they couldn't enforce it.
"I installed Mandrake 8.0, played with the security levels a bit, and found that it had decided to firewall my machine so that no connections could be made to it...
It might be better to ship the OS in the most locked-down state by default and the user has to deliberately enable things like connections from the outside."
Looks to me like Mandrake did exactly what you asked. It locked everything down. I'm not sure what problems you had...when I set my security levels differently (in Mandrake 8.0) and then restart the firewall everything works as expected.
Of course they don't have written records of what happened. That's why there is so much conjecture about how the damn things were built in the first place.
Yes most of the other countries in the world have been around longer than the US. They haven't all maintained the same government or even government type for that period. China has been around for 4000 years but has gone through many dynasties, countless boundary changes and its current system of government is only 60 years old. I agree the post was not entirely accurate in thinking that 200 years makes a long time for a government to last but at the same time, very few other countries have had the same governmental "stability" that we have hadduring the modern era. The UK even went from a soveriegnty (granted the Queen is still the head of the country--in name only) to a parliamentary type of government.
I don't necessarily agree with the demand of the post but here is a link which may shed some light.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/randy.carpente r/folklore/v5n1.html
And thankyou J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly for making our lives better...I think;)
Tell that to the guy that used to live outside Beale AFB, CA. A U2 was doing a checkout flight using one of the thermal cameras that it can carry and the guys house lit up like a Christmas tree. Needless to say the authorities found something like 5 kilos of pot growing under heat lamps in the guys house. I'm sure he would disagree with your statement that it's not invasive. I'm not saying that he was right...I don't believe in drug use, but when should we say enough is enough? I mean had it not been for a fluke of technology he would have never been suspected and there would have been no reason to issue a warrant. It seems perfectly reasonable to require a warrant to use thermal imaging just as it is required for a phone tap. In the US the police need to show probable cause BEFORE they search you. Not justifiable proof after.
Every DVD player I've ever seen has an RGB output, as well as S video and composite video. What are you talking about? You mean a 15pin VGA connector? I think you are mistaken about your assumption that this will be some modified LCD. Most likely it will be a simple 15" LCD just like Sony puts on its laptop computers.
I think the problem people have is that if you create an intelligent machine, you don't have to write software that writes software. The machine will LEARN to write software.
I mis-phrased that last post (i hope it gets posted before this one anyway.) You don't hear the boom because you are already traveling faster than the sound and therefore you are steadily increasing the distance between you and the source of the boom (the location where you broke the barrier)and you are essentially moving away from the sound at a faster speed than the sound is traveling.
As I understand it, you don't hear the boom because the sound is actually behind you and travelling "away" from you. This may not be entirely accurate, though, as we all know that sound doesn't travel in only one direction from a source.
Would this work on two pieces of equipment that WEREN'T attached by optical fibers? You imply that both sender and reciever are on the same line but in most situations that is not the case. Am I missing something here? If I'm trying to transmit information across a radio or phone line (non fiber), how can this quantum encryption have any effectiveness?
People accepted (in part) DVD players because they had the encryption from the start (for the most part) and weren't popular until after nearly every DVD sold was encrypted. You can still buy a few unencrypted titles. Furthermore, people don't totally agree with region coding as has been stated above. Why should I have to buy multiple new stereos for my house and my cars just because some asshole wants a watermark? That is how I imagine most people will respond to this if they can't play new cds without special hardware.
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Exactly! I know plenty of people who have taken counter offers with no negative side effects. There are some commonalities though. All of these people were fairly critical to the projects at the time, were all excellent workers in general and they were all getting paid less than they were worth to begin with. They also weren't looking for huge salary jumps, but matching offers. If you enjoy your work and honestly don't want to leave except to get a higher salary (*Especially* after a pay cut) then take the counter offer. If you are fair with your employers, and you don't lord it over your co-workers who might not have the same opportunity, then it shouldn't be too much of a big issue. All these people who got canned after accepting a counter should have expected it based on the management style they worked under, or they likely thought too highly of themselves and either demanded too much or didn't put in the same effort once the decision was made.
bkr
Being an athlete doesn't make you stupid. Nor does being smart make you less athletic. The problem is there needs to be balance and there rarely is balance in these things. Schools promote sports because sports activities bring in more money. This is unfortunate but true...sports are more interesting to spectators (from the general population) and therefore, draw more money. It's simple math.
Believe it or not you learn a lot more than how to tackle or hit a baseball by playing on some team sports. Maybe you should try being part of a team sometime and see what it's all about.
I've played team and individual sports all my life, and I've been a "geek" all my life; I've been pretty successful in both aspects of my life, although I wouldn't be considered a star in either...even at the high school level. I did get something different from both things though, that make me a better, more rounded individual than *I* would have been otherwise.
The point is to try and keep balance and unfortunately, that is very hard to do.
bkr
First of all, the article said he tried to return them and was told to sell them. Second, not all the parts were required destruction parts. The article doesn't mention whether or not the items sold were, but give the guy the benefit of the doubt here. He at least tried to return them properly (assuming the article is correct) and when told to sell them, he took the advice and made a little profit. The article also said he is cooperating with the Air Force who asked him to return the parts. There is no need to prosecute him for trying to be a decent person and still make his money back.
bkr
You've missed a vital piece of information, the UCAV isn't going to be picking its own targets. The targets will be determined by other forms of intelligence which can generally determine to a high degree of accuracy whether that $100 microwave is a real radar site or not. The US uses plenty of signals intelligence and imagery intelligence assets to determine what is a valid target before sending planes in to bomb said targets. These assets can determine power levels, frequencies, and if you've ever looked at a "Jane's" book, you'll know that we have all the information we need about most radars to determine if they are a threat or not. We know what weapons systems they are associated with and how to neutralize them.
Generally these UAVs are given a preset mission that includes targets to "shoot" (with cameras generally but in this case with weapons) at what time. The "pilot" is actually a payload operator who can make target adjustments during flight and there is generally an AV (air vehicle) operator who can take manual control of the aircraft in the event of a malfunction but this is generally only required during landing although automatic take-off and landing (ATOL) is making this much less of a requirement. That is why the pilot (AVO) can fly multiple aircraft at the same time. It isn't really like flying a simulator or even a remote controlled airplane. It's more like watching someone else controlling the thing unless something goes wrong and then stepping in to fix the problem, then give control back to the bird...
So who picks this completely autonomous government? How does this government enforce its laws? Who benefits from fines if there were any place to send fines to--you, some "government officials" that run this virtual governement? Who decides what the laws are--how are they created and implemented?
This is an interesting idea, but practically speaking there is no way to implement it. People must be held accountable for the laws they break in the real world, and that means being beholden to the laws of their own country/state/region/whatever. Until we can find a way to accurately and fairly transfer current laws to apply appropriately to internet practice, we will continue battling with MPAA RIAA and everyone else. All we can do now is try to get people with favorable positions into power in current government and push our current governments' awareness about the "people's position" on the issues.
bkr
"Pan, the Greek god of herds and shepherds"
Is it just me or is this a subtle dig by Intel at the consumer market? If banias is the shepherd, who are the sheep?
Being intelligent doesn't mean you have to be s pimply faced slob with no social skills. It also doesn't mean you have to be physically unhealthy and drink nothing but Jolt or Mountain Dew whilst sitting at a terminal. I will agree completely that *watching* sports is a waste of time, but playing sports (just like playing a musical instrument) can be shown to increase one's intellectual abilities. You ever hear the saying use it or lose it? Your brain is a complex thing and it gets a different type of "workout" from sports than it would from reading a book. Your brain *needs* different types of stimulation. Sports aren't totally useless as long as you participate in the sport itself and not in watching the sport.
I don't believe that we have Gravity hardwired into our brains. A baby placed on a glass table will "fear" a situation it has never been in precisely for that reason...it doesn't *know* from its experiences what the outcome will be until something happens. I'm sure if the baby were put on the glass table several times over a few day period it would no longer feel the fear it had on the first trial. Gravity, like most other things, are something we learn how to cope with. Balance is a learned thing, and gravity goes hand in hand with it.
bkr
I don't know about hiring someone new but couldn't you just start by compiling comments and formatting them into a reasonable sounding document? Are you looking for user manual type documentation or comment style docs for coders or what? The longer you wait to get this rolling though, the worse it will get, that's for sure.
I just heard on the radio yesterday that one of the airlines will begin offering a "space flight" as one of their mileage rewards beginning sometime around 2004. I figured it would be the Russians providing the vehicle but now I guess it's pretty certain. For those interested, I think it will only cost like a million mileage points...can't remember which airline though.
That was my first impression as well. How can they suggst eating habits and body distinctions (possible tail stinger or large claws) from foot prints right? Or for that matter, how can they be sure the footprints were produced by anything like a scorpion? Far down in the article, it mentions that a fossilized skeleton of one of these was found in the early '80s. "These combs are preserved in a much older giant eurypterid specimen collected near Prince Albert in the 1980s."
That may be where all this hype came from, putting a name with a face so to speak.
I still think that these guys are full of it. Even if you have a fossilized skeleton and foot prints, that doesn't give room for conjecture on subspecies of the same creature. There is no reason to think, for example, that there were some "breeds" that had claws and some that had other methods of capturing prey, as the article suggests.
Also, the article is somewhat contradictory, calling this thing a predator "like these [modern arachnids], eurypterids were almost exclusively predatory in habits, feeding on living prey such as other arthropods, soft-bodied invertebrates, and fish." Further on the article says; "but there is good reason to think that it was not a fearsome predator like many of its smaller terrestrial and aquatic relatives." It can't be both a predator and a non-predator. This article is pure conjecture without further proof in some other form or confirmation by other paleontologists.
bkr
Where do you come up with the number of 100 civilians killed versus 10 civilians killed? Also, you arent' taking into account the number of people who are maimed each year but not killed by the mines. I think you will find most people disagree with your view; this is EXACTLY the case where tech is the answer...or should be. Sure you have to design in all-terrain features in the robot but that's not that difficult. And your presumption that the machine will only clear roughly half of the mines that humans would clear is preposterous. There's no reason to believe that at all. If the mine is found by the machine, it is likely to be dispatched appropriately. If the mine isn't found by the robot, then a person can find it and still use the robot to dispose of it in a safe manner. Your math is definitely fictional and doesn't support your case at all.
bkr
GPS receivers are plenty accurate enough to tell speed. The military uses them to track all sorts of moving vehicles and even to help land certain aircraft (unmanned). These are more expensive but if your using fines to pay for the system (which isn't absurdly expensive to begin with) then it doesn't really matter because it pays for itself in no time.
A few comments. 1st - if you nearly had an accident you were driving too closely or too fast or both. Your points are therefore mute. 2nd - speeding is not necessarily dangerous. I have areas posted 40 mph near me on a major highway with no housing anywhere near it and no reason for there to be pedestrians around the road. Is going 50 or 60 unsafe in this area just because the sign says 40? What about where the speed limit is 75 or unlimited (there are places in the states with no speed limit during daylight hours)? Who determines what is safe? The driver does. Yes it is breaking the law to speed but some laws are stupid and are meant just as a catch all to use against "real" criminals. 3rd - like one of the other posters mentioned, privatization of the police, or in this case the duties of the police, is not a good thing, in any country. Policing of the populace should be done by the government and no-one else. If you say this tracking is to prevent theft then why am I required to give a credit card to rent a car? (That was supposed to be for theft prevention too.) Fining me for speeding has nothing to do with preventing theft of the vehicle and it is therefore an unjustified invasion of privacy for you to monitor my activities. Acme is simply using this as a way to scam renters into paying more for the agency's insurance premiums. I will not be renting a car from them in the future that's for sure. That is my advice to anyone who disagrees with this practice, whether it was enforced or not. Don't rent from Acme on the basis that they have made this decision and had to be told by a court of law that they couldn't enforce it.
"I installed Mandrake 8.0, played with the security levels a bit, and found that it had decided to firewall my machine so that no connections could be made to it... It might be better to ship the OS in the most locked-down state by default and the user has to deliberately enable things like connections from the outside." Looks to me like Mandrake did exactly what you asked. It locked everything down. I'm not sure what problems you had...when I set my security levels differently (in Mandrake 8.0) and then restart the firewall everything works as expected.
Of course they don't have written records of what happened. That's why there is so much conjecture about how the damn things were built in the first place.
Yes most of the other countries in the world have been around longer than the US. They haven't all maintained the same government or even government type for that period. China has been around for 4000 years but has gone through many dynasties, countless boundary changes and its current system of government is only 60 years old. I agree the post was not entirely accurate in thinking that 200 years makes a long time for a government to last but at the same time, very few other countries have had the same governmental "stability" that we have hadduring the modern era. The UK even went from a soveriegnty (granted the Queen is still the head of the country--in name only) to a parliamentary type of government.
I don't necessarily agree with the demand of the post but here is a link which may shed some light. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/randy.carpente r/folklore/v5n1.html
And thankyou J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly for making our lives better...I think ;)
Tell that to the guy that used to live outside Beale AFB, CA. A U2 was doing a checkout flight using one of the thermal cameras that it can carry and the guys house lit up like a Christmas tree. Needless to say the authorities found something like 5 kilos of pot growing under heat lamps in the guys house. I'm sure he would disagree with your statement that it's not invasive. I'm not saying that he was right...I don't believe in drug use, but when should we say enough is enough? I mean had it not been for a fluke of technology he would have never been suspected and there would have been no reason to issue a warrant. It seems perfectly reasonable to require a warrant to use thermal imaging just as it is required for a phone tap. In the US the police need to show probable cause BEFORE they search you. Not justifiable proof after.
Every DVD player I've ever seen has an RGB output, as well as S video and composite video. What are you talking about? You mean a 15pin VGA connector? I think you are mistaken about your assumption that this will be some modified LCD. Most likely it will be a simple 15" LCD just like Sony puts on its laptop computers.
I think the problem people have is that if you create an intelligent machine, you don't have to write software that writes software. The machine will LEARN to write software.
I mis-phrased that last post (i hope it gets posted before this one anyway.) You don't hear the boom because you are already traveling faster than the sound and therefore you are steadily increasing the distance between you and the source of the boom (the location where you broke the barrier)and you are essentially moving away from the sound at a faster speed than the sound is traveling.
As I understand it, you don't hear the boom because the sound is actually behind you and travelling "away" from you. This may not be entirely accurate, though, as we all know that sound doesn't travel in only one direction from a source.
Would this work on two pieces of equipment that WEREN'T attached by optical fibers? You imply that both sender and reciever are on the same line but in most situations that is not the case. Am I missing something here? If I'm trying to transmit information across a radio or phone line (non fiber), how can this quantum encryption have any effectiveness?
People accepted (in part) DVD players because they had the encryption from the start (for the most part) and weren't popular until after nearly every DVD sold was encrypted. You can still buy a few unencrypted titles. Furthermore, people don't totally agree with region coding as has been stated above. Why should I have to buy multiple new stereos for my house and my cars just because some asshole wants a watermark? That is how I imagine most people will respond to this if they can't play new cds without special hardware.