For many people/sheeple, they derive comfort from the idea that they are (a) Right, and (b) in the majority (with "right" being determined at the time with incomplete information by who is either in the majority or who shouts loudest). Things like the medieval opinion that the world is flat, that women or specific ethnic/indigenous groups are unimportant/inferior, or the Standard Model of particle physics, and even with religion, show that there is great comfort in being in the majority. Choosing to go against the majority can be a brave decision to stick up for your principles, or it can simply be a sign of bloody-mindedness with no better reason than a desire to not conform (guess who usually plays the Devil's Advocate in one-sided discussions?) In many instances, humans exhibit a profound "herd animal" instinct, where the outsider/outlier is attacked, from children in the playground picking on the smallest or the one who is different because one powerful individual does so, to the people in a meeting rounding on a dissenting voice because their manager does the same. For those people, conforming to another person's idea is an easy thing to do because then it is not necessary to think about the situation and come up with your own opinion, especially if that opinion might align with the one being attacked so that you either have to support that individual and yourself face attack or willingly go against your opinion... better to not think at all and "go with the flow".
The critical thinker who is appreciated in their own lifetime is typically the one who comes with a blindingly obvious idea which improves things all round, whose idea does not cause the loud shouters to lose prestige or influence because they did not themselves see that idea. Given that most critical thinkers' ideas piss off at least a few people and show them as being wrong, it takes time until those loud people lose their influence (or those people find a way to adopt the new idea without losing face) before the critical thinker's contribution has a real chance of being acknowledged and properly valued.
I thought Intel, Samsung and TSMC claim that the upcoming 350mm wafer going to bring along another round of cost saving.
Are they telling the truth, or are they blowing smoke ?
Yes and no... as a bona fide cynic, I will believe that the sun is made of twinkie foam before believing anything that any CEO says about increased costs justifying higher prices or smaller price reductions. But at the same time, a 350mm wafer means more chips per wafer, not smaller chips. That does help them increase yield (number of viable chips per wafer), so that each wafer is worth more (but also costs more, because it is larger... the increased value is greater than the increased cost, however, for Silicon wafers and slightly better but not as good as Silicon for the more exotic wafer types - Gallium Arsenide, Cadmium Telluride, etc. because of the extra manufacturing complexity inherent in larger wafer production for compound wafers). So the cost per chip with larger wafers comes down, but as you refine the process node and make your devices smaller, those devices become more sensitive to tiny imperfections in the wafer, whether it is a break in the crystal lattice caused by the wafer cutting or a foreign body lying across the surface of the wafer, so those process node enhancements typically drive yield down. It comes out a bit like Intel's tick-tock processor release model - improve the process nodes to drive down the die size and make smaller devices but which result in lower per-wafer yields as the "tick" phase, then larger wafers with the same process node to drive per-wafer yields back up as the tock phase. Given that the investment in each process node improvement costs many many billions of dollars, probably every 3 years, that is a huge capital cost that needs to be recouped or written off, and not many companies are going to be able to write off that kind of expense regularly (which is why we have so few companies at the cutting edge of semiconductor fabrication)...
When you buy a Bitcoin you are not buying equity in the Bitcoin environment. Wonder what model BoA valuers have in mind for this. It weirds me out.
Almost certainly they are using a Commodity Futures Contract model that is used for precious metals, oil/petroleum, wheat and so on, on places like the Chicago Board of Trade or the London Metals Exchange. With those, there is a finite new supply of "product" and for the vast majority of people dealing with them, there is no physical product - the contracts being traded are for future delivery of a specific quantity of a specific product on a specific date. The product will be delivered to a specified place, and it is the responsibility of the person receiving the product (the contract owner as of the contract maturity date/product delivery date) to move it from that delivery point to a storage location of their choice. As such, the traders who buy and sell these contracts do not want to hold them until maturity, because they have no storage space, so they buy the contracts (for example) 12 months before the delivery date for a specified price, and sell them before maturity, hopefully for a profit.
With bitcoins, there are no physical deliverables, but in every other important sense they resemble these Commodities Futures contracts. If they became widely accepted and centrally traded, with a central body guaranteeing transaction integrity (basic ESCROW systems would probably be the starting point for that), they would almost certainly be traded as a "standard" currency on FX markets (exchanging Bitcoins for US Dollars, Euros, Japanese Yen, etc.), but without that central body guaranteeing the transactions, they would probably be traded as Commodities Futures.
The "problem" with both of those routes is that there is heavy auditing on every stage of every transaction, so the anonymity aspect of Bitcoin goes right out of the window. The parties involved in any given transaction would be known and recorded, and even if those are brokers acting on behalf of the real Bitcoin owners, the brokers would still need to have records showing who the real owner is.
In the world of athletics, the athlete is responsible for verifying beforehand that any substances entering their body are free from performance-enhancing drugs and a range of other substances. In this case, that same rule seems to have been applied to software - the admins are responsible for code entering the body of the application. Aside form anything else, my opinion is that someone on the project should have oversight of new code submissions before they are committed to the main codebase. If that is not happening here, then this is a lesson in stupidity for the admins. If it is happening, then the admins really are facilitating, because they have explicitly allowed that functionality into the application. Flipping the coin again, if the admins explicitly allowed the content without realizing what it does, then they have commited code without understanding the purpose or impact of the code, and we are back to the lesson in stupidity again...
As it has no motive power of its own (it has to be towed into position), it is not really a ship. But it is still a really cool feat of engineering, designed to ride out the typhoon season off the Australian coast and keep LNG production going for 25 years or so... However, Shell are apparently building an even bigger one as well. Maybe they are trying to have a ship that is longer than the Burj Khalifa?;)
This is why ALL government documents (law, contracts, etc) should be kept as a relatively plain text format in a Git repo, and if any party wants to change it, it should get branched, commits should be signed, and merges should should also be signed by those who approved them.
As someone who has worked with contracts, I can honestly say that what SHOULD happen (in my world, at least) is that while the contract is being negotiated, a version history showing proposed changes should be kept, but once a contract has been agreed by all parties, that history should be wiped and the agreed contract should be frozen with no further updates, and signed by all parties involved. Any subsequent updates should result in a branch of the original, with the updates included as additional appendices clearly marked as items added after the original signing, and if those updates are replacements of the original content of the contract, the original should be retained in the main text body, but it should be indicated on that original section being replaced which appendix contains the required changes. When the update is agreed and signed off by all parties who signed the original contract, that update then gets folded into the main branch of the contract (but with the original text still in the main document body and linking to the appendix which contains the update). It makes amendments to amendments complicated, but that is why we have contract lawyers, and if you do not keep your contract lawyers busy, they will find other things to do, and a contract lawyer with that kind of time on his hands is a dangerous beast which should be culled in the interest of public safety.
My breadth of experience is similar, having started programming before i was 10 years old and writing databases in dBase 3 (Ashton Tate, anyone?) for commercial stock control systems before I hit my teens. Now that I am in my 40's, it means I have typically 8-10 years' extra experience than colleagues of the same age, and potential employers are surprised at how young I am when I arrive for an interview. Admittedly, this is in Europe, but 5-6 years ago when working in the 'States, I got the same kind of feedback. My feeling at the moment is that there is a lot of talent on the shelf at the moment and that companies are still a bit risk-averse when hiring, so those positions you are not getting are probably going to people who are either younger (in which case, drop your age from your CV), less expensive and maybe less capable (either wait for a job that values your skills as you do, or take a lower paid job, choice is yours), or more local to the employer (in which case, reconsider your "remote working only" stance). The only way to find out is to call and ask the recruiters. If the recruiters are internal to the organisation, good luck... I doubt you will get anything out of them as they try to avoid a discrimination lawsuit. But if the recruiters are an external company, you can probably get at least some ideas based on the people they put forward for interview and the ones the potential employer showed an interest in.
But as to the question "are you too old?", my answer is "no, because in my experience a lot of companies looking for quality rather than cheap, are seriously looking at older candidates favourably".
"So, can Adams succeed in convincing the U.S. where Dr. Jack failed?" Probably not, in my opinion. The conservative Christian religious community mostly see "suicide" as a mortal sin, and usually suffering as a Good Thing, in preparation for a life in Heaven. So no traction there. The medical companies will get a nice little income stream from keeping these breathing corpses "alive" as long as they can (or at least, as long as they can pay). So no traction there. The Government (of any orientation, not just the current administration) will listen primarily to whomever shouts the loudest or waves the most cash, which in this case are going to be the lobby groups and religious groups who represent the two aforementioned groups, and anyone who tries to generate an organised response to that will be faced with accusations of murder, regicide, patricide, and Oedipus Complex, and watching too many Horror movies and playing too many violent computer games. So no traction there.
While I agree that assisted suicide could be abused by unscrupulous people for personal gain, I am also damned sure that the people who would abuse the system are going to find other ways to get the job done, so not having such a system does not stop the abusers from being abusers, but it does stop the people who care about their loved ones' ability to maintain a certain quality of life or die with some dignity and minimal suffering from doing the best thing for their family member.
There are valid options for many cases, but in the US these amount to State-specific DNR (Do Not Resucitate) forms prepared, filled and signed by the patient ahead of time and properly anotated by appropriate medical professionals. However, in the case of dementia, Parkinsons, paralysis, Locked-In syndrome, or other conditions which are not in themselves life-threatening, but which do result in a massive loss of quality of life, there is little or no option other than the sufferer literally starving themselves to death or taking active steps to commit suicide in such a way that there is no sign of assistance in the act by other people (who, of course, could then be charged with murder in many cases).
Personally, I feel this is something that does need to be looked at and debated seriously, because many people would describe the conditions that lots of these people live under as akin to mental, physical or psychological torture, and they themselves would not want to live under such conditions but in later life find themselves forced to do so by the different morality of other individuals who say that human life is sacred and we are not allowed to take our own or another life (unless you happen to be an executioner in one of the States that allows the death penalty...).
It is right and proper to have doubts about new announcements like this. That is the basis of science - the idea of "replicate, then trust, but verify" at the core of scientific approaches. If this turns out to be either an error, a late April-fools joke, a scam, a one-off result that cannot be replicated, or a valid result within a small range of constraints, then it will be labelled as such. However, if subsequent independent experiments show a robust and consistent process that can be replicated easily, then I for one will welcome our new (1 atom-thick) tinfoil hat-wearing overlords...
The manager is the one who has made this comment, so I would surmise that one of two scenarios is at work here: 1. The manager has either noticed for themselves, or they have received feedback about you, to the effect that you do not communicate effectively with others within the company. 2. The manager is looking for a reason to give you a less-than-excellent performance review (a couple of potential reasons for this, the most common one being that the less than perfect review impacts your bonus, thus saving money for the company; alternatively, this could simply be a manager who just does not give excellent reviews because they think it leads to complacent employees).
In both cases, the best thing to do is ask the manager for their advice. You are a young, (relatively) inexperienced person on the team, and from my perspective it is safe to assume that you are interested in improving yourself and doing the best job that you can - that means that if you could self-identify things you can do better, you would have done so and be doing them. So take the manager to one side and explain that you are looking for some specific input about what areas of communication could be improved. Usually in my experience, where it is not a matter of the manager finding fault to save on bonus payments, it is not about communicating more, but more effectively. If that is the case, the best advice I could give is to look up a public speaking organisation - Toastmasters (www.toastmasters.org) is one of the more common ones, and one that I have worked with for a few years. You can learn more about effective communication, and also about leadership as well, both of which will carry your career a lot further if you are a good programmer, than just being a good programmer.
Yes, the publicizing of the NSA and GCHQ's surveillance capabilities COULD in theory help paedophiles avoid detection... but I suspect that most paedophiles are not so technically savvy that the details will be important to them. For the majority of them, just as for the majority of the general population, the message they will take away is that "Big Brother Is Watching You", and if they do not assume that from the very start, then they are very naive. The other side of the coin would be an interesting one - perhaps a Freedom Of Information request to GCHQ, to ask how many man-hours as a percentage of their total work is spent tracking and investigating paedophiles. I would wager a lot of money that, if they were to give an honest answer to that, it would be 0. GCHQ are not, and never will be, interested in tracking paedophiles.
This certainly could be the way that things go, but there are a few delicate balancing acts to be performed if a dev wants to game the process in this way.
Purposefully writes bugs into the software will probably have a negative impact on the quality of the finished product, making it less attractive to potential users. Less attractive will usually translate to fewer users, which translates to a smaller pool of potential "bribers". If the bugs are in a core element of the product that everybody uses, it will be discovered quickly, and either fixed quickly by another contributor who is not looking to get paid for it or start driving users toward other potential options (assuming there are other potential options which offer a similar feature set). If the bugs are in an area that not many people will use, so it is less likely to garner widespread attention from devs looking to fix it, there will also be fewer users interested in the problem. Those users may be the most likely to post a bribe/bounty on the bug, and may post a correspondingly higher bribe, but that single user's contribution may be the only contribution. Delaying a bug fix in order to try and get paid (or paid more) on the bribe/bounty runs the risk of another dev stepping in who fixes the bug for nothing or the currently posted amount, so the work you have done to date is for nothing. If the code on a project is so badly written (on purpose, to game the system) and you are the only dev supporting the project, that no-one else is willing to get involved in it, then the project will probably not see many users.
The gaming options are also present on the user's side - being the first to post a bribe/bounty on a particular bug in the hope that others will climb on board is a good way to get your bug addressed, but there is a degree of "why should I foot the entire bill for this change?" which is perfectly reasonable as the change will probably benefit either the community as a whole or at least a section of it. The gaming side from the user's perspective is similar to a Dutch Auction, where the question "How low can I go?" comes in. Also, and this one depends very much on the implementation of the idea, not the idea itself, if a user posts a bribe for a particular bug, which then attracts other contributors, what happens if the original briber then tries to withdraw their bribe? For example, I want to get a bug fixed but I do not want to pay for it, so I post a $100 bribe for the bug to be fixed. 10 other users see that, and contribute $10 to the bribe fund, and I then withdraw my bribe (because now, there is a much higher chance that other users will contribute and that devs will take notice, so the problem might be fixed without me having to spend anything).
The sweet spot for this system to be gained is thus pretty small, and probably most applicable to older projects which have been very popular in the past and have a fairly large community of users with significant investment of time and effort spent using the system, so they are pretty much locked in. On those projects where there has been some drama or the existing dev team have not been maintaining the project properly, then this approach could work and could be reasonably profitable, as long as both the devs and the users are not going to try and game the system too much.
I thin that you'd frequently find, at least here in the US, that the spree murder's "suicide" is actually a police homicide.
I can accept the suicide/homicide argument for sure, as I was not present for any of these shootings. It would be an interesting read though, because which police officer would not want to be lauded as the hero who stopped more innocent deaths by shooting the perpetrator? Maybe if the guy was shot 22 times and beaten before the killing shot perhaps... but that would be kind of hard to label "suicide", even if there is an urban legend in Finland about a woman who claimed that her husband "fell on the knife 17 times..." (a topic for another/. post, though). But 4 mass-killings in the UK (technically it should be 3, as one of the UK incidents resulted in a single death and 13 wounded - the US figures only included incidents with 6+ deaths. Using demographics, that is roughly 16 million people per UK mass-killing if you count 3, or 20+ million if you count 3, versus around 4 million people per US mass-killing. 4-5 times more incidents once adjusted for the population size is massively significant.
"Terrorism is not a relevant threat to anything" unless its your ass that gets shot.
True... but as a UK citizen who has lived in the US and several other countries with varying levels of firearm legislation, I can acknowledge that simply putting more guns on the streets would make the occasional massive rampage less likely because the shooter gets shot earlier, but without performing an in/depth study, my recollection of recent gun rampages is that the vast majority of them have been by people in countries where weapons can be carried openly without law enforcement interference, or in countries where Concealed Carry is prevalent (US being the major one there). As an example, I can think of 4 mass shootings in the UK from the last 30 years - Michael Ryan in Hungerford (1987), Robert Sartin in Monkseaton (1989), Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane (1996), and Derrick Bird in Cumbria (2010). A quick check through the Wikipedia lists for mass killings, school killings, workplace killings and so on show at least 70-80 incidents in the continental US in the same timeframe, where 6 or more people were killed. In the vast majority of those cases, it seems that the killer ended the killing spree themselves by commiting suicide, so from that anecdotal evidence, concealed carry does not seem particularly effective at stopping the sprees happening.
At least in countries where the carrying of weapons is flat out against the law except in a small range of situations, it is usually going to be easier to spot the problem earlier... in theory.
However, the biggest shining light in favour of personal gun ownership (not neccessarily concealed carry, but the personal ownership of guns at least), is Switzerland - more legally registered guns per head of the population than just about anywhere else, and one of the lowest instances of gun crime too. I have no idea why their crime figures are so low, and I suspect neither does anyone else on/., but taking Switzerland and the US as your two data points, it does suggest that "the right to bear arms" is not in itself a defining factor in the gun rampage issue. I would suspect that keeping guns out of the hands of crazy people seems to be a more significant matter.
Britain has been facing the constant threat of terrorist attacks since the 1970's, right up until the early years of the 21st century, thanks to the terrorist elements of the Irish Republican Army and other Irish Republican splinter groups. Bombings happened, but even without the all-pervasive intelligence gathering apparatus that is apparently now necessary to track every "terrorist", the British Security Services still did a pretty good job of foiling most of the attacks.
I say most, not all, and I am not arguing that increased surveillance would not have prevented more attacks and saved more lives. Indeed, the extreme prevalence of CCTV cameras in UK is probably in large part a reaction to the bombings by the IRA et al.
But it seems to me that because the Irish problems did not adversely affect the US, it was less of a threat. Now that the US has a terrorist threat pointed its way, all-inclusive surveillance becomes the order of the day and the Brits are jumping on the bandwagon.
In most of the companies where I have worked, the interns were judged to be incapable of direct involvement in frontline work, whether that was coding, sales, process-based QA, support or technical documentation. I did show on a couple of occasions that they could be useful in the QA, support and documentation roles on a limited basis, and when that was not possible, I always dragged my interns off to any meetings I was attending, and talked for what felt like the whole day about what I was doing, but mostly about "why" and "how" - by the time they got out of an internship and finished their education, the chances of them using the same tools as me was minimal anyway, so the processes and reasoning were more useful anyway. Just about every other engineer and manager used their interns as coffee boys/girls or errand runners. I cannot say that my interns were happier or felt more fulfilled than any of the others, but they were the ones who wanted to come back a second time, and I am pretty sure they learned a lot more (although one or two of our interns actually made coffee for the first time ever when they were with us). The whole point of this self-patting-on-back is to say that interns rarely get tasks relevant to their skillset or needs. In this case, it seems like a bit of Chinese pragmatism, using the free resources they have available to maximise profit.
When trying to replace an in-house system for something as business-critical as ERP and CRM (basically, everything your business does, and everyone you talk to), even when that system is based on as simple a solution as MS Access, any potential solution is going to require significant customization from its out-of-the-box state to (1) work, and (2) work the way your business wants it to work - remember, that the current business workflow both depends on the way the application works and also defines the way the application has to work. If you are a good coder (the complaints about coding style and quality suggest you are better (or at least more energetic, at the moment) than the previous guys, then migrating to a more reliable SQL database (maybe MS SQL, maybe something open-source, but the MS SQL option would be less complex a data schema migration, I suspect), and then refactoring the VB code so it is cleaner, smaller and more reliable, might be an option. If you do not have the time for that task in addition to your other roles, then you will not have the time to install and configure a replacement CRM/ERP system, because that replacement will require a massive investment in time and effort to re-discover the business rules and work/data flow that the ERP system needs to support and account for, plus the "shortcuts" that employees use to get an end run around processes at 15:00 on a Friday afternoon because they need to get either a shipment or themselves out of the door asap. Add to that the fact that business users cannot accurately tell you what their workflow is 95% of the time, or they pad things to make their roles more important, or they forget important steps, and figuring out the "what" an application does is relatively easy. Figuring out "why" it does it that way, so that you can put data validation rules and consistency checks in place is very hard. That goes for any ERP system, whether it is a paid solution with external consultants or an open source/in-house system that you produce. The difference is that with the paid solutions, those headaches are primarily the responsibility of the external consultants... you will just have the headache of figuring things out when the consultants screw up:)
fsck, event 3 minutes is too long: it's long enough for some automated system to issue a speeding ticket and the abuse is done (letting aside the possiblity of having NSA prisming it forever... given the times we live in, one cannot rule this out).
I move to delete them as soon as the are captured... heck, why waste money to install these cameras in the first place? Aren't any other better means to ensure traffic safety?
(grin... I know, stupid... but less stupid than the code I am to write now)
Damn, I am going to feed the AC troll. But I cannot resist... If the pictures are deleted as soon as a citation is issued, there is no evidence to support or assist in refuting the citation. Or would you like to live in a world where the Police can say "the photographic evidence existed to charge this person with murder, treason, speeding, bestiality and voting Democrat, but he posted as a dipshit AC on/. insisting on the pictures being deleted after 3 minutes, so we deleted them and now it is up to him to provide evidence to prove his innocence". Remember, photographic evidence can be a tool to prove both guilt and innocence. Additionally, destroying evidence that was used as the basis for a citation is itself a criminal offence. If a picture is taken by one of a network of cameras, and analysis confirms that it does not provide evidence of a specific and currently investigated crime crime, then it should be deleted immediately (no need to wait for 3 minutes, because that is enough time for the picture to be "archived for disaster recovery purposes". But if the picture shows evidence of a potential crime, then it should be kept at least until that crime has been investigated and charges brought/dismissed....
However, my own problem with my argument is ironically the "if the picture shows evidence of a potential crime" part - does anyone seriously want to claim that they know all the laws of whatever country they live in, and how those laws are interpreted by the police and judicial system? Given that the laws of any non-autocratic state become more complex over time (I cannot provide a citation for that, but I do recall reading it in an ex-girlfriend's Poli Sci course book while helping her study for an exam, but it is an echo of some commentaries by Voltaire and even Macchiavelli), it becomes inevitable that over time laws are less about the meaning and intention of the original legislators and more about interpretation by judicial authority, especially when those laws are seeming written to be very obtuse, unclear and overly broad. So the "evidence of a potential crime" angle is itself open to abuse.
The bottom line is that people in positions of authority cannot and should not be trusted to refrain from abusing their authority. The buffer against that abuse is an independent and transparent review process for all levels of the decision-making process, with the penalties for circumventing the review process being punitive and rigorously applied. Does anyone feel comfortable that this review process is working?
No, they have a clear paper trail of emails between them and MusicNet. It's in their complaint. Yeah, yeah. You didn't RTFA.
Actually, I did read the article. And the actual complaint. At no point in those readings did I find anything to suggest that there had been any communication from MediaNet to Aimee Mann or her representatives. If I missed a paragraph, I am sure you would be willing to point out that specific point.
"Mann's representative is said to have sent a termination notice in 2005"
I am assuming that Mann's representative sent the termination notice in some way that requires notarized acceptance that is recorded (in other words, someone at MediaNet had to sign to say that the notice had been received) and that the receipt notification was returned to Mann's representative, who kept the original and can produce it on demand.
If not, MediaNet will probably say "hmm, we have no record of it, looks like it got lost in the mail", with probably little or no paper/electronic trail to contradict that, aside from them collecting royalties on the playlist and not distributing that to the artist.
So it could be a copyright infringement case or a non-payment of contract issue (the latter being a distinctly smaller payout, I would guess).
Anthropoligical theses such as "Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE - 400 CE" by Martin Joffee... who I am sure will not mind too much if I pull out a quote from one of his chapters: "true literacy was rare among Jews in this period, and was confined to various professional scribal groups associated with the Temple and its governing agencies. Even among scribal groups who created literary works, writing and literary transmission was highly oral in character" Granted, this period was 800-1000 years before the Christian Monasteries you are referring to, where scribes were probably broadly literate, but where also there would probably have been considerable internal political pressure to make the message conform to desired social constraints - conspiracy theories such as the de-emphasis in the Bible of the influence of Mary aside, rewriting of the Bible as a book is a common thing - my old family bible from the 1700's (handed down through the generations because of a tradition of using it to record the family geneaology) is incredibly blood-thirsty and violent in comparison to modern versions... that difference was what initially piqued my interest in the act and processes of recording of history.
If you didn't fund schools based on attendance, then how else would you do it? (and this is a serious question)
Granted the system in the UK is so far pro perfect, that a person with good eyesight and excellent binoculars standing on top of the system in the UK could not even see "Perfect" over the horizon... but the funding system there is at least in part based on the academic results of the students. Why is this not perfect? 1. The schools no longer teach the subject, they teach the way to pass the exam. 2. Schools offer more easy courses (and as a result, fewer math/science/technology options). 3. Students want an easier life, so they pick the easier courses. 4. Governments like to be able to say that their education approach is improving things, and they point to consistently higher grades, which are achieved through the subjects being dumbed-down, sometimes to the point where students going on to the next phase of education have not achieved a basic core competence level in fundamental subject that are the building blocks of education at the next phase.
Granted, as I left University in the mid-90's, this is no longer my problem so I can be the doddering old fart with a shotgun in one hand and my Zimmer frame in the other, shouting "Gerroffmylawn!!!", but the problem really came home to me when I came to try and help my daughter with her math homework, which was "how do you perform multiplication on a calculator?", and "Using your calculator, perform the following calculations...".
it is easier, cheaper, quicker and garners more positive publicity for the politicians involved to get the ISP to block something (anything, does not really matter what, as long as something is blocked) than it is to actually tackle the underlying problem and catch the child abusers.
However, as politicians we need censorship options to go alongside our surveillance capability... we use the surveillance ability to keep an eye on the people we are afraid of (in the UK, that apparently means the Government is afraid of about 65 million people... quite a way behind the US though, who have a list of 300 million or so people that scare the politicians). We then need the censorship mechanisms so that we can keep information about our surveillance system out of the public domain, and we then need the surveillance system again to watch the people who are trying to circumvent the censorship equipment (oh, good... we are already watching those people, because they are on our "people to be feared" list!).
On a more serious note, Claire Lilley at the NSPCC pointed out that "In every single child abuse image there is a victim, a child who has been abused". This is true, if you check the circumstances of the photograph. But I am 100% sure than a 5 minute search of Youtube would turn up a ton of clips from movies, from which you could grab stills that look like child abuse and that a third party viewer would categorize as child abuse, even though no children were abused in the production of said image. I am all for stamping our Child Abuse, preferably in a process that involves stamping out the penis and testicles of any men involved in said abuse, but blocking sites that some unaccountable quango group deep in the bowels of the British government thinks should be blocked is not the way to go about it... unless of course, the porn blocking is simply a convenient excuse behind which the real purpose of the system is being hidden.
Damn, I am starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist. Somebody pass me my kool-aid, quick!
So the writers of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, for example, were theorising and speculating, were they?
Possibly - what proof do we have that the authors of the Anglo Saxon Chronicles were actual witnesses of what they wrote, or even that what they wrote was truthful? Bearing in mind that the language the Chronicles were written in has next to no relation to modern English, you would be reliant on the honesty/ethics/accuracy of a modern-day translator to convert the Chronicles into a form you could actually read. A similar (or the same) problem exists with the Bible (one of the oldest known books, and just about the most widely distributed book with probably the most different versions of the book) - something happened, and someone who was there at the time told someone else their version of what happened, that person then told someone else, and so on. If you take the earliest known fragments of the Bible as an example, that gives you a 200-year long game of Chinese Whispers before someone actually writes something down... or 400+ years if you take the Greek Septuagint (oldest record of the complete text). Once it is written down, because there is no printing press (developed in the 11th Century by the Han Chinese, or the first Guttenberg presses of the 15th Century), each new copy has to be scribed from an existing copy. While the vast majority of scribes probably could not read, and were therefore copying verbatim, any copy produced by a literate scribe is subject to editing (see the changes to the Bible over the course of history, as each group pushes their own "interpretation" of the "original" which matches their own beliefs and agenda).
Just because a document is damned old does not mean it is accurate. The older it is, the less likely it is that the general populace will be able to read it, meaning that you have a much smaller chance of getting someone's interpretation of what the document says, rather than the original meaning.
As I used to work for an American company who have an office in Dubai (full of people with Arabic names, and lots of Muslims), a working team in India (very close to Pakistan, never mind the fact that the two countries hate each other almost as much as Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers fans), and a development/support team in the Phillippines (close to China, with a similar relationship to India and Pakistan, and with their own domestic terrorism issues), clients in sub-Saharan Africa, Russia and Texas, my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles are full of people in those areas. Given that the NSA does not stop at analyzing your own contacts, I am apparently a person of interest if one of my contacts has any dubious friends, or if one of my contact's contacts has any dubious friends. Kevin Bacon is indeed going to be screwed, we might as well just lock him up and start waterboarding him now, and save the NSA the trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
For many people/sheeple, they derive comfort from the idea that they are (a) Right, and (b) in the majority (with "right" being determined at the time with incomplete information by who is either in the majority or who shouts loudest).
Things like the medieval opinion that the world is flat, that women or specific ethnic/indigenous groups are unimportant/inferior, or the Standard Model of particle physics, and even with religion, show that there is great comfort in being in the majority.
Choosing to go against the majority can be a brave decision to stick up for your principles, or it can simply be a sign of bloody-mindedness with no better reason than a desire to not conform (guess who usually plays the Devil's Advocate in one-sided discussions?)
In many instances, humans exhibit a profound "herd animal" instinct, where the outsider/outlier is attacked, from children in the playground picking on the smallest or the one who is different because one powerful individual does so, to the people in a meeting rounding on a dissenting voice because their manager does the same. For those people, conforming to another person's idea is an easy thing to do because then it is not necessary to think about the situation and come up with your own opinion, especially if that opinion might align with the one being attacked so that you either have to support that individual and yourself face attack or willingly go against your opinion... better to not think at all and "go with the flow".
The critical thinker who is appreciated in their own lifetime is typically the one who comes with a blindingly obvious idea which improves things all round, whose idea does not cause the loud shouters to lose prestige or influence because they did not themselves see that idea. Given that most critical thinkers' ideas piss off at least a few people and show them as being wrong, it takes time until those loud people lose their influence (or those people find a way to adopt the new idea without losing face) before the critical thinker's contribution has a real chance of being acknowledged and properly valued.
I thought Intel, Samsung and TSMC claim that the upcoming 350mm wafer going to bring along another round of cost saving.
Are they telling the truth, or are they blowing smoke ?
Yes and no... as a bona fide cynic, I will believe that the sun is made of twinkie foam before believing anything that any CEO says about increased costs justifying higher prices or smaller price reductions. But at the same time, a 350mm wafer means more chips per wafer, not smaller chips. That does help them increase yield (number of viable chips per wafer), so that each wafer is worth more (but also costs more, because it is larger... the increased value is greater than the increased cost, however, for Silicon wafers and slightly better but not as good as Silicon for the more exotic wafer types - Gallium Arsenide, Cadmium Telluride, etc. because of the extra manufacturing complexity inherent in larger wafer production for compound wafers).
So the cost per chip with larger wafers comes down, but as you refine the process node and make your devices smaller, those devices become more sensitive to tiny imperfections in the wafer, whether it is a break in the crystal lattice caused by the wafer cutting or a foreign body lying across the surface of the wafer, so those process node enhancements typically drive yield down.
It comes out a bit like Intel's tick-tock processor release model - improve the process nodes to drive down the die size and make smaller devices but which result in lower per-wafer yields as the "tick" phase, then larger wafers with the same process node to drive per-wafer yields back up as the tock phase.
Given that the investment in each process node improvement costs many many billions of dollars, probably every 3 years, that is a huge capital cost that needs to be recouped or written off, and not many companies are going to be able to write off that kind of expense regularly (which is why we have so few companies at the cutting edge of semiconductor fabrication)...
When you buy a Bitcoin you are not buying equity in the Bitcoin environment. Wonder what model BoA valuers have in mind for this. It weirds me out.
Almost certainly they are using a Commodity Futures Contract model that is used for precious metals, oil/petroleum, wheat and so on, on places like the Chicago Board of Trade or the London Metals Exchange. With those, there is a finite new supply of "product" and for the vast majority of people dealing with them, there is no physical product - the contracts being traded are for future delivery of a specific quantity of a specific product on a specific date. The product will be delivered to a specified place, and it is the responsibility of the person receiving the product (the contract owner as of the contract maturity date/product delivery date) to move it from that delivery point to a storage location of their choice.
As such, the traders who buy and sell these contracts do not want to hold them until maturity, because they have no storage space, so they buy the contracts (for example) 12 months before the delivery date for a specified price, and sell them before maturity, hopefully for a profit.
With bitcoins, there are no physical deliverables, but in every other important sense they resemble these Commodities Futures contracts.
If they became widely accepted and centrally traded, with a central body guaranteeing transaction integrity (basic ESCROW systems would probably be the starting point for that), they would almost certainly be traded as a "standard" currency on FX markets (exchanging Bitcoins for US Dollars, Euros, Japanese Yen, etc.), but without that central body guaranteeing the transactions, they would probably be traded as Commodities Futures.
The "problem" with both of those routes is that there is heavy auditing on every stage of every transaction, so the anonymity aspect of Bitcoin goes right out of the window. The parties involved in any given transaction would be known and recorded, and even if those are brokers acting on behalf of the real Bitcoin owners, the brokers would still need to have records showing who the real owner is.
In the world of athletics, the athlete is responsible for verifying beforehand that any substances entering their body are free from performance-enhancing drugs and a range of other substances. In this case, that same rule seems to have been applied to software - the admins are responsible for code entering the body of the application.
Aside form anything else, my opinion is that someone on the project should have oversight of new code submissions before they are committed to the main codebase. If that is not happening here, then this is a lesson in stupidity for the admins. If it is happening, then the admins really are facilitating, because they have explicitly allowed that functionality into the application. Flipping the coin again, if the admins explicitly allowed the content without realizing what it does, then they have commited code without understanding the purpose or impact of the code, and we are back to the lesson in stupidity again...
As it has no motive power of its own (it has to be towed into position), it is not really a ship. But it is still a really cool feat of engineering, designed to ride out the typhoon season off the Australian coast and keep LNG production going for 25 years or so... ;)
However, Shell are apparently building an even bigger one as well. Maybe they are trying to have a ship that is longer than the Burj Khalifa?
This is why ALL government documents (law, contracts, etc) should be kept as a relatively plain text format in a Git repo, and if any party wants to change it, it should get branched, commits should be signed, and merges should should also be signed by those who approved them.
As someone who has worked with contracts, I can honestly say that what SHOULD happen (in my world, at least) is that while the contract is being negotiated, a version history showing proposed changes should be kept, but once a contract has been agreed by all parties, that history should be wiped and the agreed contract should be frozen with no further updates, and signed by all parties involved.
Any subsequent updates should result in a branch of the original, with the updates included as additional appendices clearly marked as items added after the original signing, and if those updates are replacements of the original content of the contract, the original should be retained in the main text body, but it should be indicated on that original section being replaced which appendix contains the required changes. When the update is agreed and signed off by all parties who signed the original contract, that update then gets folded into the main branch of the contract (but with the original text still in the main document body and linking to the appendix which contains the update).
It makes amendments to amendments complicated, but that is why we have contract lawyers, and if you do not keep your contract lawyers busy, they will find other things to do, and a contract lawyer with that kind of time on his hands is a dangerous beast which should be culled in the interest of public safety.
My breadth of experience is similar, having started programming before i was 10 years old and writing databases in dBase 3 (Ashton Tate, anyone?) for commercial stock control systems before I hit my teens. Now that I am in my 40's, it means I have typically 8-10 years' extra experience than colleagues of the same age, and potential employers are surprised at how young I am when I arrive for an interview.
Admittedly, this is in Europe, but 5-6 years ago when working in the 'States, I got the same kind of feedback.
My feeling at the moment is that there is a lot of talent on the shelf at the moment and that companies are still a bit risk-averse when hiring, so those positions you are not getting are probably going to people who are either younger (in which case, drop your age from your CV), less expensive and maybe less capable (either wait for a job that values your skills as you do, or take a lower paid job, choice is yours), or more local to the employer (in which case, reconsider your "remote working only" stance). The only way to find out is to call and ask the recruiters. If the recruiters are internal to the organisation, good luck... I doubt you will get anything out of them as they try to avoid a discrimination lawsuit. But if the recruiters are an external company, you can probably get at least some ideas based on the people they put forward for interview and the ones the potential employer showed an interest in.
But as to the question "are you too old?", my answer is "no, because in my experience a lot of companies looking for quality rather than cheap, are seriously looking at older candidates favourably".
"So, can Adams succeed in convincing the U.S. where Dr. Jack failed?"
Probably not, in my opinion.
The conservative Christian religious community mostly see "suicide" as a mortal sin, and usually suffering as a Good Thing, in preparation for a life in Heaven. So no traction there.
The medical companies will get a nice little income stream from keeping these breathing corpses "alive" as long as they can (or at least, as long as they can pay). So no traction there.
The Government (of any orientation, not just the current administration) will listen primarily to whomever shouts the loudest or waves the most cash, which in this case are going to be the lobby groups and religious groups who represent the two aforementioned groups, and anyone who tries to generate an organised response to that will be faced with accusations of murder, regicide, patricide, and Oedipus Complex, and watching too many Horror movies and playing too many violent computer games. So no traction there.
While I agree that assisted suicide could be abused by unscrupulous people for personal gain, I am also damned sure that the people who would abuse the system are going to find other ways to get the job done, so not having such a system does not stop the abusers from being abusers, but it does stop the people who care about their loved ones' ability to maintain a certain quality of life or die with some dignity and minimal suffering from doing the best thing for their family member.
There are valid options for many cases, but in the US these amount to State-specific DNR (Do Not Resucitate) forms prepared, filled and signed by the patient ahead of time and properly anotated by appropriate medical professionals. However, in the case of dementia, Parkinsons, paralysis, Locked-In syndrome, or other conditions which are not in themselves life-threatening, but which do result in a massive loss of quality of life, there is little or no option other than the sufferer literally starving themselves to death or taking active steps to commit suicide in such a way that there is no sign of assistance in the act by other people (who, of course, could then be charged with murder in many cases).
Personally, I feel this is something that does need to be looked at and debated seriously, because many people would describe the conditions that lots of these people live under as akin to mental, physical or psychological torture, and they themselves would not want to live under such conditions but in later life find themselves forced to do so by the different morality of other individuals who say that human life is sacred and we are not allowed to take our own or another life (unless you happen to be an executioner in one of the States that allows the death penalty...).
It is right and proper to have doubts about new announcements like this. That is the basis of science - the idea of "replicate, then trust, but verify" at the core of scientific approaches. If this turns out to be either an error, a late April-fools joke, a scam, a one-off result that cannot be replicated, or a valid result within a small range of constraints, then it will be labelled as such.
However, if subsequent independent experiments show a robust and consistent process that can be replicated easily, then I for one will welcome our new (1 atom-thick) tinfoil hat-wearing overlords...
The manager is the one who has made this comment, so I would surmise that one of two scenarios is at work here:
1. The manager has either noticed for themselves, or they have received feedback about you, to the effect that you do not communicate effectively with others within the company.
2. The manager is looking for a reason to give you a less-than-excellent performance review (a couple of potential reasons for this, the most common one being that the less than perfect review impacts your bonus, thus saving money for the company; alternatively, this could simply be a manager who just does not give excellent reviews because they think it leads to complacent employees).
In both cases, the best thing to do is ask the manager for their advice. You are a young, (relatively) inexperienced person on the team, and from my perspective it is safe to assume that you are interested in improving yourself and doing the best job that you can - that means that if you could self-identify things you can do better, you would have done so and be doing them. So take the manager to one side and explain that you are looking for some specific input about what areas of communication could be improved. Usually in my experience, where it is not a matter of the manager finding fault to save on bonus payments, it is not about communicating more, but more effectively. If that is the case, the best advice I could give is to look up a public speaking organisation - Toastmasters (www.toastmasters.org) is one of the more common ones, and one that I have worked with for a few years. You can learn more about effective communication, and also about leadership as well, both of which will carry your career a lot further if you are a good programmer, than just being a good programmer.
Yes, the publicizing of the NSA and GCHQ's surveillance capabilities COULD in theory help paedophiles avoid detection... but I suspect that most paedophiles are not so technically savvy that the details will be important to them. For the majority of them, just as for the majority of the general population, the message they will take away is that "Big Brother Is Watching You", and if they do not assume that from the very start, then they are very naive.
The other side of the coin would be an interesting one - perhaps a Freedom Of Information request to GCHQ, to ask how many man-hours as a percentage of their total work is spent tracking and investigating paedophiles. I would wager a lot of money that, if they were to give an honest answer to that, it would be 0. GCHQ are not, and never will be, interested in tracking paedophiles.
This certainly could be the way that things go, but there are a few delicate balancing acts to be performed if a dev wants to game the process in this way.
Purposefully writes bugs into the software will probably have a negative impact on the quality of the finished product, making it less attractive to potential users. Less attractive will usually translate to fewer users, which translates to a smaller pool of potential "bribers".
If the bugs are in a core element of the product that everybody uses, it will be discovered quickly, and either fixed quickly by another contributor who is not looking to get paid for it or start driving users toward other potential options (assuming there are other potential options which offer a similar feature set).
If the bugs are in an area that not many people will use, so it is less likely to garner widespread attention from devs looking to fix it, there will also be fewer users interested in the problem. Those users may be the most likely to post a bribe/bounty on the bug, and may post a correspondingly higher bribe, but that single user's contribution may be the only contribution.
Delaying a bug fix in order to try and get paid (or paid more) on the bribe/bounty runs the risk of another dev stepping in who fixes the bug for nothing or the currently posted amount, so the work you have done to date is for nothing.
If the code on a project is so badly written (on purpose, to game the system) and you are the only dev supporting the project, that no-one else is willing to get involved in it, then the project will probably not see many users.
The gaming options are also present on the user's side - being the first to post a bribe/bounty on a particular bug in the hope that others will climb on board is a good way to get your bug addressed, but there is a degree of "why should I foot the entire bill for this change?" which is perfectly reasonable as the change will probably benefit either the community as a whole or at least a section of it. The gaming side from the user's perspective is similar to a Dutch Auction, where the question "How low can I go?" comes in.
Also, and this one depends very much on the implementation of the idea, not the idea itself, if a user posts a bribe for a particular bug, which then attracts other contributors, what happens if the original briber then tries to withdraw their bribe? For example, I want to get a bug fixed but I do not want to pay for it, so I post a $100 bribe for the bug to be fixed. 10 other users see that, and contribute $10 to the bribe fund, and I then withdraw my bribe (because now, there is a much higher chance that other users will contribute and that devs will take notice, so the problem might be fixed without me having to spend anything).
The sweet spot for this system to be gained is thus pretty small, and probably most applicable to older projects which have been very popular in the past and have a fairly large community of users with significant investment of time and effort spent using the system, so they are pretty much locked in. On those projects where there has been some drama or the existing dev team have not been maintaining the project properly, then this approach could work and could be reasonably profitable, as long as both the devs and the users are not going to try and game the system too much.
Part of that is simple demographics:
Population of the United Kingdom - 63,705,000
Population of the United States - 316,862,000
I thin that you'd frequently find, at least here in the US, that the spree murder's "suicide" is actually a police homicide.
I can accept the suicide/homicide argument for sure, as I was not present for any of these shootings. It would be an interesting read though, because which police officer would not want to be lauded as the hero who stopped more innocent deaths by shooting the perpetrator? Maybe if the guy was shot 22 times and beaten before the killing shot perhaps... but that would be kind of hard to label "suicide", even if there is an urban legend in Finland about a woman who claimed that her husband "fell on the knife 17 times..." (a topic for another /. post, though).
But 4 mass-killings in the UK (technically it should be 3, as one of the UK incidents resulted in a single death and 13 wounded - the US figures only included incidents with 6+ deaths. Using demographics, that is roughly 16 million people per UK mass-killing if you count 3, or 20+ million if you count 3, versus around 4 million people per US mass-killing. 4-5 times more incidents once adjusted for the population size is massively significant.
"Terrorism is not a relevant threat to anything" unless its your ass that gets shot.
True... but as a UK citizen who has lived in the US and several other countries with varying levels of firearm legislation, I can acknowledge that simply putting more guns on the streets would make the occasional massive rampage less likely because the shooter gets shot earlier, but without performing an in/depth study, my recollection of recent gun rampages is that the vast majority of them have been by people in countries where weapons can be carried openly without law enforcement interference, or in countries where Concealed Carry is prevalent (US being the major one there).
As an example, I can think of 4 mass shootings in the UK from the last 30 years - Michael Ryan in Hungerford (1987), Robert Sartin in Monkseaton (1989), Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane (1996), and Derrick Bird in Cumbria (2010). A quick check through the Wikipedia lists for mass killings, school killings, workplace killings and so on show at least 70-80 incidents in the continental US in the same timeframe, where 6 or more people were killed. In the vast majority of those cases, it seems that the killer ended the killing spree themselves by commiting suicide, so from that anecdotal evidence, concealed carry does not seem particularly effective at stopping the sprees happening.
At least in countries where the carrying of weapons is flat out against the law except in a small range of situations, it is usually going to be easier to spot the problem earlier... in theory.
However, the biggest shining light in favour of personal gun ownership (not neccessarily concealed carry, but the personal ownership of guns at least), is Switzerland - more legally registered guns per head of the population than just about anywhere else, and one of the lowest instances of gun crime too. I have no idea why their crime figures are so low, and I suspect neither does anyone else on /., but taking Switzerland and the US as your two data points, it does suggest that "the right to bear arms" is not in itself a defining factor in the gun rampage issue. I would suspect that keeping guns out of the hands of crazy people seems to be a more significant matter.
Britain has been facing the constant threat of terrorist attacks since the 1970's, right up until the early years of the 21st century, thanks to the terrorist elements of the Irish Republican Army and other Irish Republican splinter groups. Bombings happened, but even without the all-pervasive intelligence gathering apparatus that is apparently now necessary to track every "terrorist", the British Security Services still did a pretty good job of foiling most of the attacks.
I say most, not all, and I am not arguing that increased surveillance would not have prevented more attacks and saved more lives. Indeed, the extreme prevalence of CCTV cameras in UK is probably in large part a reaction to the bombings by the IRA et al.
But it seems to me that because the Irish problems did not adversely affect the US, it was less of a threat. Now that the US has a terrorist threat pointed its way, all-inclusive surveillance becomes the order of the day and the Brits are jumping on the bandwagon.
In most of the companies where I have worked, the interns were judged to be incapable of direct involvement in frontline work, whether that was coding, sales, process-based QA, support or technical documentation.
I did show on a couple of occasions that they could be useful in the QA, support and documentation roles on a limited basis, and when that was not possible, I always dragged my interns off to any meetings I was attending, and talked for what felt like the whole day about what I was doing, but mostly about "why" and "how" - by the time they got out of an internship and finished their education, the chances of them using the same tools as me was minimal anyway, so the processes and reasoning were more useful anyway.
Just about every other engineer and manager used their interns as coffee boys/girls or errand runners.
I cannot say that my interns were happier or felt more fulfilled than any of the others, but they were the ones who wanted to come back a second time, and I am pretty sure they learned a lot more (although one or two of our interns actually made coffee for the first time ever when they were with us).
The whole point of this self-patting-on-back is to say that interns rarely get tasks relevant to their skillset or needs. In this case, it seems like a bit of Chinese pragmatism, using the free resources they have available to maximise profit.
When trying to replace an in-house system for something as business-critical as ERP and CRM (basically, everything your business does, and everyone you talk to), even when that system is based on as simple a solution as MS Access, any potential solution is going to require significant customization from its out-of-the-box state to (1) work, and (2) work the way your business wants it to work - remember, that the current business workflow both depends on the way the application works and also defines the way the application has to work. :)
If you are a good coder (the complaints about coding style and quality suggest you are better (or at least more energetic, at the moment) than the previous guys, then migrating to a more reliable SQL database (maybe MS SQL, maybe something open-source, but the MS SQL option would be less complex a data schema migration, I suspect), and then refactoring the VB code so it is cleaner, smaller and more reliable, might be an option.
If you do not have the time for that task in addition to your other roles, then you will not have the time to install and configure a replacement CRM/ERP system, because that replacement will require a massive investment in time and effort to re-discover the business rules and work/data flow that the ERP system needs to support and account for, plus the "shortcuts" that employees use to get an end run around processes at 15:00 on a Friday afternoon because they need to get either a shipment or themselves out of the door asap.
Add to that the fact that business users cannot accurately tell you what their workflow is 95% of the time, or they pad things to make their roles more important, or they forget important steps, and figuring out the "what" an application does is relatively easy. Figuring out "why" it does it that way, so that you can put data validation rules and consistency checks in place is very hard. That goes for any ERP system, whether it is a paid solution with external consultants or an open source/in-house system that you produce. The difference is that with the paid solutions, those headaches are primarily the responsibility of the external consultants... you will just have the headache of figuring things out when the consultants screw up
fsck, event 3 minutes is too long: it's long enough for some automated system to issue a speeding ticket and the abuse is done (letting aside the possiblity of having NSA prisming it forever... given the times we live in, one cannot rule this out).
I move to delete them as soon as the are captured... heck, why waste money to install these cameras in the first place? Aren't any other better means to ensure traffic safety?
(grin... I know, stupid... but less stupid than the code I am to write now)
Damn, I am going to feed the AC troll. But I cannot resist... /. insisting on the pictures being deleted after 3 minutes, so we deleted them and now it is up to him to provide evidence to prove his innocence".
If the pictures are deleted as soon as a citation is issued, there is no evidence to support or assist in refuting the citation. Or would you like to live in a world where the Police can say "the photographic evidence existed to charge this person with murder, treason, speeding, bestiality and voting Democrat, but he posted as a dipshit AC on
Remember, photographic evidence can be a tool to prove both guilt and innocence.
Additionally, destroying evidence that was used as the basis for a citation is itself a criminal offence.
If a picture is taken by one of a network of cameras, and analysis confirms that it does not provide evidence of a specific and currently investigated crime crime, then it should be deleted immediately (no need to wait for 3 minutes, because that is enough time for the picture to be "archived for disaster recovery purposes". But if the picture shows evidence of a potential crime, then it should be kept at least until that crime has been investigated and charges brought/dismissed....
However, my own problem with my argument is ironically the "if the picture shows evidence of a potential crime" part - does anyone seriously want to claim that they know all the laws of whatever country they live in, and how those laws are interpreted by the police and judicial system? Given that the laws of any non-autocratic state become more complex over time (I cannot provide a citation for that, but I do recall reading it in an ex-girlfriend's Poli Sci course book while helping her study for an exam, but it is an echo of some commentaries by Voltaire and even Macchiavelli), it becomes inevitable that over time laws are less about the meaning and intention of the original legislators and more about interpretation by judicial authority, especially when those laws are seeming written to be very obtuse, unclear and overly broad. So the "evidence of a potential crime" angle is itself open to abuse.
The bottom line is that people in positions of authority cannot and should not be trusted to refrain from abusing their authority. The buffer against that abuse is an independent and transparent review process for all levels of the decision-making process, with the penalties for circumventing the review process being punitive and rigorously applied. Does anyone feel comfortable that this review process is working?
No, they have a clear paper trail of emails between them and MusicNet. It's in their complaint. Yeah, yeah. You didn't RTFA.
Actually, I did read the article. And the actual complaint. At no point in those readings did I find anything to suggest that there had been any communication from MediaNet to Aimee Mann or her representatives.
If I missed a paragraph, I am sure you would be willing to point out that specific point.
"Mann's representative is said to have sent a termination notice in 2005"
I am assuming that Mann's representative sent the termination notice in some way that requires notarized acceptance that is recorded (in other words, someone at MediaNet had to sign to say that the notice had been received) and that the receipt notification was returned to Mann's representative, who kept the original and can produce it on demand.
If not, MediaNet will probably say "hmm, we have no record of it, looks like it got lost in the mail", with probably little or no paper/electronic trail to contradict that, aside from them collecting royalties on the playlist and not distributing that to the artist.
So it could be a copyright infringement case or a non-payment of contract issue (the latter being a distinctly smaller payout, I would guess).
What is your source for this assertion?
Anthropoligical theses such as "Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE - 400 CE" by Martin Joffee... who I am sure will not mind too much if I pull out a quote from one of his chapters:
"true literacy was rare among Jews in this period, and was confined to various professional scribal groups associated with the Temple and its governing agencies. Even among scribal groups who created literary works, writing and literary transmission was highly oral in character"
Granted, this period was 800-1000 years before the Christian Monasteries you are referring to, where scribes were probably broadly literate, but where also there would probably have been considerable internal political pressure to make the message conform to desired social constraints - conspiracy theories such as the de-emphasis in the Bible of the influence of Mary aside, rewriting of the Bible as a book is a common thing - my old family bible from the 1700's (handed down through the generations because of a tradition of using it to record the family geneaology) is incredibly blood-thirsty and violent in comparison to modern versions... that difference was what initially piqued my interest in the act and processes of recording of history.
If you didn't fund schools based on attendance, then how else would you do it? (and this is a serious question)
Granted the system in the UK is so far pro perfect, that a person with good eyesight and excellent binoculars standing on top of the system in the UK could not even see "Perfect" over the horizon... but the funding system there is at least in part based on the academic results of the students.
Why is this not perfect?
1. The schools no longer teach the subject, they teach the way to pass the exam.
2. Schools offer more easy courses (and as a result, fewer math/science/technology options).
3. Students want an easier life, so they pick the easier courses.
4. Governments like to be able to say that their education approach is improving things, and they point to consistently higher grades, which are achieved through the subjects being dumbed-down, sometimes to the point where students going on to the next phase of education have not achieved a basic core competence level in fundamental subject that are the building blocks of education at the next phase.
Granted, as I left University in the mid-90's, this is no longer my problem so I can be the doddering old fart with a shotgun in one hand and my Zimmer frame in the other, shouting "Gerroffmylawn!!!", but the problem really came home to me when I came to try and help my daughter with her math homework, which was "how do you perform multiplication on a calculator?", and "Using your calculator, perform the following calculations...".
it is easier, cheaper, quicker and garners more positive publicity for the politicians involved to get the ISP to block something (anything, does not really matter what, as long as something is blocked) than it is to actually tackle the underlying problem and catch the child abusers.
However, as politicians we need censorship options to go alongside our surveillance capability... we use the surveillance ability to keep an eye on the people we are afraid of (in the UK, that apparently means the Government is afraid of about 65 million people... quite a way behind the US though, who have a list of 300 million or so people that scare the politicians). We then need the censorship mechanisms so that we can keep information about our surveillance system out of the public domain, and we then need the surveillance system again to watch the people who are trying to circumvent the censorship equipment (oh, good... we are already watching those people, because they are on our "people to be feared" list!).
On a more serious note, Claire Lilley at the NSPCC pointed out that "In every single child abuse image there is a victim, a child who has been abused". This is true, if you check the circumstances of the photograph. But I am 100% sure than a 5 minute search of Youtube would turn up a ton of clips from movies, from which you could grab stills that look like child abuse and that a third party viewer would categorize as child abuse, even though no children were abused in the production of said image.
I am all for stamping our Child Abuse, preferably in a process that involves stamping out the penis and testicles of any men involved in said abuse, but blocking sites that some unaccountable quango group deep in the bowels of the British government thinks should be blocked is not the way to go about it... unless of course, the porn blocking is simply a convenient excuse behind which the real purpose of the system is being hidden.
Damn, I am starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist. Somebody pass me my kool-aid, quick!
So the writers of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, for example, were theorising and speculating, were they?
Possibly - what proof do we have that the authors of the Anglo Saxon Chronicles were actual witnesses of what they wrote, or even that what they wrote was truthful?
Bearing in mind that the language the Chronicles were written in has next to no relation to modern English, you would be reliant on the honesty/ethics/accuracy of a modern-day translator to convert the Chronicles into a form you could actually read.
A similar (or the same) problem exists with the Bible (one of the oldest known books, and just about the most widely distributed book with probably the most different versions of the book) - something happened, and someone who was there at the time told someone else their version of what happened, that person then told someone else, and so on. If you take the earliest known fragments of the Bible as an example, that gives you a 200-year long game of Chinese Whispers before someone actually writes something down... or 400+ years if you take the Greek Septuagint (oldest record of the complete text).
Once it is written down, because there is no printing press (developed in the 11th Century by the Han Chinese, or the first Guttenberg presses of the 15th Century), each new copy has to be scribed from an existing copy. While the vast majority of scribes probably could not read, and were therefore copying verbatim, any copy produced by a literate scribe is subject to editing (see the changes to the Bible over the course of history, as each group pushes their own "interpretation" of the "original" which matches their own beliefs and agenda).
Just because a document is damned old does not mean it is accurate. The older it is, the less likely it is that the general populace will be able to read it, meaning that you have a much smaller chance of getting someone's interpretation of what the document says, rather than the original meaning.
As I used to work for an American company who have an office in Dubai (full of people with Arabic names, and lots of Muslims), a working team in India (very close to Pakistan, never mind the fact that the two countries hate each other almost as much as Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers fans), and a development/support team in the Phillippines (close to China, with a similar relationship to India and Pakistan, and with their own domestic terrorism issues), clients in sub-Saharan Africa, Russia and Texas, my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles are full of people in those areas.
Given that the NSA does not stop at analyzing your own contacts, I am apparently a person of interest if one of my contacts has any dubious friends, or if one of my contact's contacts has any dubious friends.
Kevin Bacon is indeed going to be screwed, we might as well just lock him up and start waterboarding him now, and save the NSA the trouble.