Most people are decent. A lot of people are venal if they think no one is personally going to be hurt by it. ("It's just taking money from the insurance company, no big deal, right?")
Suddenly discovering neck injuries after being examined by an expert lawyer post-accident (a very, very common scenario where I live, has happened in almost every accident I've been mixed up in) is not the same in most people's minds as stealing someone's personal, favorite game computer that they invested all their spare pay in.
On the other hand, there is a small percentage of people who are complete fucktards. There's a moral bell-curve as well as an intelligence one, and you'll always have that bottom 5% plaguing humanity. Don't let that bottom 5% fool you into thinking everyone is like that.
I have no idea what you were ranting about, but I'm skeptical that you're much of a pilot. If you can't tell when you are near an airport without using GPS, kindly land and turn in your pilot's license. That's basic VFR navigation, and I was doing it as a child in my father's airplane 35 years ago, with OMNI & RDF and a gyro-compass. Oh, and a chart. That's the thing with the printing on it that tells you where the airports are. The transparent things above your instrument panel are the windows that let you see things around you, like the ground (with landmarks) below you and the mountains in front of you. (If you're flying in SoCal below 3000', some of those mountains are definitely in FRONT of you, not below you....)
Also, you have heard of filing a flight plan BEFORE you leave the ground, haven't you? You know, the old-fashioned way we did it 35 years ago.
The device you're looking for is called a 'transponder'. They were a big issue for private pilots 35 years ago, and standard on airliners and military planes back then.
No one's figured out a perfect method for always making hits that will draw in a huge audience over the short and long term.
That's not actually true; there have been a few genre authors that hit the mother lode and figured out just what sells to their particularly fairly popular genre--and they kept it up (selling steadily) for decades until they died of old age.
Case in point: Erle Stanley Gardner for crime fiction, and Louis L'Amour for westerns.
And anyone who has ever worked in California is surprised by this because...?
It's pretty well-known that California law does not allow non-compete clauses in employment contracts. Here, the California State Supreme Court ruled that the law says what is says.
I'd be more interested in finding out if it is true that states with "Right-to-Work" laws also forbid non-compete clauses as part of their "right to work" laws. I heard that once, but do not know if it is correct. I've heard it said that a company has a hard time enforcing a non-compete clause in a Right-to-Work state.
So when management violates the law one should just "toughen up and grow a sack"?
Hmm, not coming down on abuse of the law and employee's rights sounds more like cowardice than toughness. There's a big difference between laziness and not allowing some asshole to take advantage of you; until you learn that difference, assholes will be able to take advantage of you by pushing your "work ethic" buttons.
"What? You don't want to work 80 hours a week without compensation? You're lazy/not a team player/want the benefits without putting in the work..."
Yeah, I've heard that spiel before. I bet we all have. It's a scam, a hard-sell tactic to keep you from realizing they are taking advantage of you. My answer to "mandatory unpaid overtime" that I can't switch jobs to get away from just yet is the same one the Soviet subjects had: "You pretend to pay me, I'll pretend to work". You get what you pay for, and that includes employers.
the working conditions, while they might not be great on a farm, are a damn sight healthier than they are in an electronics factory
I wouldn't bet on that. Chinese farms traditionally used excrement, or "night soil" as fertilizer in their fields, and Chinese farmers traditionally work barefoot or in sandals. You pick up many amusing parasites and diseases that way, and more from the water contaminated with fecal matter that your food is growing in, or is seeping into your water supply.
Blame Hollyweird's obsession with DRM protection on their movies for that. The Blu-ray players have to do a shitload of self-authentication against internal keys, check for signs of tampering, and load the goddamn stupid JVM before you can view your movie.
*curses whoever thought a JVM was a good idea for an embedded consumer device*
The delay from pressing the 'on' button to getting something on the screen was a big issue when I was working with a certain consumer electronics company on the firmware, but it was very difficult to reduce it further because of all the required DRM/anti-tampering crap. The actual embedded kernel boots very quickly.
Which alternate timeline did you come in from? The Slashdot I remember from 5-10 years ago was *ALWAYS* like this--only back then you had Jon Katz articles, too. Customizing my Slashdot front page to block those really improved it.
Er, that's a Mormon tract. I'd read it with a big grain of salt, seeing as one of the fundamentals of Mormonism is "All other, older churches are corrupt and failed and we're the only ones who have it right, so you should listen to us". The author might have been a tad biased in his arguments.
I have read Martin Luther's essays, however, and he had a lot to say about the corruption of the medieval Roman church of his day. Some of those abuses were corrected by the mid-20th century as fallout from the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, but some of the doctrine is still screwy to this day.
Seems like the free market already does what you want the reward system to do for inventions: rewards financially those inventions that society finds useful.
So basically you want to replace the infinitely flexible, highly responsive, cellular automata reward-issuer that is the free market with the timely, superior wisdom of a government bureaucracy??
The crazies are the ones whose judgment is enough impaired that they make the mistake of talking about it.
Sane people see a lot of weird stuff over a lifetime, but we keep our mouths shut because (a) we want to be able to keep a job and pay the bills, and (b) no one wants to hear you talk about the weird stuff except the crazies. See, other sane people either (a) never saw the weird stuff, so they think you are crazy, or (b) they have, and they know better than to talk about it in public, so they think you're one of the crazies for talking about it. Either way, they back away quickly and you find that no one sane wants to talk to you.
The first rule about the Weird Stuff is we don't talk about the Weird Stuff.
Actually.. no. You're wrong. Neanderthals were part of the genus Homo, and some paleoanthropologists consider them a sub-species of Homo sapiens. They are much, much more closely related to us than chimpanzees, and were probably capable of interbreeding with modern (Cro-Magnon) Homo sapiens, and probably did. I invite you to read the Wikipedia article.
You're pretty much wrong on every other point, too. Our ancestors during the time of the Neanderthals were 6' plus Cro-Magnons, and species do not evolve to larger (or smaller) forms unless there is an evolutionary advantage to doing so.
He does? Hmm... As someone from Louisiana, I can tell you that Joe Cook is a rabid attack dog on the whole separation of church and state thing. He'll go after principals uttering prayers at high school athletic events, so if he thinks it's constitutional, that means the ACLU's lawyers can't see a way to challenge it.
Nice, concise re-statement of Catholic theology on Creation.
I wish the Young Earth Creationists would stop trying to shove their peculiar doctrines down the rest of our throats. They successfully convey the misleading impression that *ALL* Christians are a bunch of anti-intellectual, anti-science nutjobs.
Ah! Another Norton fan! I wondered why no one recommended her juvenile sci-fi for kids; they're classic space opera, and frequently center around orphaned or otherwise alienated children as protagonists.
And while we're talking about Bester, how about "The Demolished Man"?
Also, H. G. Wells was a good writer and is definitely a classic.
Pfft! The parent had a valid point: Isaac Asimov was not the best of writers. He had great ideas, but he couldn't characterize his way out of a paperbag. When your most vivid characters are your robots, you're not doing it right...
So they've proved what, exactly? That even stone-age, tool-using cultures understand the concept of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"? This paper strikes me as a stunning no-brainer, not the revolutionary research it's being hyped as.
"We've established that people don't randomly change useful tools to useless tools, but they do change the decorations."
That's because he's doing "work for hire" and doesn't retain the rights to it. A writer doing "work for hire", e.g. an ad copywriter or a journalist, gets paid once and not 6 months after the fact.
I currently have an embedded Linux job. Note that I have over 25 years of programming experience in general, though not so much in embedded systems specifically. I'd gotten rather badly pigeon-holed as a Windows programmer in the last decade because my last several jobs were Windows programming--very frustrating, because I detest programming in Windows and very much wanted a Linux/Unix/etc programming job. Unfortunately, when your 20 year-old jobs say System V Unix and your 5 year-old jobs on the resume say Windows, they offer you Windows jobs...
I managed to land my current job because of two things: I have 25 years of programming experience in C/C++, and because I tinker heavily with Linux as a hobby. I got into Linux From Scratch for a while because I was sick of SuSE Linux's aggressive handholding, and wanted to get to know my system all the way down at the inittab level, like I did when I was working with System V supermicros way back when. Thanks to Linux From Scratch, I was up on shell scripting, compiling entire toolchains and systems from source code, and knew how init scripts worked, which got me the job.
Okay, having learned Python to maintain a mapping utility for a certain MMORPG also helped clinch the deal, since the internal testing website is written in Python and Perl, and part of my job is helping maintain it.
I'm still amused that I got the best job I've had in 15 years because of my hobbies.
Molly Weasley kills Bellatrix Lestrange. One of the most feared duelers on Voldemort's side is killed by Molly Weasley? Sure, she's a member of the OotP, but the only spells she had shown in the previous books were household charms. It shows JK Rowling's opinion of a mother's love. But that is going too far in my opinion. Made me laugh when I read it. A recurring theme in both Tom Clancy and Louis L'Amour's novels is that the most dangerous guys in the world aren't the kill-crazy psychos; instead, it's the peaceful, law-abiding guy who gets well and truly pissed off. The kind of guy who might have been a Marine war veteran, or (in the Old West) a Civil War veteran, but who put down his guns when the war was over, settled down and raised kids and no one thinks he's a threat because he's the law-abiding sort.... until you give him a very good reason to pick that gun up again.
Mothers are even more dangerous--maternal ties override little things like moral restraints when your children are threatened. Bellatrix, who kills people for fun, was facing a mother fighting for her kid's lives. Molly has no moral constraints at this point--they've been switched to 'off' by the threat to her children. She's fighting to kill as quickly as possible, and it isn't for mere 'fun'. She also doesn't care about threats to herself, whereas Bellatrix is probably trying not to get killed in this fight.
There is nothing more dangerous than someone doesn't care what they lose as long as they kill you. Bellatrix was doomed.
Actually, that is the standard pattern when the buyer dominates the suppliers (i.e, many small, weak suppliers whose sole/majority market is a very large, powerful buyer), for *any* buyer, not just Wal-Mart. When I took Management Accounting, the classic example was Sears. In its heyday, Sears did to its suppliers EXACTLY what you describe above.
You don't ever want to be in the position of having only one customer that you can't afford to lose, because then they can squeeze out of you everything but just enough profit to keep the lights on.
BTW, the U.S. government has been known to do the same thing to its suppliers, except that sometimes the government isn't careful to leave the suppliers enough to operate on.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people are decent. A lot of people are venal if they think no one is personally going to be hurt by it. ("It's just taking money from the insurance company, no big deal, right?")
Suddenly discovering neck injuries after being examined by an expert lawyer post-accident (a very, very common scenario where I live, has happened in almost every accident I've been mixed up in) is not the same in most people's minds as stealing someone's personal, favorite game computer that they invested all their spare pay in.
On the other hand, there is a small percentage of people who are complete fucktards. There's a moral bell-curve as well as an intelligence one, and you'll always have that bottom 5% plaguing humanity. Don't let that bottom 5% fool you into thinking everyone is like that.
I have no idea what you were ranting about, but I'm skeptical that you're much of a pilot. If you can't tell when you are near an airport without using GPS, kindly land and turn in your pilot's license. That's basic VFR navigation, and I was doing it as a child in my father's airplane 35 years ago, with OMNI & RDF and a gyro-compass. Oh, and a chart. That's the thing with the printing on it that tells you where the airports are. The transparent things above your instrument panel are the windows that let you see things around you, like the ground (with landmarks) below you and the mountains in front of you. (If you're flying in SoCal below 3000', some of those mountains are definitely in FRONT of you, not below you....)
Also, you have heard of filing a flight plan BEFORE you leave the ground, haven't you? You know, the old-fashioned way we did it 35 years ago.
The device you're looking for is called a 'transponder'. They were a big issue for private pilots 35 years ago, and standard on airliners and military planes back then.
No one's figured out a perfect method for always making hits that will draw in a huge audience over the short and long term.
That's not actually true; there have been a few genre authors that hit the mother lode and figured out just what sells to their particularly fairly popular genre--and they kept it up (selling steadily) for decades until they died of old age.
Case in point: Erle Stanley Gardner for crime fiction, and Louis L'Amour for westerns.
And anyone who has ever worked in California is surprised by this because...?
It's pretty well-known that California law does not allow non-compete clauses in employment contracts. Here, the California State Supreme Court ruled that the law says what is says.
I'd be more interested in finding out if it is true that states with "Right-to-Work" laws also forbid non-compete clauses as part of their "right to work" laws. I heard that once, but do not know if it is correct. I've heard it said that a company has a hard time enforcing a non-compete clause in a Right-to-Work state.
So when management violates the law one should just "toughen up and grow a sack"?
Hmm, not coming down on abuse of the law and employee's rights sounds more like cowardice than toughness. There's a big difference between laziness and not allowing some asshole to take advantage of you; until you learn that difference, assholes will be able to take advantage of you by pushing your "work ethic" buttons.
"What? You don't want to work 80 hours a week without compensation? You're lazy/not a team player/want the benefits without putting in the work..."
Yeah, I've heard that spiel before. I bet we all have. It's a scam, a hard-sell tactic to keep you from realizing they are taking advantage of you. My answer to "mandatory unpaid overtime" that I can't switch jobs to get away from just yet is the same one the Soviet subjects had: "You pretend to pay me, I'll pretend to work". You get what you pay for, and that includes employers.
the working conditions, while they might not be great on a farm, are a damn sight healthier than they are in an electronics factory
I wouldn't bet on that. Chinese farms traditionally used excrement, or "night soil" as fertilizer in their fields, and Chinese farmers traditionally work barefoot or in sandals. You pick up many amusing parasites and diseases that way, and more from the water contaminated with fecal matter that your food is growing in, or is seeping into your water supply.
Blame Hollyweird's obsession with DRM protection on their movies for that. The Blu-ray players have to do a shitload of self-authentication against internal keys, check for signs of tampering, and load the goddamn stupid JVM before you can view your movie.
*curses whoever thought a JVM was a good idea for an embedded consumer device*
The delay from pressing the 'on' button to getting something on the screen was a big issue when I was working with a certain consumer electronics company on the firmware, but it was very difficult to reduce it further because of all the required DRM/anti-tampering crap. The actual embedded kernel boots very quickly.
Which alternate timeline did you come in from? The Slashdot I remember from 5-10 years ago was *ALWAYS* like this--only back then you had Jon Katz articles, too. Customizing my Slashdot front page to block those really improved it.
Er, that's a Mormon tract. I'd read it with a big grain of salt, seeing as one of the fundamentals of Mormonism is "All other, older churches are corrupt and failed and we're the only ones who have it right, so you should listen to us". The author might have been a tad biased in his arguments.
I have read Martin Luther's essays, however, and he had a lot to say about the corruption of the medieval Roman church of his day. Some of those abuses were corrected by the mid-20th century as fallout from the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, but some of the doctrine is still screwy to this day.
But the tinfoil hat is protecting you just fine, right?
Well, it does explain where the Blackhorse project disappeared to when it went black...
Seems like the free market already does what you want the reward system to do for inventions: rewards financially those inventions that society finds useful.
So basically you want to replace the infinitely flexible, highly responsive, cellular automata reward-issuer that is the free market with the timely, superior wisdom of a government bureaucracy??
A little reading of slashdot commentaries is proof of that...
The crazies are the ones whose judgment is enough impaired that they make the mistake of talking about it.
Sane people see a lot of weird stuff over a lifetime, but we keep our mouths shut because (a) we want to be able to keep a job and pay the bills, and (b) no one wants to hear you talk about the weird stuff except the crazies. See, other sane people either (a) never saw the weird stuff, so they think you are crazy, or (b) they have, and they know better than to talk about it in public, so they think you're one of the crazies for talking about it. Either way, they back away quickly and you find that no one sane wants to talk to you.
The first rule about the Weird Stuff is we don't talk about the Weird Stuff.
Actually.. no. You're wrong. Neanderthals were part of the genus Homo, and some paleoanthropologists consider them a sub-species of Homo sapiens. They are much, much more closely related to us than chimpanzees, and were probably capable of interbreeding with modern (Cro-Magnon) Homo sapiens, and probably did. I invite you to read the Wikipedia article.
You're pretty much wrong on every other point, too. Our ancestors during the time of the Neanderthals were 6' plus Cro-Magnons, and species do not evolve to larger (or smaller) forms unless there is an evolutionary advantage to doing so.
He does? Hmm... As someone from Louisiana, I can tell you that Joe Cook is a rabid attack dog on the whole separation of church and state thing. He'll go after principals uttering prayers at high school athletic events, so if he thinks it's constitutional, that means the ACLU's lawyers can't see a way to challenge it.
Nice, concise re-statement of Catholic theology on Creation.
I wish the Young Earth Creationists would stop trying to shove their peculiar doctrines down the rest of our throats. They successfully convey the misleading impression that *ALL* Christians are a bunch of anti-intellectual, anti-science nutjobs.
Ah! Another Norton fan! I wondered why no one recommended her juvenile sci-fi for kids; they're classic space opera, and frequently center around orphaned or otherwise alienated children as protagonists.
And while we're talking about Bester, how about "The Demolished Man"?
Also, H. G. Wells was a good writer and is definitely a classic.
Pfft! The parent had a valid point: Isaac Asimov was not the best of writers. He had great ideas, but he couldn't characterize his way out of a paperbag. When your most vivid characters are your robots, you're not doing it right...
So they've proved what, exactly? That even stone-age, tool-using cultures understand the concept of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"? This paper strikes me as a stunning no-brainer, not the revolutionary research it's being hyped as.
"We've established that people don't randomly change useful tools to useless tools, but they do change the decorations."
That's a real exciting discovery there...
That's because he's doing "work for hire" and doesn't retain the rights to it. A writer doing "work for hire", e.g. an ad copywriter or a journalist, gets paid once and not 6 months after the fact.
Code for yourself and market it, you own it.
Two words: Harlan Ellison
He's someone else who is nuts enough to sue up down and sideways over "Hollywood accounting" and misappropriation of copyright.
I currently have an embedded Linux job. Note that I have over 25 years of programming experience in general, though not so much in embedded systems specifically. I'd gotten rather badly pigeon-holed as a Windows programmer in the last decade because my last several jobs were Windows programming--very frustrating, because I detest programming in Windows and very much wanted a Linux/Unix/etc programming job. Unfortunately, when your 20 year-old jobs say System V Unix and your 5 year-old jobs on the resume say Windows, they offer you Windows jobs...
I managed to land my current job because of two things: I have 25 years of programming experience in C/C++, and because I tinker heavily with Linux as a hobby. I got into Linux From Scratch for a while because I was sick of SuSE Linux's aggressive handholding, and wanted to get to know my system all the way down at the inittab level, like I did when I was working with System V supermicros way back when. Thanks to Linux From Scratch, I was up on shell scripting, compiling entire toolchains and systems from source code, and knew how init scripts worked, which got me the job.
Okay, having learned Python to maintain a mapping utility for a certain MMORPG also helped clinch the deal, since the internal testing website is written in Python and Perl, and part of my job is helping maintain it.
I'm still amused that I got the best job I've had in 15 years because of my hobbies.
One of the most feared duelers on Voldemort's side is killed by Molly Weasley? Sure, she's a member of the OotP, but the only spells she had shown in the previous books were household charms. It shows JK Rowling's opinion of a mother's love. But that is going too far in my opinion. Made me laugh when I read it. A recurring theme in both Tom Clancy and Louis L'Amour's novels is that the most dangerous guys in the world aren't the kill-crazy psychos; instead, it's the peaceful, law-abiding guy who gets well and truly pissed off. The kind of guy who might have been a Marine war veteran, or (in the Old West) a Civil War veteran, but who put down his guns when the war was over, settled down and raised kids and no one thinks he's a threat because he's the law-abiding sort.... until you give him a very good reason to pick that gun up again.
Mothers are even more dangerous--maternal ties override little things like moral restraints when your children are threatened. Bellatrix, who kills people for fun, was facing a mother fighting for her kid's lives. Molly has no moral constraints at this point--they've been switched to 'off' by the threat to her children. She's fighting to kill as quickly as possible, and it isn't for mere 'fun'. She also doesn't care about threats to herself, whereas Bellatrix is probably trying not to get killed in this fight.
There is nothing more dangerous than someone doesn't care what they lose as long as they kill you. Bellatrix was doomed.
Actually, that is the standard pattern when the buyer dominates the suppliers (i.e, many small, weak suppliers whose sole/majority market is a very large, powerful buyer), for *any* buyer, not just Wal-Mart. When I took Management Accounting, the classic example was Sears. In its heyday, Sears did to its suppliers EXACTLY what you describe above.
You don't ever want to be in the position of having only one customer that you can't afford to lose, because then they can squeeze out of you everything but just enough profit to keep the lights on.
BTW, the U.S. government has been known to do the same thing to its suppliers, except that sometimes the government isn't careful to leave the suppliers enough to operate on.