You don't have to. The best people are by definition self-motivated. They achieve high results because to do otherwise isn't in their personality. If you need to financially motivate them to insane amounts as well, you've already failed.
Yes, the best people are self-motivated. And if you are paying them $X and they can make 7*$X somewhere else, you won't hold them long. And if you want someone making $X at your competitor to join your company, you'd do well to offer him more than $X to leave.
In a long-lived slashdot tradition, it doesn't appear that anyone on this discussion thread read the fine article. It argues that freedom is the root of fear in America. More specifically it is the freedom myth - that we are a nation founded in freedom - that is the root of all fear and paranoia in America. He compares 3 countries with what he defines as cultures of fear based in freedom myth as the root of their anti-democratic evils: the US, Israel and Apartheid South Africa.
In his view we are slaves to a culture created in the back of covered wagons, with women and children cowering in fear from the isolation and danger crossing the frontier alone.
I suppose it is left to the reader to divine what the solution would be if the problem is that we venerate freedom too much.
You may be and so may I be but the people that sue (and there will be many) won't really care if self driving cars reduce deaths. They will only be looking a one or two deaths at a time.
Yup. Unless they come up with some sort of industry-wide accident payout system or some federal level legislation to protect manufacturers, it is going to be tough sledding for automated driving. They do seem to be working toward some sort of national legal framework for this - I hope they get it right. Since the day I saw that first DARPA challenge race, I've been waiting for my self-driving car. Each new revelation of an even better version just twists the knife. Google's blind guy driving video left me sure that it was only a matter of time until I could get one. This year's news makes it clear that they are ready to go - they just need the government and the rest of us to catch up.
Having no other information than the articles provided, I kinda had the same hunch. Just because they showed there were some possible bugs in the code doesn't mean that this particular accident was caused by the computer.
I'll be interested to see what the flood of cases to follow looks like. I'm guessing they will also be dominated by elderly drivers.
All that being said, I have a very close friend who lost his teenage daughter to an unexplained single car accident that looked very much like an uncontrolled acceleration. She was driving a new Toyota Corolla at the time. It makes me wonder if she didn't find one of these software bugs...
I agree with everything in your post - except one thing. I voted in the same election in south Florida and the voting booth thing was infuriating. They could have scaled easily. They mostly voted in places like elementary schools and churches with scantron bubble ballots. Yet they only had the stupid mini-folding-table voting booths set up - limiting supply of voting stations. Here's this huge room with tables and seats for a couple hundred and you've gotta wait for one of 15 little stand-up booth thingies. Give me some scrap cardboard and a roll of duct tape and I could have built little 3-sided voting booth privacy shields for the lunchroom tables for double that number in under a half-hour. Which is exactly what the "additional assistance needed" booth looked like - only it costs $20 to buy the little plastic shield they put on the table. But nobody would have gotten the contract for a stack of $200 voting booth table thingies in that case.
Of course the narrative is that the whole thing is a right-wing plot by those that somehow control the uniformly left/democrat elected officials down here. Truly a case of ascribing to malice that which can best be explained by incompetence. We voters down here are so smart that we have continued to elect the same supervisor that presided over the 2000 presidential election year after year. She's still there even though we make national news every election cycle for the problems with voting. Pogo was definitely on to something.
Not every customer is the same. I've had quite a few over the years that didn't really do the "work together to scope out what sort of work is realistic in a given time frame" thing. Some people view IT as a personal plaything and requirements as a one-way-street. Heck, I had one big-shot pull a project that had been waiting for his final UAT for two weeks (after 3 weeks of requirements/development time) because "You might be able to finish this in another 3 months, but we need it right now." He didn't even have time to look at the ready-for-UAT version. He farmed the project out to a consulting firm that told him they could have it ready in 30 days. 2 years later they went live with the first beta. He was very proud of his success. After 2 years of horrendous scope-creep, the consultants were much less happy. The 2-man team that put together our version wasn't so happy with them - the version that finally went live still couldn't do everything that their original version could. It did have a really fancy flash-based "wizard" that collected all of the required information over the course of 15 separate pages (as opposed to the original single page web form). So there is that... You can guess how much the insurance agents and financial planners who were the target audience loved that.
I'm going to guess that the lion's share of that money went to requirements gathering. A site like this which has to pull in data from dozens of different companies is going to have a lot of stakeholders. The consulting time for analysts and PM's to compile all of the user stories must have been immense. The actual development on the website itself doesn't look like it could have consumed more than a couple of million. That being said, my team developed about a dozen sites per year of comparable complexity (though not approaching that scale) on a budget of about 5 million, including all of the project management and requirements documentation on top of development, testing, administration and support.
So yeah, I would have like to have had a shot at building the thing for $54 million. A little voice is whispering in my ear that I might have been taking home about half that amount for myself. According to the article you link, they are only getting $137 per hour for the lead technical architect. That seems pretty cheap for a consultant in that role on a project of this size. Heck, they bill out their account manager at $202 per hour. Oh, and they point out that they'll be getting all of their insurance plan info from eHealth.com So never mind about all that consulting time to gather requirements from all of the insurance companies on the exchange.
Oh, and another point on the scale - with a population in Washington of just under 7 million and only 5% on individual plans and another 14% uninsured, the target user base is for under 1.4 million people, presumably many of whom are in family groups - so call it less than a million users total. That's big, but it isn't that big. They probably assumed peak usage at under 1% of the target audience and got it wrong by an order of magnitude because of the general curiosity.
Auuugh! My browser glitched on the second half of your comment until after I posted. Weird... probably because even firefox knows that Wickard is an abomination.
Actually, there is more to it than that. Take a look at Wickard and Raich, the two supreme court cases he was probably alluding to.
The cases in question say that under the commerce clause the federal government can prevent you from growing your own food on your own land for you own consumption (in the case of Wickard v. Filburn) because if you hadn't grown the food (wheat in this case) you would have had to buy it in the marketplace, which thereby affects the market (because you didn't buy something you would have bought).
In Raich they extended this logic to marijuana. Growing a plant in your closet that you are only going to use for yourself is interstate commerce because if you hadn't grown it you would have to have bought it.... and even if you bought it from a local supplier, they would have had to buy it over state lines if they didn't grow it themselves locally. Ta-da! Everything that could be bought or sold is now interstate commerce.
This type of protectionism (like the Texas law) would seem to be a direct violation of the commerce clause of the US constitution. Some industries do seem to have this sort of protectionism in place - particularly alcohol sales where most states have distributorship monopolies and prevent direct marketing to consumers from out of state wineries and distilleries.
Still, it would appear that there is some hope. Earlier this year a federal court struck down a similar law in Louisiana that prevented direct-to-consumer sales of coffins. There is some ambiguity as this case was decided on the nonsensical and arbitrary nature of the regulations - but the court did indicate that they also would have struck it down on interstate commerce grounds.
This is fantastic news, but I wonder why the capacity is so small. TFA says it carried a little less than 600kg of cargo up. The SpaceX Dragon can carry 10 times that amount (literally - 6,000 kg) and it has a return capability of up to 3,000 kg.
After beefing up their vehicle with a second version they plan to be able to deliver 2,700 kg. So best case scenario they can't even carry half the cargo of the Dragon. That's a pretty big disparity.
Sorry. I don't buy it. If there is solid matter, then it must have a surface. At some point there are going to be molecules that are part of the solid's lattice, and some that are not.
Hmmm... is it really meaningful to talk about a "surface" under pressures and temperatures at the center of Jupiter? It seems like current theory is that the core of jupiter is a giant molten soup, but with that amount of mass there could be something exotic and cool like a sea of giant carbon crystals floating on the molten core.... would you call that a surface?
It is also over-specifying what the demand is. The demand for cars isn't for a Tesla, the demand is people want to go somewhere. And people want to look cool and have fun while doing it. If you were to invent something that filled that need better than a car, you'd get rich really, really quickly.
The same goes for the iPhone. The demand was to communicate with others, not to have a phone. The iPhone filled this need better than a landline, better than a flip-phone, better than a laptop computer. So people bought them by the millions.
Identifying the true underlying need is the part where visionaries come in. Black-and-Decker's customers don't want a powerful, torquey drill,, they want to put a hole in something. Maytag's customers don't want a fancy frontloading washer with all the bells and whistles, they want to get their clothes clean. Loosing focus on the customer's core need has been the downfall of many businesses.
Look at Blockbuster. Their customers didn't want to rent a videotape and bring it home to watch. They wanted to watch a movie in the privacy of their own home. Netflix (and many others) bettered them on this core objective and the business was crushed.
Correctly designed lighting does make a huge difference though. Areas that mandate proper cowling of outdoor lights and low pressure sodium are notably less light polluted. The big island of Hawaii takes light pollution rather seriously, and it does make a massive difference. The lights of Hilo are very dim and muted from a distance. It works so well that it is difficult to pick out constellations in the night sky from 9,000 ft. up Mauna Kea, not because the sky is too bright, but because there are too many stars in the night sky.
Contrast that with my home in south Florida where it seems there is a mandate that every parking lot be illuminated with white lights pointed mostly skyward. On clear nights you can make out stars all the way down to magnitude 1. Other nights you've got the moon and Venus (sadly, that's only mildly sarcastic).
I have no studies to back me up, but I think the premise of the article is stupid. Women who can code are rock stars in geek culture.
I used to run a 50-person IT department. I hired as many qualified women as I could get. My IT-Infrastructure director was a woman. My SQL admin team lead was a woman. One of 3 senior architects was a woman. IT departments also tend to look like the United Nations. IT folk as a group may be a bit nerdy to the average observer, but we are also much more objective about things like race, gender or sexual orientation as a group. Can't code? You gotta go. Code like a rock-star - you get to come in late and eat free cookies and mountain dew at your desk. I never heard anyone in our group mention anything other than ability and personality as reasons to judge another employee.
In the 1970's the variant was a maglev subway from NY to LA. The train would accelerate in a partial vacuum at roughly 1G and then brake at 1G -- peaking at a few thousand mph and making the trip in some ridiculous time like a half an hour. PopSci, PopMech and other sciency magazines all did features on variants. It seems I remember a feature in Scientific American that had a demonstration system built in a high school gym using a ping-pong ball as the train going some 1,500 mph.
For those who are armchair civil engineers, the BBC program "Top Gear" provides ample evidence of this observation with its 'challenges'. They frequently race a car on normal roadways against public transport on trains, including high speed rail. They are easily able to set challenges where the car and train take a very similar amount of time. In many, perhaps even most use cases, having your car with you at the end of the journey would be a significant advantage. Cost is rarely to the advantage of rail vs a single passenger car trip these days (other than in-city commuter rail). Put 3 passengers in your car and even very heavily subsidized rail prices would have trouble competing with the automobile.
As an additional poke in the eye to all of us commuters, they have also frequently trotted out challenges that pit an automobile against commuter rail and a bicycle. They often show that the bicycle is the fastest way to navigate the city. So there you have it - the BBC has proven that we don't need new rail lines. Everyone should just ride their bicycle.
When I was a grad student the most valuable training happened in lab meetings, journal clubs and at the Burly Earl Pub around the corner. Everyone was allowed to express their ideas and then prodded to back them up. Even a lowly grad student like me. At one of my first big journal club meetings a big-shot professor was presenting a paper on T-helper cell subgroups. Everyone in the room was very impressed by the implications and off and running on discussions about what the results mean. But I pointed out that the data looked funky to me. Nobody bought it. So I dug in further and pointed out that their controls were off by more than double the measured results that they were comparing. It seemed that their assay was very unpredictable. Within 10 minutes the entire group swung my way and we ripped the article apart. One of the other groups took on the task of replicating the results - just like science is supposed to work.
My first chance to meet a real big-shot was at the Burly Earl. Our department had drinks with Linus Pauling, just a couple of years before he died - still brilliant and curious. He was sharing a back-of-the-napkin idea with the group and I started arguing with him. Wrap your head around that - a 20 year old grad student arguing with a 2-time Nobel Laureate. I got a couple of incredulous looks from some of the others, but Dr. Pauling was very engaged and seemed to enjoy the discussion. He ended up jumping to my side and arguing with some of the other professors. It was just an amazing afternoon. And you know what he never said? "Shut up you idiot, I have 2 Nobel Prizes and you haven't even passed your qualifying exam." (Which, as argument from authority goes is a pretty effective rejoinder, you've gotta admit.)
Imagine either of those scenarios happening in the halls of power.... You think an intern at the State Department gets to call out Hillary Clinton? Imagine Dick Cheney taking a couple of hours to argue big policy decisions with Donald Rumsfeld's assistant's intern. Right.. that might have happened!
Not only is "testability" built into the mechanisms of science, it is also part-and-parcel of the culture of science. (That doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of opinionated pricks running around who think they can declare something so by the weight of their credentials - they do. It's just that you don't have to listen to them if you can back it up.)
It is more than the way the code is written. By having smaller deliverables that are put into production immediately instead of waiting for quarterly releases, you get immediate benefit from the deployment and immediate feedback on an individual feature. This means that the business unit can adapt to incremental change instead of biting off a huge training project and bug fixes are immediate and targeted rather than a deluge of disparate unrelated issues.
With or without agile processes, breaking changes into small deliverables, prioritizing by business impact and deploying each change as it is ready is a great way to work, when possible.
More than this, they were originally private airport security guards that the government nationalized at the insistence of (mostly democrats in) congress.
It also completely ignores recent court decisions which have ruled public photography to be a FIRST AMENDMENT right.
The rulings that public photography is a First Amendment right goes back a long, long ways. The recent ones just re-affirm that. The author of TFA is woefully ignorant of the state-of-the-law when it comes to photography.
In many states you do not have the right to record a conversation unless every party to the conversation consents. I have never understood this rationale. If I can be a party to a conversation, I can tell anyone else about that conversation legally. I can immediately write down everything said to the best of my ability, also legally. I could even hire a set of actors to reenact the scene and record that legally. All of which are less accurate and reliable than a tape recorder.
From what I can tell, two party consent laws simply provide legal cover for the ability to lie about a conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to. The best people are by definition self-motivated. They achieve high results because to do otherwise isn't in their personality. If you need to financially motivate them to insane amounts as well, you've already failed.
Yes, the best people are self-motivated. And if you are paying them $X and they can make 7*$X somewhere else, you won't hold them long. And if you want someone making $X at your competitor to join your company, you'd do well to offer him more than $X to leave.
In a long-lived slashdot tradition, it doesn't appear that anyone on this discussion thread read the fine article. It argues that freedom is the root of fear in America. More specifically it is the freedom myth - that we are a nation founded in freedom - that is the root of all fear and paranoia in America. He compares 3 countries with what he defines as cultures of fear based in freedom myth as the root of their anti-democratic evils: the US, Israel and Apartheid South Africa.
In his view we are slaves to a culture created in the back of covered wagons, with women and children cowering in fear from the isolation and danger crossing the frontier alone.
I suppose it is left to the reader to divine what the solution would be if the problem is that we venerate freedom too much.
You may be and so may I be but the people that sue (and there will be many) won't really care if self driving cars reduce deaths. They will only be looking a one or two deaths at a time.
Yup. Unless they come up with some sort of industry-wide accident payout system or some federal level legislation to protect manufacturers, it is going to be tough sledding for automated driving. They do seem to be working toward some sort of national legal framework for this - I hope they get it right. Since the day I saw that first DARPA challenge race, I've been waiting for my self-driving car. Each new revelation of an even better version just twists the knife. Google's blind guy driving video left me sure that it was only a matter of time until I could get one. This year's news makes it clear that they are ready to go - they just need the government and the rest of us to catch up.
Having no other information than the articles provided, I kinda had the same hunch. Just because they showed there were some possible bugs in the code doesn't mean that this particular accident was caused by the computer.
I'll be interested to see what the flood of cases to follow looks like. I'm guessing they will also be dominated by elderly drivers.
All that being said, I have a very close friend who lost his teenage daughter to an unexplained single car accident that looked very much like an uncontrolled acceleration. She was driving a new Toyota Corolla at the time. It makes me wonder if she didn't find one of these software bugs...
I agree with everything in your post - except one thing. I voted in the same election in south Florida and the voting booth thing was infuriating. They could have scaled easily. They mostly voted in places like elementary schools and churches with scantron bubble ballots. Yet they only had the stupid mini-folding-table voting booths set up - limiting supply of voting stations. Here's this huge room with tables and seats for a couple hundred and you've gotta wait for one of 15 little stand-up booth thingies. Give me some scrap cardboard and a roll of duct tape and I could have built little 3-sided voting booth privacy shields for the lunchroom tables for double that number in under a half-hour. Which is exactly what the "additional assistance needed" booth looked like - only it costs $20 to buy the little plastic shield they put on the table. But nobody would have gotten the contract for a stack of $200 voting booth table thingies in that case.
Of course the narrative is that the whole thing is a right-wing plot by those that somehow control the uniformly left/democrat elected officials down here. Truly a case of ascribing to malice that which can best be explained by incompetence. We voters down here are so smart that we have continued to elect the same supervisor that presided over the 2000 presidential election year after year. She's still there even though we make national news every election cycle for the problems with voting. Pogo was definitely on to something.
Not every customer is the same. I've had quite a few over the years that didn't really do the "work together to scope out what sort of work is realistic in a given time frame" thing. Some people view IT as a personal plaything and requirements as a one-way-street. Heck, I had one big-shot pull a project that had been waiting for his final UAT for two weeks (after 3 weeks of requirements/development time) because "You might be able to finish this in another 3 months, but we need it right now." He didn't even have time to look at the ready-for-UAT version. He farmed the project out to a consulting firm that told him they could have it ready in 30 days. 2 years later they went live with the first beta. He was very proud of his success. After 2 years of horrendous scope-creep, the consultants were much less happy. The 2-man team that put together our version wasn't so happy with them - the version that finally went live still couldn't do everything that their original version could. It did have a really fancy flash-based "wizard" that collected all of the required information over the course of 15 separate pages (as opposed to the original single page web form). So there is that... You can guess how much the insurance agents and financial planners who were the target audience loved that.
I'm going to guess that the lion's share of that money went to requirements gathering. A site like this which has to pull in data from dozens of different companies is going to have a lot of stakeholders. The consulting time for analysts and PM's to compile all of the user stories must have been immense. The actual development on the website itself doesn't look like it could have consumed more than a couple of million. That being said, my team developed about a dozen sites per year of comparable complexity (though not approaching that scale) on a budget of about 5 million, including all of the project management and requirements documentation on top of development, testing, administration and support.
So yeah, I would have like to have had a shot at building the thing for $54 million. A little voice is whispering in my ear that I might have been taking home about half that amount for myself. According to the article you link, they are only getting $137 per hour for the lead technical architect. That seems pretty cheap for a consultant in that role on a project of this size. Heck, they bill out their account manager at $202 per hour. Oh, and they point out that they'll be getting all of their insurance plan info from eHealth.com So never mind about all that consulting time to gather requirements from all of the insurance companies on the exchange.
Oh, and another point on the scale - with a population in Washington of just under 7 million and only 5% on individual plans and another 14% uninsured, the target user base is for under 1.4 million people, presumably many of whom are in family groups - so call it less than a million users total. That's big, but it isn't that big. They probably assumed peak usage at under 1% of the target audience and got it wrong by an order of magnitude because of the general curiosity.
Auuugh! My browser glitched on the second half of your comment until after I posted. Weird... probably because even firefox knows that Wickard is an abomination.
Actually, there is more to it than that. Take a look at Wickard and Raich, the two supreme court cases he was probably alluding to.
The cases in question say that under the commerce clause the federal government can prevent you from growing your own food on your own land for you own consumption (in the case of Wickard v. Filburn) because if you hadn't grown the food (wheat in this case) you would have had to buy it in the marketplace, which thereby affects the market (because you didn't buy something you would have bought).
In Raich they extended this logic to marijuana. Growing a plant in your closet that you are only going to use for yourself is interstate commerce because if you hadn't grown it you would have to have bought it.... and even if you bought it from a local supplier, they would have had to buy it over state lines if they didn't grow it themselves locally. Ta-da! Everything that could be bought or sold is now interstate commerce.
This type of protectionism (like the Texas law) would seem to be a direct violation of the commerce clause of the US constitution. Some industries do seem to have this sort of protectionism in place - particularly alcohol sales where most states have distributorship monopolies and prevent direct marketing to consumers from out of state wineries and distilleries.
Still, it would appear that there is some hope. Earlier this year a federal court struck down a similar law in Louisiana that prevented direct-to-consumer sales of coffins. There is some ambiguity as this case was decided on the nonsensical and arbitrary nature of the regulations - but the court did indicate that they also would have struck it down on interstate commerce grounds.
This is fantastic news, but I wonder why the capacity is so small. TFA says it carried a little less than 600kg of cargo up. The SpaceX Dragon can carry 10 times that amount (literally - 6,000 kg) and it has a return capability of up to 3,000 kg.
After beefing up their vehicle with a second version they plan to be able to deliver 2,700 kg. So best case scenario they can't even carry half the cargo of the Dragon. That's a pretty big disparity.
Not common enough. e.g. George Lucas should have hired one for Star Wars.
Sorry. I don't buy it. If there is solid matter, then it must have a surface. At some point there are going to be molecules that are part of the solid's lattice, and some that are not.
Hmmm... is it really meaningful to talk about a "surface" under pressures and temperatures at the center of Jupiter? It seems like current theory is that the core of jupiter is a giant molten soup, but with that amount of mass there could be something exotic and cool like a sea of giant carbon crystals floating on the molten core.... would you call that a surface?
It is also over-specifying what the demand is. The demand for cars isn't for a Tesla, the demand is people want to go somewhere. And people want to look cool and have fun while doing it. If you were to invent something that filled that need better than a car, you'd get rich really, really quickly.
The same goes for the iPhone. The demand was to communicate with others, not to have a phone. The iPhone filled this need better than a landline, better than a flip-phone, better than a laptop computer. So people bought them by the millions.
Identifying the true underlying need is the part where visionaries come in. Black-and-Decker's customers don't want a powerful, torquey drill,, they want to put a hole in something. Maytag's customers don't want a fancy frontloading washer with all the bells and whistles, they want to get their clothes clean. Loosing focus on the customer's core need has been the downfall of many businesses.
Look at Blockbuster. Their customers didn't want to rent a videotape and bring it home to watch. They wanted to watch a movie in the privacy of their own home. Netflix (and many others) bettered them on this core objective and the business was crushed.
Consider yourself lucky. Our night skies are a sci-fi film version of orange, with few stars keeping the moon company.
Correctly designed lighting does make a huge difference though. Areas that mandate proper cowling of outdoor lights and low pressure sodium are notably less light polluted. The big island of Hawaii takes light pollution rather seriously, and it does make a massive difference. The lights of Hilo are very dim and muted from a distance. It works so well that it is difficult to pick out constellations in the night sky from 9,000 ft. up Mauna Kea, not because the sky is too bright, but because there are too many stars in the night sky.
Contrast that with my home in south Florida where it seems there is a mandate that every parking lot be illuminated with white lights pointed mostly skyward. On clear nights you can make out stars all the way down to magnitude 1. Other nights you've got the moon and Venus (sadly, that's only mildly sarcastic).
I have no studies to back me up, but I think the premise of the article is stupid. Women who can code are rock stars in geek culture.
I used to run a 50-person IT department. I hired as many qualified women as I could get. My IT-Infrastructure director was a woman. My SQL admin team lead was a woman. One of 3 senior architects was a woman. IT departments also tend to look like the United Nations. IT folk as a group may be a bit nerdy to the average observer, but we are also much more objective about things like race, gender or sexual orientation as a group. Can't code? You gotta go. Code like a rock-star - you get to come in late and eat free cookies and mountain dew at your desk. I never heard anyone in our group mention anything other than ability and personality as reasons to judge another employee.
In the 1970's the variant was a maglev subway from NY to LA. The train would accelerate in a partial vacuum at roughly 1G and then brake at 1G -- peaking at a few thousand mph and making the trip in some ridiculous time like a half an hour. PopSci, PopMech and other sciency magazines all did features on variants. It seems I remember a feature in Scientific American that had a demonstration system built in a high school gym using a ping-pong ball as the train going some 1,500 mph.
For those who are armchair civil engineers, the BBC program "Top Gear" provides ample evidence of this observation with its 'challenges'. They frequently race a car on normal roadways against public transport on trains, including high speed rail. They are easily able to set challenges where the car and train take a very similar amount of time. In many, perhaps even most use cases, having your car with you at the end of the journey would be a significant advantage. Cost is rarely to the advantage of rail vs a single passenger car trip these days (other than in-city commuter rail). Put 3 passengers in your car and even very heavily subsidized rail prices would have trouble competing with the automobile.
As an additional poke in the eye to all of us commuters, they have also frequently trotted out challenges that pit an automobile against commuter rail and a bicycle. They often show that the bicycle is the fastest way to navigate the city. So there you have it - the BBC has proven that we don't need new rail lines. Everyone should just ride their bicycle.
I can fully back up BM on this.
When I was a grad student the most valuable training happened in lab meetings, journal clubs and at the Burly Earl Pub around the corner. Everyone was allowed to express their ideas and then prodded to back them up. Even a lowly grad student like me. At one of my first big journal club meetings a big-shot professor was presenting a paper on T-helper cell subgroups. Everyone in the room was very impressed by the implications and off and running on discussions about what the results mean. But I pointed out that the data looked funky to me. Nobody bought it. So I dug in further and pointed out that their controls were off by more than double the measured results that they were comparing. It seemed that their assay was very unpredictable. Within 10 minutes the entire group swung my way and we ripped the article apart. One of the other groups took on the task of replicating the results - just like science is supposed to work.
My first chance to meet a real big-shot was at the Burly Earl. Our department had drinks with Linus Pauling, just a couple of years before he died - still brilliant and curious. He was sharing a back-of-the-napkin idea with the group and I started arguing with him. Wrap your head around that - a 20 year old grad student arguing with a 2-time Nobel Laureate. I got a couple of incredulous looks from some of the others, but Dr. Pauling was very engaged and seemed to enjoy the discussion. He ended up jumping to my side and arguing with some of the other professors. It was just an amazing afternoon. And you know what he never said? "Shut up you idiot, I have 2 Nobel Prizes and you haven't even passed your qualifying exam." (Which, as argument from authority goes is a pretty effective rejoinder, you've gotta admit.)
Imagine either of those scenarios happening in the halls of power.... You think an intern at the State Department gets to call out Hillary Clinton? Imagine Dick Cheney taking a couple of hours to argue big policy decisions with Donald Rumsfeld's assistant's intern. Right.. that might have happened!
Not only is "testability" built into the mechanisms of science, it is also part-and-parcel of the culture of science. (That doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of opinionated pricks running around who think they can declare something so by the weight of their credentials - they do. It's just that you don't have to listen to them if you can back it up.)
It is more than the way the code is written. By having smaller deliverables that are put into production immediately instead of waiting for quarterly releases, you get immediate benefit from the deployment and immediate feedback on an individual feature. This means that the business unit can adapt to incremental change instead of biting off a huge training project and bug fixes are immediate and targeted rather than a deluge of disparate unrelated issues.
With or without agile processes, breaking changes into small deliverables, prioritizing by business impact and deploying each change as it is ready is a great way to work, when possible.
More than this, they were originally private airport security guards that the government nationalized at the insistence of (mostly democrats in) congress.
And I didn't see any tanks, unless you were watching something I wasn't. What the hell good would they be? You gonna shoot a guy with a tank cannon?
Well, maybe 'tanks' is a bit strong of a word for some, but just because they didn't have cannons doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of armor on hand.
The rulings that public photography is a First Amendment right goes back a long, long ways. The recent ones just re-affirm that. The author of TFA is woefully ignorant of the state-of-the-law when it comes to photography.
Unfortunately, so are many public officials
In many states you do not have the right to record a conversation unless every party to the conversation consents. I have never understood this rationale. If I can be a party to a conversation, I can tell anyone else about that conversation legally. I can immediately write down everything said to the best of my ability, also legally. I could even hire a set of actors to reenact the scene and record that legally. All of which are less accurate and reliable than a tape recorder.
From what I can tell, two party consent laws simply provide legal cover for the ability to lie about a conversation.