That's a bit of an oversimplified version of that twisty little story. And while Abramoff is surely a slime, it is actually a Good Thing that the bar for convicting someone of murder is set fairly high.
The whole concept of "specialist-article-experts" doesn't really exist in Wikipedia, which is part of its problem. A print encyclopedia can get a recognized expert in a particular field to author an article. Britannica back in its glory days frequently did this. You could argue that their articles weren't NPOV, but they were at least written by an informed person. But on Wikipedia, someone with a Ph.D. and an established reputation in the real world is just another contributor. Their offline reputation is irrelevant to their online reputation. Wikipedia doesn't want their opinion (this is part of their NPOV philosophy), and some 10 year old can overwrite what they wrote. This is nice and democratic, but the results are not always as good as what the print world achieves, for fairly obvious reasons.
Well, I think GNU/Linux is silly, too, but GNU components are hardly dispensible, since you need gcc to build the kernel (in theory you could use another compiler, or build your own compiler, but in practice you need gcc).
>8 year olds should NEVER be put in a situation where they would need a cell phone
Well, ok probably true for 8 year olds. But my soon to be 12 year old is about to start commuting to school on public transit. Maybe she is young to do this, but other kids at her school do it also and certainly high school kids do it frequently, in my area.
She'll be met at the station, but the train could break down, she could fall asleep and miss the stop, lots of things could happen. So I'd like to know, or like the school to know, if any of these things do. Hence she has a cell phone.
When I was a college lecturer, I tried to point out that we have a lot of evidence of organisms changing over time as a result of environmental pressures. Antibiotic resistance is a fine example. So are Darwin's numerous examples of human deliberate selective modification of domestic animals and pets. Furthermore, unlike Darwin, we now understand the fundamental biological mechanisms by which variation in traits and transmission of traits occur (e.g. mutation of genes, expression of previously unexpressed genes). So we do not know everything about evolution, but it is a bit hard to deny the phenomenon could happen at all (some people accept that it does, but don't believe it explains the current set of species we have at the present time). However, I got the impression that many students didn't even get this set of information/arguments in high school biology.
It works just fine.. until it doesn't work. Most email clients are not well suited to managing huge folders full of mail. If your inbox file gets corrupted, they will barf and you will have to hope you can fix it. I have had this issue more than once, with Outlook and (yes) Thunderbird. Backups of course help but in general it would be nice if mail client authors assumed they'd get ridiculous quantities of data and put a better data management and integrity layer underneath. Maybe this is a good argument to keep it all on the server (although until recently my corporate email kept quotas and prevented you doing that).
It is more than just name recognition. Ever since the dot-com implosion, corporate purchasers are leery of small companies. They can go away. They can get bought. Yeah, I know with open source you can say the source is eternally available, but enterprise buyers like to have a vendor behind it and they like that vendor to have a certain scale, size, and market acceptance before they commit their $$$. Red Hat is a $4 Billion dollar corporation and it qualifies. Novell is on the borderline because they're smaller and struggling. Anybody else doesn't qualify.
A good part of the rest of the world has considerable doubts about how civilized we are. For example, our insistence on capital punishment offends many people in the numerous countries that have abolished it.
Specifically, to get these technologies adopted in a business environment, somebody has to be able to explain to executives what the benefits are and the cost, and therefore why they should adopt this technology, and if it's for sale somehow, why they should invest in semantically aware software/hardware. The barrier here is that business guys who write checks may not be technical, or not very, and sales guys who talk to them are also not generally technical. So it doesn't get traction because the benefits are hard to explain and the stuff you do to get the benefits is really inscrutable. There are a few areas where SW is getting significant adoption (pharamaceutical research is one) but in general it is off the radar screen and the vendors providing software that implements this stuff are niche players.
This is not far off. I spent 7 years in grad school getting a social science Ph.D. Being a student was ok. Then I found out that there were maybe a handful of jobs in my specialty in the whole country. So I wound up in a non-tenured lectureship. That was ok for a few years. Then I got tired of making way less than a good secretary, and went into CS, where my Ph.D. was irrelevant, but I rapidly ramped up in salary, got stock options, and did well.. eventually, better than the tenured faculty at the institution I graduated from.
Would it have been different if I had a Ph.D. in a technical field? I have been involved in hiring many engineering staff, from beginner level engineers up to high level positions. Generally a Master's degree had no influence on hiring. Nobody cares what your Master's project was. If you have a Ph.D. and if (big if) your research is relevant to what the company needs, then you may get extra attention and a better offer than a Bachelor's level candidate would get.
Personally, I've never gotten an email requesting a return receipt where, from my point of view anyway, it was necessary. At least people set the priority flag semi-appropriately - but some people seem to use return receipt even on the most routine communication.
If service is the wave of the future, then surely providing customer satisfaction is key to success in this area. This is what service oriented companies compete on. If you have unhappy customers and happy employees you will not last long, IMO.
Read the little "Legal" link on their site where they say it's all kosher according to Russian law, but they make no guarantees about your legal liabilities if you're not Russian.
Very worthwhile, IMO. Their selection isn't bad - depends on what you want. For the stuff I mostly listen to (reggae, blues, classic rock), I have found plenty to download. And it's around $0.40 a track or so.
I certainly agree raises are not an entitlement, and businesses have constraints on how generous they can be.
But one large factor that affects salary costs is that hiring for top quality, highly productive people is very competitive. You may have to match or beat other employer's offers to get them on board and retain them. Run of the mill folks may not get raises, but you need to make sure your top talent is not walking out the door.
I liked Norton just fine until it came time to renew my subcription, and they needed the subscription key to renew, which is in some email they sent me a year ago. Heck, I installed it with the subscription key, why doesn't the software keep track of it? Then after some email traffic they also explained to me that I'd have to buy 3 renewal subscriptions because my 3-user license wasn't renewable as is. Next day I had McAfee installed.
I read Phil's book about his years with the Dead recently and one point he made was that the band kept touring far longer and more intensively than maybe they wanted to, for the reason that they had a large crew and staff they treated as a kind of extended family - Phil said it cost them $500K a month just to keep the Dead organization together. Clearly it's a much diminished org now but still, what they earn is not just for the band.
Personally I am disappointed with the lack of soundboard downloads mainly because the Dead org has had a kind of random approach to releasing shows on CD. There are lots of highly prized concerts that haven't made it into official releases or the Dick's Picks series (which are mostly 2-channel soundboards), while quite a number of (IMO) inferior shows have gone through this process. If they made their stuff available on CD or through paid download I would buy it. But a lot of what was on archive.org was not distributed otherwise except through a much more underground disk and tape trading network.
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That's a bit of an oversimplified version of that twisty little story. And while Abramoff is surely a slime, it is actually a Good Thing that the bar for convicting someone of murder is set fairly high.
The whole concept of "specialist-article-experts" doesn't really exist in Wikipedia, which is part of its problem. A print encyclopedia can get a recognized expert in a particular field to author an article. Britannica back in its glory days frequently did this. You could argue that their articles weren't NPOV, but they were at least written by an informed person. But on Wikipedia, someone with a Ph.D. and an established reputation in the real world is just another contributor. Their offline reputation is irrelevant to their online reputation. Wikipedia doesn't want their opinion (this is part of their NPOV philosophy), and some 10 year old can overwrite what they wrote. This is nice and democratic, but the results are not always as good as what the print world achieves, for fairly obvious reasons.
Well, I think GNU/Linux is silly, too, but GNU components are hardly dispensible, since you need gcc to build the kernel (in theory you could use another compiler, or build your own compiler, but in practice you need gcc).
Cesium is a liquid at room temperature. So I guess it is already banned ;-).
>8 year olds should NEVER be put in a situation where they would need a cell phone
Well, ok probably true for 8 year olds. But my soon to be 12 year old is about to start commuting to school on public transit. Maybe she is young to do this, but other kids at her school do it also and certainly high school kids do it frequently, in my area.
She'll be met at the station, but the train could break down, she could fall asleep and miss the stop, lots of things could happen. So I'd like to know, or like the school to know, if any of these things do. Hence she has a cell phone.
When I was a college lecturer, I tried to point out that we have a lot of evidence of organisms changing over time as a result of environmental pressures. Antibiotic resistance is a fine example. So are Darwin's numerous examples of human deliberate selective modification of domestic animals and pets. Furthermore, unlike Darwin, we now understand the fundamental biological mechanisms by which variation in traits and transmission of traits occur (e.g. mutation of genes, expression of previously unexpressed genes). So we do not know everything about evolution, but it is a bit hard to deny the phenomenon could happen at all (some people accept that it does, but don't believe it explains the current set of species we have at the present time). However, I got the impression that many students didn't even get this set of information/arguments in high school biology.
>12,000 messages and counting, works just fine
.. until it doesn't work. Most email clients are not well suited to managing huge folders full of mail. If your inbox file gets corrupted, they will barf and you will have to hope you can fix it. I have had this issue more than once, with Outlook and (yes) Thunderbird. Backups of course help but in general it would be nice if mail client authors assumed they'd get ridiculous quantities of data and put a better data management and integrity layer underneath. Maybe this is a good argument to keep it all on the server (although until recently my corporate email kept quotas and prevented you doing that).
It works just fine
It is more than just name recognition. Ever since the dot-com implosion, corporate purchasers are leery of small companies. They can go away. They can get bought. Yeah, I know with open source you can say the source is eternally available, but enterprise buyers like to have a vendor behind it and they like that vendor to have a certain scale, size, and market acceptance before they commit their $$$. Red Hat is a $4 Billion dollar corporation and it qualifies. Novell is on the borderline because they're smaller and struggling. Anybody else doesn't qualify.
A good part of the rest of the world has considerable doubts about how civilized we are. For example, our insistence on capital punishment offends many people in the numerous countries that have abolished it.
Specifically, to get these technologies adopted in a business environment, somebody has to be able to explain to executives what the benefits are and the cost, and therefore why they should adopt this technology, and if it's for sale somehow, why they should invest in semantically aware software/hardware. The barrier here is that business guys who write checks may not be technical, or not very, and sales guys who talk to them are also not generally technical. So it doesn't get traction because the benefits are hard to explain and the stuff you do to get the benefits is really inscrutable. There are a few areas where SW is getting significant adoption (pharamaceutical research is one) but in general it is off the radar screen and the vendors providing software that implements this stuff are niche players.
This is not far off. I spent 7 years in grad school getting a social science Ph.D. Being a student was ok. Then I found out that there were maybe a handful of jobs in my specialty in the whole country. So I wound up in a non-tenured lectureship. That was ok for a few years. Then I got tired of making way less than a good secretary, and went into CS, where my Ph.D. was irrelevant, but I rapidly ramped up in salary, got stock options, and did well .. eventually, better than the tenured faculty at the institution I graduated from.
Would it have been different if I had a Ph.D. in a technical field? I have been involved in hiring many engineering staff, from beginner level engineers up to high level positions. Generally a Master's degree had no influence on hiring. Nobody cares what your Master's project was. If you have a Ph.D. and if (big if) your research is relevant to what the company needs, then you may get extra attention and a better offer than a Bachelor's level candidate would get.
Personally, I've never gotten an email requesting
a return receipt where, from my point of view anyway,
it was necessary. At least people set the priority flag
semi-appropriately - but some people seem to use return
receipt even on the most routine communication.
And you call up Oracle and tell them about your Ubuntu
Linux box, and they say "can you spell that?".
If you want to run Oracle DB and have no support, then go
ahead. But they won't support you doing this.
If service is the wave of the future, then surely providing
customer satisfaction is key to success in this area. This
is what service oriented companies compete on. If you have
unhappy customers and happy employees you will not last long,
IMO.
Read the little "Legal" link on their site where they say it's all kosher according to Russian law, but they make no guarantees about your legal liabilities if you're not Russian.
Very worthwhile, IMO. Their selection isn't bad - depends
on what you want. For the stuff I mostly listen to (reggae,
blues, classic rock), I have found plenty to download. And
it's around $0.40 a track or so.
For me it is a huge effect, especially since Amazon sells used
CDs and there is little I want that I can't get there used.
I very seldom buy a new CD at list price, but I have bought a
lot of used ones. No DRM and it's often even cheaper per track
than iTunes downloads.
I certainly agree raises are not an entitlement,
and businesses have constraints on how generous they
can be.
But one large factor that affects salary costs is
that hiring for top quality, highly productive people
is very competitive. You may have to match or beat other
employer's offers to get them on board and retain them.
Run of the mill folks may not get raises, but you need
to make sure your top talent is not walking out the
door.
I liked Norton just fine until it came time to renew
my subcription, and they needed the subscription key
to renew, which is in some email they sent me a year
ago. Heck, I installed it with the subscription key,
why doesn't the software keep track of it? Then after
some email traffic they also explained to me that I'd
have to buy 3 renewal subscriptions because my 3-user
license wasn't renewable as is. Next day I had McAfee
installed.
I wouldn't say they are just greedy.
I read Phil's book about his years with the Dead recently
and one point he made was that the band kept touring far
longer and more intensively than maybe they wanted to,
for the reason that they had a large crew and staff they
treated as a kind of extended family - Phil said it cost
them $500K a month just to keep the Dead organization
together. Clearly it's a much diminished org now but still,
what they earn is not just for the band.
Personally I am disappointed with the lack of soundboard
downloads mainly because the Dead org has had a kind of
random approach to releasing shows on CD. There are lots
of highly prized concerts that haven't made it into
official releases or the Dick's Picks series (which are
mostly 2-channel soundboards), while quite a number of
(IMO) inferior shows have gone through this process. If they
made their stuff available on CD or through paid download
I would buy it. But a lot of what was on archive.org was
not distributed otherwise except through a much more
underground disk and tape trading network.
no, it doesn't prevent phishing, but it does address the man in the middle problem.
I assume they use SSL to the banking site.
Longer than that. Kidnapping (not just parental) has been a federal crime ever since Charles Lindbergh's baby was snatched.
If it's lacking claws, but still has teeth, I wouldn't want it jumping on me. Doesn't the sequence usually go: pounce, play with, kill, eat?
So I guess you haven't bothered yourself about the dozens of security advisories for OpenBSD over the past 2 years?