This year we witnessed the first flight by a private spaceship to pass the boundary into space. In your opinion, is there any legitimate purpose for a publicly funded civilian space program? Do you believe that public funding of NASA hurts the private space industry?
I know Margaret Atwood is not an author that/.ers would typically read, but she wrote an excellent novel on just this subject (bio-hacking). It's called Oryx and Crake. I enjoyed it immensely and highly recommend it.
As both a big-L Libertarian and a subscriber to Reason, I have to disagree. Perhaps our Libertarian votes don't get a lot of Libertarian candidates elected, but we certainly have an effect on the political process. The Republican party is consistently making efforts to become more Libertarian in order to court our votes. There are any number of elections in recent years at all levels of goverment that would have had different outcomes if the Libertarians had not voted Libertarian.
The 2000 presidential election was a perfect example of just how powerful an effect "third" parties can have; let's not forget that if it weren't for third party votes Al Gore would be president.
I have been doing some consulting work lately with a large software company that is headquartered way out in the boonies. Jack Henry & Associates is a developer of banking software that does a ton of software development in Monett, Missouri. Believe me, it's way out there. If you can get hired there, it would be very hard to lose the job -- they have a no layoff policy. You'd have to screw up bad to get fired.
Needless to say, they have a difficult time finding programmers willing to move to Monett, MO, so you'd have an advantage there. Land/houses are cheap there too. For the price of a house in DC you can buy a 100 acre farm in Monett with a house, a barn, and maybe even some livestock.
I don't understand why there is so much resistance to voting machines that print receipts for each voter. Combining this with a simple mechanism for correcting votes that were recorded inaccurately would provide all the necessary feedback and correction required to ensure that a vote was at least correctly cast and counted by the polling machine. Is this a privacy issue of some kind?
Another potential benefit of this simple mechanism would be more accurate exit polls. If the voter isn't willing to show the exit poller their receipt, then they aren't counted in the exit poll. This would eliminate the common practice of voters lying to exit pollers.
No matter how much I hate M$, protectionism always hurts the constituents that it endeavors to "protect". Shielding any industry from competition in any market, whether bounded geographically, politicaly or otherwise, will stifle innovation within that market and will disadvantage the companies and individuals that are "protected".
The whole idea of anti-trust law is suspect for the same reason. Competition cannot be legislated. The best remedy for companies that abuse their customers the way M$ does is evident right here in the postings of/. We are M$'s customers (well, many of us are) and we know we are being abused by a "monopoly". We don't need governments of nations, states, municipalities or otherwise to mandate the use of non-M$ technology. That would just create other monopolies. Those of us who feel the harm of M$'s monopolies will choose to avoid their products whenever possible.
The invisible hand of the free market will remedy all such abuses more rapidly and more efficiently than any legislative or judicial remedies.
The last time I switched jobs was in 1999, and I found my current job through Monster. It was a job posting and I found it by a geographically limited keyword search. Surprisingly, though, I knew the first person to contact me after I applied, so personal networking would have found the position as well if I had called my friend.
The company went through a downturn over the last 2+ years (yeah, who didn't) where we shrunk significantly, but we are now hiring at a rapid clip. It's my responsibility to specify the skillsets and experience needed for our open positions, to interview the short-listed candidates, and ultimately to contribute my vote to the hire/no hire decision, which must be a unanimous vote of about 4 people.
We currently find candidates using three methods. By far the one we rely on most heavily, and the one that has been the most successful in finding qualified candidates that we eventually hire, is networking.
After networking, we turn to the job boards. The main reason we do this is that we have found that many headhunters send us resumes that they pulled from job boards, so why pay a headhunter a (hefty) fee for something we can do ourselves just as easily?
If we are still having difficulty filling a position after exhausting the first two methods, then we turn to a small group of headhunters and staff augmentation firms that we have existing contractual relationships with. We don't deal with firms that charge huge fees, and we don't work with firms that send you stacks of unscreened resumes.
So, at least in my case, I have found the job boards useful both as a job seeker and as a hiring manager.
There is no reason why the government should be funding space travel/exploration. If there is a reason to go to space, then private industry will go. Private space travel and exploration will be much more efficient, expedient and cost-effective than taxpayer funded bureaucracy's like NASA.
NASA's very existence serves as a deterrent to privately funded space travel. Witness the recent demise of Beal Aerospace last October.
Slashdot Mirror
This year we witnessed the first flight by a private spaceship to pass the boundary into space. In your opinion, is there any legitimate purpose for a publicly funded civilian space program? Do you believe that public funding of NASA hurts the private space industry?
I know Margaret Atwood is not an author that /.ers would typically read, but she wrote an excellent novel on just this subject (bio-hacking). It's called Oryx and Crake. I enjoyed it immensely and highly recommend it.
How do you feel about risk-based project management?
What is the best way to document requirements?
Have you ever managed a development team utilizing an agile development process?
How do you gather and report project status?
How do you track the progress of tasks?
What input do you expect from the development team when creating the project plan?
What are the levers available to pull on a project that falls behind schedule to attempt to get it back on schedule?
The 2000 presidential election was a perfect example of just how powerful an effect "third" parties can have; let's not forget that if it weren't for third party votes Al Gore would be president.
Needless to say, they have a difficult time finding programmers willing to move to Monett, MO, so you'd have an advantage there. Land/houses are cheap there too. For the price of a house in DC you can buy a 100 acre farm in Monett with a house, a barn, and maybe even some livestock.
I don't understand why there is so much resistance to voting machines that print receipts for each voter. Combining this with a simple mechanism for correcting votes that were recorded inaccurately would provide all the necessary feedback and correction required to ensure that a vote was at least correctly cast and counted by the polling machine. Is this a privacy issue of some kind?
Another potential benefit of this simple mechanism would be more accurate exit polls. If the voter isn't willing to show the exit poller their receipt, then they aren't counted in the exit poll. This would eliminate the common practice of voters lying to exit pollers.
No matter how much I hate M$, protectionism always hurts the constituents that it endeavors to "protect". Shielding any industry from competition in any market, whether bounded geographically, politicaly or otherwise, will stifle innovation within that market and will disadvantage the companies and individuals that are "protected".
/. We are M$'s customers (well, many of us are) and we know we are being abused by a "monopoly". We don't need governments of nations, states, municipalities or otherwise to mandate the use of non-M$ technology. That would just create other monopolies. Those of us who feel the harm of M$'s monopolies will choose to avoid their products whenever possible.
The whole idea of anti-trust law is suspect for the same reason. Competition cannot be legislated. The best remedy for companies that abuse their customers the way M$ does is evident right here in the postings of
The invisible hand of the free market will remedy all such abuses more rapidly and more efficiently than any legislative or judicial remedies.
The last time I switched jobs was in 1999, and I found my current job through Monster. It was a job posting and I found it by a geographically limited keyword search. Surprisingly, though, I knew the first person to contact me after I applied, so personal networking would have found the position as well if I had called my friend.
The company went through a downturn over the last 2+ years (yeah, who didn't) where we shrunk significantly, but we are now hiring at a rapid clip. It's my responsibility to specify the skillsets and experience needed for our open positions, to interview the short-listed candidates, and ultimately to contribute my vote to the hire/no hire decision, which must be a unanimous vote of about 4 people.
We currently find candidates using three methods. By far the one we rely on most heavily, and the one that has been the most successful in finding qualified candidates that we eventually hire, is networking.
After networking, we turn to the job boards. The main reason we do this is that we have found that many headhunters send us resumes that they pulled from job boards, so why pay a headhunter a (hefty) fee for something we can do ourselves just as easily?
If we are still having difficulty filling a position after exhausting the first two methods, then we turn to a small group of headhunters and staff augmentation firms that we have existing contractual relationships with. We don't deal with firms that charge huge fees, and we don't work with firms that send you stacks of unscreened resumes.
So, at least in my case, I have found the job boards useful both as a job seeker and as a hiring manager.
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."
-- Franz Kafka
NASA's very existence serves as a deterrent to privately funded space travel. Witness the recent demise of Beal Aerospace last October.