That's more of a tradition thing than anything else: the French and Italians in particular are famous for taking August off and heading for the beach/hills with the wife and kids. However, this certainly isn't mandatory, those of us who don't have kids in school get to take holidays whenever we want them (a week's ice climbing in March? That'll do nicely:-)
I have had my European coworkers (those from the UK too;-)) explain this system to me. And while I think this is actually a Good Thing(tm), I am always struck by one point that the Europeans leave out: the process as stated has an underlying assumption that hotel workers, petrol station attendents, garbage collectors, etc (which is to say, people who can't just "stop working" no matter what country they live in) are not classified in the group "everyone". And by extension are not exactly people (?).
Is there a converter/plugin for Word (latest versions also) that goes the other way?? ie, Save em in the nice xml star/openoffice format, and when folks say they can't open em, post em the filter.
Too young to remember the word processor wars? When WordPerfect was king [1], WP had import routines that would read other word processors' formats exactly, but export routines that would only write to, say, MS-Word format with 90% accuracy. At that time MS-Word had export routines that would write to WP format exactly.
Fast forward 5 years. MS-Word has dethroned the King and reigns as Usurper. Now Word will only write to WP format with 90% accuracy, while suddenly WP can write to MS-Word format 100%.
And if you think about it, that is the only way it can work in a competitive environment, particularly with publicly-held companies. There is negative incentive for the leader to be able to write to the challengers' formats.
Now, we could talk about an entirely open standard for document formatting... Oops, we already have SGML and TeX. Oh well...
sPh
[1]This argument extends back to PFS:Write and Electric Pencil as well of course.
More or less. At least, this is the current thinking. The brain is just a big-ole circuit that produces an output when given inputs. The neat thing about the brain is that its output can be used again as inputs to allow the path to be optimized. Computers currently can't really do that.
making computers that can function like minds, or simply working really well with computers, I leave to you.
This is the basis of artificial intellegence research. I do believe though that we will need to advance more in biomechanics before we can do anything worthwhile in AI since it isn't particularily easy to replicate the ability for organic compounds to evolve and recreate themselves.
I disagree. To me, the chess problem demonstrates pretty convincingly that we fundamentally don't know anything about the nature of intelligence. "Artificial intelligence is 30 years away - and has been for the last 40 years".
To me, chess programs are the strongest demonstration around that we don't know anything about the nature of intelligence. You would expect that since, say, 1980 or so, when numerical calculating power greatly in excess of the human brain became available (and I set it at 1980, not 1960-70, just to be conservative) that computer chess programs should have been able to whomp human players right off the board.
And yet, this hasn't happened. Even today, when numerical computing power vast beyond the limits of human understanding is available, there are still a few humans who can beat the best chess programs. This is as if an Olympic runner could still out run and outpull a modern freight locomotive! "Inconceivable"!
That any human can still defeat chess programs tells us that humans must be playing chess in some way fundamentally different from the numerical calculations and search algorithms used by the programs. And I don't think anyone has even come close to describing how this occurs.
There's only a limited number of positions. You can enumerate them and then 'solve' the game in the same way we generate endgame tablebases. But we lack storage and processing power for many many many years to come.
The number of possible chess games isn't known excatly, but since even the lower estimates approach the number of atoms in the known universe we will be waiting a long time for enough processing power and memory to enumerate every possible game!
Not necessarily. It is possible to write a program which knows only the rules of the game, and teaches itself how to play. This requires the programmer to be talented at writing machine learning code, but not necessarily talented at the game of chess.
I don't think so. Not realistically, anyway. All chess programs that I know of start with an opening book, which catalogues the best known responses for the most common x games (x being 5000, 10000, whatever human and machine memory can handle). These openings were in large part developed with thought and analysis, not just brute force trial-and-error.
If you just set a chess program loose without an opening book, I think it would be millions of years before it replicated those openings. That doesn't pass the Turing test or even my definition of "playing chess". IMHO anyway.
Let's be reasonable here. This is an industry group. They are not a company or corporation, or even a government body. That is, they don't have shareholders, and they don't get to take home bonuses if they have a "good year." In fact, the people at the BSA would consider the best year to be one in which they have no work at all.
Why? Because the BSA exists for no other purpose than to protect the investments of software companies. Whose products benefit us all (yes, even we Linux customers...for surely the software in use by banks, at the DMV, at "the club," etc. are not all free.
Can you back that up? Do you have copies of BSA's contracts with its member firms and the employment agreements of the BSA officers?
In fact, I strongly suspect that like most organizations of this type, BSA gets a cut of the swag. So the more "audits" they conduct the higher their compenstation will be.
That's called barratry [dictionary.com] and it's actually illegal: If you threaten groundless legal action to blackmail or intimidate, you are abusing the legal system in an unsavoury way and I believe in most Western nations you can face criminal or civil punishment.
In theory, yes.
In practice, if such laws were enforced, the amount of work for lawyers and judges to do would drop drastically, and the money earned by lawyers would also go down.
Laywers (including prosecuting attorneys) and judges decide whether or not barratry cases will be allowed. Do you spot a small conflict of interest? How do you think it will be resolved?
sPh
Re:Existing system works - why change?
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VoIP at $15 a Pop
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· Score: 2
Yes, but the network support is largely a fixed cost
Thanks - I needed a bit of humour to brighten up my day!
sPh
Re:Existing system works - why change?
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VoIP at $15 a Pop
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The existing system works well, but as we say in math: for some definition of works well. Typically that ment something that was obviously true, but the class wasn't ready for a formal proff yet. And typically when we accually were ready for the formal proff we discovered that there were serious limitations to what we all thought obviously true.
Um, yeah. I can pick up a POTS phone (even the 50 year old one I just bought at a garage sale) and be connected to any location in North America, Western Europe, and most of the Pacific in a few seconds with good-to-excellent quality. If you want to call that "some value of 'works well'" that's fine.
However it costs a lot of money to maintain all the copper in the ground, and it requires a lot of extra, unused capacity
It also costs a lot of money to maintain data networks, as Qwest, Enron, Level 3, etc. are finding to their sorrow. Sort of like the "VPN for data transport" rage of 1999 - sooner or later,/someone/ has to pay for the North Atlantic cable. And the last mile problem is the same whether it is UTP or coax being maintained.
Personlly, I am happy I have a 1940's era phone cable and am within 5,000 yards of a Bell CO - at least I have some hope of maintaining some kind of communications!
sPh
Re:Existing system works - why change?
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VoIP at $15 a Pop
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The reason people are going to VOIP is that it costs less than circuit switched telephones.
The per-minute (variable) cost may be lower, but that is because the equipment costs are hidden in the capital budget and the support costs are hidden in "LAN/WAN Support".
Even for a good-sized office (say 250 people), the phone/PBX guy is usually on-site 1 or 2 days a month. Can you say the same for your "network support group"?
sPh
Existing system works - why change?
on
VoIP at $15 a Pop
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The existing voice telephone system works and works very well. There is absolutly no business justification for moving voice from a stable, reliable, cost-effective voice network to an unstable, unreliable, increasing-cost data network. None whatsoever, except to pump up the earnings of Cisco.
Who, come to think of it, is one of the biggest boosters of VoIP. Hmmm...
270 lawsuits successfully filed (which is not to say "won") in a year, out of 5 million corporations registered to do business in the U.S. of A? And the standard for filing raised to "substantial evidence of fraud"? I don't think that is an indication of companies being sued at the drop of a hat.
Now, I grant you the Enron situation may have changed things a bit...
Also, Google could face a second, potentially more expensive investor lawsuit, should the Church of Scientology [xenu.net] sue. Not taking proper steps to protect your investors' dollars is grounds for legal action; and the ultimate result, if and when you lose both lawsuits, could be the end of your company, with all those jobs lost and all your intellectual property on fire sale.
Of course, they could face a similar investor lawsuit if they fail to accurately catalog the Internet as they advertise, and as a result their credibility/number of hits/sales begins to drop.
Cryptonomicon notwithstanding, does anyone have some links to these myriad of investor lawsuits that everyone in Silicon Valley is so terrified of? Because in 15 years of reading the WSJ daily I have read of one or two, all of which were thrown out by the court. US corporate law seems to be pretty much "pay your money and take your chance" when it comes to investors and their ability to actually affect the direction of a firm that they have invested in.
Of course, somewhere out there there might be someone who specializes in preloading systems with mis-directing and/or mis-incriminating evidence and planting them in places that investigators are sure to "find"...
Actually this is a very huge step. Why would your employer want to use passport to authenticate who you are? Passport just requires a password. The current method of a Social Security number and a valid drivers license works much better.
Greatly reduced cost of paperwork is the first thought that comes to mind.
But the real benefit would be transferring liability from the employer to the federal government. As it stands today if an employer accepts a forged drivers license as proof of identity, INS can still argue that the employer "should have known" that there was no right to work. It would be hard for them to argue that if the federal government was providing the authentication in real time.
There's also lots implied meanings in the article that people seem to be taking at extreme literal.
For example, the Government is considering using Passport Technology. That's a gigantic difference from using Passport(TM) itself.
Head over to The Register and read up on the details of what is going on with a similar scheme in the UK. It started out there as you describe, and then quickly progressed to the things that you say will never happen, such as requiring the use of Microsoft Internet Explorer for all electronic transactions with the UK gov't.
Why would your business *ever* authenticate who you are in this way? Wake up, life is not some film you saw with your skinny-ass spotty mates last week.
Been a while since you started a new job, dude? Ever worked for a company with more than 200 employees (IRS cutoff point)? More than 500 employees (cutoff point for most US Federal regulations)? You are clearly not aware of the massive amounts of paperwork that larger companies must keep about not only their employees but even their applicants. Corporations face Federal sanctions if they cannot prove that every one of their employees is authorized to work in the United States. This is a huge paperwork burden and corps face massive fines if they don't comply. That app alone would justify interfacing the HR system with a federal authentication system if one existed.
Even if this dreamworld sci-fi thing was to happen - so what? So you can't have food unless you have an MS ID? So? What are they going to do with that? [...] Get out of Star Trek, get out of your lame-ass sci-fi books, and LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD.
I was working on "dreamworld" projects like this back in 1994. Those projects used pre-Internet technology and data, because at that time most Fortune 500 companies were not even aware that the Internet existed. The scenario I described is exactly the kind of "service" we were attempting to provide, because it takes human error totally out of the loop and it massively reduces the clerical cost of HR.
You don't think companies like Cisco and Oracle put their HR functions on-line for their employees' benefit do you? They did it to reduce their cost. Having something like a Federal Passport(tm) do all the "eligible to work" verification in one shot would be a tremendous gain for a large organization.
No real point in flamefests, but you might want to look around the corporate world a bit and see how things really work.
Again, just to reitterate, realize that the gov't is thinking about using Microsoft Passport technology and not hiring MS to keep track of everyone. Still scary, but an important difference
While the government does have a lot of technology capability in-house, when it is hit with a project this big and complex it typically contracts it out. Since Microsoft is the only contractor with both the experience and size to handle a MS-Passport specific implementation of this magnitude, they would almost certainly be given the contract. See The Register for details on how it is happening in the UK.
AFAIK, Congress does not mandate what software for the federal government to use. If the White House CIO is looking into this, I think we need to write Bush, not our congress representative.
Congress does not mandate the day-to-day details of the Executive Branch agencies, but it certainly does get involved when Big $$$ are mentioned. Witness the recent flap when the Air Force tried to sign a bargain basement contract for $100 billion of Boeing 767 refueling tankers. Even though the AF was getting a good deal (post-9/11 markdown and all that), everyone from Daschle on down had to get involved.
Similarly, Congress does have to authorize the money for schemes such as this.
So while writing Bush would be good, it wouldn't hurt to tickle your congresspersons.
I swear to -god- my five year old has better reading comprension than some of you people.
The article mentions that is is for online services three times.
Problem is, once an entity reaches a certain size, it is required to deal with the federal gov't electronically. For example, employers of more than 200 people must file all their tax information electronically. They also must verify that their employees are eligible to work in the US.
It is not a long step (in fact, it is a very very short step) from there to having employers say to you "Ready to start work? Sure - just step up to that HR kiosk, fire up Internet Explorer(tm), and use your Federal Passport(tm) to authenticate who you are.". What? No Microsoft Passport(tm)? Sorry - no paycheck for you. And so on for other "optional" services that allow you to do optional things such as eat.
Who cares? I never use online services by the federal govt. Only exception is filing income taxes.
Because just as happened with drivers' licenses and Social Security numbers, once this "government experience enhancer" becomes available it will shortly thereafter become required. Starting a new job? Sure, just sign into your Microsoft Passport account to validate your right to work in the US. What's that? No Passport ID? Sorry, no job.
If this bothers you (and to me it is VERY disturbing), please put pen to paper and write your Congresspersons expressing in firm, polite language why you oppose this idea. Please.
Slashdot Mirror
sPh
Fast forward 5 years. MS-Word has dethroned the King and reigns as Usurper. Now Word will only write to WP format with 90% accuracy, while suddenly WP can write to MS-Word format 100%.
And if you think about it, that is the only way it can work in a competitive environment, particularly with publicly-held companies. There is negative incentive for the leader to be able to write to the challengers' formats.
Now, we could talk about an entirely open standard for document formatting... Oops, we already have SGML and TeX. Oh well...
sPh
[1]This argument extends back to PFS:Write and Electric Pencil as well of course.
sPh
And yet, this hasn't happened. Even today, when numerical computing power vast beyond the limits of human understanding is available, there are still a few humans who can beat the best chess programs. This is as if an Olympic runner could still out run and outpull a modern freight locomotive! "Inconceivable"!
That any human can still defeat chess programs tells us that humans must be playing chess in some way fundamentally different from the numerical calculations and search algorithms used by the programs. And I don't think anyone has even come close to describing how this occurs.
sPh
sPh
If you just set a chess program loose without an opening book, I think it would be millions of years before it replicated those openings. That doesn't pass the Turing test or even my definition of "playing chess". IMHO anyway.
sPh
In fact, I strongly suspect that like most organizations of this type, BSA gets a cut of the swag. So the more "audits" they conduct the higher their compenstation will be.
sPh
In practice, if such laws were enforced, the amount of work for lawyers and judges to do would drop drastically, and the money earned by lawyers would also go down.
Laywers (including prosecuting attorneys) and judges decide whether or not barratry cases will be allowed. Do you spot a small conflict of interest? How do you think it will be resolved?
sPh
sPh
Personlly, I am happy I have a 1940's era phone cable and am within 5,000 yards of a Bell CO - at least I have some hope of maintaining some kind of communications!
sPh
Even for a good-sized office (say 250 people), the phone/PBX guy is usually on-site 1 or 2 days a month. Can you say the same for your "network support group"?
sPh
Who, come to think of it, is one of the biggest boosters of VoIP. Hmmm...
sPh
That said, I actually thing TPM could be made acceptable by editing out sPh
Now, I grant you the Enron situation may have changed things a bit...
sPh
Cryptonomicon notwithstanding, does anyone have some links to these myriad of investor lawsuits that everyone in Silicon Valley is so terrified of? Because in 15 years of reading the WSJ daily I have read of one or two, all of which were thrown out by the court. US corporate law seems to be pretty much "pay your money and take your chance" when it comes to investors and their ability to actually affect the direction of a firm that they have invested in.
sPh
sPh
But the real benefit would be transferring liability from the employer to the federal government. As it stands today if an employer accepts a forged drivers license as proof of identity, INS can still argue that the employer "should have known" that there was no right to work. It would be hard for them to argue that if the federal government was providing the authentication in real time.
sPh
sPh
sPh
You don't think companies like Cisco and Oracle put their HR functions on-line for their employees' benefit do you? They did it to reduce their cost. Having something like a Federal Passport(tm) do all the "eligible to work" verification in one shot would be a tremendous gain for a large organization.
No real point in flamefests, but you might want to look around the corporate world a bit and see how things really work.
sPh
Similarly, Congress does have to authorize the money for schemes such as this.
So while writing Bush would be good, it wouldn't hurt to tickle your congresspersons.
sPh
It is not a long step (in fact, it is a very very short step) from there to having employers say to you "Ready to start work? Sure - just step up to that HR kiosk, fire up Internet Explorer(tm), and use your Federal Passport(tm) to authenticate who you are.". What? No Microsoft Passport(tm)? Sorry - no paycheck for you. And so on for other "optional" services that allow you to do optional things such as eat.
sPh
sPh
sPh