Wal-mart for all its problems is pretty liberal with its return policy. My guess is that if you could talk to someone who even knew they sold music online they would either a) give you a refund or b) give you the tracks again DRM-free.
We already went down this road. Again, look at history to see how people will be treated unless we force companies to follow basic rules.
You have a company, and presumably in a form that provides some immunity to things like lawsuits, debt, etc. In exchange, you agree to be regulated, so that you can't use your company to destory people's lives and the environment.
I think you made a pretty large leap from the OPs comment about not being forced to provide a living for another person and destroying people's lives. This is government injecting itself where it shouldn't. If you want to force OT pay, then why not have the gov. go ahead and set salaries too. That's really what they are doing in a round about way. While we're at I think the gov. should push that everyone own a home too...err, never mind I think we're seeing where that got us.
also, it would be hard to argue that some distortions are bad - like requiring equal treatment for different classes of people, including races, sexual preference and disabilities.
In true capitalism you wouldn't have to require it because it wouldn't matter. If you could do the job better/faster/cheaper than the next person, then your race/sex/whatever wouldn't matter. It's non-capitalist disruptions that cause the need for non-capitalist fixes, like requiring equal treatment.
When I go to conferences you can always pick out the Americans from the Europeans. During breaks and what not the Americans are busy checking their blackberrys and working while the Europeans are hanging out, drinking a beer and socializing. Their attitudes generally seem more laid back and hippie like than the Americans. It could be that most of the Europeans I see at these conferences are professors while we (the Americans) have real jobs in addition to publishing papers.
The whole free trade argument is mostly bogus anyways. Many german cars for example are made right here in the US and shipped back out all over the world. What the Germans have done is build factories in right to work states and offer good enough benefits that no one wants to unionize. It ends up saving everyone money.
What Obama can (and wants to) do is raise corporate taxes. Doing that could make all the foreign corps who have put up headquarters here leave and push some of our national companies to other countries. You're right that protectionism won't work, mainly because the base premise for wanting it is false to begin with.
What's a bit different than anything I've gone through is that I had to go through every position on my department and explain what they do and why we need that person.
Well this is just good business and something you should be doing every so often anyways. I find that companies hiring in excess during boom times which makes the cut backs that much harder when times get lean again.
This is the problem with "IT." It encompasses too many positions. IMHO, a help desk tech really isn't IT anymore. That's a common job many teenagers nowadays can do with a little training out of school.
Now, if you want to talk about 'professionals' like skilled developers or engineers I think for the most part they are doing fine (or at least better than average since the economy is pretty crappy atm). For example, my company has a hiring freeze on right now, except for my team. We're trying to find more mid-level software developers. I'm about ready to give up since it seems like no one can actually do anything they say on their resume./sigh
If anything, I hope that Android takes off and forces Apple into opening up the iPhone platform. Realistically, all they would have to do is allow users to install apps from any source they please.
The other thing that Apple does so well is marketing. I'm not sure I've ever seen a 'google' commercial, but something along those lines will be required to get consumers to even do the research into what Android is and what it can provide.
I don't see leaving an app out of the store as a violation of any users rights. The violation I think most people have a problem with is that there is no other way to install that app. So here you have a computing device and the only place to get applications for the device is from Apple. Leaving apps out of the store is fine, but they should allow the user to go find the app on their own and install it on their own phone that they purchased.
This is what a developer wants. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that Android is going to be a success.
The developer also wants a large audience to sell to. I want Android to take off, but you can't ignore the things that Apple has actually done right with the app store and the iPhone integration.
I have a 1st gen iPhone and it's a cool device. It's the worst cell phone ever, but it's a great little internet browsing/email/tech device. The iPod part is cool, but I chuckle every time SJ says it's the best iPod ever since the max space is still 32GB I think. The draconian policies of Apple bug me. I definitely won't buy another iPhone when this one breaks unless Apple opens up. And I'm not talking about OSS the whole OS or anything, but open up and let development happen on the platform. I don't see it happening though unless someone can mount a challenge to the iPhones coolness. Google has a change with Android, but I'm not sure they'll be able to pull it off since they are just providing the software and not the equally impressive hardware required.
I agree. I had no problems going up to a white board and writing my pseudo code to solve problems. I've also talked about my personal coding style and given detailed summaries of my thesis.
IMHO, that's not a test. That's an interview. The tests I thought the original poster talked about were the 'multiple choice did you memorize the help manual sort.' I've taken some of those and wonder the whole time who takes the time to memorize this stuff. And, if they are busy memorizing the help manual how do they have time to get any work done? lol
The best interview I've gone through is one where I was told in advance to prepare a 30 minute presentation on a technical project I've done. It could be work, school, personal, whatever... After giving the presentation to about 10 people or so they asked me questions for the next 2 hours. This was they could test my technical skills, my people skills, and see how I do under pressure. I felt I did well and ended up getting offered the job, but we could never agree on salary.
I read your linked post. All a test does is maybe help you with #2. The other items won't be determined by any amount of testing.
Personally I'm okay with some basic knowledge tests to make sure that you do indeed know what you say you know on your resume. The tests I have problems with are the ones that require you to have memorized parts of an API or some esoteric features of some given language. As an employer I want to know how you're going to solve a problem and not whether or not you have memorized some readily available documentation.
Exactly. For all of MSs shortcomings one thing that they have gotten right most of the time is that mindshare leads to marketshare. Make it easy for developers to make apps for your platform and the applications will comes which in turn will help sustain and grow your platform.
No, but he's saying that fees like that hurt the small time investors more than the large investors.
Have you seen how much those large investors pay for seats on the stock exchange. If they don't do that, then how much they pay to their hedge fund (who still probably didn't make them much more than a normal fund). Of course the rich guys are moving more money around and thus making or losing more, but they also aren't paying $20 for a trade either.
I think many problems could actually be solved by eliminating the market features that make it possible to make money on a tanking stock.
So how do people who believe a stock is overvalued monetize their beliefs?
Without short selling the market would probably have a much stronger tendency to self correct.
Not true. Getting rid of short selling would lead to stocks not being valued properly. In fact they would generally be over-valued. The SEC evens has a paper:
Finance theory predicts that under certain conditions, constraints on short selling may cause securities to be misvalued by the market, particularly when investors have highly divergent opinions about the stock. A simple argument is that short sale constraints make it more costly for those investors who have a negative opinion of a stock to trade on their beliefs, and thus, their views may be reflected less in the stock price than those who have a positive view. Under more general assumptions, theoretic models predict that short sale constraints can cause stocks to be either overvalued or undervalued.
They go on to test this theory and find:
We find that pilot stocks and control stocks have similar returns over this horizon, but some tests show weak evidence consistent with the hypothesis that price restrictions facilitate over-pricing. In the absence of price restrictions, prices do not rise as much as with price restrictions, leading to a lower equilibrium price.
As for the rest of your post, if Iraq was such a threat, then maybe we shouldn't have sent Rumsfeld there under the Reagan administration to give aid & arms to Hussein!
This is how it goes, the British were ripping off Mosaddeq in Iran in the 1950s, Mosaddeq didn't like it and threatened to cut off oil to the British. The British met with the US government, we labeled Mosaddeq a communist, carried out Operation Ajax, invaded Iran, and overthrew Mosaddeq.
Fast forward to the 70s and 80s, Iran is now violently anti-American and under rule of Ayatollah Khomeini. The US backs Hussein in Iraq because he was secular and didn't agree with the religious uprisings in Iran. Iran & Iraq go to war, Iraq starts to lose, and Reagan sends in Rumsfeld to meet with Hussein and promise him aid, weapons, etc.
Saddam Hussein was our ally. We propped him up and helped to keep him in power, right up until he invaded Kuwait. Then suddenly, overnight, he's bad guy #1 and we have to bomb Iraq, put up sanctions against him, and denounce him as the scum of the world.
This is just the way politics works though (especially when dealing with radical governments). The enemy of your enemy is your friend until he becomes a worse enemy (look at Russia during WW2). At that time the US determined it was more dangerous to have Iran win a war with Iraq so we helped Iraq. Also, just because we helped someone in the past doesn't meant they have to remain our ally forever. That might hold true if the world is all rainbows and butterflies but it's not.
I'm not saying he was a good person, he was a violent, awful man who killed thousands, no argument there. But we knew that even while we gave him weapons & money, because doing so was convenient to us at the time. Therefore, if Iraq was at the top of the US threat list, it's largely our own doing that put it there.
Hindsight is 20/20. Why not go back farther and blame the mid-east problems on how it was split up when Britain and France left in 1948 since most of the ultimate issues stem back to how that played out.
Actually they weren't being dealt with through inspectors and sanctions. Saddam repeatedly either kicked out the inspectors, wouldn't let them in or stalled them when they wanted to go certain places. Now, he might have just have been being a pain because he felt like it. Or, he could have actually been hiding something. At this point we may never know.
What I don't really understand though is that if Saddam had just let the weapon inspectors in and do whatever they wanted, he could have continued living his life of luxury forever more. Iraq is a very rich country and really had no need to jerk around the UN except to be a PITA. Sorta like the kid who keeps pulling on the dogs tail until the dog finally turns around and bites him.
Why is all fucking americans blaming china? This is the third post which answers to my post talking about china. It's not like the chinese people is the most consuming and resource spending people on the planet. It's you! Sure your things may be PRODUCED in china but that doesn't matter. As long as you want more items it will use more resources and energy, simple as that, consume less and the hit on nature will be less. Stop blaming the chinese people, most of them are poor fucks who can't afford shit compared to you americans.
No one is blaming China, but they have to be included on any solution proposed to limit the use of fossil fuels. They are rapidly bringing a huge population up to the carbon usage levels of the rest of the world. China connects a new coal fired powered plant to their grid every *10* days. IIRC, they are now the number one importer of coal. Cities the size of Philadelphia were popping up (they have slowed some now) in China every month. Ignoring China when thinking about the issue of CO2 pollution is to ignore the largest future CO2 producer.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
I don't know about slashdot specifically, but many sites contract out their ad space to ad companies. It's then up the ad companies to rotate ads on and off the page. These ads come from the contract companies servers and not the websites. Another reason is load and sharing across sites owned by the same parent company.
The housing/credit crisis was caused by greed on ALL levels. From the big shot wall street banker who didn't care or analyze the actual risk their were monetizing to the person who purchased a 500k house they couldn't afford using an I/O loan 'because housing prices only go up.' It's easy to push personal responsibility off to some mythical CLUB, but no one forced people to buy houses at crazy inflated prices using loan terms that were just as crazy. Now if you want to blame the CLUB mentality for the idiotic bailout the Fed continues to hand out, I'll go along with that. What I won't agree with is that it is someone else fault when someone bought something that they clearly could not afford.
The 14% he was talking about was SS. Nowhere did he say that he wanted to be exempt from all taxes. If the government is using SS for fixing roads and delivering electricity then the the post that you responded to has his point strengthened. Basically the government has no clue how to handle money.
Slashdot Mirror
Wal-mart for all its problems is pretty liberal with its return policy. My guess is that if you could talk to someone who even knew they sold music online they would either a) give you a refund or b) give you the tracks again DRM-free.
I think you made a pretty large leap from the OPs comment about not being forced to provide a living for another person and destroying people's lives. This is government injecting itself where it shouldn't. If you want to force OT pay, then why not have the gov. go ahead and set salaries too. That's really what they are doing in a round about way. While we're at I think the gov. should push that everyone own a home too...err, never mind I think we're seeing where that got us.
In true capitalism you wouldn't have to require it because it wouldn't matter. If you could do the job better/faster/cheaper than the next person, then your race/sex/whatever wouldn't matter. It's non-capitalist disruptions that cause the need for non-capitalist fixes, like requiring equal treatment.
When I go to conferences you can always pick out the Americans from the Europeans. During breaks and what not the Americans are busy checking their blackberrys and working while the Europeans are hanging out, drinking a beer and socializing. Their attitudes generally seem more laid back and hippie like than the Americans. It could be that most of the Europeans I see at these conferences are professors while we (the Americans) have real jobs in addition to publishing papers.
Fixed that for you.
The whole free trade argument is mostly bogus anyways. Many german cars for example are made right here in the US and shipped back out all over the world. What the Germans have done is build factories in right to work states and offer good enough benefits that no one wants to unionize. It ends up saving everyone money.
What Obama can (and wants to) do is raise corporate taxes. Doing that could make all the foreign corps who have put up headquarters here leave and push some of our national companies to other countries. You're right that protectionism won't work, mainly because the base premise for wanting it is false to begin with.
Well this is just good business and something you should be doing every so often anyways. I find that companies hiring in excess during boom times which makes the cut backs that much harder when times get lean again.
This is the problem with "IT." It encompasses too many positions. IMHO, a help desk tech really isn't IT anymore. That's a common job many teenagers nowadays can do with a little training out of school.
Now, if you want to talk about 'professionals' like skilled developers or engineers I think for the most part they are doing fine (or at least better than average since the economy is pretty crappy atm). For example, my company has a hiring freeze on right now, except for my team. We're trying to find more mid-level software developers. I'm about ready to give up since it seems like no one can actually do anything they say on their resume. /sigh
If anything, I hope that Android takes off and forces Apple into opening up the iPhone platform. Realistically, all they would have to do is allow users to install apps from any source they please.
The other thing that Apple does so well is marketing. I'm not sure I've ever seen a 'google' commercial, but something along those lines will be required to get consumers to even do the research into what Android is and what it can provide.
I don't see leaving an app out of the store as a violation of any users rights. The violation I think most people have a problem with is that there is no other way to install that app. So here you have a computing device and the only place to get applications for the device is from Apple. Leaving apps out of the store is fine, but they should allow the user to go find the app on their own and install it on their own phone that they purchased.
The developer also wants a large audience to sell to. I want Android to take off, but you can't ignore the things that Apple has actually done right with the app store and the iPhone integration.
I have a 1st gen iPhone and it's a cool device. It's the worst cell phone ever, but it's a great little internet browsing/email/tech device. The iPod part is cool, but I chuckle every time SJ says it's the best iPod ever since the max space is still 32GB I think. The draconian policies of Apple bug me. I definitely won't buy another iPhone when this one breaks unless Apple opens up. And I'm not talking about OSS the whole OS or anything, but open up and let development happen on the platform. I don't see it happening though unless someone can mount a challenge to the iPhones coolness. Google has a change with Android, but I'm not sure they'll be able to pull it off since they are just providing the software and not the equally impressive hardware required.
IMHO, that's not a test. That's an interview. The tests I thought the original poster talked about were the 'multiple choice did you memorize the help manual sort.' I've taken some of those and wonder the whole time who takes the time to memorize this stuff. And, if they are busy memorizing the help manual how do they have time to get any work done? lol
The best interview I've gone through is one where I was told in advance to prepare a 30 minute presentation on a technical project I've done. It could be work, school, personal, whatever... After giving the presentation to about 10 people or so they asked me questions for the next 2 hours. This was they could test my technical skills, my people skills, and see how I do under pressure. I felt I did well and ended up getting offered the job, but we could never agree on salary.
I read your linked post. All a test does is maybe help you with #2. The other items won't be determined by any amount of testing.
Personally I'm okay with some basic knowledge tests to make sure that you do indeed know what you say you know on your resume. The tests I have problems with are the ones that require you to have memorized parts of an API or some esoteric features of some given language. As an employer I want to know how you're going to solve a problem and not whether or not you have memorized some readily available documentation.
Exactly. For all of MSs shortcomings one thing that they have gotten right most of the time is that mindshare leads to marketshare. Make it easy for developers to make apps for your platform and the applications will comes which in turn will help sustain and grow your platform.
Have you seen how much those large investors pay for seats on the stock exchange. If they don't do that, then how much they pay to their hedge fund (who still probably didn't make them much more than a normal fund). Of course the rich guys are moving more money around and thus making or losing more, but they also aren't paying $20 for a trade either.
All investing is speculation. Every investment by its very nature has the potential for loss.
So how do people who believe a stock is overvalued monetize their beliefs?
Not true. Getting rid of short selling would lead to stocks not being valued properly. In fact they would generally be over-valued. The SEC evens has a paper:
They go on to test this theory and find:
This is just the way politics works though (especially when dealing with radical governments). The enemy of your enemy is your friend until he becomes a worse enemy (look at Russia during WW2). At that time the US determined it was more dangerous to have Iran win a war with Iraq so we helped Iraq. Also, just because we helped someone in the past doesn't meant they have to remain our ally forever. That might hold true if the world is all rainbows and butterflies but it's not.
Hindsight is 20/20. Why not go back farther and blame the mid-east problems on how it was split up when Britain and France left in 1948 since most of the ultimate issues stem back to how that played out.
Actually they weren't being dealt with through inspectors and sanctions. Saddam repeatedly either kicked out the inspectors, wouldn't let them in or stalled them when they wanted to go certain places. Now, he might have just have been being a pain because he felt like it. Or, he could have actually been hiding something. At this point we may never know.
What I don't really understand though is that if Saddam had just let the weapon inspectors in and do whatever they wanted, he could have continued living his life of luxury forever more. Iraq is a very rich country and really had no need to jerk around the UN except to be a PITA. Sorta like the kid who keeps pulling on the dogs tail until the dog finally turns around and bites him.
No one is blaming China, but they have to be included on any solution proposed to limit the use of fossil fuels. They are rapidly bringing a huge population up to the carbon usage levels of the rest of the world. China connects a new coal fired powered plant to their grid every *10* days. IIRC, they are now the number one importer of coal. Cities the size of Philadelphia were popping up (they have slowed some now) in China every month. Ignoring China when thinking about the issue of CO2 pollution is to ignore the largest future CO2 producer.
I don't know about slashdot specifically, but many sites contract out their ad space to ad companies. It's then up the ad companies to rotate ads on and off the page. These ads come from the contract companies servers and not the websites. Another reason is load and sharing across sites owned by the same parent company.
The housing/credit crisis was caused by greed on ALL levels. From the big shot wall street banker who didn't care or analyze the actual risk their were monetizing to the person who purchased a 500k house they couldn't afford using an I/O loan 'because housing prices only go up.' It's easy to push personal responsibility off to some mythical CLUB, but no one forced people to buy houses at crazy inflated prices using loan terms that were just as crazy. Now if you want to blame the CLUB mentality for the idiotic bailout the Fed continues to hand out, I'll go along with that. What I won't agree with is that it is someone else fault when someone bought something that they clearly could not afford.
The 14% he was talking about was SS. Nowhere did he say that he wanted to be exempt from all taxes. If the government is using SS for fixing roads and delivering electricity then the the post that you responded to has his point strengthened. Basically the government has no clue how to handle money.
Interesting. What kind of freelance work do you do?