It's downright embarrassing how little money it even takes to buy the government. Intuit makes a couple billion dollars a year. The lobbying spend, $2.6 million, is about eight hours' worth of revenues.
This does not mean that location is necessarily public information to be provided by the government, but FERC specifically sought to keep the location of particular bits of infrastructure out of that data which is considered confidential.
If Schumer has a beef, he should bring it up with FERC.
Is a phone conversation "consumed" as its transcript (a few hundred bytes) or as an audio file (a few hundred kb) or a really well sampled audio file that conveys nuance perfectly (a few Mb)?
A tweet is 140 characters, but if I were to take a screenshot of a screen with Twitter (and about 20 tweets) that could be a couple of Mb.
And much of that "data" could be compressed in a meaningful way. I spend most of my day in my cubicle staring at my monitor. Does all of the visual data that my eyes are receiving (about eight hours' worth of grey walls and a small computer monitor's contents) count?
As long as his contracting period is less than 60 days, he can elect not to take COBRA and then retroactively take it and get full benefits if he needs it.
So if he falls down the stairs and breaks both legs on the 57th day after his benefits are terminated, he can notify his plan administrator on the 58th day that he wants COBRA, submit a check for the premium difference, and his bills from the previous day's fall will be covered.
Most public school teachers are clueless when it comes to technology. At best, half of the math and science teachers will be technically savvy, while less than 25% of the English and social studies teachers will know the difference between a browser and a word processor. At the elementary level, you're talking 10%, tops.
It's the whole "teach a man to fish" thing. Having a single teacher on staff that is technically savvy breeds dependence on that one teacher and continued naïveté. If all teachers on staff except for a handful are clueful, the others feel obligated to catch up out of peer pressure.
The fact that you're installing Edubuntu is great, but teachers will go to the one technological in-service they get per year and wonder where the "Start" menu is when they get back to their school and sit down in front of one of your machines.
I'm a former high school teacher. Teachers are under exceptional amounts of stress in a classroom. You're performing in front of an audience for several hours every day. Anything that they're even slightly uncomfortable with will be left behind in favor of the familiar. You can either give up or you can work to breed familiarity.
I'd say keep up building machines, but also volunteer to offer in-service or after-hours training. You might not have to do it alone — you could probably get one of the clueful teachers at the school to teach sessions during the day or after school. But I promise, if you build machines and don't provide any kind of support for how to use them, they'll only gather dust.
I was going to make the same point, but then I saw that the next article down on the main page is entitled "Does Zelda Need an Overhaul?" and realized Slashdot is the wrong forum to decide what is useful and what isn't.
Cursive is just another way of putting ideas down on paper.
It's cultural evolution -- cursive is obviously inferior for our current needs (ever try OCR'ing cursive?), and is losing its relevance.
It was originally designed as a faster form of writing by hand. We now have a faster form of writing by hand -- typing. As time goes on, just about everyone who does any form of communication will type more and write less, and the average length of hand-written messages and letters will decrease.
And for many languages (in particular those using a non-Western character set), there's no such thing as cursive anyway. Therefore, cursive can't be that important to a well-educated and literate society.
For everyday life, teaching third graders Palm Graffiti would probably be more useful than cursive.
The free market is only really free if customers have perfect information. That can never happen, but you can strive to get something that works good enough.
Close... a free market is one where people are free to trade with whomever they want, giving preference to none.
An efficient market is one that is predicated on perfect information. Companies don't have incentive to work in an efficient market -- assuming that what you have for sale is just that, your product*, there's nothing to differentiate one company from another.
Therefore, all that hard-spent advertising revenue is worthless, all that market share and word-of-mouth is useless. Someone will go to bogus-retailer.com rather than a real retailer to get the same item for 3 cents less.
*In reality, no two products are ever really identical, due to the service that comes with a purchase, warranty, shipping speed, customer experience, etc. But as big companies become more "parts vendors" than "solution providers", this becomes moot as time goes on.
I'm convinced that end users will go to great lengths and withstand great sacrifices to get something for "free".
If it ends up being the case that in five or ten years no CD is rippable/burnable, someone in the world will play the CD and put a microphone up to the speaker. Quality will be horrid, but copies of the tunes will be available, and they'll be "good enough" for a music-hungry populace.
Filesharing will happen as long as the Internet is around. I hate to say this to the RIAA/MPAA, but it's a losing battle. Better to continue to churn out better content to encourage buying of CDs.
They're hard to find, but there is a lot of older currency still in circulation.
Of course, in this particular case, I can't be sure the bank didn't just screw up and miss this particular bill in the replacement they are required to do.
I don't know what you or your company does, so I could be very wrong, but what's the likelihood those degrees are really necessary?
If you do highly technical engineering work, mathematical modeling, or are working on a software product for a very technical field, then what I'm about to say doesn't apply.
Someone who's doing development of an application like a word-processor, or even B2B application shouldn't need a M.S. or Ph.D. in CS or IS to do this work. Any programmer with half a head on their shoulders and a reasonable amount of skill should be able to manage this easily. It's an unfortunate consequence of the tight labor market that companies choose to use the resumes of the applicants as a disqualifying process. There are many very talented non-college-educated people that are working, and quite a few M.S. in C.S. grads that are so used to working in a theoretical environment they can't easily get the grasp of working ina a software house. Alternately, they come up with great theoretical solutions that are too cost- and time-prohibitive to implement.
More required reading on this topic is Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. In one line, humanity will be bored and miserable if we solve all the mechanical problems of the world through automation and don't address the "real" issues: unemployment, homelessness, racism, etc.
[I]t's a prime example of people who don't think at work...
Ever go to the grocery store and try to pay with a check? The cashier has to call over a manager for "approval", which is always just a "rubber stamp" process. If no decisions are made by this approval, why have it? Why not just let the cashier do it? Why waste a manager's time?
This situation seems no different. eBay's low-level employees can't actually do anything, and the lowly end user is kept as far from possible from those who can.
I wouldn't necessarily blame the non-thinkers, because even if they wanted to help I'll bet they can't.
Not to be anal here, but electrons themselves travel EXCEPTIONALLY slowly in wires. Calculating drift velocity of electrons is a good student experiment in first-year electricity and magnetism.
If my memory recalls, drift velocity (for some reasonable values of conductance, etc), is somewhere around a millimeter per second.
The electrical potential difference is what travels at or near the speed of light, which is why there's an imperceptable difference between flipping the light switch and the light switch turning on.
Just be careful when you decide to go with an automated test tool.
It's real easy to think as a test tool as a panacea -- that you'll no longer require any testing effort.
It's not true; do a very careful cost analysis before purchasing the tool.
I used to be the automated testing manager for my company, so I speak from experience. If your
front end changes often, or is extremely data driven (especially if you have a large, shared,
rules-driven database setup), you will spend significantly more time setting up the test suite
than you will ever save running it.
Don't get me wrong -- automated testing tools are terrific in certain cases. In particular, for testing
individual forms, deterministic behavior, and mathematical tests that your testers may find pedestrian
or boring. But all processes that are even slightly complex or could have varying behavior depending
on many parameters, are not appropriate for automated testing.
Also be sure that management is aware of the costs involved. The standard rule of thumb is that it
takes about ten times as long to automate tests as it does to run them once. From experience, this
number can move between five and fifty, but the point is this: don't try to automate everything, just
those tests where you stand to run them repeatedly.
Given this, I hope you have a better sense of what's involved. Given your examples it seems like
you're a case where automated testing can truly make you more efficient. Just remember to at least
start with the tests that meet the criteria I've enumerated above, and you should be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
It's downright embarrassing how little money it even takes to buy the government. Intuit makes a couple billion dollars a year. The lobbying spend, $2.6 million, is about eight hours' worth of revenues.
Essentially, that was Feynman's rationale for learning Portuguese over Spanish. And he did pretty well by it.
Location is specifically not protected as Critical Energy Infrastructure Information (CEII).
This does not mean that location is necessarily public information to be provided by the government, but FERC specifically sought to keep the location of particular bits of infrastructure out of that data which is considered confidential.
If Schumer has a beef, he should bring it up with FERC.
They're just trying to achieve the Ballmer peak! http://xkcd.com/323/
This number is entirely meaningless.
Is a phone conversation "consumed" as its transcript (a few hundred bytes) or as an audio file (a few hundred kb) or a really well sampled audio file that conveys nuance perfectly (a few Mb)?
A tweet is 140 characters, but if I were to take a screenshot of a screen with Twitter (and about 20 tweets) that could be a couple of Mb.
And much of that "data" could be compressed in a meaningful way. I spend most of my day in my cubicle staring at my monitor. Does all of the visual data that my eyes are receiving (about eight hours' worth of grey walls and a small computer monitor's contents) count?
He didn't. I saw "Coming to America".
Very cool... I'll have to poke around for it on eBay.
I always thought Dante's Inferno would have made a great Dungeons and Dragons module; unfortunately I never got around to writing it.
As long as his contracting period is less than 60 days, he can elect not to take COBRA and then retroactively take it and get full benefits if he needs it.
So if he falls down the stairs and breaks both legs on the 57th day after his benefits are terminated, he can notify his plan administrator on the 58th day that he wants COBRA, submit a check for the premium difference, and his bills from the previous day's fall will be covered.
Most public school teachers are clueless when it comes to technology. At best, half of the math and science teachers will be technically savvy, while less than 25% of the English and social studies teachers will know the difference between a browser and a word processor. At the elementary level, you're talking 10%, tops.
It's the whole "teach a man to fish" thing. Having a single teacher on staff that is technically savvy breeds dependence on that one teacher and continued naïveté. If all teachers on staff except for a handful are clueful, the others feel obligated to catch up out of peer pressure.
The fact that you're installing Edubuntu is great, but teachers will go to the one technological in-service they get per year and wonder where the "Start" menu is when they get back to their school and sit down in front of one of your machines.
I'm a former high school teacher. Teachers are under exceptional amounts of stress in a classroom. You're performing in front of an audience for several hours every day. Anything that they're even slightly uncomfortable with will be left behind in favor of the familiar. You can either give up or you can work to breed familiarity.
I'd say keep up building machines, but also volunteer to offer in-service or after-hours training. You might not have to do it alone — you could probably get one of the clueful teachers at the school to teach sessions during the day or after school. But I promise, if you build machines and don't provide any kind of support for how to use them, they'll only gather dust.
Hate to link to myself, but this one really deserves its own counterlist. Top Five Reasons it Rocks To Be An Engineering Student
Remember that the envelopes go both ways, so it would actually be 34c "loss" per envelope. But the point still holds...
I was going to make the same point, but then I saw that the next article down on the main page is entitled "Does Zelda Need an Overhaul?" and realized Slashdot is the wrong forum to decide what is useful and what isn't.
Eh, then he'd have to answer a mathematical-skill testing question to claim his prize...
Cursive is just another way of putting ideas down on paper.
It's cultural evolution -- cursive is obviously inferior for our current needs (ever try OCR'ing cursive?), and is losing its relevance.
It was originally designed as a faster form of writing by hand. We now have a faster form of writing by hand -- typing. As time goes on, just about everyone who does any form of communication will type more and write less, and the average length of hand-written messages and letters will decrease.
And for many languages (in particular those using a non-Western character set), there's no such thing as cursive anyway. Therefore, cursive can't be that important to a well-educated and literate society.
For everyday life, teaching third graders Palm Graffiti would probably be more useful than cursive.
An efficient market is one that is predicated on perfect information. Companies don't have incentive to work in an efficient market -- assuming that what you have for sale is just that, your product*, there's nothing to differentiate one company from another.
Therefore, all that hard-spent advertising revenue is worthless, all that market share and word-of-mouth is useless. Someone will go to bogus-retailer.com rather than a real retailer to get the same item for 3 cents less.
*In reality, no two products are ever really identical, due to the service that comes with a purchase, warranty, shipping speed, customer experience, etc. But as big companies become more "parts vendors" than "solution providers", this becomes moot as time goes on.
If it ends up being the case that in five or ten years no CD is rippable/burnable, someone in the world will play the CD and put a microphone up to the speaker. Quality will be horrid, but copies of the tunes will be available, and they'll be "good enough" for a music-hungry populace.
Filesharing will happen as long as the Internet is around. I hate to say this to the RIAA/MPAA, but it's a losing battle. Better to continue to churn out better content to encourage buying of CDs.
Oh wait...
They're hard to find, but there is a lot of older currency still in circulation.
Of course, in this particular case, I can't be sure the bank didn't just screw up and miss this particular bill in the replacement they are required to do.
If you do highly technical engineering work, mathematical modeling, or are working on a software product for a very technical field, then what I'm about to say doesn't apply.
Someone who's doing development of an application like a word-processor, or even B2B application shouldn't need a M.S. or Ph.D. in CS or IS to do this work. Any programmer with half a head on their shoulders and a reasonable amount of skill should be able to manage this easily. It's an unfortunate consequence of the tight labor market that companies choose to use the resumes of the applicants as a disqualifying process. There are many very talented non-college-educated people that are working, and quite a few M.S. in C.S. grads that are so used to working in a theoretical environment they can't easily get the grasp of working ina a software house. Alternately, they come up with great theoretical solutions that are too cost- and time-prohibitive to implement.
God's gonna be pissed...
Ever go to the grocery store and try to pay with a check? The cashier has to call over a manager for "approval", which is always just a "rubber stamp" process. If no decisions are made by this approval, why have it? Why not just let the cashier do it? Why waste a manager's time?
This situation seems no different. eBay's low-level employees can't actually do anything, and the lowly end user is kept as far from possible from those who can.
I wouldn't necessarily blame the non-thinkers, because even if they wanted to help I'll bet they can't.
If my memory recalls, drift velocity (for some reasonable values of conductance, etc), is somewhere around a millimeter per second.
The electrical potential difference is what travels at or near the speed of light, which is why there's an imperceptable difference between flipping the light switch and the light switch turning on.
It's real easy to think as a test tool as a panacea -- that you'll no longer require any testing effort. It's not true; do a very careful cost analysis before purchasing the tool.
I used to be the automated testing manager for my company, so I speak from experience. If your front end changes often, or is extremely data driven (especially if you have a large, shared, rules-driven database setup), you will spend significantly more time setting up the test suite than you will ever save running it.
Don't get me wrong -- automated testing tools are terrific in certain cases. In particular, for testing individual forms, deterministic behavior, and mathematical tests that your testers may find pedestrian or boring. But all processes that are even slightly complex or could have varying behavior depending on many parameters, are not appropriate for automated testing.
Also be sure that management is aware of the costs involved. The standard rule of thumb is that it takes about ten times as long to automate tests as it does to run them once. From experience, this number can move between five and fifty, but the point is this: don't try to automate everything, just those tests where you stand to run them repeatedly.
Given this, I hope you have a better sense of what's involved. Given your examples it seems like you're a case where automated testing can truly make you more efficient. Just remember to at least start with the tests that meet the criteria I've enumerated above, and you should be fine.