Bingo. They aren't allowed to fix prices, because that's illegal. So they do the next best thing. They make it impossible for the customer to compare prices for what he is getting.
This is like buying a car. Every time I've tried to buy a car, the salesman has tried to make the deal more complicated. Let's talk trade in! Nope. I'm selling my car separately. Well how about financing? Nope, I'm paying cash. What about this nifty special warranty the dealer offers? I'd rather just hand you the money than going through that charade. And no, I'm not handing you the money. Well, an extended manufacturer warranty? I'll self-insure, thank you.
You see, we both know on some level that what I want to buy is a car. The dealer is trying to trick me into forgetting that.
What I want from a mobile carrier is bandwidth. Period. I don't want to use *their* app store. I don't want to use *their* messaging service. I don't want a relationship with them other than this: I pay them monthly, and I get to make/receive phone calls and send data.
I don't believe we'll ever be able to get back a US where there isn't government subsidies in everything.
In electricity, there's isn't a historical free market Utopia to return to, unless you're talking about Edison wiring a few neighborhoods in New York City with DC. Right from the get-go, we started to do the most un-free market thing possible by granting monopolies on electricity generation and distribution.
Why?
In order to attract more rapid investment. Oh, we'd have got to almost universal electrification, but it wouldn't have happened over fifteen or twenty years. It might have taken twice as long. In the meantime we'd have an industrial infrastructure still dependent on steam engines and water power years after other nations were electrified.
That's what we're talking about here. Not operational subsidies, but getting lots of wind generation built over the course of a few years, rather than over the course of generations. The hope is that attract additional private investment to create companies in the US to design, build, service and innovate in wind power generation.
There's some really, really specific kinds of things you need to build a wind generator, and it would be nice to have the technological capability to do that here instead of sending to Germany for the massive bearings, or China for the blades and generators.
Maybe it has split into multiple bubble universes, and the people who are dealing with the consequences of the collapse of the Internet multiverse are simply beyond our cosmological horizon.
We are unaware that anything has gone wrong, because *our* universe continues to expand.
She got her degree in the Soviet Union before it fell. Apparently the quality of the "top" students that came out of Soviet CS programs was inconsistent. I've also met some Soviet CS grads who were very capable.
Reminds me of a grad student TA I had in comp sci 100 who announced in the first section that she would not accept termination in any of our requirement lists for the exercises because "you can't tell whether a program will terminate."
I had a little side talk with her after about what the halting problem actually means.
Generally undecidable problems can have decidable special cases. Intractable problems can have both tractable special cases and useful approximations.
I'd say that a man software rated system which could not be verified to be within an acceptable approximation of "safe" is faulty by design.
Well, I don't think paying the teachers we have now more won't make them teach better. I think paying teachers more will attract better teachers to the profession. It will also allow us to keep the most talented teachers in the profession.
It's not something I'd do overnight. But I'd start with raising entry level salaries and then gradually upgrading salaries up the seniority chain over the course of twenty years. The aim would be to increase competition for jobs at every seniority level. You can manufacture experienced teachers overnight, so you raise their salaries more slowly.
Raising the salaries of the teaching profession probably wouldn't change the skills of the best teachers, but over time it allow us to replace the worst teachers with more teachers who are like the best ones.
As for the income/education correlation, that argument cuts both ways. People with more income spend more money on education. They get better results. And their children make more money.
What makes you think that launch businesses won't be "strictly" overseen?
What do you mean by "strict" anyway? Should oversight ever be "lax"?
Of course not. Oversight should always be strict, but at the same time reasonable. In other words the rules should be clear, have a reasonable justification, and make provision for foreseeable hardships they might cause. Given that, violators shouldn't get a pass because regulators are "lax".
I dunno. Here is Massachusetts our per student elementary school expenditures is $11,545. That's pretty high. Our rank in 8th grade math nationally? #1. Our rank in reading? #1.
But our rank in expenditures is not #1, but #10.
Spending money does not create student achievement magically. But at some point you're faced with spending more money to get more achievement. That means better books, more lab equipment, testing materials, auxiliary teachers, enrichment programs etc.
Now compare Massachusetts to Texas. Texas ranks 33rd in combined math and reading to Massachusetts' #1. On the other hand, Texas ranks fourth from the bottom in spending, so arguably Texas schools are more financially efficient, if you don't count the value of having students who are more proficient in math and reading. Massachusetts could probably learn some things about financial efficiency from Texas. But given that Texas is already more "efficient" than Massachusetts, I doubt they'll ever outscore us without spending more.
Now lest this become an East/West argument, Montana actually spends a tiny bit more than Massachusetts per pupil, $15 more. They rank 6th in 8th grade student achievement, but the absolute difference in test scores from Massachusetts is not significant, less than 1%.
You will always be able to point to schools that spend lots of money and get no results. But *none* of the states in the bottom quintile by spending broke into the top quintile by reading and math scores.
In fact, only two states in the bottom quintile by spending broke median for scores, but then just barely: Utah ranks 23rd and Idaho ranks 25th by scores. On the other hand, of the ten states in the bottom quintile by spending, five of them are in the bottom quintile for math and reading scores. That's pretty convincing to me that underspending is bad.
What about the other end, the top quintile by per student spending? Well, half of them are in the top quintile by scores, and three are within less than 1% of tying tenth ranked state.
Only two states in the top quintile by spending failed to score better than median, although just barely. Alaska is a special case, of course. The real object lesson is Rhode Island. Rhode Island spends a whopping 12,478 and ranks 6th by spending. It ranks 37th by scores.
So I suggest you do not take Rhode Island as model for school reform.
RI is a good example of how spending doesn't magically produce achievement. However, if you want to break into the top 10 states, plan on paying for the privilege.
I've found that a big part of getting more out of people is expecting more. As a manager, despising your employees is a psychological defense mechanism. None of us are perfect, and it's easy to blame that on the people around us.
There's a kind of inside joke government workers use when there aren't outsiders around. It goes like this: "A guy comes into the office and asks, 'How many people work here?'. So I say, 'Oh, about half of us.'"
The truth is that if you look at any government agency where things get done, there will be a cadre of people who go above and beyond to make that happen. It's not easy getting things done under the rules politicians insist upon. I'm talking about the people who believe in public service, and the agency mission. I have a friend who works for HUD. He's passionate about access to housing for poor people. I've also known lots of absolutely stellar people working unglamorous and thankless public health and environmental protection jobs in the government sector.
I even knew an IRS auditor. All he wants from the vast majority of people is truthful documentation and an honest effort at tax compliance. As long as you do that he'll cut you all the slack he can find in the regulations. Why? Because most people *can't* commit very much fraud. IRS already has most of the money you owe. What little fraud an average guy can commit is so unlikely to succeed it's usually just a mistake. But he has to deal with people who are mad at him because of how much tax the law says they have to pay, because the politicians who wrote those laws use auditors as a scapegoat. They'd like to reduce the number of auditors so the small number of people who have the financial sophistication to attempt serious fraud can get away with it.
Here's the take home lesson: everything you hate about government isn't the fault of government employees. It's the fault of the politicians you elect to office.
I've worked with many state governments as a private contractor. Every time the politicians get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, they pass "ethics reform" that applies to state workers *but not to themselves*. How dumb do we have to be not to figure that out? I've seen state employees who have to pay expenses out of their own pocket when they travel because the state travel reimbursement rates won't cover a decent hotel room. But the politicians are *still* flying off to those resort junkets.
So what about that other half? The half of government employees that's not really doing much work? They're the politicians' fault too. One thing I've learned in business is that good people are usually a bargain at whatever price they can command, but bad ones are worse than useless and still cost you money. In most cases I'll take a guy who can command 100,000 in a field that normally pays 80,000 over four guys who can only command 50,000 in that field.
I've also seen some really, really horribly corrupt places. They're not the norm, but you see them where there's a lot of political cynicism about public service. It is not a chicken or the egg problem. It's the politicians. They rail against *employee* corruption, but they don't take any effective steps against it because that would be breaking their rice bowl. For Chrissakes they talk about how bad the government *they're in complete control of* is? How stupid can people get?
These are places where government is low-paid, and workers utrageously disrespected. Of course they attract a lot of people who think that honest public service is for suckers. I can tell you stories that would make your hair stand on end. But you know what, the people who keep voting for the same crooks deserve that kind of service. What is amazing is that there are *still* people there who give honorable service under those conditions. In fact those people in the "half that works" are even more important, because they aren't 1/2 of workforce. They're maybe 1/4.
There are all kinds of ideological explanations for why this *must* be so, but I don't think they hold water.
My first management job was at a largish non-profit where I inherited a three year IT request backlog. So I analyzed the backlog and discovered that most of it consisted of requests for software to speed moving decisions from what amounted to the user's in tray to the out tray, and pretty soon I realized all those in-out transformations formed a network. I charted out the network, and it was *obvious* that certain key information latencies could be reduced from 35 days to about half a day by rerouting the information through this network. In fact, most of the work in the network could be eliminated entirely, while providing better, But rather than spring this on people, I just laid out the charts and they figured everything out for themselves. That way I didn't have to persuade anyone.
Now the interesting question was how this kind of situation could happen. It's not because the people were stupid. They weren't. It wasn't because they were lazy or not dedicated. Quite the contrary. Lack of profit motive certainly played a part in the evolution of the problem, but it did not create the least barrier to addressing the problem.
What we had was two levels of people in the organization. People down in the ranks who cared about the mission of the organization and understood their local piece of the process. And people at the top who sometimes cared about the mission of the organization, but were mainly focused on shmoozing. But nobody had any idea what the *whole* process looked like. So the people in the ranks were largely left to guide themselves in solving problems. They were self-starters, they had initiative, what they lacked was a global understanding of how everything fit together. So they talked to their neighbors in the existing process about where they were under pressure, then they demanded the higher ups provide them with tools to reduce the pressure at individual points. The higher ups had no idea how to fix these things, so they just stuck the requests onto the back of a three year queue, and when things began to catch fire they'd demand the queue get resorted.
But the queue shouldn't have existed at all. When folks were done applying common sense to the big picture I provided, most of the dreaded request queue evaporated. My backlog went forty months down to under thirty days, and I didn't have a lick of code written.
What was missing was *leadership*. In my book leadership equals caring about the results plus understanding how the process works.
It's not really useful to convert numbers like this into units people understand.
I've been guilty of this sillly practice as anybody, because people like to thing trying visualize things like stacks of paper reaching from the Earth to the Moon is helpful. In fact most people have no freakin' idea of how far the Moon is.
This kind of visualization doesn't really harness the power of numbers, which is to allow you to compare things beyond meaningful sensory imagination. It's better to say that:
1. the Sun is 50x as far away than the Moon, 2. the Moon 9x as far away as geosynchronous orbit, 3. geosynchronous orbit is 21x as far as the upper limits of low earth orbit, 4. the upper limit of LEO is about 12x as far as the lower limit (160km) 5. the lower limit of LEO is a bit more than the distance from New York City to Philadelphia (or about the distance from London to Birmingham).
Oh, I wouldn't rely on a name and tradition. I'd rely on the fact that *some* of the lawyers on the faculty are the best litigators in the country.
It's like anything else. If you looked at a creative writing program, most of the people in it are theoreticians, critics, and minor published authors. But you can't paint *all* creative writing teachers with the same brush. A few of them are quite successful in the market.
What we're seeing here isn't really all that surprising. Public response not mediated by the traditional media? That's a direct result of not having a free press. Vigilantism? That's a direct result of people feeling that the rules don't secure them from a threat.
Lynch mobs are all about people taking matters into their own hands when the government can't. In the US, local authorities often turned a blind eye to lynchings because they were in sympathy with the mob, and covered up the crime later, but weren't ready to dirty their own hands. Lynchings didn't happen in the antebellum days when blacks were officially slaves.
That's what you need for a lynching. You need enough people to give each other cover, and you need official indifference. Local government is notoriously corrupt and lax in China.
I tell you what. Meet me at the county courthouse. You bring your lawyer, I bring my pick of the Harvard Law (not Nesson obviously. Maybe Dershowitz). First guy who's lawyer calls for his momma owes the other a case of beer.
True. But the point is that just because the technology is new, doesn't mean it's expensive.
I did some digging and found an article last June which discussed the acquisition of the Kindle's display manufacturer by a Chinese company. The current display for the Kindle adds about $60 to the cost of the device, but it is manufactured in Massachusetts. When production moves to South China, it'll probably drop by at least 50%, if not 80%.
Which, basically, says "follow this inter-county planning document":
Actually, I don't read the document entitled "COIT Security Policy" as saying that as all.
The document section is badly titled. If you read it carefully the heading "COIT Security Policy" should really be read "COIT Plan for Drafting New Security Policies". In fact, the whole thing is dreadfully written; I'd give it a "C" in High School English at best. For example under "Policy" it states "Recommends an initial policy to address the following:" which you would expect to be followed by a litany of concerns the policy must address. In fact, what the following points address is the steps recommended to arrive at a future policy, steps which by the way don't involve any kind of threat analysis or examination of legal responsibilities, or any other clarification of the goals the procedure outlined is supposed to pursue.
Here is the relevant quote,under the heading "Recommends an initial policy to address the following:"
COIT will initially adopt the California Counties Information Services Directors Association (CCISDA) “Best Policies for the Countywide Information Security Program” Framework (pdf) as a starting point and initial reference for CCSF Security Policies.
[emphasis mine]
Note it does NOT say "COIT hereby adopts CCISDA's BPCISP with all instances of 'County' replaced by 'City'." As best as I can make out this compositional abortion, it says that COIT will adopt BPCISP as a starting point for drafting its own future regulations.
In any case this document does not seem to say anything about what the current security policies are.
I'm not sure that's the case at all. If e-ink is not cheaper than LCDs, it will be soon. You just can't lay your hands on e-ink displays because they are only available to OEMs.
Motorola had a phone with an e-paper display three or four years ago. It's a low end GSM phone targeted at developing countries. You can buy the sucker now off Amazon, unlocked, for the princely sum of $24.
Remember the old days when spies would swallow their instructions, written on paper (hopefully they had the foresight to use rice paper)?
I wonder whether this event might qualify for the largest documented quantity of artificially encoded information (as opposed to naturally encoded information like in DNA) ever ingested.
I don't think their yard is ugly *in its own right*. It looks like desert, and I don't happen think desert is ugly.
Leaving aside libertarian considerations and with my architecture critic hat on (didn't know I had one of those suckas, did you?), I'd say the aesthetic problem is consistency and harmonizing with its surroundings. If *everybody* just admitted they were living in a desert and landscaped accordingly, it would not seem ugly. But one little patch of desert in an ocean of plots pretending to be cut from the turf of an English country estate (neatly cropped by sheep) looks bad.
There's nothing aesthetically wrong with a thatch roofed stone cottage, but it wouldn't harmonize with a neighborhood where the other homes are built in a 1930s Italian "Futurist" style.
The front lawn is one of the crappiest zoning and landscaping conventions *ever*. Visit an old village in England and you'll see houses built right up to the sidewalk, so that the front ground floor rooms are essentially public spaces. The payoff? You get huge, private back yards to garden, or set up your astronomical observatory. It's a practice that invites idiosyncrasy, whereas the American suburban lot typically has more than half of the available space sacrificed to a statement of conformity.
When you're in a neighborhood dominated by conformity, you *can't* escape it. You can build high walls around your lot to try to hide your non-conformity, but that pretty much *advertises* your individuality.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo. They aren't allowed to fix prices, because that's illegal. So they do the next best thing. They make it impossible for the customer to compare prices for what he is getting.
This is like buying a car. Every time I've tried to buy a car, the salesman has tried to make the deal more complicated. Let's talk trade in! Nope. I'm selling my car separately. Well how about financing? Nope, I'm paying cash. What about this nifty special warranty the dealer offers? I'd rather just hand you the money than going through that charade. And no, I'm not handing you the money. Well, an extended manufacturer warranty? I'll self-insure, thank you.
You see, we both know on some level that what I want to buy is a car. The dealer is trying to trick me into forgetting that.
What I want from a mobile carrier is bandwidth. Period. I don't want to use *their* app store. I don't want to use *their* messaging service. I don't want a relationship with them other than this: I pay them monthly, and I get to make/receive phone calls and send data.
I don't believe we'll ever be able to get back a US where there isn't government subsidies in everything.
In electricity, there's isn't a historical free market Utopia to return to, unless you're talking about Edison wiring a few neighborhoods in New York City with DC. Right from the get-go, we started to do the most un-free market thing possible by granting monopolies on electricity generation and distribution.
Why?
In order to attract more rapid investment. Oh, we'd have got to almost universal electrification, but it wouldn't have happened over fifteen or twenty years. It might have taken twice as long. In the meantime we'd have an industrial infrastructure still dependent on steam engines and water power years after other nations were electrified.
That's what we're talking about here. Not operational subsidies, but getting lots of wind generation built over the course of a few years, rather than over the course of generations. The hope is that attract additional private investment to create companies in the US to design, build, service and innovate in wind power generation.
There's some really, really specific kinds of things you need to build a wind generator, and it would be nice to have the technological capability to do that here instead of sending to Germany for the massive bearings, or China for the blades and generators.
Maybe it has split into multiple bubble universes, and the people who are dealing with the consequences of the collapse of the Internet multiverse are simply beyond our cosmological horizon.
We are unaware that anything has gone wrong, because *our* universe continues to expand.
She got her degree in the Soviet Union before it fell. Apparently the quality of the "top" students that came out of Soviet CS programs was inconsistent. I've also met some Soviet CS grads who were very capable.
Reminds me of a grad student TA I had in comp sci 100 who announced in the first section that she would not accept termination in any of our requirement lists for the exercises because "you can't tell whether a program will terminate."
I had a little side talk with her after about what the halting problem actually means.
Generally undecidable problems can have decidable special cases. Intractable problems can have both tractable special cases and useful approximations.
I'd say that a man software rated system which could not be verified to be within an acceptable approximation of "safe" is faulty by design.
Well, figuring out the problem and how to solve it actually is the engineering part.
Coding is the craft part. It plays the same role in relation to software engineering that carpentry places to structural engineering.
where they ask the witness to pick the culprit out in a lineup.
Well, I don't think paying the teachers we have now more won't make them teach better. I think paying teachers more will attract better teachers to the profession. It will also allow us to keep the most talented teachers in the profession.
It's not something I'd do overnight. But I'd start with raising entry level salaries and then gradually upgrading salaries up the seniority chain over the course of twenty years. The aim would be to increase competition for jobs at every seniority level. You can manufacture experienced teachers overnight, so you raise their salaries more slowly.
Raising the salaries of the teaching profession probably wouldn't change the skills of the best teachers, but over time it allow us to replace the worst teachers with more teachers who are like the best ones.
As for the income/education correlation, that argument cuts both ways. People with more income spend more money on education. They get better results. And their children make more money.
What makes you think that launch businesses won't be "strictly" overseen?
What do you mean by "strict" anyway? Should oversight ever be "lax"?
Of course not. Oversight should always be strict, but at the same time reasonable. In other words the rules should be clear, have a reasonable justification, and make provision for foreseeable hardships they might cause. Given that, violators shouldn't get a pass because regulators are "lax".
I dunno. Here is Massachusetts our per student elementary school expenditures is $11,545. That's pretty high. Our rank in 8th grade math nationally? #1. Our rank in reading? #1.
But our rank in expenditures is not #1, but #10.
Spending money does not create student achievement magically. But at some point you're faced with spending more money to get more achievement. That means better books, more lab equipment, testing materials, auxiliary teachers, enrichment programs etc.
Now compare Massachusetts to Texas. Texas ranks 33rd in combined math and reading to Massachusetts' #1. On the other hand, Texas ranks fourth from the bottom in spending, so arguably Texas schools are more financially efficient, if you don't count the value of having students who are more proficient in math and reading. Massachusetts could probably learn some things about financial efficiency from Texas. But given that Texas is already more "efficient" than Massachusetts, I doubt they'll ever outscore us without spending more.
Now lest this become an East/West argument, Montana actually spends a tiny bit more than Massachusetts per pupil, $15 more. They rank 6th in 8th grade student achievement, but the absolute difference in test scores from Massachusetts is not significant, less than 1%.
You will always be able to point to schools that spend lots of money and get no results. But *none* of the states in the bottom quintile by spending broke into the top quintile by reading and math scores.
In fact, only two states in the bottom quintile by spending broke median for scores, but then just barely: Utah ranks 23rd and Idaho ranks 25th by scores. On the other hand, of the ten states in the bottom quintile by spending, five of them are in the bottom quintile for math and reading scores. That's pretty convincing to me that underspending is bad.
What about the other end, the top quintile by per student spending? Well, half of them are in the top quintile by scores, and three are within less than 1% of tying tenth ranked state.
Only two states in the top quintile by spending failed to score better than median, although just barely. Alaska is a special case, of course. The real object lesson is Rhode Island. Rhode Island spends a whopping 12,478 and ranks 6th by spending. It ranks 37th by scores.
So I suggest you do not take Rhode Island as model for school reform.
RI is a good example of how spending doesn't magically produce achievement. However, if you want to break into the top 10 states, plan on paying for the privilege.
That's very true.
I've found that a big part of getting more out of people is expecting more. As a manager, despising your employees is a psychological defense mechanism. None of us are perfect, and it's easy to blame that on the people around us.
There's a kind of inside joke government workers use when there aren't outsiders around. It goes like this: "A guy comes into the office and asks, 'How many people work here?'. So I say, 'Oh, about half of us.'"
The truth is that if you look at any government agency where things get done, there will be a cadre of people who go above and beyond to make that happen. It's not easy getting things done under the rules politicians insist upon. I'm talking about the people who believe in public service, and the agency mission. I have a friend who works for HUD. He's passionate about access to housing for poor people. I've also known lots of absolutely stellar people working unglamorous and thankless public health and environmental protection jobs in the government sector.
I even knew an IRS auditor. All he wants from the vast majority of people is truthful documentation and an honest effort at tax compliance. As long as you do that he'll cut you all the slack he can find in the regulations. Why? Because most people *can't* commit very much fraud. IRS already has most of the money you owe. What little fraud an average guy can commit is so unlikely to succeed it's usually just a mistake. But he has to deal with people who are mad at him because of how much tax the law says they have to pay, because the politicians who wrote those laws use auditors as a scapegoat. They'd like to reduce the number of auditors so the small number of people who have the financial sophistication to attempt serious fraud can get away with it.
Here's the take home lesson: everything you hate about government isn't the fault of government employees. It's the fault of the politicians you elect to office.
I've worked with many state governments as a private contractor. Every time the politicians get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, they pass "ethics reform" that applies to state workers *but not to themselves*. How dumb do we have to be not to figure that out? I've seen state employees who have to pay expenses out of their own pocket when they travel because the state travel reimbursement rates won't cover a decent hotel room. But the politicians are *still* flying off to those resort junkets.
So what about that other half? The half of government employees that's not really doing much work? They're the politicians' fault too. One thing I've learned in business is that good people are usually a bargain at whatever price they can command, but bad ones are worse than useless and still cost you money. In most cases I'll take a guy who can command 100,000 in a field that normally pays 80,000 over four guys who can only command 50,000 in that field.
I've also seen some really, really horribly corrupt places. They're not the norm, but you see them where there's a lot of political cynicism about public service. It is not a chicken or the egg problem. It's the politicians. They rail against *employee* corruption, but they don't take any effective steps against it because that would be breaking their rice bowl. For Chrissakes they talk about how bad the government *they're in complete control of* is? How stupid can people get?
These are places where government is low-paid, and workers utrageously disrespected. Of course they attract a lot of people who think that honest public service is for suckers. I can tell you stories that would make your hair stand on end. But you know what, the people who keep voting for the same crooks deserve that kind of service. What is amazing is that there are *still* people there who give honorable service under those conditions. In fact those people in the "half that works" are even more important, because they aren't 1/2 of workforce. They're maybe 1/4.
There are all kinds of ideological explanations for why this *must* be so, but I don't think they hold water.
My first management job was at a largish non-profit where I inherited a three year IT request backlog. So I analyzed the backlog and discovered that most of it consisted of requests for software to speed moving decisions from what amounted to the user's in tray to the out tray, and pretty soon I realized all those in-out transformations formed a network. I charted out the network, and it was *obvious* that certain key information latencies could be reduced from 35 days to about half a day by rerouting the information through this network. In fact, most of the work in the network could be eliminated entirely, while providing better, But rather than spring this on people, I just laid out the charts and they figured everything out for themselves. That way I didn't have to persuade anyone.
Now the interesting question was how this kind of situation could happen. It's not because the people were stupid. They weren't. It wasn't because they were lazy or not dedicated. Quite the contrary. Lack of profit motive certainly played a part in the evolution of the problem, but it did not create the least barrier to addressing the problem.
What we had was two levels of people in the organization. People down in the ranks who cared about the mission of the organization and understood their local piece of the process. And people at the top who sometimes cared about the mission of the organization, but were mainly focused on shmoozing. But nobody had any idea what the *whole* process looked like. So the people in the ranks were largely left to guide themselves in solving problems. They were self-starters, they had initiative, what they lacked was a global understanding of how everything fit together. So they talked to their neighbors in the existing process about where they were under pressure, then they demanded the higher ups provide them with tools to reduce the pressure at individual points. The higher ups had no idea how to fix these things, so they just stuck the requests onto the back of a three year queue, and when things began to catch fire they'd demand the queue get resorted.
But the queue shouldn't have existed at all. When folks were done applying common sense to the big picture I provided, most of the dreaded request queue evaporated. My backlog went forty months down to under thirty days, and I didn't have a lick of code written.
What was missing was *leadership*. In my book leadership equals caring about the results plus understanding how the process works.
It's not really useful to convert numbers like this into units people understand.
I've been guilty of this sillly practice as anybody, because people like to thing trying visualize things like stacks of paper reaching from the Earth to the Moon is helpful. In fact most people have no freakin' idea of how far the Moon is.
This kind of visualization doesn't really harness the power of numbers, which is to allow you to compare things beyond meaningful sensory imagination. It's better to say that:
1. the Sun is 50x as far away than the Moon,
2. the Moon 9x as far away as geosynchronous orbit,
3. geosynchronous orbit is 21x as far as the upper limits of low earth orbit,
4. the upper limit of LEO is about 12x as far as the lower limit (160km)
5. the lower limit of LEO is a bit more than the distance from New York City to Philadelphia (or about the distance from London to Birmingham).
Yes, but can you convert that to barrels of laughs?
so i'm under the impression of having advanced quantum physics described to me by a drunk with a cockney accent. i guess that's helpful...
Nah. Then then they'd call "Anti-Strange Hyypernuclei" something like "Panty-mange wiper pukey pie."
Oh, I wouldn't rely on a name and tradition. I'd rely on the fact that *some* of the lawyers on the faculty are the best litigators in the country.
It's like anything else. If you looked at a creative writing program, most of the people in it are theoreticians, critics, and minor published authors. But you can't paint *all* creative writing teachers with the same brush. A few of them are quite successful in the market.
Exactly.
It's the difference between what the government is supposed to do and what officials *want* to be done that encourages vigilantes.
You don't even need a plurality to lynch someone.
What we're seeing here isn't really all that surprising. Public response not mediated by the traditional media? That's a direct result of not having a free press. Vigilantism? That's a direct result of people feeling that the rules don't secure them from a threat.
Lynch mobs are all about people taking matters into their own hands when the government can't. In the US, local authorities often turned a blind eye to lynchings because they were in sympathy with the mob, and covered up the crime later, but weren't ready to dirty their own hands. Lynchings didn't happen in the antebellum days when blacks were officially slaves.
That's what you need for a lynching. You need enough people to give each other cover, and you need official indifference. Local government is notoriously corrupt and lax in China.
I tell you what. Meet me at the county courthouse. You bring your lawyer, I bring my pick of the Harvard Law (not Nesson obviously. Maybe Dershowitz). First guy who's lawyer calls for his momma owes the other a case of beer.
True. But the point is that just because the technology is new, doesn't mean it's expensive.
I did some digging and found an article last June which discussed the acquisition of the Kindle's display manufacturer by a Chinese company. The current display for the Kindle adds about $60 to the cost of the device, but it is manufactured in Massachusetts. When production moves to South China, it'll probably drop by at least 50%, if not 80%.
Which, basically, says "follow this inter-county planning document":
Actually, I don't read the document entitled "COIT Security Policy" as saying that as all.
The document section is badly titled. If you read it carefully the heading "COIT Security Policy" should really be read "COIT Plan for Drafting New Security Policies". In fact, the whole thing is dreadfully written; I'd give it a "C" in High School English at best. For example under "Policy" it states "Recommends an initial policy to address the following:" which you would expect to be followed by a litany of concerns the policy must address. In fact, what the following points address is the steps recommended to arrive at a future policy, steps which by the way don't involve any kind of threat analysis or examination of legal responsibilities, or any other clarification of the goals the procedure outlined is supposed to pursue.
Here is the relevant quote,under the heading "Recommends an initial policy to address the following:"
COIT will initially adopt the California Counties Information Services Directors Association (CCISDA) “Best Policies for the Countywide Information Security Program” Framework (pdf) as a starting point and initial reference for CCSF Security Policies.
[emphasis mine]
Note it does NOT say "COIT hereby adopts CCISDA's BPCISP with all instances of 'County' replaced by 'City'." As best as I can make out this compositional abortion, it says that COIT will adopt BPCISP as a starting point for drafting its own future regulations.
In any case this document does not seem to say anything about what the current security policies are.
I'm not sure that's the case at all. If e-ink is not cheaper than LCDs, it will be soon. You just can't lay your hands on e-ink displays because they are only available to OEMs.
Motorola had a phone with an e-paper display three or four years ago. It's a low end GSM phone targeted at developing countries. You can buy the sucker now off Amazon, unlocked, for the princely sum of $24.
Remember the old days when spies would swallow their instructions, written on paper (hopefully they had the foresight to use rice paper)?
I wonder whether this event might qualify for the largest documented quantity of artificially encoded information (as opposed to naturally encoded information like in DNA) ever ingested.
I did look.
I don't think their yard is ugly *in its own right*. It looks like desert, and I don't happen think desert is ugly.
Leaving aside libertarian considerations and with my architecture critic hat on (didn't know I had one of those suckas, did you?), I'd say the aesthetic problem is consistency and harmonizing with its surroundings. If *everybody* just admitted they were living in a desert and landscaped accordingly, it would not seem ugly. But one little patch of desert in an ocean of plots pretending to be cut from the turf of an English country estate (neatly cropped by sheep) looks bad.
There's nothing aesthetically wrong with a thatch roofed stone cottage, but it wouldn't harmonize with a neighborhood where the other homes are built in a 1930s Italian "Futurist" style.
The front lawn is one of the crappiest zoning and landscaping conventions *ever*. Visit an old village in England and you'll see houses built right up to the sidewalk, so that the front ground floor rooms are essentially public spaces. The payoff? You get huge, private back yards to garden, or set up your astronomical observatory. It's a practice that invites idiosyncrasy, whereas the American suburban lot typically has more than half of the available space sacrificed to a statement of conformity.
When you're in a neighborhood dominated by conformity, you *can't* escape it. You can build high walls around your lot to try to hide your non-conformity, but that pretty much *advertises* your individuality.