More interesting than the statistic would be, if black people play more games those of other colour living in the same neighbourhood. Probably not.
And I guess the same applies to the game producers, that the number of black game producers / programmers etc. quite well match the colour distribution of people having the right skill, training or diploma.
Most likely, the thing should be resumed as: Well-fare people have more time to play games than others and baggers in supermarkets can't program games. Apply appropriate colour distribution.
It's so obvious. Terrorism is mostly an engineering and resource management problem. No surprise terrorist will want to have engineers to solve them properly.
"Those people" are dinosaurs and there time is passing anyway. Hopefully as the "Gen X" and "Gen Y" kids start to displace their predecessors in the business world, it'll represent an opportunity to inject some fresh thinking and new approaches to things.
You might be too young to remember, but in 1968 there was a big movement about changing society, authority, ditching old values etc. Today's revolutionaries are pretty tame compared to the the generation of 68. So what became of those revolutionaries and non-conformists? Today, they sit in suits and ties and are exactly those dinosaur managers you accuse of being the establishment incarnate. With Gen X and Gen Y - whatever those may be - exactly the same will happen and fresh approaches to things will be discarded like before.
Life is too short to waste time worrying about what morons think about your belt and shoes.
No, you got it wrong. For them life is to short waste time to figure out if that moron who can't even dress properly has other redeeming values.
More generally speaking, clothes and appearance are the cues you give other people what to think about you. So if you dress like a techie, people will treat you like a techie (which is in short: Fix this and begone). This is perfectly fine, as long as you want that. However if you want to be treated differently (eg being taken seriously by people with decision power) you'll have a hard time. The easiest way to overcome this is send other signals. (eg dress in a cheap ill fitting suit with an atrocious tie for the used car salesman treatment). The extremes in this area are con men, who make it an art to appear a lot more than they are.
Clothes are just a communication protocol: Learn the spec and use it when appropriate.
In brick and mortar business, it's exactly the same, but sometimes it isn't so obvious, because the business is less open to creativity. A company who makes spoons has to produce something remotely resembling a spoon and even the greatest moron will have some clue what a spoon is. There are less parameters here to mess up compared to consulting an IT, which are mostly bullshit artistry anyway. Also, for customers, verifying the quality of a spoon is a lot easier that of an IT security concept, so the worst garbage will be refused.
> Except that we are not living in continental Europe and we don't expect to give our ID for "any reason whatsoever".
Yes, that's exactly the strange part. You give the your ID all the time, you have things nearly as good as a national ID (Driving license?), you are already registered in many Big Brother Databases (Income tax? Mobile phone records? Social Security?) and with all this the "I don't have to ID myself"-myth goes on.
>Last but not least, I think you are forgetting these IDs are readable at a LONG DISTANCE.
That's all? There a easy, cheap, low tech solution to that problem, just get a carrying case with a little meta. It might even be enough if you cut you a beer can twice the size of a credit card fold it around your card.
As to the general discussion about private data, although I personally hate it, I have to agree with David Brin, the times of privacy are over. Get used to it and adapt to it. The future doesn't lie in protecting the data, but to poison the data pool as a possible to reduce its reliability and make the access to data as fair as possible. As an example, the best way to get rid of the TSA No fly list would be to put half of the lawyers in America on it. I bet, inside a week, being on the no-fly list won't even delay your check in any more.
Could someone please explain to me, why Americans, Canadians, Brits and Australians are so afraid of a national ID card?
I live in continental Europe in a country where everyone is expected to be able to identify himself to the police at any time, in a country where there's a central voter register and if you move, you are expected to register yourself with the local town inside of 3 weeks. That sounds like the total police state, doesn't it?
Lets see how this works out in reality:
[b]Identify yourself[/b]: Usually any official document with picture is ok, in reality this means in most cases your driving license - issued nationally, your national ID card or your passport (which many people have anyway to get to the sea in summer). As most Americans have a driving license anyway, this wouldn't change a lot of things for a good part of the population. The issuers of the driving licenses might need do a little more work checking the identity to prevent issues to the wrong name or wrong dates - but this wouldn't affect the common people.
The benefit of having a national ID card on the other hand is, that there's only a small number of documents used commonly and if you have one, you are identified. No more 'Bring 3 types of ID' stuff. You have your driving license, your passport or your ID card, you are set. If those are good enough for the police, they are good enough for everyone else too (eg banks, insurances, airlines).
As those official documents are quite important, forging those, getting those in wrong names or otherwise messing with them is taken very, very seriously by law enforcement. You don't mess around with your driving license just to get some beer before you should (which wouldn't be a problem anyway, once you get a driving license you're also considered old enough to get alcohol), that would send you quite quickly to jail. This improves the general trust in those documents.
At the same time identity theft a lot less of a problem here. If you need to identify yourself, you show one of those documents and everyone is happy. Should, for instance, a bank teller have doubts about your documents, you'll just be invited for a coffee while the police quickly drops by to check your documents. If it clear, fine, if it doesn't you're in deep deep trouble. To try getting around with a fake identity, you immediately raise the stakes to the level of a federal crime, which in most cases isn't worth the risk to small time criminals.
[b]To the police:[/b] So yes, the police may ask you at any time to identify yourself. If not, they can put you in lock-up for some time (similar to the 24 hours available to the American police if one can trust crime shows) to check your identity. In day to day operation, is seems very similar no matter if there's a national ID card scheme or not. If the police doesn't like your face, they can give you a hard time.
For people without ID, there are some procedures to get identified, but those take time and effort. If you happen to be one of the unfortunates without ID, your ID got lost / stolen / whatever, you do it only once to get a temporary replacement before having the new ones issued.
[b]Central voter register:[/b] So wherever you live, you are forced to register yourself inside 3 weeks. This is done mainly for the voter register, to have an idea who can vote in what district, for the tax man and for the police who likes to have a total control over the citizens.
The voter register is a good thing, it makes fraud and manipulation at the time of elections a little harder - you ain't registered officially in the district, you ain't going to vote for it.
The tax man is unfortunately very unavoidable. No matter if there's a national ID card or not, Mr. Tax man will own you and your data - in Soviet Russia and everywhere else too.
The police might have it a little easier to start up to indulge in their totalitarian police state fantasies if they have a national ID card. But if they don't they just dig into the d
> Try this instead "Never be offensive at work in any form. If you need to vent > do it elsewhere and don't name people or divulge information you shouldn't".
I fully agree on that, but some people feel the need to be offensive and can't take it to be reasonable and polite at all times. The advice was more for those, who can't control that impulse, at least they shouldn't put it in writing.
>..but I bet it comes up in discussion if your job security or salary come into question.
No, actually not. The point is, you get evaluated on how well you reach your assigned tasks and projects. Now most of the time, the email flood contains stuff in addition to that, and if you take the time to get involved there, you end up cutting your time to do what you should in the first place.
> You could avoid anything from a minor work disaster to huge amounts of overtime > if you read every email you get and reply judiciously if required.
And most important, if you do that you will avoid to do the work you get paid for and waste your time doing email. Remember, we're dealing here with a situation where you get swamped with email and your main task on the job isn't to handle email. At performance review time, nobody will care that you made happy a million other departments you can't bill your hours too, if you failed your projects and tasks.
A final advice I missed but was raised by other people was, to read email only 3 or 4 times a day. On one hand, that reduces the time wasted switching tasks, on the other hand, the delay often resolve problems without intervention.
No, but I get paid to do some actual work and not to play email-tag. So if said colleagues can't even have the minimal courtesy to make sure the mail is addressed to right person and not some random shout in a crowd.
As to my managers, interestingly enough, denies most of those requests if they ever get put to him - if said people don't bring a project to bill the effort. And surprise, surprise, most of this important things requested via email have trouble to provide those.
To be honest, I enjoy most not turning up at all to meetings. Around here the saying goes: Either you work or you meet. I prefer to work.
First, forget about changing the people, it's futile to try. You need to find a solution that works for you under the current situation.
Second, never ever put something in writing what you wouldn't want to have to explain at court. There's no reason for it. Be offensive as you like face to face, in meeting or on the phone, but always the voice of reason in mails or chat. Never take part of bad-mouthing people in written, you simply don't know who will read it.
About mails where you're on the CC: list: ignore anything where you're only on CC. If the sender would have intended it for you, he'd put you on the To: list.
For mails where you're on the To: list, the question is if you're the only one. If there are other people on it and things need to be done based on it, assume someone else from the To: list will do the work and ignore it. If it the sender intended something specially for you, he'd should have sent you the mail addressed only to you.
Mail containing meeting minutes of meetings you didn't attend, ignore them. I something relevant to you was discussed there, you'd either have been invited or someone would have had the task to inform you about it. Wading through other peoples meeting minutes isn't productive.
All this sounds harsh and should only apply to mails you don't care about, but in reality works quite well. For the CC: I always liked to blame it on my clever spam filter that failed to highlight it as non-spam because I'm not a recipient. People get very miffed about that but somehow seem to slow to come up with good arguments against it. For the other mails you ignored, it's best to ramp that up slowly starting by the most stupid ones. The more mails you ignore, the less people expect you to read them.
If some mail asks for work to be done and you're on the To: list and you don't feel safe enough to ignore it completely, in big organisations a good way to cover your arse is to ask the original sender for a meeting of all people on the To: list to schedule resource allocations. If you are creative, add to that mail a few additional people, best some with opposing agendas. That usually puts off tasks for long enough for them to become irrelevant.
About the endless quotes and attachments, what works best is never to quote the whole thing. Always remove all quotes except a very few you are replying to. That has the advantage, that people see only what you want them to see. Most people won't find the original message in their inbox anyway. It's also a good idea to cut down on the recipient list (just leave enough to cover your backside). That divides te recipient crowd into groups with different information, which always can be useful, in case people start to blame you. Then you can fob it off to someone else you informed but who didn't act on it.
Also avoid short mails, except if they're very positive to you. Present the case with advantages and caveats. Instead of quotes, start your mail with a short - and naturally also biased in your favour - summary of the matter at hand. That forces people to read and think your mail, instead of scanning just for know thread patterns. Most likely, this will exceed most people's attention span. The additional advantage of restating all the important aspects of matter is, that people will sometimes go into discussions about that or will feel uncomfortable to disagree. I always liked to bring up matters like involving the legal department, safety and health regulations, compliances of any kind, or of everything else fails the involvement of the quality control department for affairs I wanted to get rid off. You'd be surprised how few people dare to put in writing, that they don't want to make sure those things are done properly.
This should give you in the middle term some lee-way to ignore mails as you see fit, and people will get very cautious of asking for your help. And, as a side benefits, you sometimes are able to collect mails that are always very popular if your company happens to be investigated for some misdeeds.
How much's the going rate for giving up the right for ever these days?
Giving the right to vote for ever happens every day - every time some poor sod in Mexico or somewhere else decides to emigrate to the home of the brave and land of the free. Arrived there, he's just an alien with no right to vote and what does he get for it?
A minimum wage job and atrocious living conditions. That's how much it is worth!
As to the right to vote in the next election, that one isn't probably even worth a cup of coffee in a cardboard cup. With the system being as stable as it is, the cattle will just be able to choose between a blueish and reddish tinted droid out of the same assembly line anyway. If you can trade that for a working iPod of any type, you come out a ahead big time.
The same thing was said about Super-8, VHS and any other film format whenever the prices for the recorders dropped and they became affordable.
In a photograph, it's usually good enough if one gets two out of the framing, lightning and content right for moderate useful results. Even blind chicken manage that from time to time, if they take enough pictures.
For a video, the same applies but for the whole duration of the clip, and then to add complexity to the matter, the clip needs also some story it tells and the sound should be ok too. The same blind chicken that manages decent pictures will manage a few decent frames in a video clip, but without fail the garbage before and after it will destroy any possible positive impression and the result will be junk. All the time.
The result will be, that with a lot more effort the usual hobbyist will manage with video only to produce material that scares away the audience. With photographs at least he can select his three good shots and be appreciated.
This revolution will again fail to happen. Video just takes too much effort to produce results that aren't total crap.
The article is totally worthless. It just states that some industry-sponsored organisation doesn't like paper trails. Let me guess, it's sponsored by the voting machine manufacturers or by Buy-An-Election Inc.
As to why paper trails are bad, they don't say, just that they will publish a paper really soon now. News at 11.
Oh, and yes you can apply for citizenship in the Netherlands but ONLY if you agree to give up your other citizenship. Anyone who tells you otherwise (that it's possible to keep your birth country citizenship) hasn't actually tried to do it recently.
What's the panic? The requirement to give up your original citizenship is very common when applying for a new one and used my most countries around the world, I wouldn't be surprised if even was handled this way in the USA and Canada. The easiest way to get a dual citizenship is to have an entitlement (by birth location or parents) to both. Buying a second passport is usually not easy.
But run an ad on a website for a month and the result is a lot less predictable. Maybe you'll see a correlation with revenue. Maybe not.
On the web it's exactly the same. If you can't find a correlation between the desired results (sales, diverted traffic, whatever) and the ad, then it isn't effective. There's no reason the web should have some special secret multiplier added because it might create some buzz about you. What works for the web is exactly the same way for ads in busses, newspapers or radio.
Musings on MySpace don't have a strong correlation with how an employee composes himself.
Don't they really? if you spend 8 hours sleeping and 8 hours at the job per day, your employer will get your wonderful personality for 50% of your conscious time. That's probably more than your kids see you. There's a really good guess, that most of your self will come true and influence your behaviour at work sooner or later. As a crass example, if I'm running a call-center for the republican party, it wouldn't be such a good idea to hire people who profess on myspace a strong involvement with the communist party and the first church of Satan. I'd be better served by hiring people with details on myspace about their sunday school and latest abortion clinic bombings.
Surprisingly enough, this approach can be pulled off quite easily in big organisations, because it uses their own weapons against them. Every employee's life is made a living hell whenever those ISO, SOX, ITIL or whatever auditors and consultants roam the offices, with their crazy requirement to document everything down to the smallest fart. Per definition, the amount of paper amassed whenever the auditor's or consualtant's budget run out is the whole documentation about all jobs.
So in case of training replacements, an employee can do no wrong, if he uses this documentation to train his replacement. If it weren't ok, the whole ISO, SOX and ITIL charade would collapse, which would be worse for management than one poorly trained replacement.
Clueful managers or collegues are no risk either. If they try to force you to deviate from the documented procedures for training, they'll be forces faster than they can say woosh to update those procedures. By definition, no clueful person ever would want to be forced to do that. If managers are really clueful, they'll never let the fired employees train replacement.
If one makes sure that every step of the training is well documented and by the book - which nearly always means very slow and useless - he's in no danger from HR. And as the fired employee has basically no other important task than protect his arse, he can spen all necessary time to go by the book.
As to the real costs for the company, who cares? From the point of view of an employer, the only reasonable thing to do with a fired employee is to forbid him to reenter the company on the day he's fired and wish him all the best for the future. No useful work can be expected from him anyway, and by getting rid of him fast saves a lot of trouble.
Walking out isn't a good solution, because probably you're just another cog in the big machine. If you refuse to train them, you'll just save them your severance pay without much effect.
To really spite them, you should make the effort an train your indian replacement, in a creative way.
Step 1 is to dig all those SOX and ISO-9000 procedures, you have been forced to fill out over the years. Per definition, they describe your work in a reproducible way. These should be the base of any training. Make your replacement memorize them an apply them in harmless cases, where they don't generate too much mayhem. This alone should easily occupy about 3 months worth of training time and prove totally worthless while being the perfect employee by the book.
Step 1a, if above mentioned documentation doesn't have enough volume, take the time and have the trainee update it. This alone should cover another 6 months.
Step 2 have your trainee sign of every thing you've told him, that he learned and understood the procedure. By the end of every day, you shoudl have at least 4 signed papers by your replacement how well you've trained him. Add copies of these signed statements to your daily work log.
Step 3 stop doing any regular work - except for problems that are not easy to fix an will appear again after you've left. The trainees and the managers should get the impression your job is just easy routine. If some manageroid comes with urgent requests, let him know that you don't have time for it, as you have to train the replacement for your severance pay and the replacement isn't ready to perform this yet. If they want it done anyway, get it in written and signed on paper, best with HR also approving that you don't have to train the replacement while doing soem other things. Give a reasonable time frame (eg Rebooting a desktop: 2 work days)
Step 4 is only valid if you get the explicit written order, that you need to stop training your replacement for some time period. Use it to to the fullest.
Step 5 you naturally work only from 9 to 5. Should your trainee be late or has to leave early, complain immediately with HR that he fails to appear. If your trainee has certain time constraints, make sure you make it as hard as possible for him to keep them.
Step 6, do all work under the account of the trainee, best let the trainee do the typing. If something gets messed up, it was him. How do you say in hindi "rm -rf/." ?
Step 7, if you can stomach it, always be nice and friendly with your trainee. Try to connect with him, make him feel comfortable. This way, he'll be easier to have him do things that have long term consequences.
With these easy steps, you should be able to cover any time necessary to get the full pay, generate a good enough paper trail to document your outstanding commitment and can do more damage than any other way. If you manage to coordinate these procedure with collegues, you might be able to teach all trainees the same crap while leaving out the importatn stuff. Nothing beats having some poor indian schmucks create 5 documentation copies of the same irrelevant procedure on how backup tapes are stored, while leaving out that the backup job needs to be run manually every day.
The EU, by and large, trusts their governments to deal with privacy and controlling it. The US, by and large, trusts the private sector.
Yes, that sums it up quite well. And given the choice, trusting the gouvernement seems more reasonable, as they already have certain monopols (law making, law enforcement, military power). So if your gouvernement becomes corrupt to a point that even basic trust isn't justified any more, your personal data will be your least concern. Another feature of gouvernements is that it keeps the level of corruption rather equal across the branches. So if you still have a few branches you trust, there's a good chance you can trust the other branches as much.
On the other side you have the private sector, where every corporation does as it thinks it can get away with. If one oversteps the boundary, they'll declare bankrupt and the same people start another corporation with a different name and the same game. Self-regulation has been proven many times in the past not to work, a very popular example for this is boiler safety in the UK and US in the late 1800s. If the major concern is the protection of weak individuals against corporations, asking the industry to play fair and nice is naïve, if so much money can be made by not playing nice. Also corporations will have a hard time being more trustworthy than the gouvernement, which can threaten the people working in the corporation. Never underestimate the persuavie power of free roaming death-squads.
To balance things out, the private sector works far better if the goal is effiency to deliver products and services. So if you want cheap and efficient data protection, go to the private sector, if you want trustworthy data protection, stay with the gouvernement.
Well, the point isn't to preotect you from getting into legal databases, the point is that a citizen you have certain rights to the data in those databases. And no, those rights don't allow you to have your criminal record deleted immediately or forbid the gouvernement to collect data about you.
These rights are more to prevent the gouvernement to sell this data to the next direct marketeer, which will use it to make personalised adds along the road you drive every morning, or to have pharmacies sell your drug purchase history to your employer.
In the worst case, all flights to the USA will have an intermediate stop in Canada, Mexico or some remote island in the atlantic. There on paper, the flight leaving the EU will end and a new flight to the USA will start and the USA get all the data they want.
But I think it more likely that either the USA drops the requirements for the EU, or they'll agree on some kind of safe-haven for the data.
Which raises the question as to what specifically the EU courts find lacking in US data security.
Basically, the main problem of the database-war between the USA and the EU is, that the EU guarantee to its citizens certain rights concerning their data, like not having it transferred to third parties, the right to review the data about oneself and some limited rights to have the data erased. To prevent clever corporations to circumvent those regulations by shipping the data outside the EU, there's a directive that personal data can only be shipped to countries, that have similar data-protection rights (so called safe havens). As you can imagine, the USA isn't really too interested in giving its own citizens data protection rights from corporations and the gouvernement and even less on granting those rights to foreigners. Thus, no data transfer of personal data of EU-citizens to the USA.
That'll help all those EU-citizens a lot, that had their data sent to the USA in the past two years to be stored for the rest of eternity is all kind of dubious databases in the USA.
But better late than never. I always though the implementation of the treaty should have been postponed until this ruling.
I'm running Ubuntu with XFCE on a Dell Inspiron 6000 with Ubuntu 5.10. From the start on, it mostly worked, except that the Intel Wireless Driver was flaky. After replacing them with current ipw2200 drivers, it works like a charm. The only remaining problem I still have, is that combined with beamers for presentations, the dual-screen setup doesn't seem to switch the VGA port to frequencies all beamers understand. In some situations I have to switch to beamer mode only.
For stuff I need to do on Windows (Juniper VPN) or badly behaved applications that redirect my network traffic (eg Cisco VPNclient) I'm using VMware. There the main problem I have is, that my Blackberry isn't able to communicate over the USB connection. That seems to be a generic problem with the way the Blackberry software handles USB-events at connection.
All in all, if you aren't afraid to recompile parts of the system, the Dell Inspiron laptops are quite useful under Linux, even if they're less stylish than IBM's or Apple's.
Quality of life are no more then 45 hours per week work time, 6 week paid vacation per year, a short commute, enough money to feed the family, keep it healthy and live comfortable and a job you don't hate most of the time.
It seems that with the general IT population getting older, even in the USA people start to realise that spending 16 hours per day in the office isn't improving their life. Also it seem to me, that people aren't really more productive than people who just spend 9 hours per day. The excess time is usally spend in goofing around or creating problems, which will take time the next day to fix.
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In what way are those counterfeit motherboards worse than the original?
Is just DFI getting no money for them or can the end user experience any difference?
Confused.
More interesting than the statistic would be, if black people play more games those of other colour living in the same neighbourhood. Probably not.
And I guess the same applies to the game producers, that the number of black game producers / programmers etc. quite well match the colour distribution of people having the right skill, training or diploma.
Most likely, the thing should be resumed as: Well-fare people have more time to play games than others and baggers in supermarkets can't program games. Apply appropriate colour distribution.
It's so obvious. Terrorism is mostly an engineering and resource management problem. No surprise terrorist will want to have engineers to solve them properly.
What's new about that?
You might be too young to remember, but in 1968 there was a big movement about changing society, authority, ditching old values etc. Today's revolutionaries are pretty tame compared to the the generation of 68. So what became of those revolutionaries and non-conformists? Today, they sit in suits and ties and are exactly those dinosaur managers you accuse of being the establishment incarnate. With Gen X and Gen Y - whatever those may be - exactly the same will happen and fresh approaches to things will be discarded like before.
No, you got it wrong. For them life is to short waste time to figure out if that moron who can't even dress properly has other redeeming values.
More generally speaking, clothes and appearance are the cues you give other people what to think about you. So if you dress like a techie, people will treat you like a techie (which is in short: Fix this and begone). This is perfectly fine, as long as you want that. However if you want to be treated differently (eg being taken seriously by people with decision power) you'll have a hard time. The easiest way to overcome this is send other signals. (eg dress in a cheap ill fitting suit with an atrocious tie for the used car salesman treatment). The extremes in this area are con men, who make it an art to appear a lot more than they are.
Clothes are just a communication protocol: Learn the spec and use it when appropriate.
In brick and mortar business, it's exactly the same, but sometimes it isn't so obvious, because the business is less open to creativity. A company who makes spoons has to produce something remotely resembling a spoon and even the greatest moron will have some clue what a spoon is. There are less parameters here to mess up compared to consulting an IT, which are mostly bullshit artistry anyway. Also, for customers, verifying the quality of a spoon is a lot easier that of an IT security concept, so the worst garbage will be refused.
> Except that we are not living in continental Europe and we don't expect to give our ID for "any reason whatsoever".
Yes, that's exactly the strange part. You give the your ID all the time, you have things nearly as good as a national ID (Driving license?), you are already registered in many Big Brother Databases (Income tax? Mobile phone records? Social Security?) and with all this the "I don't have to ID myself"-myth goes on.
>Last but not least, I think you are forgetting these IDs are readable at a LONG DISTANCE.
That's all? There a easy, cheap, low tech solution to that problem, just get a carrying case with a little meta. It might even be enough if you cut you a beer can twice the size of a credit card fold it around your card.
As to the general discussion about private data, although I personally hate it, I have to agree with David Brin, the times of privacy are over. Get used to it and adapt to it. The future doesn't lie in protecting the data, but to poison the data pool as a possible to reduce its reliability and make the access to data as fair as possible. As an example, the best way to get rid of the TSA No fly list would be to put half of the lawyers in America on it. I bet, inside a week, being on the no-fly list won't even delay your check in any more.
Could someone please explain to me, why Americans, Canadians, Brits and Australians are so afraid of a national ID card?
I live in continental Europe in a country where everyone is expected to be able to identify himself to the police at any time, in a country where there's a central voter register and if you move, you are expected to register yourself with the local town inside of 3 weeks. That sounds like the total police state, doesn't it?
Lets see how this works out in reality:
[b]Identify yourself[/b]: Usually any official document with picture is ok, in reality this means in most cases your driving license - issued nationally, your national ID card or your passport (which many people have anyway to get to the sea in summer). As most Americans have a driving license anyway, this wouldn't change a lot of things for a good part of the population. The issuers of the driving licenses might need do a little more work checking the identity to prevent issues to the wrong name or wrong dates - but this wouldn't affect the common people.
The benefit of having a national ID card on the other hand is, that there's only a small number of documents used commonly and if you have one, you are identified. No more 'Bring 3 types of ID' stuff. You have your driving license, your passport or your ID card, you are set. If those are good enough for the police, they are good enough for everyone else too (eg banks, insurances, airlines).
As those official documents are quite important, forging those, getting those in wrong names or otherwise messing with them is taken very, very seriously by law enforcement. You don't mess around with your driving license just to get some beer before you should (which wouldn't be a problem anyway, once you get a driving license you're also considered old enough to get alcohol), that would send you quite quickly to jail. This improves the general trust in those documents.
At the same time identity theft a lot less of a problem here. If you need to identify yourself, you show one of those documents and everyone is happy. Should, for instance, a bank teller have doubts about your documents, you'll just be invited for a coffee while the police quickly drops by to check your documents. If it clear, fine, if it doesn't you're in deep deep trouble. To try getting around with a fake identity, you immediately raise the stakes to the level of a federal crime, which in most cases isn't worth the risk to small time criminals.
[b]To the police:[/b] So yes, the police may ask you at any time to identify yourself. If not, they can put you in lock-up for some time (similar to the 24 hours available to the American police if one can trust crime shows) to check your identity. In day to day operation, is seems very similar no matter if there's a national ID card scheme or not. If the police doesn't like your face, they can give you a hard time.
For people without ID, there are some procedures to get identified, but those take time and effort. If you happen to be one of the unfortunates without ID, your ID got lost / stolen / whatever, you do it only once to get a temporary replacement before having the new ones issued.
[b]Central voter register:[/b] So wherever you live, you are forced to register yourself inside 3 weeks. This is done mainly for the voter register, to have an idea who can vote in what district, for the tax man and for the police who likes to have a total control over the citizens.
The voter register is a good thing, it makes fraud and manipulation at the time of elections a little harder - you ain't registered officially in the district, you ain't going to vote for it.
The tax man is unfortunately very unavoidable. No matter if there's a national ID card or not, Mr. Tax man will own you and your data - in Soviet Russia and everywhere else too.
The police might have it a little easier to start up to indulge in their totalitarian police state fantasies if they have a national ID card. But if they don't they just dig into the d
Hello there,
..but I bet it comes up in discussion if your job security or salary come into question.
> Try this instead "Never be offensive at work in any form. If you need to vent
> do it elsewhere and don't name people or divulge information you shouldn't".
I fully agree on that, but some people feel the need to be offensive and can't take it to be reasonable and polite at all times. The advice was more for those, who can't control that impulse, at least they shouldn't put it in writing.
>
No, actually not. The point is, you get evaluated on how well you reach your assigned tasks and projects. Now most of the time, the email flood contains stuff in addition to that, and if you take the time to get involved there, you end up cutting your time to do what you should in the first place.
> You could avoid anything from a minor work disaster to huge amounts of overtime
> if you read every email you get and reply judiciously if required.
And most important, if you do that you will avoid to do the work you get paid for and waste your time doing email. Remember, we're dealing here with a situation where you get swamped with email and your main task on the job isn't to handle email. At performance review time, nobody will care that you made happy a million other departments you can't bill your hours too, if you failed your projects and tasks.
A final advice I missed but was raised by other people was, to read email only 3 or 4 times a day. On one hand, that reduces the time wasted switching tasks, on the other hand, the delay often resolve problems without intervention.
Do I hate my colleagues or employer?
No, but I get paid to do some actual work and not to play email-tag. So if said colleagues can't even have the minimal courtesy to make sure the mail is addressed to right person and not some random shout in a crowd.
As to my managers, interestingly enough, denies most of those requests if they ever get put to him - if said people don't bring a project to bill the effort. And surprise, surprise, most of this important things requested via email have trouble to provide those.
To be honest, I enjoy most not turning up at all to meetings. Around here the saying goes: Either you work or you meet. I prefer to work.
First, forget about changing the people, it's futile to try. You need to find a solution that works for you under the current situation.
Second, never ever put something in writing what you wouldn't want to have to explain at court. There's no reason for it. Be offensive as you like face to face, in meeting or on the phone, but always the voice of reason in mails or chat. Never take part of bad-mouthing people in written, you simply don't know who will read it.
About mails where you're on the CC: list: ignore anything where you're only on CC. If the sender would have intended it for you, he'd put you on the To: list.
For mails where you're on the To: list, the question is if you're the only one. If there are other people on it and things need to be done based on it, assume someone else from the To: list will do the work and ignore it. If it the sender intended something specially for you, he'd should have sent you the mail addressed only to you.
Mail containing meeting minutes of meetings you didn't attend, ignore them. I something relevant to you was discussed there, you'd either have been invited or someone would have had the task to inform you about it. Wading through other peoples meeting minutes isn't productive.
All this sounds harsh and should only apply to mails you don't care about, but in reality works quite well. For the CC: I always liked to blame it on my clever spam filter that failed to highlight it as non-spam because I'm not a recipient. People get very miffed about that but somehow seem to slow to come up with good arguments against it. For the other mails you ignored, it's best to ramp that up slowly starting by the most stupid ones. The more mails you ignore, the less people expect you to read them.
If some mail asks for work to be done and you're on the To: list and you don't feel safe enough to ignore it completely, in big organisations a good way to cover your arse is to ask the original sender for a meeting of all people on the To: list to schedule resource allocations. If you are creative, add to that mail a few additional people, best some with opposing agendas. That usually puts off tasks for long enough for them to become irrelevant.
About the endless quotes and attachments, what works best is never to quote the whole thing. Always remove all quotes except a very few you are replying to. That has the advantage, that people see only what you want them to see. Most people won't find the original message in their inbox anyway. It's also a good idea to cut down on the recipient list (just leave enough to cover your backside). That divides te recipient crowd into groups with different information, which always can be useful, in case people start to blame you. Then you can fob it off to someone else you informed but who didn't act on it.
Also avoid short mails, except if they're very positive to you. Present the case with advantages and caveats. Instead of quotes, start your mail with a short - and naturally also biased in your favour - summary of the matter at hand. That forces people to read and think your mail, instead of scanning just for know thread patterns. Most likely, this will exceed most people's attention span. The additional advantage of restating all the important aspects of matter is, that people will sometimes go into discussions about that or will feel uncomfortable to disagree. I always liked to bring up matters like involving the legal department, safety and health regulations, compliances of any kind, or of everything else fails the involvement of the quality control department for affairs I wanted to get rid off. You'd be surprised how few people dare to put in writing, that they don't want to make sure those things are done properly.
This should give you in the middle term some lee-way to ignore mails as you see fit, and people will get very cautious of asking for your help. And, as a side benefits, you sometimes are able to collect mails that are always very popular if your company happens to be investigated for some misdeeds.
Cheers.
How much's the going rate for giving up the right for ever these days?
Giving the right to vote for ever happens every day - every time some poor sod in Mexico or somewhere else decides to emigrate to the home of the brave and land of the free. Arrived there, he's just an alien with no right to vote and what does he get for it?
A minimum wage job and atrocious living conditions. That's how much it is worth!
As to the right to vote in the next election, that one isn't probably even worth a cup of coffee in a cardboard cup. With the system being as stable as it is, the cattle will just be able to choose between a blueish and reddish tinted droid out of the same assembly line anyway. If you can trade that for a working iPod of any type, you come out a ahead big time.
The same thing was said about Super-8, VHS and any other film format whenever the prices for the recorders dropped and they became affordable.
In a photograph, it's usually good enough if one gets two out of the framing, lightning and content right for moderate useful results. Even blind chicken manage that from time to time, if they take enough pictures.
For a video, the same applies but for the whole duration of the clip, and then to add complexity to the matter, the clip needs also some story it tells and the sound should be ok too. The same blind chicken that manages decent pictures will manage a few decent frames in a video clip, but without fail the garbage before and after it will destroy any possible positive impression and the result will be junk. All the time.
The result will be, that with a lot more effort the usual hobbyist will manage with video only to produce material that scares away the audience. With photographs at least he can select his three good shots and be appreciated.
This revolution will again fail to happen. Video just takes too much effort to produce results that aren't total crap.
--
Confused
The article is totally worthless. It just states that some industry-sponsored organisation doesn't like paper trails. Let me guess, it's sponsored by the voting machine manufacturers or by Buy-An-Election Inc.
As to why paper trails are bad, they don't say, just that they will publish a paper really soon now. News at 11.
What's the panic? The requirement to give up your original citizenship is very common when applying for a new one and used my most countries around the world, I wouldn't be surprised if even was handled this way in the USA and Canada. The easiest way to get a dual citizenship is to have an entitlement (by birth location or parents) to both. Buying a second passport is usually not easy.
On the web it's exactly the same. If you can't find a correlation between the desired results (sales, diverted traffic, whatever) and the ad, then it isn't effective. There's no reason the web should have some special secret multiplier added because it might create some buzz about you. What works for the web is exactly the same way for ads in busses, newspapers or radio.
Don't they really? if you spend 8 hours sleeping and 8 hours at the job per day, your employer will get your wonderful personality for 50% of your conscious time. That's probably more than your kids see you. There's a really good guess, that most of your self will come true and influence your behaviour at work sooner or later. As a crass example, if I'm running a call-center for the republican party, it wouldn't be such a good idea to hire people who profess on myspace a strong involvement with the communist party and the first church of Satan. I'd be better served by hiring people with details on myspace about their sunday school and latest abortion clinic bombings.
Surprisingly enough, this approach can be pulled off quite easily in big organisations, because it uses their own weapons against them. Every employee's life is made a living hell whenever those ISO, SOX, ITIL or whatever auditors and consultants roam the offices, with their crazy requirement to document everything down to the smallest fart. Per definition, the amount of paper amassed whenever the auditor's or consualtant's budget run out is the whole documentation about all jobs.
So in case of training replacements, an employee can do no wrong, if he uses this documentation to train his replacement. If it weren't ok, the whole ISO, SOX and ITIL charade would collapse, which would be worse for management than one poorly trained replacement.
Clueful managers or collegues are no risk either. If they try to force you to deviate from the documented procedures for training, they'll be forces faster than they can say woosh to update those procedures. By definition, no clueful person ever would want to be forced to do that. If managers are really clueful, they'll never let the fired employees train replacement.
If one makes sure that every step of the training is well documented and by the book - which nearly always means very slow and useless - he's in no danger from HR. And as the fired employee has basically no other important task than protect his arse, he can spen all necessary time to go by the book.
As to the real costs for the company, who cares? From the point of view of an employer, the only reasonable thing to do with a fired employee is to forbid him to reenter the company on the day he's fired and wish him all the best for the future. No useful work can be expected from him anyway, and by getting rid of him fast saves a lot of trouble.
Walking out isn't a good solution, because probably you're just another cog in the big machine. If you refuse to train them, you'll just save them your severance pay without much effect.
/." ?
To really spite them, you should make the effort an train your indian replacement, in a creative way.
Step 1 is to dig all those SOX and ISO-9000 procedures, you have been forced to fill out over the years. Per definition, they describe your work in a reproducible way. These should be the base of any training. Make your replacement memorize them an apply them in harmless cases, where they don't generate too much mayhem. This alone should easily occupy about 3 months worth of training time and prove totally worthless while being the perfect employee by the book.
Step 1a, if above mentioned documentation doesn't have enough volume, take the time and have the trainee update it. This alone should cover another 6 months.
Step 2 have your trainee sign of every thing you've told him, that he learned and understood the procedure. By the end of every day, you shoudl have at least 4 signed papers by your replacement how well you've trained him. Add copies of these signed statements to your daily work log.
Step 3 stop doing any regular work - except for problems that are not easy to fix an will appear again after you've left. The trainees and the managers should get the impression your job is just easy routine. If some manageroid comes with urgent requests, let him know that you don't have time for it, as you have to train the replacement for your severance pay and the replacement isn't ready to perform this yet. If they want it done anyway, get it in written and signed on paper, best with HR also approving that you don't have to train the replacement while doing soem other things. Give a reasonable time frame (eg Rebooting a desktop: 2 work days)
Step 4 is only valid if you get the explicit written order, that you need to stop training your replacement for some time period. Use it to to the fullest.
Step 5 you naturally work only from 9 to 5. Should your trainee be late or has to leave early, complain immediately with HR that he fails to appear. If your trainee has certain time constraints, make sure you make it as hard as possible for him to keep them.
Step 6, do all work under the account of the trainee, best let the trainee do the typing. If something gets messed up, it was him. How do you say in hindi "rm -rf
Step 7, if you can stomach it, always be nice and friendly with your trainee. Try to connect with him, make him feel comfortable. This way, he'll be easier to have him do things that have long term consequences.
With these easy steps, you should be able to cover any time necessary to get the full pay, generate a good enough paper trail to document your outstanding commitment and can do more damage than any other way. If you manage to coordinate these procedure with collegues, you might be able to teach all trainees the same crap while leaving out the importatn stuff. Nothing beats having some poor indian schmucks create 5 documentation copies of the same irrelevant procedure on how backup tapes are stored, while leaving out that the backup job needs to be run manually every day.
Yes, that sums it up quite well. And given the choice, trusting the gouvernement seems more reasonable, as they already have certain monopols (law making, law enforcement, military power). So if your gouvernement becomes corrupt to a point that even basic trust isn't justified any more, your personal data will be your least concern. Another feature of gouvernements is that it keeps the level of corruption rather equal across the branches. So if you still have a few branches you trust, there's a good chance you can trust the other branches as much.
On the other side you have the private sector, where every corporation does as it thinks it can get away with. If one oversteps the boundary, they'll declare bankrupt and the same people start another corporation with a different name and the same game. Self-regulation has been proven many times in the past not to work, a very popular example for this is boiler safety in the UK and US in the late 1800s. If the major concern is the protection of weak individuals against corporations, asking the industry to play fair and nice is naïve, if so much money can be made by not playing nice. Also corporations will have a hard time being more trustworthy than the gouvernement, which can threaten the people working in the corporation. Never underestimate the persuavie power of free roaming death-squads.
To balance things out, the private sector works far better if the goal is effiency to deliver products and services. So if you want cheap and efficient data protection, go to the private sector, if you want trustworthy data protection, stay with the gouvernement.
Well, the point isn't to preotect you from getting into legal databases, the point is that a citizen you have certain rights to the data in those databases. And no, those rights don't allow you to have your criminal record deleted immediately or forbid the gouvernement to collect data about you.
These rights are more to prevent the gouvernement to sell this data to the next direct marketeer, which will use it to make personalised adds along the road you drive every morning, or to have pharmacies sell your drug purchase history to your employer.
In the worst case, all flights to the USA will have an intermediate stop in Canada, Mexico or some remote island in the atlantic. There on paper, the flight leaving the EU will end and a new flight to the USA will start and the USA get all the data they want.
But I think it more likely that either the USA drops the requirements for the EU, or they'll agree on some kind of safe-haven for the data.
Basically, the main problem of the database-war between the USA and the EU is, that the EU guarantee to its citizens certain rights concerning their data, like not having it transferred to third parties, the right to review the data about oneself and some limited rights to have the data erased. To prevent clever corporations to circumvent those regulations by shipping the data outside the EU, there's a directive that personal data can only be shipped to countries, that have similar data-protection rights (so called safe havens). As you can imagine, the USA isn't really too interested in giving its own citizens data protection rights from corporations and the gouvernement and even less on granting those rights to foreigners. Thus, no data transfer of personal data of EU-citizens to the USA.
That'll help all those EU-citizens a lot, that had their data sent to the USA in the past two years to be stored for the rest of eternity is all kind of dubious databases in the USA.
But better late than never. I always though the implementation of the treaty should have been postponed until this ruling.
I'm running Ubuntu with XFCE on a Dell Inspiron 6000 with Ubuntu 5.10. From the start on, it mostly worked, except that the Intel Wireless Driver was flaky. After replacing them with current ipw2200 drivers, it works like a charm. The only remaining problem I still have, is that combined with beamers for presentations, the dual-screen setup doesn't seem to switch the VGA port to frequencies all beamers understand. In some situations I have to switch to beamer mode only.
This site http://rtr.ca/dell_i9300/ was a really big help.
For stuff I need to do on Windows (Juniper VPN) or badly behaved applications that redirect my network traffic (eg Cisco VPNclient) I'm using VMware. There the main problem I have is, that my Blackberry isn't able to communicate over the USB connection. That seems to be a generic problem with the way the Blackberry software handles USB-events at connection.
All in all, if you aren't afraid to recompile parts of the system, the Dell Inspiron laptops are quite useful under Linux, even if they're less stylish than IBM's or Apple's.
Quality of life are no more then 45 hours per week work time, 6 week paid vacation per year, a short commute, enough money to feed the family, keep it healthy and live comfortable and a job you don't hate most of the time.
It seems that with the general IT population getting older, even in the USA people start to realise that spending 16 hours per day in the office isn't improving their life. Also it seem to me, that people aren't really more productive than people who just spend 9 hours per day. The excess time is usally spend in goofing around or creating problems, which will take time the next day to fix.