[...] Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air...."
See second paragraph: "The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:"
...emphasis mine, which kind of explains the rest. Being a Humanities PhD? The tech equivalent is kind of like being a a PMP-certified project manager now, or being MCSE-certified admin in 2001. There's too many out there, more on the way, and so the market has no room for you.
Now if you have a PhD in chemistry, engineering, or a field where there is some chance of using it to get a kick-ass job out in private industry? Suddenly your chances of landing a solid job in academia (esp. with industry/applied experience) isn't so dismal, and any uni with a half-intelligent leadership know that in competing w/ the outside world, they have to offer something at least half as attractive.
As a graduate student in chemistry, I have to say that your naiveté is charming. It's not as bad as the humanities, I'm sure, but even with tenure an academic scientist is in a constant struggle to keep their job. Not as in, "If I keep doing my job well, everything will be fine," but, "If I keep doing my job well, spend all of my time writing for funding and am lucky enough to be in the 6% of applicants that are funded, I'll keep my job until the grant runs up."
In chemistry, at least, Academia does not compete with industry for applicants. The draw of Academia is supposed to be "prestige" and freedom to choose your own research direction; money hardly enters the equation at all.
you know the person that has to open the bag and checks sure as hell doesnt want to open up a bag and find a vibrator.
Uh... people who's job it is to screen for dangerous stuff... are afraid of vibrators?
Absolutely. Bombs in checked luggage don't exist (practically, the chances of any of these screeners ever finding a bomb during their entire career is effectively zero). Vibrators, however, do exist. Would you want to touch some stranger's vibrator? Who knows if they clean it, if they have STDs, ick?
Is their recourse for us when the patent office patents nature?
There is recourse. You can shell out obscene amount of money to take the patentholder to court and have the patent invalidated. The patent office seems ok with this and is working on the principle of "grant patents for everything and let the courts sort them out". You can see how well that philosophy is working.
I was rejected at some works tests because high IQ (98 percentil) and i was told by HR pros high IQ is a high problem to find a job.
No you weren't. You have never submitted your IQ to your employer. You also can not string together a coherent thought so it is highly unlikely you are in the 98th percentile.
While you're likely correct about the OP, some jobs do test IQ. My father had a consulting company that evaluated executive level applicants with a variety of psychological tests and a standard IQ test was among the battery. He never said anything about a high IQ being a hindrance, though, and I doubt it really ever is.
I hope the country has the capital and the expertise to develop those new wells, because there's no way any foreign oil company or investor will even dream of getting involved.
I'm curious to see how this works out, because they do have the cash to pull this off if they don't fritter it away. The free market is great at finding and eliminating inefficiencies, but don't forget that profit is an inefficiency, too (especially in areas with natural monopolies or high barriers to entry: profit can inflate the price well beyond what bloated bureaucracy can).
the one good thing about lawyers is that they replace violence
don't get me wrong, i hate the intellectual property mess
but at least this bullshit is playing out in boring courtrooms voluntarily by sweaty guys in overcompensating suits
rather than by kids handed an implement of death and pointed at each other, too young and too stupid to know they are wasting their lives on bullshit, as it has been in centuries past
I don't know. The aristocracy used to have decency enough to thin their numbers with duels over petty disputes. They could bring that system back.
I know a lot of soldiers. They wouldn't fire on the American people.
But you know who would fire on American people? The same people who are trained that all civilians are criminals worthy of a beatdown. The same people who are getting hand-me-downs from the military. In the case of an widespread insurrection in the US, the military may abandon the federal government, but the police's wet dream would come true.
Of course. They keep saying that 'users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos.' That's not really the issue, though. Nobody claimed that they were taking ownership of the photos, only that you're granting them a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service...
So they've added the right to transfer or sub-license your photos. They've not claimed that they own your photos, but they claim to be able to sell them as they please.
Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the Instagram Services. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.
Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, except that you can control who can view certain of your Content and activities on the Service as described in the Service's Privacy Policy, available here: http://instagram.com/legal/privacy/.
I'm just trying to express the rationale for using them as a tool to improve the experience of the majority of customers until a capacity upgrade can be completed.
Bingo. This is what caps are for and they do a great job. The ISPs will rake in record profits and pay out massive bonuses instead of upgrading capacity. Caps are the reason why our shitty network infrastructure still works as well as it does. Caps will also be used to postpone capacity upgrades as long as possible.
1.5 millibytes per second? Capitalization matters with units. (Though I love the ironic statement afterwards! I could have resisted the pedantry had you not said that.)
All I need to do is poison DNS pretending to be your pop3 server, then Google will connect to me instead of you. I now have your pop3 login credentials given to me by Google. Now I pop-before-smtp against your server and can send all the authenticated spam from your server I want.
Or you configure your server in a sane way and don't allow plaintext authentication. Google will authenticate using APOP if required, which will protect your credentials from a MITM.
I'll accept this, assuming you aren't trying to sneak through something extra that google doesn't have.
Your client must have no information about your server's self-signed certificate, and must accept all self-signed certificates as equally valid.
Or Google could just fix their broken approach.
This is the same shit they pull with Android, too. The options are to trust a CA signed certificate with all of the best security practices in place or throw out best practices and blindly trust all (self-signed) certificates without any memory of which certificates have been seen before. With this behavior in place, it's surprising that they don't sell certificate signing.
This is fairly old, and I haven't read any of his other stuff, but I thought La invención de Morel by Adolfo Casares was very good. It's a fairly short book, but it is very well written and doesn't feel dated, which is weird for that epoch of sci-fi.
I was really psyched about micropayments, too. Paying for access is no problem. I already pay $12/month as a donation to the author of my the adblock program I use. I know that I don't have to, but I appreciate the work he does and I want him to be able to keep it up. I'd gladly pay a small amount per page view to help pay the bills so that sites I like can stay up.
But ads are not a solution that I can support. Blinking, noisemaking, obnoxious ads are something that I won't tolerate. Advertising is turning this world into an uglier, more disgusting place and it's a shame that so many people are on board with it.
This is actually a good topic for "correlation is not causation". It is impairment, and not BAC, that is the cause of an increased chance of accident. While impairment and BAC are very closely related, they are not identical.
If BAC / tolerance = impairment and we can't test for tolerance, then assuming that BAC = impairment and testing solely on BAC gives us a failed test. If, as you say, "we're trying to place a known and logical limit on our society that will best protect the largest amount of people" then testing on BAC gives us the uncle false-positive and, more dangerously, the mom false-negative.
Since we can directly test for impairment with a Field Sobriety Test (which would conveniently allow testing for non-alcohol related impairment), that would be the logical limit you suggest. It's not BAC that we should care about, but actual impairment. BAC is just the weapon of the modern temperance movement (MADD, et al).
"My religion forbids me to wear a badge, so forcing me to wear one is a prohibition of the free exercise of that religion, and a violation of my rights. I should therefore be able to attend school without a badge".
Is that the line of reasoning here? Fine. Now replace "a badge" with "pants".
Strawman much? Now replace "a badge" with "a device that allows school administrators to execute student at the push of a button". See, it works both ways, which is why strawman arguments are stupid and invalid. Try again.
You are not describing the typical graduate degree. The typical graduate degree does not include serious research, is 30-40 credit hours, and costs about 50% more per hour than an undergrad. They are handed out like hotcakes nowadays.
Fine, the typical NON-USA (or Indian) graduate degree. Other parts of the world still make us work hard for them.
It's not even that. He just redefined "graduate degree" to mean only "Masters degree" and then continued his post as if a doctoral degree isn't a graduate degree. Just arbitrary semantics; no real point. You still have to work for a US doctoral degree. I'm not familiar with masters degrees, though.
Thirteen is old enough to think through things rationally and question social mores. Filesharing is largely a victimless crime and the thread of reasoning for it carrying a punishment is tenuous at best. It's easy to see how a person with a well developed sense of right and wrong can think filesharing isn't wrong.
Anyway, he was downloading old music, right? Some of it was from artists that are now dead. The bigger stretch is saying that it's wrong to deprive media executives income derived from the works of other dead people. It takes a much more twisted sense of right and wrong to justify eternal (forever minus a day) style of copyright with massive financial or criminal penalties.
But that's not how it works with electricity. You're billed by how much electricity crosses the meter attached to your house. The cost of power lost in distribution is certainly passed on to the customers, but it's not passed along as metered usage.
Likewise, if the ISP's network is inefficient and expensive to maintain, that would reasonably affect the rates that you're billed. But their inefficiencies are invisible to you and outside your control, so they shouldn't be directly counted among your usage.
But Scott Adams is right, nobody has such a right, but it's something that is worth fighting for nonetheless.
And thus you've basically affirmed the issues that the Federalists had over the Bill of Rights that at some point in the future idiots like you would claim that if it's not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights that the right doesn't exist. You, Scott Adams and the Supreme Court are all wrong on this issue.
I agree, but do you really think things would be better if we didn't have a Bill of Rights? If anything, the Bill of Rights limited the damage that has been done.
The absence of a Bill of Rights would be the equivalent of only having the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Since those were disregarded almost immediately, we'd have nothing positively affirming the first eight and it would be assumed that we had no rights at all except what the government decides we have.
Frankly, at least government can be held accountable in democracy.
Good luck with the corporations though. And unlike governments, corporations don't have to take care of people either.
Corporations are designed to avoid accountability. Legally, they exist to stop the owners and officers from personally feeling the (negative) financial consequences of their actions. Structurally, they're set up so that no one person, or group of people, have to take the blame for malicious actions.
If the malicious action happens to be illegal, it's possible to go after the people responsible, but most likely the company gets a pitiful fine and all is forgiven.
So it's no accident that corporations can't be held responsible. That's why they even exist.
A bit OT, but the one thing I really miss after ditching my iPhone and getting a Galaxy Nexus is Firewall IP. (For those who haven't used it), it was an egress firewall that would prompt (and save the results) for all connections by app/server/port. It was great for blocking an app's unnecessary network connections (pulling ads, phoning home, doing fuck knows what) while allowing the necessary connections to be made.
All of the firewalls on Android seem to only allow you to block all connections or none. Is there a Firewall IP-like app for Android that I missed?
Slashdot Mirror
[...] Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. ..."
See second paragraph: "The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:"
...emphasis mine, which kind of explains the rest. Being a Humanities PhD? The tech equivalent is kind of like being a a PMP-certified project manager now, or being MCSE-certified admin in 2001. There's too many out there, more on the way, and so the market has no room for you.
Now if you have a PhD in chemistry, engineering, or a field where there is some chance of using it to get a kick-ass job out in private industry? Suddenly your chances of landing a solid job in academia (esp. with industry/applied experience) isn't so dismal, and any uni with a half-intelligent leadership know that in competing w/ the outside world, they have to offer something at least half as attractive.
As a graduate student in chemistry, I have to say that your naiveté is charming. It's not as bad as the humanities, I'm sure, but even with tenure an academic scientist is in a constant struggle to keep their job. Not as in, "If I keep doing my job well, everything will be fine," but, "If I keep doing my job well, spend all of my time writing for funding and am lucky enough to be in the 6% of applicants that are funded, I'll keep my job until the grant runs up."
In chemistry, at least, Academia does not compete with industry for applicants. The draw of Academia is supposed to be "prestige" and freedom to choose your own research direction; money hardly enters the equation at all.
you know the person that has to open the bag and checks sure as hell doesnt want to open up a bag and find a vibrator.
Uh... people who's job it is to screen for dangerous stuff... are afraid of vibrators?
Absolutely. Bombs in checked luggage don't exist (practically, the chances of any of these screeners ever finding a bomb during their entire career is effectively zero). Vibrators, however, do exist. Would you want to touch some stranger's vibrator? Who knows if they clean it, if they have STDs, ick?
Is their recourse for us when the patent office patents nature?
There is recourse. You can shell out obscene amount of money to take the patentholder to court and have the patent invalidated. The patent office seems ok with this and is working on the principle of "grant patents for everything and let the courts sort them out". You can see how well that philosophy is working.
I was rejected at some works tests because high IQ (98 percentil) and i was told by HR pros high IQ is a high problem to find a job.
No you weren't. You have never submitted your IQ to your employer. You also can not string together a coherent thought so it is highly unlikely you are in the 98th percentile.
While you're likely correct about the OP, some jobs do test IQ. My father had a consulting company that evaluated executive level applicants with a variety of psychological tests and a standard IQ test was among the battery. He never said anything about a high IQ being a hindrance, though, and I doubt it really ever is.
I hope the country has the capital and the expertise to develop those new wells, because there's no way any foreign oil company or investor will even dream of getting involved.
I'm curious to see how this works out, because they do have the cash to pull this off if they don't fritter it away. The free market is great at finding and eliminating inefficiencies, but don't forget that profit is an inefficiency, too (especially in areas with natural monopolies or high barriers to entry: profit can inflate the price well beyond what bloated bureaucracy can).
the one good thing about lawyers is that they replace violence
don't get me wrong, i hate the intellectual property mess
but at least this bullshit is playing out in boring courtrooms voluntarily by sweaty guys in overcompensating suits
rather than by kids handed an implement of death and pointed at each other, too young and too stupid to know they are wasting their lives on bullshit, as it has been in centuries past
I don't know. The aristocracy used to have decency enough to thin their numbers with duels over petty disputes. They could bring that system back.
I know a lot of soldiers. They wouldn't fire on the American people.
But you know who would fire on American people? The same people who are trained that all civilians are criminals worthy of a beatdown. The same people who are getting hand-me-downs from the military. In the case of an widespread insurrection in the US, the military may abandon the federal government, but the police's wet dream would come true.
I know what you meant. I was just poking a little fun.
I completely sympathize, too: until very recently, that's the fastest I could get here.
Of course. They keep saying that 'users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos.' That's not really the issue, though. Nobody claimed that they were taking ownership of the photos, only that you're granting them a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service...
So they've added the right to transfer or sub-license your photos. They've not claimed that they own your photos, but they claim to be able to sell them as they please.
Here's their old ToS:
Instagram does NOT claim ANY ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the Instagram Services. By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.
and the new, updated ToS:
Instagram does not claim ownership of any Content that you post on or through the Service. Instead, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service, except that you can control who can view certain of your Content and activities on the Service as described in the Service's Privacy Policy, available here: http://instagram.com/legal/privacy/.
I'm just trying to express the rationale for using them as a tool to improve the experience of the majority of customers until a capacity upgrade can be completed.
Bingo. This is what caps are for and they do a great job. The ISPs will rake in record profits and pay out massive bonuses instead of upgrading capacity. Caps are the reason why our shitty network infrastructure still works as well as it does. Caps will also be used to postpone capacity upgrades as long as possible.
1.5 mBps (yes you read that right)
1.5 millibytes per second? Capitalization matters with units. (Though I love the ironic statement afterwards! I could have resisted the pedantry had you not said that.)
All I need to do is poison DNS pretending to be your pop3 server, then Google will connect to me instead of you. I now have your pop3 login credentials given to me by Google.
Now I pop-before-smtp against your server and can send all the authenticated spam from your server I want.
Or you configure your server in a sane way and don't allow plaintext authentication. Google will authenticate using APOP if required, which will protect your credentials from a MITM.
I'll accept this, assuming you aren't trying to sneak through something extra that google doesn't have.
Your client must have no information about your server's self-signed certificate, and must accept all self-signed certificates as equally valid.
Or Google could just fix their broken approach.
This is the same shit they pull with Android, too. The options are to trust a CA signed certificate with all of the best security practices in place or throw out best practices and blindly trust all (self-signed) certificates without any memory of which certificates have been seen before. With this behavior in place, it's surprising that they don't sell certificate signing.
Well, there's your problem. Your GPS appears to be made out of gelatin. You should see to that.
This is fairly old, and I haven't read any of his other stuff, but I thought La invención de Morel by Adolfo Casares was very good. It's a fairly short book, but it is very well written and doesn't feel dated, which is weird for that epoch of sci-fi.
Anyway, I heartily second this question!
I was really psyched about micropayments, too. Paying for access is no problem. I already pay $12/month as a donation to the author of my the adblock program I use. I know that I don't have to, but I appreciate the work he does and I want him to be able to keep it up. I'd gladly pay a small amount per page view to help pay the bills so that sites I like can stay up.
But ads are not a solution that I can support. Blinking, noisemaking, obnoxious ads are something that I won't tolerate. Advertising is turning this world into an uglier, more disgusting place and it's a shame that so many people are on board with it.
This is actually a good topic for "correlation is not causation". It is impairment, and not BAC, that is the cause of an increased chance of accident. While impairment and BAC are very closely related, they are not identical.
If BAC / tolerance = impairment and we can't test for tolerance, then assuming that BAC = impairment and testing solely on BAC gives us a failed test. If, as you say, "we're trying to place a known and logical limit on our society that will best protect the largest amount of people" then testing on BAC gives us the uncle false-positive and, more dangerously, the mom false-negative.
Since we can directly test for impairment with a Field Sobriety Test (which would conveniently allow testing for non-alcohol related impairment), that would be the logical limit you suggest. It's not BAC that we should care about, but actual impairment. BAC is just the weapon of the modern temperance movement (MADD, et al).
"My religion forbids me to wear a badge, so forcing me to wear one is a prohibition of the free exercise of that religion, and a violation of my rights. I should therefore be able to attend school without a badge".
Is that the line of reasoning here? Fine. Now replace "a badge" with "pants".
Strawman much? Now replace "a badge" with "a device that allows school administrators to execute student at the push of a button". See, it works both ways, which is why strawman arguments are stupid and invalid. Try again.
You are not describing the typical graduate degree. The typical graduate degree does not include serious research, is 30-40 credit hours, and costs about 50% more per hour than an undergrad. They are handed out like hotcakes nowadays.
Fine, the typical NON-USA (or Indian) graduate degree. Other parts of the world still make us work hard for them.
It's not even that. He just redefined "graduate degree" to mean only "Masters degree" and then continued his post as if a doctoral degree isn't a graduate degree. Just arbitrary semantics; no real point. You still have to work for a US doctoral degree. I'm not familiar with masters degrees, though.
Thirteen is old enough to think through things rationally and question social mores. Filesharing is largely a victimless crime and the thread of reasoning for it carrying a punishment is tenuous at best. It's easy to see how a person with a well developed sense of right and wrong can think filesharing isn't wrong.
Anyway, he was downloading old music, right? Some of it was from artists that are now dead. The bigger stretch is saying that it's wrong to deprive media executives income derived from the works of other dead people. It takes a much more twisted sense of right and wrong to justify eternal (forever minus a day) style of copyright with massive financial or criminal penalties.
But that's not how it works with electricity. You're billed by how much electricity crosses the meter attached to your house. The cost of power lost in distribution is certainly passed on to the customers, but it's not passed along as metered usage.
Likewise, if the ISP's network is inefficient and expensive to maintain, that would reasonably affect the rates that you're billed. But their inefficiencies are invisible to you and outside your control, so they shouldn't be directly counted among your usage.
But Scott Adams is right, nobody has such a right, but it's something that is worth fighting for nonetheless.
And thus you've basically affirmed the issues that the Federalists had over the Bill of Rights that at some point in the future idiots like you would claim that if it's not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights that the right doesn't exist. You, Scott Adams and the Supreme Court are all wrong on this issue.
I agree, but do you really think things would be better if we didn't have a Bill of Rights? If anything, the Bill of Rights limited the damage that has been done.
The absence of a Bill of Rights would be the equivalent of only having the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Since those were disregarded almost immediately, we'd have nothing positively affirming the first eight and it would be assumed that we had no rights at all except what the government decides we have.
Frankly, at least government can be held accountable in democracy.
Good luck with the corporations though. And unlike governments, corporations don't have to take care of people either.
Corporations are designed to avoid accountability. Legally, they exist to stop the owners and officers from personally feeling the (negative) financial consequences of their actions. Structurally, they're set up so that no one person, or group of people, have to take the blame for malicious actions.
If the malicious action happens to be illegal, it's possible to go after the people responsible, but most likely the company gets a pitiful fine and all is forgiven.
So it's no accident that corporations can't be held responsible. That's why they even exist.
A bit OT, but the one thing I really miss after ditching my iPhone and getting a Galaxy Nexus is Firewall IP. (For those who haven't used it), it was an egress firewall that would prompt (and save the results) for all connections by app/server/port. It was great for blocking an app's unnecessary network connections (pulling ads, phoning home, doing fuck knows what) while allowing the necessary connections to be made.
All of the firewalls on Android seem to only allow you to block all connections or none. Is there a Firewall IP-like app for Android that I missed?
I've stuck with Zebra F-402 pens for a while now. They're readily available, comfortable to write with, and make clean consistent lines.
The line is 0.7 mm, though, so not thin enough for his tastes. Ink blobbing is an issue with the Zebra pens, but they're not the worst I've seen.