"Change the education industry"? That's a strange choice of words, considering Khan Academy coursework is free and so is K-12 education in America. Should we even be thinking of educating our children as an industry?
My point was that I never check anything by choice. A laptop? Camera lenses? None of that stuff takes up much space. If you really need to bring more than one suit, I guess that might make things difficult.
Ha! It just occured to me that I posted the above immediately after watching an entire half-season of The Wire. Folks might want to check out that show to see how things go when managers are encouraged to play the stats game.
Seriously, though, the interesting question is: If you are going to be evaluated on your job performance, would you prefer it to be done in part using an automated system as described in the patent, or completely by a manager who may have no effective way of understanding your programming work?
Personally? I'll take the manager. Fuck the automated system.
Why? Because the automated system isn't ever going to be given the authority to assign you promotions, or give you raises, or dole out work. The manager is still going to do those things, whether there's an automated system or not. The purpose of the system is to give the manager information by which to make decisions.
What that means is, without the automated system, you have a silly, ignorant manager who doesn't know his job. With the system, you have a silly, ignorant manager who thinks he knows his job and can claim to have "hard numbers" to back up his decisions. And because he has the numbers, his supervisors will believe him.
But as we all know, you can spin numbers any way you want. If you have bad numbers and your manager doesn't like you, your job is on the line. If you have bad numbers and he likes you, he can probably dig around until he finds a trend that he says indicates you're showing improvement. If he really likes you, your bad numbers indicate that you're not being given the work that will really allow you to shine. On the other hand, if he really doesn't like you, your good numbers mean you're overworked, you make too many commits because you don't take direction, or you're a control freak and you're constantly rewriting other people's code. Or the good numbers simply disappear and he tells his boss you're average and you're not causing any problems.
What's more, you will never, ever dispute your numbers, because if you can successfully dispute them, it will mean that all the money spent on the automated system was wasted -- and the people who authorized the purchase of the system will never let that be known. It simply won't happen.
So yeah, fuck the automated system. And furthermore, fuck any kind of bullshit "metrics" that are really just CYA for the middle management class. You know what a manager's job is? To manage. If you're not qualified to do that, then why should you be given software that makes you sound as if you are?
How much stuff do you need to bring? I usually travel with a little shoulder-bag (like a nylon man-purse) and one bag that's sized to fit in the overhead compartment. That's it, and I usually end up feeling like I overpacked.
You're joking, but in all seriousness we always hear this kind of talk from "former execs."
"Former exec from Company A, which is known to have a near-indomitable lead in Market B, says that Market B is irrelevant and that anyone who isn't in Market C is missing the boat."
Scratch that former exec and you'll either find someone who just landed himself a new job at Company D, whose business plan absolutely depends on Market C -- or else who really, really desperately wants to get hired there.
It's your choice whether to be offended by people calling you (or others) mean words, or to be offended by scatological humor, or by posters of "Praise Jesus for everything good in your life". Most of us reflexively DO feel offended, and are making an unconscious choice to do so.
So when I pick my six-year-old daughter up at the library and she tells me what she saw when she was there, I should give her the old "it was wrong of you to be offended" lecture? Or maybe I should explain to her how fortunate she is to live in a society where the Constitution gives that man the right to watch those movies at the library.
Back to your original comment. If Bob is watching porn in the library, you can choose to look the other way, you can ask that they move
But apparently you can't -- that's the gist of the story here. It's hard to look the other way when someone is watching porn movies a few feet away from you, and the librarian refused to ask him to move.
It seems like it's more of a business decision on the part of the library
But the library isn't a "business," it's a public institution run for the benefit of the public. It has a mission and a purpose, and IMO neither of those include providing a free porno theater for patrons.
B/c it's unsanitary, i.e. damaging to the public health. You can't piss, shit or spit on public property, either.
If you own the movie theater at the mall you can't screen porn movies there, either, and that's a rule governing your own, private business. Why should the government be allowed to tell private businesses what they can do but it can't set standards for the institutions that it operates itself?
Your suggestion is absurd. A library's purpose is to make informational available to the public. Its purpose is NOT to provide a place to have sex. It's also NOT a place to eat 5 course meal. It's NOT a place to sleep for the winter. There are plenty of activities NOT suitable in a library. Looking at information however IS an activity that a library is intended to facilitate.
I totally agree. I disagree that watching hardcore porn videos in a public place can reasonably be defended as "looking at information," however.
There are laws that say the corner store can only shelve porn magazines in areas where they can't be accessed/seen by children. Why, when patrons suggest the public library should follow the same standard, are people suddenly waving the Constitution around?
The right not to be offended is not enumerated in the Constitution.
So I don't have a right to expect that my children can visit the public library and not be exposed to hardcore pornography. But people do have a right to behave like inhuman, drooling beasts, engaging in whatever whim suits their fancy, anywhere they choose, in public, in front of children, or anywhere else, because there's nothing in the Constitution that says they can't? That's a strange sort of society you envision, my friend.
Show me where your "right to not be offended" is enumerated in the Constitution please, because I just can't seem to find it in my copy.
So, again, why not just let people fuck on the tables at the library if they want to? Let's do away with this whole concept of "being offended," because apparently it was already outdated as of 1776.
No one is fucking on the tables. This is about what people are allowed to look at on the computer. That's it.
And normal, rational people shouldn't have to witness graphic sex acts when they go to the library. It's you who doesn't seem to understand the point being made.
If porn is filtered for being objectionable today, tomorrow it will be sexual education sites, LGBT rights websites, Erowid, a violent kickboxing site, fringe political sites, conspiracy theorists, supposedly "racist" material, gun sites, men's mags, Fark, or who knows what else.
Or not. The problem with slippery slope arguments is that an objection that seems rational can quickly turn into a ridiculous overexaggeration that distorts the actual issues and derails the whole debate. (See what I did there?)
I really don't understand why any place adults go must be "family friendly". Go to the park if you want a family picnic. To make a library "family-friendly" would mean to remove anything anyone finds objectionable*, which includes a lot of philosophy, war books, medical books, sex education, yes erotica too. You want to turn a library into the Disney channel.
Personally, I don't think a library should be any kind of TV channel. It should be a library. When more people visit the library to check out DVDs than books and it's so noisy that it's impossible to study, the library has already veered way off track, IMO.
As for "objectionable material," I think teens peeking between the covers of Tropic of Cancer is a far, far cry from young children seeing videos of women being violently anally penetrated and ejaculated upon when they weren't at the library looking for such material to begin with.
In my local branch library, there really is nowhere where they could put computers that would have this degree of privacy. It's a very open floorplan and there are children all over the place, all the time. (In fact, if I have any complaint about my library, it's that it could actually use a little more old-fashioned shushing and return the focus back to study materials -- it seems to have devolved into a combination video store and daycare.)
In terms of amazingly bad crazy drivers and pedestrians no American city can touch it.
Like I said, further south it gets far crazier than Rome. But the thing about it is, I never saw a car accident. American cities are designed for constant automobile traffic flow, and people are slamming into each other all the time. In Itality, with its "amazingly bad crazy drivers," everybody seems to negotiate the roads just fine.
often on mopeds, I've never heard of a single stroke motor, perhaps you mean single cylinder, 2 stroke?
Is that really considered a derivative work just because they can see the source? Genuinely curious here.
It could be. As the poster below says, it kind of depends on who has the most lawyers. SCO argued that Linux violated SCO copyrights because its source code tarball contained similar-looking header files.
I confess I only skimmed TFA -- this is Slashdot, after all.
But I'm not sure I understand the argument that is being made here. If Sony is really trying to "rewrite Busybox" -- which makes it sound like they're going to look at the Busybox code and write a new version that does the same thing in a different way -- then surely that's a derivative work of Busybox and it's a copyright violation.
If, on the other hand, Sony is planning to write a Busybox replacement from scratch -- what's wrong with that? Are companies not entitled to write code? How is that "violating licenses with impunity"?
If Sony is planning to do a clean-room re-engineering of Busybox -- what's wrong with that? Isn't that essentially what Linux kernel developers have done for all kinds of devices? Again, how is that "violating licenses with impunity"?
Sony wants to not use GPL-licensed code in its proprietary products. What could be more clear? Would you rather they used it without complying with the license?
Eh? I've been to Rome several times. It has nothing on any American city. Unless you count single-stroke mopeds, I guess. The further south you go (Napoli, Sicily), the less the traffic rules apply, but still that's sitcom comedy compared to a really nasty snarl on the L.A. freeways.
No, actually Janimal was bang on. Answer his argument if you can, rather than making specious non-sequiturs.
OK. I download some MP3s from a friend because I want to hear them. I decide I don't really like them very much and don't listen to them anymore. How is the value of the work diminished to its creator? It isn't. I probably wasn't going to buy the MP3s to begin with, and having confirmed that I don't really like the music, I won't. No net gain or loss to either myself or the creator.
On the other hand, if I do like the music, who's to say I won't buy the CD? If I do, the value to the creator is actually increased, isn't it? Admittedly, most people who download a lot of MP3s probably aren't going to buy the CDs, but some do. Therefore the act of possessing MP3s does not itself diminish anything.
The problem here is that, even if a reasonable person can understand that getting music without paying for it is wrong, there's a disconnect between the law as written and promoted and people's innate sense of morality. It's like saying "marijuana must remain outlawed because we did a survey of one hundred rapists and all of them were high on reefer, proving that dope smokers are violent rapists." Now, we already KNOW that marijuana is against the law. We don't really WANT to think of ourselves as lawbreakers. But we hear this ruling, and we think, "Wait a minute. I smoke weed. Gary over there smokes weed. So do Janet and Steve. In fact, everybody I know smokes weed, and nobody has ever raped anybody." Thus, contempt for the law grows.
In the case of file sharing, movie studios are reporting record profits, rap stars are bragging about all the hundreds of millions they make and renting out entire floors of hospitals so their wife can give birth in private, and yet the content lobby is telling us that your 16-year-old son is a criminal because he didn't pay for the Korn MP3s on his iPod, and libraries are stealing because they want to let people borrow the same e-book more than 20 times. To a reasonable person, even one who believes that taking things without paying for them is wrong, these assertions just don't add up.
Yeah, it's inconceivable that he used to be a resident, and moved because they didn't like him?
I base my assumption on the fact that the places he mentions he'd rather spend time in are leisure destinations in the Northern California wine country. He doesn't say anything about the realities of being a resident in either area.
Slashdot Mirror
"Change the education industry"? That's a strange choice of words, considering Khan Academy coursework is free and so is K-12 education in America. Should we even be thinking of educating our children as an industry?
My point was that I never check anything by choice. A laptop? Camera lenses? None of that stuff takes up much space. If you really need to bring more than one suit, I guess that might make things difficult.
Ha! It just occured to me that I posted the above immediately after watching an entire half-season of The Wire. Folks might want to check out that show to see how things go when managers are encouraged to play the stats game.
Seriously, though, the interesting question is: If you are going to be evaluated on your job performance, would you prefer it to be done in part using an automated system as described in the patent, or completely by a manager who may have no effective way of understanding your programming work?
Personally? I'll take the manager. Fuck the automated system.
Why? Because the automated system isn't ever going to be given the authority to assign you promotions, or give you raises, or dole out work. The manager is still going to do those things, whether there's an automated system or not. The purpose of the system is to give the manager information by which to make decisions.
What that means is, without the automated system, you have a silly, ignorant manager who doesn't know his job. With the system, you have a silly, ignorant manager who thinks he knows his job and can claim to have "hard numbers" to back up his decisions. And because he has the numbers, his supervisors will believe him.
But as we all know, you can spin numbers any way you want. If you have bad numbers and your manager doesn't like you, your job is on the line. If you have bad numbers and he likes you, he can probably dig around until he finds a trend that he says indicates you're showing improvement. If he really likes you, your bad numbers indicate that you're not being given the work that will really allow you to shine. On the other hand, if he really doesn't like you, your good numbers mean you're overworked, you make too many commits because you don't take direction, or you're a control freak and you're constantly rewriting other people's code. Or the good numbers simply disappear and he tells his boss you're average and you're not causing any problems.
What's more, you will never, ever dispute your numbers, because if you can successfully dispute them, it will mean that all the money spent on the automated system was wasted -- and the people who authorized the purchase of the system will never let that be known. It simply won't happen.
So yeah, fuck the automated system. And furthermore, fuck any kind of bullshit "metrics" that are really just CYA for the middle management class. You know what a manager's job is? To manage. If you're not qualified to do that, then why should you be given software that makes you sound as if you are?
How much stuff do you need to bring? I usually travel with a little shoulder-bag (like a nylon man-purse) and one bag that's sized to fit in the overhead compartment. That's it, and I usually end up feeling like I overpacked.
No wonder he is a "former" exec...
You're joking, but in all seriousness we always hear this kind of talk from "former execs."
"Former exec from Company A, which is known to have a near-indomitable lead in Market B, says that Market B is irrelevant and that anyone who isn't in Market C is missing the boat."
Scratch that former exec and you'll either find someone who just landed himself a new job at Company D, whose business plan absolutely depends on Market C -- or else who really, really desperately wants to get hired there.
"Forbidden Planet" was good enough for me.
"Forbidden Planet" was based on "The Tempest," not "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
As for a the "Reviews of two+ year old books suxorz" *shrug* 1) it is still a good book today, and 2) some geeks might enjoy reading it.
Bummer for me is that I picked it up from the library Sunday afternoon and I haven't even started yet, so this thread couldn't have worse timing.
Will you guys keep it the fuck down out there?
It's your choice whether to be offended by people calling you (or others) mean words, or to be offended by scatological humor, or by posters of "Praise Jesus for everything good in your life". Most of us reflexively DO feel offended, and are making an unconscious choice to do so.
So when I pick my six-year-old daughter up at the library and she tells me what she saw when she was there, I should give her the old "it was wrong of you to be offended" lecture? Or maybe I should explain to her how fortunate she is to live in a society where the Constitution gives that man the right to watch those movies at the library.
Back to your original comment. If Bob is watching porn in the library, you can choose to look the other way, you can ask that they move
But apparently you can't -- that's the gist of the story here. It's hard to look the other way when someone is watching porn movies a few feet away from you, and the librarian refused to ask him to move.
It seems like it's more of a business decision on the part of the library
But the library isn't a "business," it's a public institution run for the benefit of the public. It has a mission and a purpose, and IMO neither of those include providing a free porno theater for patrons.
B/c it's unsanitary, i.e. damaging to the public health. You can't piss, shit or spit on public property, either.
If you own the movie theater at the mall you can't screen porn movies there, either, and that's a rule governing your own, private business. Why should the government be allowed to tell private businesses what they can do but it can't set standards for the institutions that it operates itself?
Your suggestion is absurd. A library's purpose is to make informational available to the public. Its purpose is NOT to provide a place to have sex. It's also NOT a place to eat 5 course meal. It's NOT a place to sleep for the winter. There are plenty of activities NOT suitable in a library. Looking at information however IS an activity that a library is intended to facilitate.
I totally agree. I disagree that watching hardcore porn videos in a public place can reasonably be defended as "looking at information," however.
There are laws that say the corner store can only shelve porn magazines in areas where they can't be accessed/seen by children. Why, when patrons suggest the public library should follow the same standard, are people suddenly waving the Constitution around?
The right not to be offended is not enumerated in the Constitution.
So I don't have a right to expect that my children can visit the public library and not be exposed to hardcore pornography. But people do have a right to behave like inhuman, drooling beasts, engaging in whatever whim suits their fancy, anywhere they choose, in public, in front of children, or anywhere else, because there's nothing in the Constitution that says they can't? That's a strange sort of society you envision, my friend.
Show me where your "right to not be offended" is enumerated in the Constitution please, because I just can't seem to find it in my copy.
So, again, why not just let people fuck on the tables at the library if they want to? Let's do away with this whole concept of "being offended," because apparently it was already outdated as of 1776.
No one is fucking on the tables. This is about what people are allowed to look at on the computer. That's it.
And normal, rational people shouldn't have to witness graphic sex acts when they go to the library. It's you who doesn't seem to understand the point being made.
If porn is filtered for being objectionable today, tomorrow it will be sexual education sites, LGBT rights websites, Erowid, a violent kickboxing site, fringe political sites, conspiracy theorists, supposedly "racist" material, gun sites, men's mags, Fark, or who knows what else.
Or not. The problem with slippery slope arguments is that an objection that seems rational can quickly turn into a ridiculous overexaggeration that distorts the actual issues and derails the whole debate. (See what I did there?)
I really don't understand why any place adults go must be "family friendly". Go to the park if you want a family picnic. To make a library "family-friendly" would mean to remove anything anyone finds objectionable*, which includes a lot of philosophy, war books, medical books, sex education, yes erotica too. You want to turn a library into the Disney channel.
Personally, I don't think a library should be any kind of TV channel. It should be a library. When more people visit the library to check out DVDs than books and it's so noisy that it's impossible to study, the library has already veered way off track, IMO.
As for "objectionable material," I think teens peeking between the covers of Tropic of Cancer is a far, far cry from young children seeing videos of women being violently anally penetrated and ejaculated upon when they weren't at the library looking for such material to begin with.
In my local branch library, there really is nowhere where they could put computers that would have this degree of privacy. It's a very open floorplan and there are children all over the place, all the time. (In fact, if I have any complaint about my library, it's that it could actually use a little more old-fashioned shushing and return the focus back to study materials -- it seems to have devolved into a combination video store and daycare.)
And, to be honest, I don't care "what someone wants to see". You don't have some Constitutional right to not be offended.
So why not just let people fuck on the tables at the library? I mean, whatever consenting adults want to do -- right?
In terms of amazingly bad crazy drivers and pedestrians no American city can touch it.
Like I said, further south it gets far crazier than Rome. But the thing about it is, I never saw a car accident. American cities are designed for constant automobile traffic flow, and people are slamming into each other all the time. In Itality, with its "amazingly bad crazy drivers," everybody seems to negotiate the roads just fine.
often on mopeds, I've never heard of a single stroke motor, perhaps you mean single cylinder, 2 stroke?
Who knows what I meant! :-P
Is that really considered a derivative work just because they can see the source? Genuinely curious here.
It could be. As the poster below says, it kind of depends on who has the most lawyers. SCO argued that Linux violated SCO copyrights because its source code tarball contained similar-looking header files.
The real issue is what this look like
But... dude. Surely you see my point here. It's Sony.
I confess I only skimmed TFA -- this is Slashdot, after all.
But I'm not sure I understand the argument that is being made here. If Sony is really trying to "rewrite Busybox" -- which makes it sound like they're going to look at the Busybox code and write a new version that does the same thing in a different way -- then surely that's a derivative work of Busybox and it's a copyright violation.
If, on the other hand, Sony is planning to write a Busybox replacement from scratch -- what's wrong with that? Are companies not entitled to write code? How is that "violating licenses with impunity"?
If Sony is planning to do a clean-room re-engineering of Busybox -- what's wrong with that? Isn't that essentially what Linux kernel developers have done for all kinds of devices? Again, how is that "violating licenses with impunity"?
Sony wants to not use GPL-licensed code in its proprietary products. What could be more clear? Would you rather they used it without complying with the license?
Nothing on Rome. Nothing.
Eh? I've been to Rome several times. It has nothing on any American city. Unless you count single-stroke mopeds, I guess. The further south you go (Napoli, Sicily), the less the traffic rules apply, but still that's sitcom comedy compared to a really nasty snarl on the L.A. freeways.
No, actually Janimal was bang on. Answer his argument if you can, rather than making specious non-sequiturs.
OK. I download some MP3s from a friend because I want to hear them. I decide I don't really like them very much and don't listen to them anymore. How is the value of the work diminished to its creator? It isn't. I probably wasn't going to buy the MP3s to begin with, and having confirmed that I don't really like the music, I won't. No net gain or loss to either myself or the creator.
On the other hand, if I do like the music, who's to say I won't buy the CD? If I do, the value to the creator is actually increased, isn't it? Admittedly, most people who download a lot of MP3s probably aren't going to buy the CDs, but some do. Therefore the act of possessing MP3s does not itself diminish anything.
The problem here is that, even if a reasonable person can understand that getting music without paying for it is wrong, there's a disconnect between the law as written and promoted and people's innate sense of morality. It's like saying "marijuana must remain outlawed because we did a survey of one hundred rapists and all of them were high on reefer, proving that dope smokers are violent rapists." Now, we already KNOW that marijuana is against the law. We don't really WANT to think of ourselves as lawbreakers. But we hear this ruling, and we think, "Wait a minute. I smoke weed. Gary over there smokes weed. So do Janet and Steve. In fact, everybody I know smokes weed, and nobody has ever raped anybody." Thus, contempt for the law grows.
In the case of file sharing, movie studios are reporting record profits, rap stars are bragging about all the hundreds of millions they make and renting out entire floors of hospitals so their wife can give birth in private, and yet the content lobby is telling us that your 16-year-old son is a criminal because he didn't pay for the Korn MP3s on his iPod, and libraries are stealing because they want to let people borrow the same e-book more than 20 times. To a reasonable person, even one who believes that taking things without paying for them is wrong, these assertions just don't add up.
Yeah, it's inconceivable that he used to be a resident, and moved because they didn't like him?
I base my assumption on the fact that the places he mentions he'd rather spend time in are leisure destinations in the Northern California wine country. He doesn't say anything about the realities of being a resident in either area.