The story of LOTR, like The Hobbit, Silmarillion, and the rest of the published material, is only a way to present Middle Earth. And while you can set a film in Middle Earth and create the parts you need to film realistically, you can't get it across the way Tolkien does in the novel. You can only suggest it. Even the best movies can't realize the entire world in which they're set. After watching The Bicycle Thief, I may have an excellent idea of what life was like in post-war Italy, but I don't really experience it as real.
I totally disagree. People seem to have this idea that books represent "high art" where movies represent some bastard child of art. However, I think in some cases a movie is a richer mode of expression.
Because a book relies so much on one's own imagination to paint the picture of the story, the world that is portrayed in a book is influenced very much by our own experiences. I would argue that seeing a movie provides a more realistic window into the mind of its director than a book does, because you get to actually see what the director sees, rather than what you imagine.
That being said, the LOTR movies realize the version of Middle Earth that Peter Jackson has imagined, and not necessarily the world that Tolkien imagined. However, the movie does a better job at realizing Jackson's Middle Earth than the book does at realizing Tolkien's Middle Earth, due to the medium of expression.
Digital Deli is copyright (C)1984. It is posted on www.atariarchives.org with the approval of Steve Ditlea, editor of the book, for archival purposes only. Commercial reproduction or use of any of this material without the permission of the individual author and/or photographer is prohibited.
It looks like they DID get the proper permissions.
One of the reasons they're doing this is that students often tend to use multiple extensions on a single outlet, which is the second leading cause of fire deaths, according to this.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The whole point of having a circuit breaker/fuse box is to limit the amount of current drawn on a particular circuit. If the current draw gets to be too big for the circuit to handle, then the breaker kicks in and power cuts off. I don't see where having multiple extensions would be any more of a fire hazard.
By the way, the article on the Moscow dorm fire only states that fire officials suspect that the fire was caused by "electrical problems", which could mean that the wiring was old and fraying (the article states that the building was dilapidated so this isn't far fetched). Plus, the building had no fire alarms or sprinklers, and many residents used personal space heaters because the heat in the building was so poor. It sounds to me that multiple extensions was WAY DOWN the list of possible fire hazards.
Hey, that is nothing! I did my first raytracing steps on a 286
You were lucky! Back in my day we used to DREAM about doing raytracing on something as powerful as a 286. All we had was some graph paper, a couple of worn down pencils, and an abacus. If we were lucky, we'd have something done in a decade or two...
My sincerest sympathies for your loss. However, I think you are putting the blame in the wrong place. Based upon what you wrote, your wife wasn't failed by "our health care system, but by your doctor.
First you state that the doctor refused to fight the insurance company over their refusal to pay for an MRI. Then you state that "they" (I assume you mean the doctor) failed to diagnose the ovarian cancer for several years because they couldn't be bothered to actually look for anything wrong. It isn't the "system's" fault that your doctor may have made mistakes in judgment.
Don't get me wrong - doctors are human like the rest of us, so it is unfair to hold them to godlike standards. Most doctors do the best they can under the circumstances.
Someone I know uses an RSA key to access a VPN into work. It nearly cripples the PC with its CPU load. Even though this is a late 90s machine, still the overhead of the RSA VPN is, in my opinion, too high for the benefits, especially over dialup.
There is a degradation in performance when you access a network over a VPN, I admit. You need to be judicious in your use of it. However, if you need to access your network remoting and are concerned with security, I believe it is worth the tradeoff. Also, with regards to the original poster, he could use the RSA token for authentication onto his local intranet. That way, you have the benefit of strong authentication, without the overhead of using a VPN.
The RSA key is also difficult to use to legitimately log in. It's easy to mistime your login where the number rolls around and end up having to try again. In theory, RSA VPN sounds neat, put it looks like a huge pain in exchange for extra security.
The RSA token that I use has a little digital "timer bar" along the side which lets you know when the number is about to change. If it is getting ready to change, you simply wait for the next number. Also, even after the number changes, the previous number is good for another minute or so. Your so-called "timing" issue is really a non-issue.
Using clients that insist on encrypted protocols over a regular, unencrypted connection might perform better, especially if you're stuck with dialup. With engineering applications, I'd think you'd want needless CPU usage kept to a minimum to allow your application to perform well.
What you suggest doesn't address authentication. As I said above, even if you don't like the VPN architecture, you can still use a RSA token-like system to get strong authentication.
Just give me an Admin account on your server, and I'll secure it for you....:-)
Seriously, where I work, we use a VPN that is secured using a PIN and a RSA token. Basically, the RSA token is a little keychain thingly that displays a 6 digit number which changes every minute or so. When the user wants to connect to the network, they need to enter their PIN plus the 6 digit number.
Because the token is "keyed" to the individual, only my RSA token will work with my PIN. In order for a person to break in, they need both the person's PIN AND the person's unique RSA token. Obviously, this makes the network a lot more secure than a network protected by a traditional username/password setup.
Based upon your requirements, this may not be the best solution, as it fails to satisfy several of your requirements. However, my intuition tells me that you will be hard-pressed to satisfy ALL of your requirements with a single product (without rolling your own).
Re:I've got all of you beat - "secret service, wha
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How Were You Fired?
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Angry Drunken Dwarf sounds A LOT like a former boss of mine. His name wouldn't happen to be "Joe", would it?
Last year, I took a job at a large company, and based on all of the scuttlebutt that flies around Slashdot, I feared that I would be subject to the type of employee contract that the original poster talks about. In the past, I had worked for a number of smaller firms. While they each had a contract for me to sign with regards to assignment of copyrights and patents, they were all limited. Now that I was about to embark on a career in the Fortune 500, I was afraid that they would make me sign a onerous contract without any flexibility to change it.
Boy was I wrong.
When I received the paperwork in the mail (they wanted me to fill out forms before I started, in order to speed the process along), I immediately flipped to a document entitled "Employee Proprietary Information and Innovation Agreement". I scanned it to see how many vials of blood they wanted to extract. To my delight, it was quite fair. Basically, it said that I had to assign rights to work that fell into three categories:
1. Work that related to the business of the company (i.e. I couldn't develop a competing product on my own time and profit from it).
2. Work the resulted from or was suggested by work that I had done for the company (i.e. I couldn't develop of product based on something that I had done with the company).
3. Work that was done using company time, equipment, or facilities (i.e. something that I did on company time or property).
In addition, in bold letters there was an additional paragraph stating, in clear language, that I am NOT required to assign rights to anything that I did on my own time and equipment, and that didn't relate to the companies business, and wasn't conceived based on something I did at work.
If that weren't enough, there was a section that I could declare works that were developed prior to my employment at this company, and these would be specifically excluded from assignment. That way, there would be no confusion about what I retained the rights to.
Personally, I thought this was a very fair agreement, and it made me feel good about the company I was going to work for. Also, it shows that, unlike what the original (paranoid) poster implies, companies are out to screw you out of your weblog rantings!
You do make some interesting points. Obviously the financial aid system isn't 100% perfect. There are still a lot of things that can be done to improve it. My point, however, is that the problems are being address, albeit at a slower pace than some people would like. To me, this is a good sign that at least college administrators are listening to some of the complaints.
Also, you seem to have an all or nothing view of college: either you get into an "elite" school or your life is over. There are thousands, if not millions, of successful people who didn't go to these elite schools. Yet, they are leading happy and productive lives. There are even a few successful people who didn't go to college at all.
One route is to go to a community college for your first two years, and then transfer to a four year public (or even private) school for the last two years. This is well within reach financially of the "millions who are left out in the cold". The local community college here costs about $70 per credit, which is a bargain in my book. I should add that the quality of the community college is so good that graduating students are able to transfer to quality private and public colleges, including some Ivies! I know that some states grant automatic admission to community college transfer students from their own state. To me, this is the best value in higher education out there!
Another route is to join the military and take advantage of their educational programs. A third route is to get a non-need based academic scholarship from an institution that offers them. A lot of lesser known but quality institutions offer these scholarships in order to attract quality individuals. Some of these routes require a little hard work and sacrifice. However, I am of the belief that if you have to work hard for something, it makes the achievement a lot more meaningful, and it adds to your character.
Finally, you seem to think that tuition at a private university should be based not on your ability to pay, but on how hard you're parents have worked. While this is nice in the ideal world, back here in the real world, there is really know way to capture this information. College administrators can't just say "well, Joe's parents have a lot of cash saved up, but they worked hard, so let's give Joe a full scholarship anyway!" There's no way to do this reliably. Even the so-called rich people could say that they worked hard to make their millions, so why shouldn't they get a break too! Instead, colleges rely on looking at a person's income and assets to determine what they can afford to pay.
Does it take into account the amount of sweat that a person expelled to make that money? No.
Could this viewed as being unfair to some people who did have to save and scrimp for their savings? Yes.
Is the system perfect? No.
Is it a _good_ system? Based on the fact that administrators are willing to improve it, and it DOES help out a lot of people both poor and middle class, I would have to say YES!
I feel compelled to respond to your post, mainly because you mentioned my alma mater (Princeton) in a disparaging way.
On the topic of financial aid, what you say was largely true at one time. However, the situation has gotten A LOT better. The financial aid rules have been reformed over the past 10 or so years so the inequities that you mention have been reduced.
When I was going through college (class of 93), the financial aid formula assumed that something like 80% of assets in a student's name would be used towards tuition, while only something like 20% of assets in the parent's name would be used (I don't remember the exact figured, but you get the idea). If the family had saved money in the names of somebody else, like a sibling or a grandparent, those assets wouldn't be used in the financial aid calculation AT ALL. This ended up penalizing students like myself whose parents had saved money in my name. On the plus side, after the first year when all the assets in my name had been exhausted, my financial aid got A LOT better. Anyway, this rule has been reformed so that assets in the student's name aren't penalized as much.
There have been other reforms to the financial aid system. For instance, home equity isn't included as heavily in your parent's assets. Your friend whose parent's house appreciated in value wouldn't have hurt them as much today. Also, I know that Princeton recently announced that they would eliminate loans from their financial aid packages and replace them with grants.
All these things taken together show me that college administrators are listening to people's complaints about aid.
One area in which Princeton falls short is in their switch from Early Action to Early Decision. Under Early Decision, if you apply early and are offered admission, you are obligated to go. This does hurt students because if you are concerned about financial aid, you are discouraged from applying early because you don't know what your bill is going to look like. It's sort of like agreeing to buy a car without knowing what the sticker price is. If a car dealer did it, Ralph Nader would be all over this issue. However, since Nader is Princeton Alum, I guess he thinks it's okay!
Also, you mention how Princeton is not very diverse. If anything the elite school bend over backwards to show how diverse they are, even if they have to lower their standards. Of course, that is a debate for another day....
on a legal level, when it comes to federal vs state laws, I believe the constututional rule is, "A positive rule overrules a negative one". Thus if california had a law explicitly making the use of marijuana legal, it would be legal in california.
Then why did the Supreme Court strike down California's medical marijuana law?
come and go--concepts live on. If you don't even understand the concepts, then you will truely be lost come implementation time--and the performance, scalability, and stability of the resulting system will surely betray your lack of education.
While I agree with your general premise that education is important for learning general concepts, I don't think that you necessary need a PhD to be conversant in those concepts. Usually a PhD is a Masters degree plus some research component. The information that you are talking about can be learned as a Masters student without having to do the added research that a PhD entails.
A PhD is a very specialized degree. Generally, you have to master a very narrow area of research in order to graduate. While your degree might say PhD in "Computer Science", it would probably be more accurate if it read "Text-based Natural Language Processing" or something equally specific. The only way I could see a PhD being directly applicable to the "design of enterprise systems" would be if your area of research was in software engineering, and even that would depend on what your thesis topic was.
One transferable skill that you get as a PhD student is the ability to conduct rigourous research. This includes the technical aspects of research, as well as the non-technical stuff, like proposal writing, getting grants, managing research groups, etc.
I think you are under the misconception that a PhD is just an extra N courses beyond in MS. Nothing could be further from the truth. If your desire is to get a professorship or a job at a research lab, then a PhD is right up your alley. However, if your goal is to be a professional IT worker, then stick to a BS or an MS.
My wife and I purchased a townhouse from the founder of a local ISP. When he first started the ISP, he started it literally out of the basement of the townhouse. At one time, he had no less than FIFTY phone lines coming into the house to support the ISP. In the basement of the townhouse, there was an enormous switchbox to support all those lines. I believe the guy had his own T-1 line to handle the bandwidth, but I couldn't say for sure.
The real estate agent used this as a selling point, saying that if we ever had the need for 50 phone lines, the townhouse could handle it! We ended up buying the townhouse, but mainly because of the cathedral ceilings. The extra phone hardware was a nice little bonus.
We have since sold the townhouse, so if you are a dot-com wannabee, don't ask me ask me if it's for sale!
Yes, and... Manhattan is fairly extreme, for the US. My sister lived in northern New Jersey for a few months, and she was positively astonished at the costs of living there, even after we warned her. Everything's at least double what it is here, most things are triple, and real estate is of course many times worse than that.
Your sister can take comfort in the fact that, as expensive as Northern NJ is, it's cheaper than living in Manhattan!
I've lived in, and known people who have lived in, many of the big cities in the Northeast. I am convinced that if you want to live in the Northeast in or near an urban area, the best city to live in is Baltimore. It is big enough that there are a good amount of jobs (including high tech) and things to do. In addition, it is only about an hour from two other big Northeast cities (DC and Philly), and it is only about 3 hours from NYC if you are so inclined. However, the cost of living is downright CHEAP compared to other big urban areas in the NE. When I was living there a couple years back, we had a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath townhouse, end unit, with a basemnt and a in yard for less than $110K! Our monthly payments (mortgage, taxes, insurance) was less than $1000 a month. Where I am living now (Northern NJ to be exact), $110K won't even buy you a 1 bedroom condo in most areas! Plus we were in a nice quiet area with great schools (not that we have kids but good schools are a good indication of living in a good area), close to everything, friendly people, and bitchin' crab cakes! Seriously, I can't say enough good things about Baltimore. I think it is one of the best kept secrets in real estate. If I get the opportunity again, I'd love to move back there!
My current company grants a stock bonus (that's stock, not stock options) at the end of each year. Each employee's bonus is some percentage of the employee's annual salary. The exact percentage is set by management every year based upon the company's performance during the past year. Thus, the higher up you are in the food chain, the bigger your bonus.
For instance, let's say the bonus percentage is 15% for this year. If an employee is making $60,000 a year, he or she will get $9000 worth of company stock as a bonus. If another employee is making $100,000 a year, he or she will get a $15,000 stock bonus.
One nice thing about this company's plan is that the stock is unrestricted. There is no vesting period, so you can sell it at any time.
Also, one other thing I should mention is that your manager has to "nominate" you for the bonus. If you aren't nominated for that year, because your performance is bad, then you don't get your bonus for that year. This may sound onerous, but in my experience, pretty much everyone gets nominated, unless you are a total screwup, in which case you probably won't be with the company for long!
Windows has a color scheme called "High Contrast" which works well for most common forms of color blindness. The problem is that a lot of apps hardcode colors, which effectively short circuits the color scheme.
If you are developing an app, and you are concerned about accessibility, you shouldn't hardcode colors. Instead there are constants like "default foreground color" (I don't remember the exact constants, but you can look them up yourself). That way you won't override the user's color settings.
Microsoft actually has a lot of good information about making your app accessible. While the majority of it is Windows-specific, the principles can be applied to other development environments.
Re:Vacation vs burnout?
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Working Hard?
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You need to consider that the US compiles its unemployment statistics very differently than these countries. For instance, they consider those who don't receive unemployment checks any more as people who have stopped looking. Even though they don't have a job and are still looking for work, they aren't counted. The US is probably at least close if not above the 10% unemployment mark but there is no way to know.
You are wrong. This is a misconception that a lot of people on here seem to have. Just because you are no longer collecting unemployment benefits doesn't mean that you aren't counted as umemployed. Here is a link from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Website that describes exact how they calculate the unemployment rate.
There are court cases where lectures were ruled to not be "public performances" but closer to speeches (which are not protected by copyrights). If I am in my state run university, I am by definition in a public place. Federal law currently allows me to make recordingd in public places without the consent of anyone within microphone range.
This is silly. First of all, just because something is "state-run" doesn't make it a public place. A military base is state run, but they certainly aren't public places.
Secondly, just because someplace is a public place, doesn't mean that you make recordings there. If you go to a concert in a public place (a park or other publicly funded concert venue), you usually aren't allowed to record the band without their permission.
In my city, you are allowed to run a home-based business even if you live in an area that is zoned residential, under certain circumstances. As long as you don't receive customers on a regular basis, and you don't store certain hazardous materials on the premises, you are legal. I know this because my wife is self-employed as a consultant, and she uses one of the rooms in our house as an administrative office (computer, file cabinet, fax machine, etc).
From what I understand, this "home-based business" exemption is pretty standard stuff.
If you start employing people, and they come to your house for "work" every day, you may run into issues, not only with zoning, but with other regulatory bodies. However, since my wife doesn't employ anyone, this has never been an issue for her. I know one guy who ran a software business out of his house. He had about 10 people working for him. To get around the regulations, all of his employees worked out of their own, home office. Every few weeks, he would hold a "company meeting" in his house (although it was more like a party where business was discussed). Because he didn't have employees coming to his house on a regular basis, the zoning board had no problem with it.
Also, you may want to check your homeowner's or renters insurance policy to see if they require additional coverage because you are running a home-based business. For instance, will they cover damage to equipment owned by the business, or will you need to buy separate business insurance for that?
You mention that the USPS is "horribly unreliable". It's interesting that you say that, because the original article mentions that rebate processors use this excuse all the time, and yet I've NEVER had a problem with something I've sent via the USPS. I can't even remember a piece of mail that I've sent that hasn't gotten through to the recipient. I'm not saying that things don't ever get lost, but I think that the USPS is unfairly being cast as the scapegoat in this case.
Let's say, for instance, that the USPS is 99% reliable. What is the probability that 5 rebates are "lost in the mail" (which is what happened to the author of the original article)? That would be (.01)^5 or 1 in 10,000,000,000 (that's 1 in 10 BILLION). Of course, based on my own experience with the USPS, I would argue that their reliability is even higher than 99%, so that makes the chances of 5 rebates getting lost in the mail even less likely.
I think it is much more likely that the rebate letters are being "lost" after they are received by the processor.
Actually, my BEST rebate experience was with Microsoft. I bought a Microsoft optical mouse from CompUSA that had a $10 mail in rebate. When I finally sat down to send in the rebate, I realized I threw out the piece of paper that had the address. Undaunted, I mailed the rebate to "1 Microsoft Way, Redmond WA" which is the address of their corporate headquarters.
I figured I had a pretty slim chance of actually getting my rebate check, since this probably wasn't the right address. To my surprise, about 4 weeks later, I received a nice, shiny new $10 rebate check! While Microsoft doesn't do everything right, their rebate fulfillment department gets my highest praise.
Actually, I happen to agree with you on many of your points. In fact, I think your arguments are quite lucid. However, when you start to talk about the conspiracy by the "rich" to eliminate the "middle class", you are going to lose a lot of credibility among people like me who might otherwise be sympathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
The story of LOTR, like The Hobbit, Silmarillion, and the rest of the published material, is only a way to present Middle Earth. And while you can set a film in Middle Earth and create the parts you need to film realistically, you can't get it across the way Tolkien does in the novel. You can only suggest it. Even the best movies can't realize the entire world in which they're set. After watching The Bicycle Thief, I may have an excellent idea of what life was like in post-war Italy, but I don't really experience it as real.
I totally disagree. People seem to have this idea that books represent "high art" where movies represent some bastard child of art. However, I think in some cases a movie is a richer mode of expression.
Because a book relies so much on one's own imagination to paint the picture of the story, the world that is portrayed in a book is influenced very much by our own experiences. I would argue that seeing a movie provides a more realistic window into the mind of its director than a book does, because you get to actually see what the director sees, rather than what you imagine.
That being said, the LOTR movies realize the version of Middle Earth that Peter Jackson has imagined, and not necessarily the world that Tolkien imagined. However, the movie does a better job at realizing Jackson's Middle Earth than the book does at realizing Tolkien's Middle Earth, due to the medium of expression.
From the site:
Digital Deli is copyright (C)1984. It is posted on www.atariarchives.org with the approval of Steve Ditlea, editor of the book, for archival purposes only. Commercial reproduction or use of any of this material without the permission of the individual author and/or photographer is prohibited.
It looks like they DID get the proper permissions.
One of the reasons they're doing this is that students often tend to use multiple extensions on a single outlet, which is the second leading cause of fire deaths, according to this.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The whole point of having a circuit breaker/fuse box is to limit the amount of current drawn on a particular circuit. If the current draw gets to be too big for the circuit to handle, then the breaker kicks in and power cuts off. I don't see where having multiple extensions would be any more of a fire hazard.
By the way, the article on the Moscow dorm fire only states that fire officials suspect that the fire was caused by "electrical problems", which could mean that the wiring was old and fraying (the article states that the building was dilapidated so this isn't far fetched). Plus, the building had no fire alarms or sprinklers, and many residents used personal space heaters because the heat in the building was so poor. It sounds to me that multiple extensions was WAY DOWN the list of possible fire hazards.
Hey, that is nothing! I did my first raytracing steps on a 286
You were lucky! Back in my day we used to DREAM about doing raytracing on something as powerful as a 286. All we had was some graph paper, a couple of worn down pencils, and an abacus. If we were lucky, we'd have something done in a decade or two...
My sincerest sympathies for your loss. However, I think you are putting the blame in the wrong place. Based upon what you wrote, your wife wasn't failed by "our health care system, but by your doctor.
First you state that the doctor refused to fight the insurance company over their refusal to pay for an MRI. Then you state that "they" (I assume you mean the doctor) failed to diagnose the ovarian cancer for several years because they couldn't be bothered to actually look for anything wrong. It isn't the "system's" fault that your doctor may have made mistakes in judgment.
Don't get me wrong - doctors are human like the rest of us, so it is unfair to hold them to godlike standards. Most doctors do the best they can under the circumstances.
Someone I know uses an RSA key to access a VPN into work. It nearly cripples the PC with its CPU load. Even though this is a late 90s machine, still the overhead of the RSA VPN is, in my opinion, too high for the benefits, especially over dialup.
There is a degradation in performance when you access a network over a VPN, I admit. You need to be judicious in your use of it. However, if you need to access your network remoting and are concerned with security, I believe it is worth the tradeoff. Also, with regards to the original poster, he could use the RSA token for authentication onto his local intranet. That way, you have the benefit of strong authentication, without the overhead of using a VPN.
The RSA key is also difficult to use to legitimately log in. It's easy to mistime your login where the number rolls around and end up having to try again. In theory, RSA VPN sounds neat, put it looks like a huge pain in exchange for extra security.
The RSA token that I use has a little digital "timer bar" along the side which lets you know when the number is about to change. If it is getting ready to change, you simply wait for the next number. Also, even after the number changes, the previous number is good for another minute or so. Your so-called "timing" issue is really a non-issue.
Using clients that insist on encrypted protocols over a regular, unencrypted connection might perform better, especially if you're stuck with dialup. With engineering applications, I'd think you'd want needless CPU usage kept to a minimum to allow your application to perform well.
What you suggest doesn't address authentication. As I said above, even if you don't like the VPN architecture, you can still use a RSA token-like system to get strong authentication.
Just give me an Admin account on your server, and I'll secure it for you.... :-)
Seriously, where I work, we use a VPN that is secured using a PIN and a RSA token. Basically, the RSA token is a little keychain thingly that displays a 6 digit number which changes every minute or so. When the user wants to connect to the network, they need to enter their PIN plus the 6 digit number.
Because the token is "keyed" to the individual, only my RSA token will work with my PIN. In order for a person to break in, they need both the person's PIN AND the person's unique RSA token. Obviously, this makes the network a lot more secure than a network protected by a traditional username/password setup.
Based upon your requirements, this may not be the best solution, as it fails to satisfy several of your requirements. However, my intuition tells me that you will be hard-pressed to satisfy ALL of your requirements with a single product (without rolling your own).
Angry Drunken Dwarf sounds A LOT like a former boss of mine. His name wouldn't happen to be "Joe", would it?
If you think $10 is a lot to pay for parking, you've never been to New York City...
Last year, I took a job at a large company, and based on all of the scuttlebutt that flies around Slashdot, I feared that I would be subject to the type of employee contract that the original poster talks about. In the past, I had worked for a number of smaller firms. While they each had a contract for me to sign with regards to assignment of copyrights and patents, they were all limited. Now that I was about to embark on a career in the Fortune 500, I was afraid that they would make me sign a onerous contract without any flexibility to change it.
Boy was I wrong.
When I received the paperwork in the mail (they wanted me to fill out forms before I started, in order to speed the process along), I immediately flipped to a document entitled "Employee Proprietary Information and Innovation Agreement". I scanned it to see how many vials of blood they wanted to extract. To my delight, it was quite fair. Basically, it said that I had to assign rights to work that fell into three categories:
1. Work that related to the business of the company (i.e. I couldn't develop a competing product on my own time and profit from it).
2. Work the resulted from or was suggested by work that I had done for the company (i.e. I couldn't develop of product based on something that I had done with the company).
3. Work that was done using company time, equipment, or facilities (i.e. something that I did on company time or property).
In addition, in bold letters there was an additional paragraph stating, in clear language, that I am NOT required to assign rights to anything that I did on my own time and equipment, and that didn't relate to the companies business, and wasn't conceived based on something I did at work.
If that weren't enough, there was a section that I could declare works that were developed prior to my employment at this company, and these would be specifically excluded from assignment. That way, there would be no confusion about what I retained the rights to.
Personally, I thought this was a very fair agreement, and it made me feel good about the company I was going to work for. Also, it shows that, unlike what the original (paranoid) poster implies, companies are out to screw you out of your weblog rantings!
Contrast an $8500 Hyundai @ 30mph, and a $22,000 Toyota @ 45mpg, and the costs NEVER equal out. Both cars will be long in the junkyard before then.
Yeah but then you'd have to drive a Hyundai...
You do make some interesting points. Obviously the financial aid system isn't 100% perfect. There are still a lot of things that can be done to improve it. My point, however, is that the problems are being address, albeit at a slower pace than some people would like. To me, this is a good sign that at least college administrators are listening to some of the complaints.
Also, you seem to have an all or nothing view of college: either you get into an "elite" school or your life is over. There are thousands, if not millions, of successful people who didn't go to these elite schools. Yet, they are leading happy and productive lives. There are even a few successful people who didn't go to college at all.
One route is to go to a community college for your first two years, and then transfer to a four year public (or even private) school for the last two years. This is well within reach financially of the "millions who are left out in the cold". The local community college here costs about $70 per credit, which is a bargain in my book. I should add that the quality of the community college is so good that graduating students are able to transfer to quality private and public colleges, including some Ivies! I know that some states grant automatic admission to community college transfer students from their own state. To me, this is the best value in higher education out there!
Another route is to join the military and take advantage of their educational programs. A third route is to get a non-need based academic scholarship from an institution that offers them. A lot of lesser known but quality institutions offer these scholarships in order to attract quality individuals. Some of these routes require a little hard work and sacrifice. However, I am of the belief that if you have to work hard for something, it makes the achievement a lot more meaningful, and it adds to your character.
Finally, you seem to think that tuition at a private university should be based not on your ability to pay, but on how hard you're parents have worked. While this is nice in the ideal world, back here in the real world, there is really know way to capture this information. College administrators can't just say "well, Joe's parents have a lot of cash saved up, but they worked hard, so let's give Joe a full scholarship anyway!" There's no way to do this reliably. Even the so-called rich people could say that they worked hard to make their millions, so why shouldn't they get a break too! Instead, colleges rely on looking at a person's income and assets to determine what they can afford to pay.
Does it take into account the amount of sweat that a person expelled to make that money? No.
Could this viewed as being unfair to some people who did have to save and scrimp for their savings? Yes.
Is the system perfect? No.
Is it a _good_ system? Based on the fact that administrators are willing to improve it, and it DOES help out a lot of people both poor and middle class, I would have to say YES!
I feel compelled to respond to your post, mainly because you mentioned my alma mater (Princeton) in a disparaging way.
On the topic of financial aid, what you say was largely true at one time. However, the situation has gotten A LOT better. The financial aid rules have been reformed over the past 10 or so years so the inequities that you mention have been reduced.
When I was going through college (class of 93), the financial aid formula assumed that something like 80% of assets in a student's name would be used towards tuition, while only something like 20% of assets in the parent's name would be used (I don't remember the exact figured, but you get the idea). If the family had saved money in the names of somebody else, like a sibling or a grandparent, those assets wouldn't be used in the financial aid calculation AT ALL. This ended up penalizing students like myself whose parents had saved money in my name. On the plus side, after the first year when all the assets in my name had been exhausted, my financial aid got A LOT better. Anyway, this rule has been reformed so that assets in the student's name aren't penalized as much.
There have been other reforms to the financial aid system. For instance, home equity isn't included as heavily in your parent's assets. Your friend whose parent's house appreciated in value wouldn't have hurt them as much today. Also, I know that Princeton recently announced that they would eliminate loans from their financial aid packages and replace them with grants.
All these things taken together show me that college administrators are listening to people's complaints about aid.
One area in which Princeton falls short is in their switch from Early Action to Early Decision. Under Early Decision, if you apply early and are offered admission, you are obligated to go. This does hurt students because if you are concerned about financial aid, you are discouraged from applying early because you don't know what your bill is going to look like. It's sort of like agreeing to buy a car without knowing what the sticker price is. If a car dealer did it, Ralph Nader would be all over this issue. However, since Nader is Princeton Alum, I guess he thinks it's okay!
Also, you mention how Princeton is not very diverse. If anything the elite school bend over backwards to show how diverse they are, even if they have to lower their standards. Of course, that is a debate for another day....
on a legal level, when it comes to federal vs state laws, I believe the constututional rule is, "A positive rule overrules a negative one". Thus if california had a law explicitly making the use of marijuana legal, it would be legal in california.
Then why did the Supreme Court strike down California's medical marijuana law?
come and go--concepts live on. If you don't even understand the concepts, then you will truely be lost come implementation time--and the performance, scalability, and stability of the resulting system will surely betray your lack of education.
While I agree with your general premise that education is important for learning general concepts, I don't think that you necessary need a PhD to be conversant in those concepts. Usually a PhD is a Masters degree plus some research component. The information that you are talking about can be learned as a Masters student without having to do the added research that a PhD entails.
A PhD is a very specialized degree. Generally, you have to master a very narrow area of research in order to graduate. While your degree might say PhD in "Computer Science", it would probably be more accurate if it read "Text-based Natural Language Processing" or something equally specific. The only way I could see a PhD being directly applicable to the "design of enterprise systems" would be if your area of research was in software engineering, and even that would depend on what your thesis topic was.
One transferable skill that you get as a PhD student is the ability to conduct rigourous research. This includes the technical aspects of research, as well as the non-technical stuff, like proposal writing, getting grants, managing research groups, etc.
I think you are under the misconception that a PhD is just an extra N courses beyond in MS. Nothing could be further from the truth. If your desire is to get a professorship or a job at a research lab, then a PhD is right up your alley. However, if your goal is to be a professional IT worker, then stick to a BS or an MS.
My wife and I purchased a townhouse from the founder of a local ISP. When he first started the ISP, he started it literally out of the basement of the townhouse. At one time, he had no less than FIFTY phone lines coming into the house to support the ISP. In the basement of the townhouse, there was an enormous switchbox to support all those lines. I believe the guy had his own T-1 line to handle the bandwidth, but I couldn't say for sure.
The real estate agent used this as a selling point, saying that if we ever had the need for 50 phone lines, the townhouse could handle it! We ended up buying the townhouse, but mainly because of the cathedral ceilings. The extra phone hardware was a nice little bonus.
We have since sold the townhouse, so if you are a dot-com wannabee, don't ask me ask me if it's for sale!
Yes, and... Manhattan is fairly extreme, for the US. My sister
lived in northern New Jersey for a few months, and she was
positively astonished at the costs of living there, even after
we warned her. Everything's at least double what it is here,
most things are triple, and real estate is of course many times
worse than that.
Your sister can take comfort in the fact that, as expensive as Northern NJ is, it's cheaper than living in Manhattan!
I've lived in, and known people who have lived in, many of the big cities in the Northeast. I am convinced that if you want to live in the Northeast in or near an urban area, the best city to live in is Baltimore. It is big enough that there are a good amount of jobs (including high tech) and things to do. In addition, it is only about an hour from two other big Northeast cities (DC and Philly), and it is only about 3 hours from NYC if you are so inclined. However, the cost of living is downright CHEAP compared to other big urban areas in the NE. When I was living there a couple years back, we had a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath townhouse, end unit, with a basemnt and a in yard for less than $110K! Our monthly payments (mortgage, taxes, insurance) was less than $1000 a month. Where I am living now (Northern NJ to be exact), $110K won't even buy you a 1 bedroom condo in most areas! Plus we were in a nice quiet area with great schools (not that we have kids but good schools are a good indication of living in a good area), close to everything, friendly people, and bitchin' crab cakes! Seriously, I can't say enough good things about Baltimore. I think it is one of the best kept secrets in real estate. If I get the opportunity again, I'd love to move back there!
My current company grants a stock bonus (that's stock, not stock options) at the end of each year. Each employee's bonus is some percentage of the employee's annual salary. The exact percentage is set by management every year based upon the company's performance during the past year. Thus, the higher up you are in the food chain, the bigger your bonus.
For instance, let's say the bonus percentage is 15% for this year. If an employee is making $60,000 a year, he or she will get $9000 worth of company stock as a bonus. If another employee is making $100,000 a year, he or she will get a $15,000 stock bonus.
One nice thing about this company's plan is that the stock is unrestricted. There is no vesting period, so you can sell it at any time.
Also, one other thing I should mention is that your manager has to "nominate" you for the bonus. If you aren't nominated for that year, because your performance is bad, then you don't get your bonus for that year. This may sound onerous, but in my experience, pretty much everyone gets nominated, unless you are a total screwup, in which case you probably won't be with the company for long!
Windows has a color scheme called "High Contrast" which works well for most common forms of color blindness. The problem is that a lot of apps hardcode colors, which effectively short circuits the color scheme.
If you are developing an app, and you are concerned about accessibility, you shouldn't hardcode colors. Instead there are constants like "default foreground color" (I don't remember the exact constants, but you can look them up yourself). That way you won't override the user's color settings.
Microsoft actually has a lot of good information about making your app accessible. While the majority of it is Windows-specific, the principles can be applied to other development environments.
You need to consider that the US compiles its unemployment statistics very differently than these countries. For instance, they consider those who don't receive unemployment checks any more as people who have stopped looking. Even though they don't have a job and are still looking for work, they aren't counted. The US is probably at least close if not above the 10% unemployment mark but there is no way to know.
You are wrong. This is a misconception that a lot of people on here seem to have. Just because you are no longer collecting unemployment benefits doesn't mean that you aren't counted as umemployed. Here is a link from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Website that describes exact how they calculate the unemployment rate.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_faq.htm
There are court cases where lectures were ruled to not be "public performances" but closer to speeches (which are not protected by copyrights). If I am in my state run university, I am by definition in a public place. Federal law currently allows me to make recordingd in public places without the consent of anyone within microphone range.
This is silly. First of all, just because something is "state-run" doesn't make it a public place. A military base is state run, but they certainly aren't public places.
Secondly, just because someplace is a public place, doesn't mean that you make recordings there. If you go to a concert in a public place (a park or other publicly funded concert venue), you usually aren't allowed to record the band without their permission.
In my city, you are allowed to run a home-based business even if you live in an area that is zoned residential, under certain circumstances. As long as you don't receive customers on a regular basis, and you don't store certain hazardous materials on the premises, you are legal. I know this because my wife is self-employed as a consultant, and she uses one of the rooms in our house as an administrative office (computer, file cabinet, fax machine, etc).
From what I understand, this "home-based business" exemption is pretty standard stuff.
If you start employing people, and they come to your house for "work" every day, you may run into issues, not only with zoning, but with other regulatory bodies. However, since my wife doesn't employ anyone, this has never been an issue for her. I know one guy who ran a software business out of his house. He had about 10 people working for him. To get around the regulations, all of his employees worked out of their own, home office. Every few weeks, he would hold a "company meeting" in his house (although it was more like a party where business was discussed). Because he didn't have employees coming to his house on a regular basis, the zoning board had no problem with it.
Also, you may want to check your homeowner's or renters insurance policy to see if they require additional coverage because you are running a home-based business. For instance, will they cover damage to equipment owned by the business, or will you need to buy separate business insurance for that?
You mention that the USPS is "horribly unreliable". It's interesting that you say that, because the original article mentions that rebate processors use this excuse all the time, and yet I've NEVER had a problem with something I've sent via the USPS. I can't even remember a piece of mail that I've sent that hasn't gotten through to the recipient. I'm not saying that things don't ever get lost, but I think that the USPS is unfairly being cast as the scapegoat in this case.
Let's say, for instance, that the USPS is 99% reliable. What is the probability that 5 rebates are "lost in the mail" (which is what happened to the author of the original article)? That would be (.01)^5 or 1 in 10,000,000,000 (that's 1 in 10 BILLION). Of course, based on my own experience with the USPS, I would argue that their reliability is even higher than 99%, so that makes the chances of 5 rebates getting lost in the mail even less likely.
I think it is much more likely that the rebate letters are being "lost" after they are received by the processor.
Actually, my BEST rebate experience was with Microsoft. I bought a Microsoft optical mouse from CompUSA that had a $10 mail in rebate. When I finally sat down to send in the rebate, I realized I threw out the piece of paper that had the address. Undaunted, I mailed the rebate to "1 Microsoft Way, Redmond WA" which is the address of their corporate headquarters.
I figured I had a pretty slim chance of actually getting my rebate check, since this probably wasn't the right address. To my surprise, about 4 weeks later, I received a nice, shiny new $10 rebate check! While Microsoft doesn't do everything right, their rebate fulfillment department gets my highest praise.
Actually, I happen to agree with you on many of your points. In fact, I think your arguments are quite lucid. However, when you start to talk about the conspiracy by the "rich" to eliminate the "middle class", you are going to lose a lot of credibility among people like me who might otherwise be sympathetic.