I found it very obtrusive and annoying. Plus, clicking it off on every page meant loading the page twice.
For whatever reason, I can only log into digg if I use IE. It never accepts my login while using firefox; and frankly it's not worth the bother to figure that out. (On some articles on slashdot, it happens too, but not often).
As for linking back to comments, I personally find it easier to just open the articles and the comments with them in tabs and if I want to go back to the digg comments, I just click back on the digg comment tab for that article.
Then there's not knowing where you are by the URL. Or having to bookmark a short-url?
And just imagine once everyone else jumps on board... for a single page you'll have a digg bar, a reddit bar, a slashdot bar, a twitter bar, a facebook bar, and a myspace bar... and you'll have about 100x200 pixels left for the actual page you're viewing.
To each his own, but digg should have made it opt-in from the beginning.
Also no matter what your personal opinion is you can't change the laws of thermodynamics, you CAN'T increase in (energy-) weight without consuming more energy than you use, it's impossible, and so is the opposite, if you get fatter you eat to much, nothing else.
That's not necessarily the case. Fat cells have water in them. While that does imply energy/mass in a strictly thermodynamic sense, it does not have any dietary energy.
Simply retaining more water will cause a person to gain weight and appear fatter; even if caloric intake and energy expended were to remain the same.
Really? Come on now, I own a rifle, does that mean I shoot people? I have strong encryption on my hard drive, does that make me a terrorist?
The problem you have is that you expect the law and the legal system to be logical and based on verifiable facts. It's not. It's based on the law (that's an intentional circular reference).
A good friend of mine recently finished law school and described one of her first lectures. The professor read out, "The law says an apple is round, red, and firm." She then held up a red rubber ball and asked, "THIS is round, red, and firm. Is it an apple?"
Now, you and me, and most rational people would look at that rubber ball and say, "No, it's not an apple, it's a red rubber ball". However, we would be wrong. The professor then explained to the incredulous students that as far as the law was concerned, that it was indeed an apple because it met the legal definition of an apple. She followed that if they couldn't get their heads around that then they were probably pursuing the wrong profession.
You might believe, and rightfully so, that your use of Linux and disk encryption makes you a smart citizen. However, in the eyes of the law, you are also potentially a terrorist or criminal, and that's simply on the basis of someone in a position of authority making that judgment. The police, prosecuting attorneys, and judges all live in a world of cognitive dissonance where a red rubber ball is also an apple. These same people are empowered to imprison you or even take way your life. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.
i know a guy who used to be a sniper and he said that he had to be extremely careful with communications devices for fear he could give up his position in the field. essentially the enemy could conceivably monitor for communications and determine general locations.
In the military, what you're describing is a problem for someone who's wanting to hide. It's under the category of "electronic warfare/signals intelligence". In that field, people are trained to scan the radio spectrum, isolate different entities communicating, try to figure out who/what they are, and find their location (essentially through triangulation).*
For what you're describing, it wouldn't matter what communications devices the person is using because it's the transmission itself that is detected. It takes somewhat sophisticated equipment to do the radio location. One person doing it would have to be moving around to get multiple fixes (assuming they could isolate the police officer's transmissions they want) until they could get a location on the police officer. But since most police operate in the open it's probably easier to just look for the uniform. Additionally, most police carry and use radios anyway, so doing a radio fix on them would work even without the tech in the article.
However, the tech in the article could be open to hacking where someone gains access to the system that aggregates all the data and locations. That's new and interesting, but doing that hacking would require sophisticated equipment of its own.
* It's the psy-op guys who get to try and defeat these monitoring efforts by making fake broadcasts to appear to be a unit that's not there - fun stuff! Even one of the old original Battlestar Galactica series used something like this where Starbuck and Apollo make radio calls as if they were whole squadrons.
Updating a running program without interruption is everything but trivial.
It can be pretty easy. I helped write a database app where every time the menu form was invoked, it would check the back-end database to see what the "current" version of the front-end should be. If it wasn't the same, it would launch the new version and quietly kill itself.
The user only experiences a slight delay that can not be differentiated from network congestion or heavy database load.
The key here is that the app does the work of checking for updates at an easy time to do it (user is transitioning from one form to another) and not based on an external stimulus (an interrupt).
Doing this for something like a word processor or spreadsheet that doesn't have such stark transitions would be trickier since it would have to somehow save the state, reload itself, and restore the state.
I think in the case of the patent, they're talking about updating the app during a page-load, so the user won't notice the delay because they're going through a state-change already. I may be mistaken, but I do not think the app gets updated in the middle of reading a page without doing a refresh of some kind.
You end up printing out about 20 different letters that you just fold, staple, stamp, and mail. A few require signatures. You'll later get several letters saying "you've been taken off the list" and then the junk mail reduces to a trickle. The only things I get now are from local businesses and a shitty mortgage company that won't stop mailing me.
And the guy who was pushed into the intersection is given a ticket for running the red light.
And you as well... you crossed into the intersection on the red. How is the camera to know that you were pushed by the car behind you? And why should the company processing the tickets care to check since they get more money if you get a ticket too.
So we have our hypothetical concert with ourselves seated in the 2nd row. We can get a dummy and shove two microphones into his dummy ears for recording the sound. Do you think a 2/4/8 speaker setup would be more "accurate" than headphones?
Do you already know that what you're describing is "binaural recording" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording. When you listen to them with headphones, you get amazing position-awareness of the sounds. Some early binaural recordings were of story dramatazations - and you could hear the door creaking open "behind you".
Take for example an explosion. Then I guess the headphones loose out to the sub woofer. You bring up an interesting idea... using headphones along with a subwoofer to get get the superior sound of headphones and the "feel" of the low-end.
I would really like to hear your distinction between academic and technical people.
When I was in school, I didn't leave the engineering building much. But my understanding is that there were other buildings at the school where people studied non-technical things like business, English, political science, and communications.
I even heard rumors that there were even women in those buildings, but I was not prone to falling for such wild claims./s
Seriously, once you get out of math, engineering, and physical science disciplines, "latex" is what condoms are made of and "La-Tech" would be a French computer company. At the school I worked in, most of the engineering profs were happy using word. Only one was a serious LaTeX user (and he was definitely "technical"... he used to write liquification simulations in post-script and send them to be processed by the printer because its postscript engine was faster at floating point math and vectors than his 386 with math coprocessor!).
In the short-story collection, "I, Robot", the story "Liar" is about just that situation. Through some deviation in the manufacturing process a robot has the ability to read minds.
This leads the robot to have a more expansive interpretation of the first law because it can perceive emotional harm in addition to mere physical harm. Hilarity ensues. Actually not...
But it's a good story. This concept also plays out in one of the novels, I think, "Naked Sun".
A non-mind-reading robot wouldn't be able to perceive emotional harm so would not be inhibited from doing things emotionally harmful until they manifest in some way detectable by the robot.
The issue with "practically impossible" is that the definition of such changes every year, as computers grow more and more powerful.
I think it has to do more with how a solution to a problem can be described then if that solution is actually doable within the constraints of time and space. If there is an algorithm that can describe a solution, then it's "solvable" (theoretically possible), but if it takes an infinite amount of time or an infinite amount of processing power, then it's not "practically possible".
In one of Asimov's Foundation novels, a character is trying to describe this. He say in theory, he could meet every person in the universe by simply visiting each planet and then finding and greeting every person on the planet. But of course, it is practically impossible because he could never visit every planet in his lifetime and while he was doing that some people would die before he could meet them.
So the problem is theoretically possible, but practically impossible.
We seem to be evolving a culture where we try to solve every problem with technology. Sometimes technology is not the answer.
No. Clearly the problem is that people are invited to meetings when they feel there is more value in doing something else than actually paying attention at the meeting.
Probably the best solution is to have fewer meetings and make them shorter and more focused.
If you then still need the meeting and making it shorter and focused does not keep the attention of the people involved, maybe they need a different job where they won't be distracted by such meetings.
I work for a large corporation and I believe we have far too many meetings that are not really needed. When I'm bored in one of these meetings, I like to look around the table and try to estimate the cost in salary and benefits of the particular meeting. With a VP, a handful of directors and several managers, a one-hour meeting easily costs the company a few thousand dollars.
This kind of technology won't solve the problem of people doing other things in meetings and it will most likely just piss them off.
It reminds me of the story (reported in various tech journals but not so much in the MSM) back in the 1970s about the US DoD funding a study by some university people of what could be learned about US military sites and activity from public sources like newspapers, libraries, etc.... It seemed to me that it could become a viable career path for a small number of people. But I never read any followups.
It seems that everyone and every entity is seeming short, fast turn-around and ever-increasing bottom lines using "growth percentage" as a metric for success and viability.
This kind of thinking is a systemic problem and not just in the job market.
Consider the mortgage foreclosure issue. For a single bank making a foreclosure decision, it makes perfect sense to foreclose a bad loan, realize the loss, and then recover the value by selling the property. This is even okay to happen "regularly" as long as it's a relatively minor level of activity. But once you reach (as another posted pointed out) a "tipping point", this behavior that's good for an individual suddenly becomes extremely detrimental to everyone.
This was magnified by an unwillingness by the banks to re-negotiate the raise in rates on adjustable rate loans. Again, on a case by case basis, it makes sense for the bank to "stick to their guns" and force the consumer to pay the higher rate. But doing this to too many people will cause a large number of them to foreclose. That just refers back to the previous paragraph.
With too many homes in foreclosure, values of entire neighborhoods drop and people are stuck with homes that aren't worth what they owe. Many walk away leaving the banks with properties they can't sell in neighborhoods that are devalued.
The short-term case of chasing the profit prevented the longer term view of seeing that what they were doing was destroying the market. And now, after so much damage, they're being forced to do the very things they should have been doing in the first place - negotiating rates to help keep homeowners in their homes.
Oh, do they want more uninsured drivers on the road? Lovely. I can see how everybody wins with that proposal.
Easy fix: just mandate that every insured driver also carry "uninsured driver coverage" as part of their insurance. It's a double bonus because they pay more for that additional insurance, yielding higher tax revenues!
Sadly, my parents live in Wisconsin. They've lived in several other states and nobody there believes them when they say that they've never paid more taxes and fees than they do in Wisconsin. When they say they paid 1/3 the property tax on their house in Idaho than they pay on their smaller house in Wisconsin, people just think they're lying. The Wisconsonites simply refuse to believe they're getting royally screwed in their taxes.
If you do more than 100,000 a year with a bank you should automatically have a clause that states all assets transferred to Nigeria (or any country you don't regularly do business with for that matter) should be frozen
You mean foreign countries like New Jersey and Texas? The story says the money was being sent to a bank in Texas (which was the entity that raised a flag on this) and checks were going to some nonexistent guy in New Jersey.
But you're on the right track that there should be some "human checking" if the banking details of a state's approved list are changed. I have no idea why the IT people are being blamed. This was the error of some clerk in the accounting department, or worse, by the management of that department who didn't have a validation process for changes in banking information for vendors who are paid over a certain amount.
Some things apparently never change. My grandfather was in the Navy after WWII and he said if you wanted to make life better for yourself, make good friends with the mailman and the cook.
When I was, myself, in the Army, a good friend of mine got detailed to a Navy ship and making friends with the cook scored him all kinds of pastries and such.
I figured the same thing... if the robot snake can peer at my missing heart through the bottom of my open rib cage, then I don't think the snake will help me much.
Soldier: It's just a flesh wound. Snake Doctor: Your bloody skin's off, your organs are gone! Soldier: I've hurt worse.
we could have automated the process... However, rather than work with us...
I used to work in IT and now I'm a "business user" and I'm all for getting IT to simplify, automate, and improve processes.
However, what starts as a simple request to automate some simple but tedious task, or provide a way to link 2 sets of data ends up being treated like a multi-million dollar project that will need a team of 10 people 6 months and many hours of meetings (all charged to my budget) to put together a feasibility study, which will then be put into a queue where it will be evaluated next fiscal year by the prioritization committee, which, if approved (and it won't because there's a huge project consuming ALL discretionary IT resources) will still take another year and a half to design, test, QA, and deploy.
So instead of doing that, I spend a couple hours to write, test, and document some little Excel/VBA tool or some simple Access import-query-export solution that easily solves the problem, saving my employees loads of time (while typically improving their accuracy as tedious, manual tasks are often error-prone themselves) so they can focus on things like running the business.
As I said, I'd love to have IT solve these little problems because they are so often "low hanging fruit" that should take very little effort to do while saving many hours of work. But we always get told, "No", "Next Year", or "We'll need to conduct a study", when if they had just sent a low-level coder over to work for a couple hours it would have been done before I could schedule a meeting with all the "stakeholders" who would be conducting the study.
Having been in IT, I understand completely how bothersome it is to deal with things when the users go rogue - but if IT is unresponsive or provides no other alternative, then that is exactly what what they'll do.
If the demand for CS graduates is low, then why bother recruiting them actively?
By that logic, schools wouldn't recruit English majors, Anthropology majors, Philosophy majors and "General Studies", etc.
The sad truth is that the only part of the university that cares about what happens to the student after they graduate is the development office (they're the ones who'll hound the graduate for donations for the rest of their lives).
The rest of the school's purpose is to get tuition-paying students into their seats and make money. So that's why they'll recruit students into programs that have few prospects for the graduates. And if they have to dumb down the program to get the students to stay, and thus diminishing the prospects of their graduates at the same time, then so be it.
That's not to say that individual professors act this way, but the university is an organism itself and will often do things contrary to the wishes of the people who comprise it.
Slashdot Mirror
I found it very obtrusive and annoying. Plus, clicking it off on every page meant loading the page twice.
For whatever reason, I can only log into digg if I use IE. It never accepts my login while using firefox; and frankly it's not worth the bother to figure that out. (On some articles on slashdot, it happens too, but not often).
As for linking back to comments, I personally find it easier to just open the articles and the comments with them in tabs and if I want to go back to the digg comments, I just click back on the digg comment tab for that article.
Then there's not knowing where you are by the URL. Or having to bookmark a short-url?
And just imagine once everyone else jumps on board... for a single page you'll have a digg bar, a reddit bar, a slashdot bar, a twitter bar, a facebook bar, and a myspace bar... and you'll have about 100x200 pixels left for the actual page you're viewing.
To each his own, but digg should have made it opt-in from the beginning.
Also no matter what your personal opinion is you can't change the laws of thermodynamics, you CAN'T increase in (energy-) weight without consuming more energy than you use, it's impossible, and so is the opposite, if you get fatter you eat to much, nothing else.
That's not necessarily the case. Fat cells have water in them. While that does imply energy/mass in a strictly thermodynamic sense, it does not have any dietary energy.
Simply retaining more water will cause a person to gain weight and appear fatter; even if caloric intake and energy expended were to remain the same.
Really? Come on now, I own a rifle, does that mean I shoot people? I have strong encryption on my hard drive, does that make me a terrorist?
The problem you have is that you expect the law and the legal system to be logical and based on verifiable facts. It's not. It's based on the law (that's an intentional circular reference).
A good friend of mine recently finished law school and described one of her first lectures. The professor read out, "The law says an apple is round, red, and firm." She then held up a red rubber ball and asked, "THIS is round, red, and firm. Is it an apple?"
Now, you and me, and most rational people would look at that rubber ball and say, "No, it's not an apple, it's a red rubber ball". However, we would be wrong. The professor then explained to the incredulous students that as far as the law was concerned, that it was indeed an apple because it met the legal definition of an apple. She followed that if they couldn't get their heads around that then they were probably pursuing the wrong profession.
You might believe, and rightfully so, that your use of Linux and disk encryption makes you a smart citizen. However, in the eyes of the law, you are also potentially a terrorist or criminal, and that's simply on the basis of someone in a position of authority making that judgment. The police, prosecuting attorneys, and judges all live in a world of cognitive dissonance where a red rubber ball is also an apple. These same people are empowered to imprison you or even take way your life. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.
couldnt this go horribly wrong?
i know a guy who used to be a sniper and he said that he had to be extremely careful with communications devices for fear he could give up his position in the field. essentially the enemy could conceivably monitor for communications and determine general locations.
In the military, what you're describing is a problem for someone who's wanting to hide. It's under the category of "electronic warfare/signals intelligence". In that field, people are trained to scan the radio spectrum, isolate different entities communicating, try to figure out who/what they are, and find their location (essentially through triangulation).*
For what you're describing, it wouldn't matter what communications devices the person is using because it's the transmission itself that is detected. It takes somewhat sophisticated equipment to do the radio location. One person doing it would have to be moving around to get multiple fixes (assuming they could isolate the police officer's transmissions they want) until they could get a location on the police officer. But since most police operate in the open it's probably easier to just look for the uniform. Additionally, most police carry and use radios anyway, so doing a radio fix on them would work even without the tech in the article.
However, the tech in the article could be open to hacking where someone gains access to the system that aggregates all the data and locations. That's new and interesting, but doing that hacking would require sophisticated equipment of its own.
* It's the psy-op guys who get to try and defeat these monitoring efforts by making fake broadcasts to appear to be a unit that's not there - fun stuff! Even one of the old original Battlestar Galactica series used something like this where Starbuck and Apollo make radio calls as if they were whole squadrons.
Updating a running program without interruption is everything but trivial.
It can be pretty easy. I helped write a database app where every time the menu form was invoked, it would check the back-end database to see what the "current" version of the front-end should be. If it wasn't the same, it would launch the new version and quietly kill itself.
The user only experiences a slight delay that can not be differentiated from network congestion or heavy database load.
The key here is that the app does the work of checking for updates at an easy time to do it (user is transitioning from one form to another) and not based on an external stimulus (an interrupt).
Doing this for something like a word processor or spreadsheet that doesn't have such stark transitions would be trickier since it would have to somehow save the state, reload itself, and restore the state.
I think in the case of the patent, they're talking about updating the app during a page-load, so the user won't notice the delay because they're going through a state-change already. I may be mistaken, but I do not think the app gets updated in the middle of reading a page without doing a refresh of some kind.
Also "Tellurian" as a word for people from the planet Earth (Tellus).
Thanks for that! I have wondered what "Encyclopedia Tellurica" from the beginning of I-Robot could mean.
Every time I move, I do the process at this website: http://www.junkbusters.com/junkmail.html
You end up printing out about 20 different letters that you just fold, staple, stamp, and mail. A few require signatures. You'll later get several letters saying "you've been taken off the list" and then the junk mail reduces to a trickle. The only things I get now are from local businesses and a shitty mortgage company that won't stop mailing me.
And if you always use the iPod hooked to some other device, using that device's DAC and amplifier?
Then I suppose you have an extremely overpriced USB memory device.
My old Dodge Neon can travel several hundred miles an hour... if I load it in the back of a C141.
And the guy who was pushed into the intersection is given a ticket for running the red light.
And you as well... you crossed into the intersection on the red. How is the camera to know that you were pushed by the car behind you? And why should the company processing the tickets care to check since they get more money if you get a ticket too.
So we have our hypothetical concert with ourselves seated in the 2nd row. We can get a dummy and shove two microphones into his dummy ears for recording the sound. Do you think a 2/4/8 speaker setup would be more "accurate" than headphones?
Do you already know that what you're describing is "binaural recording" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording. When you listen to them with headphones, you get amazing position-awareness of the sounds. Some early binaural recordings were of story dramatazations - and you could hear the door creaking open "behind you".
Take for example an explosion. Then I guess the headphones loose out to the sub woofer.
You bring up an interesting idea... using headphones along with a subwoofer to get get the superior sound of headphones and the "feel" of the low-end.
I would really like to hear your distinction between academic and technical people.
When I was in school, I didn't leave the engineering building much. But my understanding is that there were other buildings at the school where people studied non-technical things like business, English, political science, and communications.
I even heard rumors that there were even women in those buildings, but I was not prone to falling for such wild claims. /s
Seriously, once you get out of math, engineering, and physical science disciplines, "latex" is what condoms are made of and "La-Tech" would be a French computer company. At the school I worked in, most of the engineering profs were happy using word. Only one was a serious LaTeX user (and he was definitely "technical"... he used to write liquification simulations in post-script and send them to be processed by the printer because its postscript engine was faster at floating point math and vectors than his 386 with math coprocessor!).
In the short-story collection, "I, Robot", the story "Liar" is about just that situation. Through some deviation in the manufacturing process a robot has the ability to read minds.
This leads the robot to have a more expansive interpretation of the first law because it can perceive emotional harm in addition to mere physical harm. Hilarity ensues. Actually not...
But it's a good story. This concept also plays out in one of the novels, I think, "Naked Sun".
A non-mind-reading robot wouldn't be able to perceive emotional harm so would not be inhibited from doing things emotionally harmful until they manifest in some way detectable by the robot.
If you happen to like audiobooks, there is a great version of "I, Robot" read by Scott Brick. I highly recommend it. (http://www.amazon.com/I-Robot-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0739312707/)
The issue with "practically impossible" is that the definition of such changes every year, as computers grow more and more powerful.
I think it has to do more with how a solution to a problem can be described then if that solution is actually doable within the constraints of time and space. If there is an algorithm that can describe a solution, then it's "solvable" (theoretically possible), but if it takes an infinite amount of time or an infinite amount of processing power, then it's not "practically possible".
In one of Asimov's Foundation novels, a character is trying to describe this. He say in theory, he could meet every person in the universe by simply visiting each planet and then finding and greeting every person on the planet. But of course, it is practically impossible because he could never visit every planet in his lifetime and while he was doing that some people would die before he could meet them.
So the problem is theoretically possible, but practically impossible.
We seem to be evolving a culture where we try to solve every problem with technology. Sometimes technology is not the answer.
No. Clearly the problem is that people are invited to meetings when they feel there is more value in doing something else than actually paying attention at the meeting.
Probably the best solution is to have fewer meetings and make them shorter and more focused.
If you then still need the meeting and making it shorter and focused does not keep the attention of the people involved, maybe they need a different job where they won't be distracted by such meetings.
I work for a large corporation and I believe we have far too many meetings that are not really needed. When I'm bored in one of these meetings, I like to look around the table and try to estimate the cost in salary and benefits of the particular meeting. With a VP, a handful of directors and several managers, a one-hour meeting easily costs the company a few thousand dollars.
This kind of technology won't solve the problem of people doing other things in meetings and it will most likely just piss them off.
It reminds me of the story (reported in various tech journals but not so much in the MSM) back in the 1970s about the US DoD funding a study by some university people of what could be learned about US military sites and activity from public sources like newspapers, libraries, etc. ...
It seemed to me that it could become a viable career path for a small number of people. But I never read any followups.
You can, indeed, make a career of such activities:
https://www.cia.gov/careers/jobs/view-all-jobs/open-source-officer-foreign-media-analyst.html
It seems that everyone and every entity is seeming short, fast turn-around and ever-increasing bottom lines using "growth percentage" as a metric for success and viability.
This kind of thinking is a systemic problem and not just in the job market.
Consider the mortgage foreclosure issue. For a single bank making a foreclosure decision, it makes perfect sense to foreclose a bad loan, realize the loss, and then recover the value by selling the property. This is even okay to happen "regularly" as long as it's a relatively minor level of activity. But once you reach (as another posted pointed out) a "tipping point", this behavior that's good for an individual suddenly becomes extremely detrimental to everyone.
This was magnified by an unwillingness by the banks to re-negotiate the raise in rates on adjustable rate loans. Again, on a case by case basis, it makes sense for the bank to "stick to their guns" and force the consumer to pay the higher rate. But doing this to too many people will cause a large number of them to foreclose. That just refers back to the previous paragraph.
With too many homes in foreclosure, values of entire neighborhoods drop and people are stuck with homes that aren't worth what they owe. Many walk away leaving the banks with properties they can't sell in neighborhoods that are devalued.
The short-term case of chasing the profit prevented the longer term view of seeing that what they were doing was destroying the market. And now, after so much damage, they're being forced to do the very things they should have been doing in the first place - negotiating rates to help keep homeowners in their homes.
Oh, do they want more uninsured drivers on the road? Lovely. I can see how everybody wins with that proposal.
Easy fix: just mandate that every insured driver also carry "uninsured driver coverage" as part of their insurance. It's a double bonus because they pay more for that additional insurance, yielding higher tax revenues!
Sadly, my parents live in Wisconsin. They've lived in several other states and nobody there believes them when they say that they've never paid more taxes and fees than they do in Wisconsin. When they say they paid 1/3 the property tax on their house in Idaho than they pay on their smaller house in Wisconsin, people just think they're lying. The Wisconsonites simply refuse to believe they're getting royally screwed in their taxes.
If you do more than 100,000 a year with a bank you should automatically have a clause that states all assets transferred to Nigeria (or any country you don't regularly do business with for that matter) should be frozen
You mean foreign countries like New Jersey and Texas? The story says the money was being sent to a bank in Texas (which was the entity that raised a flag on this) and checks were going to some nonexistent guy in New Jersey.
But you're on the right track that there should be some "human checking" if the banking details of a state's approved list are changed. I have no idea why the IT people are being blamed. This was the error of some clerk in the accounting department, or worse, by the management of that department who didn't have a validation process for changes in banking information for vendors who are paid over a certain amount.
Make friends with your commo guys!!
Some things apparently never change. My grandfather was in the Navy after WWII and he said if you wanted to make life better for yourself, make good friends with the mailman and the cook.
When I was, myself, in the Army, a good friend of mine got detailed to a Navy ship and making friends with the cook scored him all kinds of pastries and such.
I figured the same thing... if the robot snake can peer at my missing heart through the bottom of my open rib cage, then I don't think the snake will help me much.
Soldier: It's just a flesh wound.
Snake Doctor: Your bloody skin's off, your organs are gone!
Soldier: I've hurt worse.
we could have automated the process... However, rather than work with us...
I used to work in IT and now I'm a "business user" and I'm all for getting IT to simplify, automate, and improve processes.
However, what starts as a simple request to automate some simple but tedious task, or provide a way to link 2 sets of data ends up being treated like a multi-million dollar project that will need a team of 10 people 6 months and many hours of meetings (all charged to my budget) to put together a feasibility study, which will then be put into a queue where it will be evaluated next fiscal year by the prioritization committee, which, if approved (and it won't because there's a huge project consuming ALL discretionary IT resources) will still take another year and a half to design, test, QA, and deploy.
So instead of doing that, I spend a couple hours to write, test, and document some little Excel/VBA tool or some simple Access import-query-export solution that easily solves the problem, saving my employees loads of time (while typically improving their accuracy as tedious, manual tasks are often error-prone themselves) so they can focus on things like running the business.
As I said, I'd love to have IT solve these little problems because they are so often "low hanging fruit" that should take very little effort to do while saving many hours of work. But we always get told, "No", "Next Year", or "We'll need to conduct a study", when if they had just sent a low-level coder over to work for a couple hours it would have been done before I could schedule a meeting with all the "stakeholders" who would be conducting the study.
Having been in IT, I understand completely how bothersome it is to deal with things when the users go rogue - but if IT is unresponsive or provides no other alternative, then that is exactly what what they'll do.
"Once is an accident, twice is coincidence..."
Need I remind everyone what a third incidence would point to?
Fool me-- you can't get fooled again?
Pointers make routes into one big array of destinations.
Then let them figure out how to drive.
So then pointers are more like a series of tubes rather than a bunch of dump trucks?
If the demand for CS graduates is low, then why bother recruiting them actively?
By that logic, schools wouldn't recruit English majors, Anthropology majors, Philosophy majors and "General Studies", etc.
The sad truth is that the only part of the university that cares about what happens to the student after they graduate is the development office (they're the ones who'll hound the graduate for donations for the rest of their lives).
The rest of the school's purpose is to get tuition-paying students into their seats and make money. So that's why they'll recruit students into programs that have few prospects for the graduates. And if they have to dumb down the program to get the students to stay, and thus diminishing the prospects of their graduates at the same time, then so be it.
That's not to say that individual professors act this way, but the university is an organism itself and will often do things contrary to the wishes of the people who comprise it.
If I ever get laid off, can I come work with you?