The Copyright Act of 1976 extended the duration of all copyrights in force as of 1976 to the life of the original author plus fifty (50) years and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (aka The Mickey Mouse Protection Act) extended that term by an additional twenty (20) years. If the surviving members of the band continue to enjoy an average wealthy first world life expectency then the Led Zeppelin catalog should begin entering the public domain some time around the year 2093, by which time it is very likely that none of us will be around to enjoy them in that capacity (unless you buy into the whole singularity nonsense).
Wouldn't this violate many of the recent laws? I would certainly think it would.
Probably not with large companies like Amazon since they have the resources to meet the regulatory burdens. Amazon is in fact becoming a payment processing service in its own right (for markets where it choses not to be directly involved), whereby small businesses receive payments from Amazon, not directly from the consumer, and are told by Amazon where to ship the goods. In fact this is preferable for the consumer because it is better to have the payment information in one place that is well guarded rather than spreading it out piecemeal among small businesses who are mostly security novices. The Paypal service is an implementation of the exact same idea. These services exist for a reason and most Internet commerce wouldn't take place without them.
I, as an individual, prefer to be responsible for protecting my own data
Which you cannot do because you do not have control over what information third parties collect and store except for that provided by the government through laws and regulation. There are plenty of large data brokers (remember ChoicePoint?) who collect tons of information about everyone (everything that they can get their hands on) and then sell it to practically anyone with the ability to pay. If you pop up on the grid even once with these guys then they have you pegged for the rest of your life. It is practically impossible to avoid the information brokers without living under a rock and paying for everything in cash.
This is precisely why I generally do not do business with small businesses or if I do, then I pay in cash. The problem with small business is that they are well, small. They think small, they behave like amateurs (particularly in areas that are not part of their core business), and they usually provide no tangible benefit to a transaction while charging a higher price than larger businesses, especially at retail.
Now having said that, if we are going to increase the regulatory burden then it should be increased first upon the providers of consumer credit who are all large corporations and have been dragging their feet for years on security because in the current legal and regulatory environment because insurance is cheaper. There is no incentive, or very little anyway, for credit card companies to substantially improve security as long as they are not perceived as being substantially worse in that area than their competitors (which are few enough since consumer credit is essentially an oligopoly). This is compounded by the fact that the general public has such a poor understanding of security that the credit card companies would rather pay lip service to security instead of actually spending money on something that most consumers have no appreciation of.
If the merchant is required to store anything at all then it should merely be a transaction number (not the credit card number) which can be cross checked with the credit card processors in the event of an audit and the amount. The credit card processors will whine about having to store massive amounts of transaction data, but they have been earning massive profits on consumer debt for decades and would be seen as crying with two loaves of bread under their arms...they should be ignored.
Is it fair to ask why the web developers must shoulder all of the burden for these costly redesigns? How about the screen reader/html parser developers improving their products so that they can better read modern websites? A fair question I think.
The ADA is an important piece of legislation yes, but at some point the level of accommodation required by these lawsuits could be deemed unreasonable. The ADA was supposed to prevent cases of zero or unreasonable accommodation, but the lawyers have turned it into a civil lawsuit extravaganza for any business which does not bend over backwards and move mountains, whatever the cost and damn the torpedos, to meet their arbitrary opinion as to what is "reasonable". We have had a cases here in California where unscrupulous lawyers and their disabled "client(s)" make a business of traveling around and shaking down mom and pop business for ADA violations, even when the mom and pops promise to make reasonable changes (i.e. it is about the money and not access for the disabled). The idea is sound and even noble in principle, but like so many other laws with good intentions the ADA has been abused by lawyers who are more interested in lining their pockets than in actually helping the disabled.
It's not about the bling, it's about the American companies that will lose millions to cheap, legal knockoff products.
Only if the Antiguans can legally export and resell those copies in other WTO countries. The Antiguan market itself is probably not a big one for copyright and IP anyway (i.e. it doesn't generate a lot of revenue for US companies from DVDs, CDs, software exported from the US). If the damage award only allows Antiguans to make and use copies for their own enjoyment then you might have more happy Antiguans, but not a lot of extra revenue for the Antiguan treasury.
Yes, that is true, but being seen in a crowd, even by trained human agents, is not the same as having automated scanning and storage of all faces in the crowd for later analysis via computer so that a list of "trouble makers" can be compiled and cross referenced with other databases. I am not saying that this is what happened, but the potential is there once technology is employed to assist in identifying and tracking people, even at outdoor public events where in the past the size of the crowd afforded some level of anonymity.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has had artificial dragonflies with eavesdropping capabilities since the 1970s. The mechanical dragonflies were originally constructed to spy on clandestine meetings conducted spontaneously in open spaces, such as parks, where anything larger would be too conspicuous. The operator controlled the dragonfly via remote with a laser pointer like device. These were built and they actually flew and were controllable, but they proved to be ill suited for outdoor use where wind of 2mph or more would render them ineffective (the motor powering the wings was simply not strong enough to overcome the air currents). This was all documented in the book Class 11: Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class by T. J. Waters.
That is basically what the probes are albeit in a limited way. They cannot survive indefinitely because of the intense radiation in the space immediately around and out to a large distance of Jupiter. Even if the radiation problem could be solved, the orbit of Jupiter is too far out for solar panels to be very effective (i.e. extremely large area of panels would be needed) and nuclear batteries, while compact and long lasting, are none the less a finite energy resource. The current technology does not allow for permanent research stations or probes.
Re:Exhaustive?
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
but the "intelligent" pruning mechanism is still eluding everyone.
It is not the pruning mechanism itself which is still eluding everyone, but rather the difficulty in formulating a sound evaluation function for use in the alpha-beta pruning optimization of the brute force search. The game of Go is interesting because it is often the case that a particular board configuration does not give much concrete information about its future potential. In other words, a seemingly disadvantageous board in the short run might actually lead to a better endgame than a seemingly more valuable board in the present. A small situation in one part of the board might effect the larger game in unexpected and interesting ways dozens of moves into the future. It is precisely this complexity which makes Go intriguing for players and difficult for computers.
I am just saying Let the Bios do its job...boot the system.
It is still wise (at least in theory) to allow the BIOS to handle some low level hardware issues behind the abstraction barrier, at least until the OS specifically overrides a certain function for direct control (assuming that it is logical to allow such a low level override). The abstraction layer allows both the OS and the BIOS to vary independently without causing changes in each other and that is a good thing. Suppose, for example, that your mainboard wants to use the Acme Computer Inc 56IXPG chipset or something else that is low level and obscure. Shouldn't the BIOS handle the coincidental low-level on board stuff like that instead of the OS doing it directly? I agree that there is a line to be drawn at some point, the OS has to be free to manage hardware at *some* level after all (that is the whole point of the OS), but there is still value in abstraction so that the interface between the hardware and the OS can be "virtualized" to some extent (i.e. separating important hardware concepts like the kind you read about in your computer design textbooks from the sometimes coincidental details of a particular low level implementation).
Isn't it more important for the BIOS to present an efficient abstraction of certain hardware resources that *any* OS can easily communicate with according to a standard interface than to optimize support, possibly at the expense of flexibility and abstraction, for a single OS (even if that OS is Linux)? The violation of abstraction merely for performance improvements is something that engineers should generally be very reluctant to do.
Wouldn't it be fun if someone legally changed their name to "None of the Above" and then ran for President? How many people would vote for him or her, perhaps unknowingly, simply because they thought they were voting for none of the candidates and not the one named "None of the Above"?
Valeri Polyakov, launched 8 January 1994 (Soyuz TM-18), stayed at Mir LD-4 for 437.7 days, during which he orbited the earth about 7,075 times and traveled 300,765,000 km, (186,887,000 miles) returned March 22, 1995 (Soyuz TM-20). Apparently he is still alive and kicking and his 1+ year spaceflight was spent in zero gravity.
I agree. The less specialized the hardware and software that is being mobilized in the shipping container the less worthwhile the idea becomes. It makes sense for the military to package this stuff up because they have high mobility requirements AND they use specialized hardware and software (ruggedized with special enclosures and the like) that doesn't change nearly as often as generic commercial data center equipment does. For example, the artillery computers in the M109A6 "Paladin" and the associated counter-battery radars and equipment probably don't change every 18 months even though they are upgraded from time to time.
I certainly I hope that thing was air-conditioned or at least located inside an air-conditioned facility. It would really suck to be sitting out on a tarmac inside a shipping container in the middle of the Arabian desert without air-conditioning. The electronics would probably overheat as well.
It occurs to me that it is not in the best interest of Google to tip its hand prematurely on this announcement, before the spectrum auction of 700 MHz, in which Google is a bidder, is complete. If this is true then Verizon, Sprint/Nextel, and AT&T will know that Google represents a serious competitive threat and must therefore be outbid in the spectrum auction at any price so that Google can be denied the spectrum that it needs to roll out the competing services. It should be abundantly clear to everyone that the type of services that Google wants to offer in the mobile space are anathema to the entrenched providers who are used to the revenue stream from nickle and dimming practices that are enabled by absolute control of their networks. The existing carriers will certainly not offer the Google mobile OS on terms that Google would accept (Google wants freedom whereas the telcos want lock-in). This upcoming spectrum auction may prove to be very interesting indeed.
This brings up what has, IMHO, been a major sore point in an otherwise brilliant series (Civilization) and that is the generally poor level of play on the part of the AI (i.e. resort to particularly blatant cheating on noble and higher difficulty levels with generally moronic play on lower levels). If Firaxis, or anyone else, is going to do another iteration on the Civ series then please, for the love of all that is holy, do not make the AI suck. If the Strategy First people can do it with Galactic Civilizations then whoever does Civ 5 should be able to get the AI right.
Still, the profit margin on these properties was spectacular by any reckoning and Jackson deserves another chance if for no other reason than gratitude for pulling of a series of movies that many others before him said could not be done.
Given the fact that the launch tower and associated facilities for Orion will be built / modified anyway for at a cost of billions of dollars why not spend a few extra million to provide yet another obvious escape route? Heck NASA could even license the naming rights and theming for rides at amusement parks to recoup some of the costs.
The rocket concept is really a return to the right direction after the long lived and oversold space shuttle side mounted launch vehicle. The Russians have long had rocket powered escape systems on their launch vehicles (the system has saved lives on at least one occasion: Soyuz T-10-1), a system that was deemed too complex and expensive for the shuttle due to the side mounted launch position and the need for an independent escape capsule, because the rocket already contains a capsule-like vehicle oriented in a vertical position with a clear shot up and away.
If we have to return to manned space flight then the rocket concept is definitely the way to go. Personally however, I think that a return to a manned program at this time is largely a waste of taxpayer money (although not entirely since some concepts will still have to be tested from time to time) that could be better spent on advanced probes, propulsion research, artificial gravity, long term self sustained life support systems (which will be needed both for permanent off world bases and long duration space journeys), and compact fusion power generators. In fact the manned program should really not take priority again until we have developed all of those technologies to the point of high reliability AND have at least a working understanding of an interstellar drive system (probably not in my lifetime). The problem with spaceflight is that people want immediate results when in fact it will probably take several more centuries or even millennia, assuming that we do not blow ourselves up in the meantime, to really start moving people off this planet and on to other destinations in the Solar System and beyond. The question is this: do we as a species have the maturity to set and reach such long term goals? The answer, at least for now, is a resounding "no"...hence the long expected time frames.
To make matters worse, despite his inexperience, he makes even more money than the last superintendent.
Perhaps he is subject to the same disruptions in the payroll system as everyone else so he makes more in theory, but only when the system doesn't inadvertently pay him less or $0.00
I remember reading once that Deloitte was one of the biggest proponents of project outsourcing so it would not be surprising to me if it comes out in a later investigation of what went wrong that the people responsible for writing the "customization" code or integration adapters were in fact barely competent, overworked, and inexperienced "programmers" working out of some office in Bangalore who have no idea how the complex payroll system of the LAUSD should work or has worked in the past (it has been my experience that outsourced programmers frequently underestimate the complexity of the project or write brittle code that doesn't handle exceptions very well if they handle them at all). If the system cannot be specified *precisely* then it shouldn't be given to the programmers, and especially not offshore ones who will guess (and guess wrong) about what they *thought* the requirement meant while not telling you about a problem (if they even know it exists) until it is too late to fix it.
The big ERP systems are valuable if you have a very large organization, which the LAUSD probably is, AND if you use other components (such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, and other modules) all from the same vendor. If it is just one area, payroll in this case, which is being updated or modernized then SAP and PeopleSoft are probably overkill and more headache then just purchasing a smaller system which specializes in payroll or simply developing the project in house.
Probably some salesman needs to be fired (out of a cannon; into the sun)
The salesman probably doesn't care if he does get fired, people get fired or laid off in sales all of the time. If he is a true mercenary then he will quickly find another position (probably higher paying or better commission) someplace else and repeat the process. I knew a guy like that once, extremely good at what he did, which was selling things, but completely without moral compunctions...all that mattered to him was the sale and he would do anything, short of outright lying (although he would bend the truth to the breaking point if that got him the sale) to get it. He was even involved in questionably legal stuff on the side. I lost track of him after college, but there are plenty of his kind out there and the good ones always manage to stay in the game.
low ball hardware requirements and suggest that the IT people were well-meaning but out of their depth.
That is what every sales rep tries to do. In technical matters, particularly those where IT expertise would be valuable to managers making a purchase decision, the sales rep will attempt to bypass IT because he knows that if there are any flaws in the product or bad reviews from previous customers then the IT department is the most likely to uncover them. The goal of the sales rep is to close a sale, no matter how bad the product that he is selling is, and anything that gets in his way or makes that more difficult, is to be evaded, bypassed, marginalized, minimized, or preferably just not mentioned.
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The Copyright Act of 1976 extended the duration of all copyrights in force as of 1976 to the life of the original author plus fifty (50) years and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (aka The Mickey Mouse Protection Act) extended that term by an additional twenty (20) years. If the surviving members of the band continue to enjoy an average wealthy first world life expectency then the Led Zeppelin catalog should begin entering the public domain some time around the year 2093, by which time it is very likely that none of us will be around to enjoy them in that capacity (unless you buy into the whole singularity nonsense).
Wouldn't this violate many of the recent laws? I would certainly think it would.
Probably not with large companies like Amazon since they have the resources to meet the regulatory burdens. Amazon is in fact becoming a payment processing service in its own right (for markets where it choses not to be directly involved), whereby small businesses receive payments from Amazon, not directly from the consumer, and are told by Amazon where to ship the goods. In fact this is preferable for the consumer because it is better to have the payment information in one place that is well guarded rather than spreading it out piecemeal among small businesses who are mostly security novices. The Paypal service is an implementation of the exact same idea. These services exist for a reason and most Internet commerce wouldn't take place without them.
I, as an individual, prefer to be responsible for protecting my own data
Which you cannot do because you do not have control over what information third parties collect and store except for that provided by the government through laws and regulation. There are plenty of large data brokers (remember ChoicePoint?) who collect tons of information about everyone (everything that they can get their hands on) and then sell it to practically anyone with the ability to pay. If you pop up on the grid even once with these guys then they have you pegged for the rest of your life. It is practically impossible to avoid the information brokers without living under a rock and paying for everything in cash.
This is precisely why I generally do not do business with small businesses or if I do, then I pay in cash. The problem with small business is that they are well, small. They think small, they behave like amateurs (particularly in areas that are not part of their core business), and they usually provide no tangible benefit to a transaction while charging a higher price than larger businesses, especially at retail.
Now having said that, if we are going to increase the regulatory burden then it should be increased first upon the providers of consumer credit who are all large corporations and have been dragging their feet for years on security because in the current legal and regulatory environment because insurance is cheaper. There is no incentive, or very little anyway, for credit card companies to substantially improve security as long as they are not perceived as being substantially worse in that area than their competitors (which are few enough since consumer credit is essentially an oligopoly). This is compounded by the fact that the general public has such a poor understanding of security that the credit card companies would rather pay lip service to security instead of actually spending money on something that most consumers have no appreciation of.
If the merchant is required to store anything at all then it should merely be a transaction number (not the credit card number) which can be cross checked with the credit card processors in the event of an audit and the amount. The credit card processors will whine about having to store massive amounts of transaction data, but they have been earning massive profits on consumer debt for decades and would be seen as crying with two loaves of bread under their arms...they should be ignored.
Is it fair to ask why the web developers must shoulder all of the burden for these costly redesigns? How about the screen reader/html parser developers improving their products so that they can better read modern websites? A fair question I think.
The ADA is an important piece of legislation yes, but at some point the level of accommodation required by these lawsuits could be deemed unreasonable. The ADA was supposed to prevent cases of zero or unreasonable accommodation, but the lawyers have turned it into a civil lawsuit extravaganza for any business which does not bend over backwards and move mountains, whatever the cost and damn the torpedos, to meet their arbitrary opinion as to what is "reasonable". We have had a cases here in California where unscrupulous lawyers and their disabled "client(s)" make a business of traveling around and shaking down mom and pop business for ADA violations, even when the mom and pops promise to make reasonable changes (i.e. it is about the money and not access for the disabled). The idea is sound and even noble in principle, but like so many other laws with good intentions the ADA has been abused by lawyers who are more interested in lining their pockets than in actually helping the disabled.
It's not about the bling, it's about the American companies that will lose millions to cheap, legal knockoff products.
Only if the Antiguans can legally export and resell those copies in other WTO countries. The Antiguan market itself is probably not a big one for copyright and IP anyway (i.e. it doesn't generate a lot of revenue for US companies from DVDs, CDs, software exported from the US). If the damage award only allows Antiguans to make and use copies for their own enjoyment then you might have more happy Antiguans, but not a lot of extra revenue for the Antiguan treasury.
You want people to see you
Yes, that is true, but being seen in a crowd, even by trained human agents, is not the same as having automated scanning and storage of all faces in the crowd for later analysis via computer so that a list of "trouble makers" can be compiled and cross referenced with other databases. I am not saying that this is what happened, but the potential is there once technology is employed to assist in identifying and tracking people, even at outdoor public events where in the past the size of the crowd afforded some level of anonymity.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has had artificial dragonflies with eavesdropping capabilities since the 1970s. The mechanical dragonflies were originally constructed to spy on clandestine meetings conducted spontaneously in open spaces, such as parks, where anything larger would be too conspicuous. The operator controlled the dragonfly via remote with a laser pointer like device. These were built and they actually flew and were controllable, but they proved to be ill suited for outdoor use where wind of 2mph or more would render them ineffective (the motor powering the wings was simply not strong enough to overcome the air currents). This was all documented in the book Class 11: Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class by T. J. Waters.
That is basically what the probes are albeit in a limited way. They cannot survive indefinitely because of the intense radiation in the space immediately around and out to a large distance of Jupiter. Even if the radiation problem could be solved, the orbit of Jupiter is too far out for solar panels to be very effective (i.e. extremely large area of panels would be needed) and nuclear batteries, while compact and long lasting, are none the less a finite energy resource. The current technology does not allow for permanent research stations or probes.
but the "intelligent" pruning mechanism is still eluding everyone.
It is not the pruning mechanism itself which is still eluding everyone, but rather the difficulty in formulating a sound evaluation function for use in the alpha-beta pruning optimization of the brute force search. The game of Go is interesting because it is often the case that a particular board configuration does not give much concrete information about its future potential. In other words, a seemingly disadvantageous board in the short run might actually lead to a better endgame than a seemingly more valuable board in the present. A small situation in one part of the board might effect the larger game in unexpected and interesting ways dozens of moves into the future. It is precisely this complexity which makes Go intriguing for players and difficult for computers.
I am just saying Let the Bios do its job...boot the system.
It is still wise (at least in theory) to allow the BIOS to handle some low level hardware issues behind the abstraction barrier, at least until the OS specifically overrides a certain function for direct control (assuming that it is logical to allow such a low level override). The abstraction layer allows both the OS and the BIOS to vary independently without causing changes in each other and that is a good thing. Suppose, for example, that your mainboard wants to use the Acme Computer Inc 56IXPG chipset or something else that is low level and obscure. Shouldn't the BIOS handle the coincidental low-level on board stuff like that instead of the OS doing it directly? I agree that there is a line to be drawn at some point, the OS has to be free to manage hardware at *some* level after all (that is the whole point of the OS), but there is still value in abstraction so that the interface between the hardware and the OS can be "virtualized" to some extent (i.e. separating important hardware concepts like the kind you read about in your computer design textbooks from the sometimes coincidental details of a particular low level implementation).
Isn't it more important for the BIOS to present an efficient abstraction of certain hardware resources that *any* OS can easily communicate with according to a standard interface than to optimize support, possibly at the expense of flexibility and abstraction, for a single OS (even if that OS is Linux)? The violation of abstraction merely for performance improvements is something that engineers should generally be very reluctant to do.
I don't think I'm voting for any of them.
Wouldn't it be fun if someone legally changed their name to "None of the Above" and then ran for President? How many people would vote for him or her, perhaps unknowingly, simply because they thought they were voting for none of the candidates and not the one named "None of the Above"?
I don't know about everyone else but I specifically block these scripts with NoScript. Who needs them? Certainly not the users.
Valeri Polyakov, launched 8 January 1994 (Soyuz TM-18), stayed at Mir LD-4 for 437.7 days, during which he orbited the earth about 7,075 times and traveled 300,765,000 km, (186,887,000 miles) returned March 22, 1995 (Soyuz TM-20). Apparently he is still alive and kicking and his 1+ year spaceflight was spent in zero gravity.
I agree. The less specialized the hardware and software that is being mobilized in the shipping container the less worthwhile the idea becomes. It makes sense for the military to package this stuff up because they have high mobility requirements AND they use specialized hardware and software (ruggedized with special enclosures and the like) that doesn't change nearly as often as generic commercial data center equipment does. For example, the artillery computers in the M109A6 "Paladin" and the associated counter-battery radars and equipment probably don't change every 18 months even though they are upgraded from time to time.
I certainly I hope that thing was air-conditioned or at least located inside an air-conditioned facility. It would really suck to be sitting out on a tarmac inside a shipping container in the middle of the Arabian desert without air-conditioning. The electronics would probably overheat as well.
It occurs to me that it is not in the best interest of Google to tip its hand prematurely on this announcement, before the spectrum auction of 700 MHz, in which Google is a bidder, is complete. If this is true then Verizon, Sprint/Nextel, and AT&T will know that Google represents a serious competitive threat and must therefore be outbid in the spectrum auction at any price so that Google can be denied the spectrum that it needs to roll out the competing services. It should be abundantly clear to everyone that the type of services that Google wants to offer in the mobile space are anathema to the entrenched providers who are used to the revenue stream from nickle and dimming practices that are enabled by absolute control of their networks. The existing carriers will certainly not offer the Google mobile OS on terms that Google would accept (Google wants freedom whereas the telcos want lock-in). This upcoming spectrum auction may prove to be very interesting indeed.
This brings up what has, IMHO, been a major sore point in an otherwise brilliant series (Civilization) and that is the generally poor level of play on the part of the AI (i.e. resort to particularly blatant cheating on noble and higher difficulty levels with generally moronic play on lower levels). If Firaxis, or anyone else, is going to do another iteration on the Civ series then please, for the love of all that is holy, do not make the AI suck. If the Strategy First people can do it with Galactic Civilizations then whoever does Civ 5 should be able to get the AI right.
Still, the profit margin on these properties was spectacular by any reckoning and Jackson deserves another chance if for no other reason than gratitude for pulling of a series of movies that many others before him said could not be done.
Apparently the iPod and the battery rendered the songs a bit too literally...
Given the fact that the launch tower and associated facilities for Orion will be built / modified anyway for at a cost of billions of dollars why not spend a few extra million to provide yet another obvious escape route? Heck NASA could even license the naming rights and theming for rides at amusement parks to recoup some of the costs.
The rocket concept is really a return to the right direction after the long lived and oversold space shuttle side mounted launch vehicle. The Russians have long had rocket powered escape systems on their launch vehicles (the system has saved lives on at least one occasion: Soyuz T-10-1), a system that was deemed too complex and expensive for the shuttle due to the side mounted launch position and the need for an independent escape capsule, because the rocket already contains a capsule-like vehicle oriented in a vertical position with a clear shot up and away.
If we have to return to manned space flight then the rocket concept is definitely the way to go. Personally however, I think that a return to a manned program at this time is largely a waste of taxpayer money (although not entirely since some concepts will still have to be tested from time to time) that could be better spent on advanced probes, propulsion research, artificial gravity, long term self sustained life support systems (which will be needed both for permanent off world bases and long duration space journeys), and compact fusion power generators. In fact the manned program should really not take priority again until we have developed all of those technologies to the point of high reliability AND have at least a working understanding of an interstellar drive system (probably not in my lifetime). The problem with spaceflight is that people want immediate results when in fact it will probably take several more centuries or even millennia, assuming that we do not blow ourselves up in the meantime, to really start moving people off this planet and on to other destinations in the Solar System and beyond. The question is this: do we as a species have the maturity to set and reach such long term goals? The answer, at least for now, is a resounding "no"...hence the long expected time frames.
To make matters worse, despite his inexperience, he makes even more money than the last superintendent.
Perhaps he is subject to the same disruptions in the payroll system as everyone else so he makes more in theory, but only when the system doesn't inadvertently pay him less or $0.00
I remember reading once that Deloitte was one of the biggest proponents of project outsourcing so it would not be surprising to me if it comes out in a later investigation of what went wrong that the people responsible for writing the "customization" code or integration adapters were in fact barely competent, overworked, and inexperienced "programmers" working out of some office in Bangalore who have no idea how the complex payroll system of the LAUSD should work or has worked in the past (it has been my experience that outsourced programmers frequently underestimate the complexity of the project or write brittle code that doesn't handle exceptions very well if they handle them at all). If the system cannot be specified *precisely* then it shouldn't be given to the programmers, and especially not offshore ones who will guess (and guess wrong) about what they *thought* the requirement meant while not telling you about a problem (if they even know it exists) until it is too late to fix it.
The big ERP systems are valuable if you have a very large organization, which the LAUSD probably is, AND if you use other components (such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, and other modules) all from the same vendor. If it is just one area, payroll in this case, which is being updated or modernized then SAP and PeopleSoft are probably overkill and more headache then just purchasing a smaller system which specializes in payroll or simply developing the project in house.
Probably some salesman needs to be fired (out of a cannon; into the sun)
The salesman probably doesn't care if he does get fired, people get fired or laid off in sales all of the time. If he is a true mercenary then he will quickly find another position (probably higher paying or better commission) someplace else and repeat the process. I knew a guy like that once, extremely good at what he did, which was selling things, but completely without moral compunctions...all that mattered to him was the sale and he would do anything, short of outright lying (although he would bend the truth to the breaking point if that got him the sale) to get it. He was even involved in questionably legal stuff on the side. I lost track of him after college, but there are plenty of his kind out there and the good ones always manage to stay in the game.
low ball hardware requirements and suggest that the IT people were well-meaning but out of their depth.
That is what every sales rep tries to do. In technical matters, particularly those where IT expertise would be valuable to managers making a purchase decision, the sales rep will attempt to bypass IT because he knows that if there are any flaws in the product or bad reviews from previous customers then the IT department is the most likely to uncover them. The goal of the sales rep is to close a sale, no matter how bad the product that he is selling is, and anything that gets in his way or makes that more difficult, is to be evaded, bypassed, marginalized, minimized, or preferably just not mentioned.