The disabled always want to be treated equally. Well, now they can be. The harassment dispensed by the TSA at our airports is shared equally by all Americans, whether disabled or not.
no armistice was signed when the Korean War ended.
No formal peace treaty ending hostilities was signed. There was an armistice in place from the end of the fighting and the establishment of the DMZ until the North Koreans abandoned it during the recent kerfuffle.
How do we know that this is just a game that is being played between them so that all of the local populations will not question those expenses?
Military expenses can be cut, just like other government expenses, but think of the cost if you're wrong. Whatever problems you have under your current government would intensify a hundred fold if your nation was conquered and occupied by a foreign army. When weighed against those tremendously costly consequences, a military capable of providing a credible defense is definitely worth funding.
North Korea doesn't have enough resources for a sustained military campaign. They're short on everything from fuel to spare parts and even ammunition. Moreover, their equipment is mostly antique and obsolete and they're not able to replace losses. If they do attack, the US and South Korea should seize upon the opportunity to wreck as much of their military equipment as possible, as we did with the Iraqi army in Gulf War I, so as to limit their future offensive capabilities and degrade their military effectiveness. I'm not suggesting that the US or South Korea shoot first, but if the North Attacks the US and South Korea should ensure that they pay for it.
That's your opinion. However, as I understand the English language the word activist is defined as one who is an especially active and vigorous advocate of a cause. In the case of Carl Ichan the cause is the financial best interests of the shareholders. A less noble cause perhaps than what you have in mind when you use the word but a cause none the less.
There are mechanisms in the marketplace that tend to select out bad directors over time or at least put them into marginal and less profitable firms:
The first line of defense against bad management and bad directors are the shorts. I presume that most of you know what I mean when I say that but for the benefit of those who don't a short is somebody who, in exchange for payment of a fee to the owner, borrows shares with a promise to return them at a future date. In the meantime the short controls the shares. This means that the short can vote the shares at the annual meeting, receive any dividends paid on the shares and the like. However, in practice the borrowed shares are immediately sold with the expectation that the future value of the shares will decline and the short will profit from this decline when they buy back shares to return to the original owner at a lower price. The professional shorts are merciless and seek out bad directors and bad management just like sharks seek out blood in the water. So bad management is discovered and punished by shorts who are rewarded for their efforts by profiting on the sales. This works best with small or medium sized companies whose share prices can be utterly smashed by the shorts.
With larger companies there are independent investor activists who make a career of acquiring minority stakes in badly managed companies and then leading the common shareholders in an organized campaign against management. Even if the activists cannot secure enough votes to actually replace directors or force the issues outright, management can often be pressured into concessions by the prospect of a knock down drag out fight in public with these famous activists. Carl Ichan is prominent amongst these types of activist investors.
Finally, the major institutional investors, including hedge funds, wealth management firms and pension funds keep dossiers on corporate directors and actively vote against those whom they don't like or in whom they have low confidence. Eventually these bad directors get a bad reputation and their careers as corporate directors are effectively ended.
Deterrent punishment is only useful in a society where people copy each other mindlessly, and clearly everyone in the United States is too smart for that.
Perhaps my sarcasm detector is malfunctioning today, but are we living in the same country?
Ok this guy did something monumentally stupid which, most certainly should serve as example for others. Done. Now whats with the 30 months in prison?
Justice?
Why must this guy be a felon? Now unable to leave the country, unable to vote in most places, unable to own a firearm
Do you really want an idiot like laser man voting or having access to a firearm? People like this ought to be disenfranchised, at least until such time as they've proven to the rest of us that they have reformed and are worthy again of responsibility. Let this young man live and learn for another 10 years and we'll take another look at age 30.
all for something stupid that, he is unlikely to ever do again.
Ignorance and stupidity sure are expensive aren't they? A worthwhile lesson for his peers to be sure.
The punishment fetish in this country really needs to be checked
For certain crimes that's true. Legalize drugs, gambling and prostitution but those who recklessly endanger the lives of others must be punished.
punishments are totally out of whack with crimes when we have people losing their rights indefinitely over something which, while it could have been disasterous wasn't
Rights aren't removed indefinitely in most states. Only Kentucky and Virginia permanently disenfranchise convicted felons. If the plane had crashed then he could have been charged with felony murder which is a much more serious crime. The 30 month sentence seems fair given the circumstances and the reckless disregard for the lives of dozens of other people.
using it as a teaching moment than by ruining this guys life and making crime one of his best options going forward.
Teachable moments are for toddlers, not adults. After age 18 we don't coddle, we punish.
Apparently, California's prison lobby has not been deterred by the budget problems and overcrowding.
Why would they be deterred? They have the people of California over a barrel now and it's the people themselves who've obediently assumed the position over it by passing all of the "get tough on crime" propositions over the years. The liberals who run this state are now scared to death of the hardened career criminals and gangs that inhabit these gladiator schools and what might happen if any significant number of them were to be released back onto the streets. Indeed, the vulnerability of the general population is heightened further still by the fact that many Californians don't own guns and have no idea how to use them even as law enforcement is cut back and prisoners are released early from overcrowded and violent institutions. Locking more people up and hardening them in these institutions only further strengthens the hands of the prison guards and the lobbyists representing the private prisons because they know that the California politicians will pay almost any price to keep the peace and maintain the status quo.
The reports say that the algorithm written by the teen was based upon or is part of the family of iterative algorithms more commonly referred to as genetic algorithms. The basic idea is to start with a set of possible solution candidates, article summaries in this case, and then pick the best ones iteratively while using so called genetic operations like crossover and mutation to modify the sets before each successive iterative evaluation. In the context of summarizing a body of text one might consider the set of all possible five sentence paragraphs that could be constructed by breaking the article down into sentences. Then, depending upon how well or not each sentence matches certain heuristic qualities, it might be trimmed from the paragraph or promoted and crossed into other paragraphs and so on. The final result after a certain number of iterations is an increasingly good "fit" on the solution candidate or in this case a "good" summary of the article as judged by the intended human audience. Although text processing and heuristic analysis is a relatively well developed field, with many good evaluation heuristics to borrow, this teenager is never the less to be commended for his efforts. I certainly wasn't sophisticated enough at age 15 to even be thinking about doing something like this. That being said, this algorithm probably has limitations. It may be good at summarizing pop culture articles (draw your own conclusions on what that says about modern "journalism") but there's really only so much that one can do with 5 or even 8 sentences. This may not end up being as valuable as Yahoo thinks because I'm virtually certain that both Google and Microsoft have people that can match and probably exceed it. Indeed, for all we know Google has already doing this for years with it's news summaries and just hasn't publicized it. Still, 30 million is nothing to be sneezed at and I salute this young man for his achievement.
now I have to worry that if I walk up to another developer, their first thought will be, "Oh shit, it's a woman. Gotta scoot!"
Which is exactly what will happen. Many developers already suspect that women in general are more trouble than they're worth so incidents like this will only serve to reinforce that woman == trouble association.
I didn't say that you couldn't get them, merely that there weren't as available as regular consumer gear. This is especially true if you want a specific set of options, not just the stock model. For example, if you really want the built in GPS receiver, the touchscreen with stylus and the special hard drive heater (for those really cold days on the arctic tundra) then you'll almost certainly have to go through a Panasonic dealer to special order it which means full retail prices plus a few weeks for delivery.
It may seem strange, but remember that Toughbooks and related devices are almost always sold through distribution channels to institutional buyers who need the specs and are willing to pay what it costs to get them. They're actually somewhat difficult to come buy in the consumer market, especially new, and the prices are relatively high by PC standards. A fully rugged Toughbook 31 can easily cost between $6000-$10000 new, depending upon what options are selected. This is easily more than twice as expensive as any equivalent non-tough notebook of equal or even slightly better computing spec. The marketing is intended to target corporate buyers who are placing large orders, not consumers or individual users. That's why it seems strange compared to what you might see in an advertisement for a consumer device. The Toughpad android tablet looks nice, but for $1300 I'd rather have the Galaxy Tab with an OtterBox Defender case. The Toughpad would still be tougher, but I don't spend my days changing pipes on a drilling rig so I don't need the extra toughness enough to pay at least $800 more for it.
I prefer VLC but the point is well taken. Reclaim your freedom to watch the content you paid for in the manner that you wish by using open source software to re-enable your rights as a consumer.
If they are entering into an agreement that includes training he is indeed needing to "train him in comp sci".
He'd probably have more success teaching his dog to speak Spanish. There are good reasons why most people who begin a Computer Science degree at university don't complete it. It takes a certain kind of person to "get it" and those who cannot "get it" rarely turn that around simply by working harder at it.
They both should take the time to write down specifically what needs to be done.
Could you write down all of the things that you did in the 10,000+ hours of study, learning and doing that it took you to acquire the expertise and even if you could does the company seriously expect that bob from accounting can just pick up this "code thing" no problem?
It has been my experience both are going to end up very unhappy if they do not.
A more experienced contractor, if they did agree to this, would be wise to avoid open ended commitments. Exactly what will be taught and how should be specified in the contract. Anything not in the contract won't be taught. Whether or not the student successfully learns the materials or not has no bearing on whether or not the contractor gets paid. Finally, there is a limited amount of time available for questions and or a limited number of questions allowed after instruction is complete. Anything more than that and you're asking for trouble. Personally, I'd quote them such a high rate on this contract that hopefully they'd take the hint and quit pursuing it.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but wasn't there supposed to be this notion of "good faith" in the bankruptcy process? If not, then what separates a "bankruptcy" from outright fraud? Borrowing money that you knowingly plan to default on strikes me as being fraudulent. Somehow I doubt that the bankruptcy Judge will be happy with the debtor attempting to use the bankruptcy laws in this way.
which is presumably not the case with these loans, so they are a great deal for the student that doesn't plan to actually pay the money back
Surely that problem has occurred to these ex-Googlers? The first thing that any "success" algorithm would have to do is filter out opportunists of the sort you describe from the lending pool; otherwise, this venture of theirs will be swiftly bankrupted by those looking to unload their student loan debt on a bunch of suckers so that they can turn around and default.
I don't believe that they're dumb. Consider for a moment if you will what their true purpose in this venture might be, never mind the Silicon Valley bullshit about "changing the world". They're providing just enough money to get started, but not enough to really get going. Suppose that 19 out of 20 loans eventually gets sold or goes bad. They can still take the one that actually got off the ground into their 1st round of VC funding, making the introduction for a cut, or funding it further themselves for a 60%+ cut of the equity in the new venture. Even if most of these also fail, the one or two that hit and get sold for $1 billion or more will make up for all of the failures and then some. The real losers here are the young people with the bright ideas. They get suckered out of their first big grub stake by a handful of slick VCs and experienced ex-Googlers who take advantage of their youth, naivety and smarts to capture the payday that in the old days actually went to those who founded the businesses. By the time these ex-Googlers, the VCs and the private equity types have all cashed out, the founder gets a pittance for years of hard work before being shown the door at the company they founded. The investor types are the ones who end up with the profits these days, not the geeks or at least not most of them anyway.
What did you expect would happen? The miners would just throw up their hands and say, "Oh well, if we cannot use or sell this coal in the United States, I guess we'll just leave it all in the ground. You win greens!" Of course they were going to sell it overseas. That's the problem with people who don't understand economics and the way that the real world works, they fail to realize that their "solutions" might actually make the problems they want to solve worse. If that coal were burned here in the United States there's at least a chance that it could be somewhat regulated. Meanwhile, the Chinese are going to burn it in open cycle power plants with exhaust discharged directly into the atmosphere without benefit of scrubbing. So yeah, it's a real "win" for the environment to force all the coal out of the US market. Way to go greens!
The U.S. can be very cheap -- you just have to get away from the coasts.
If Marisa Myers and the rest of the "Face Time" boosters win the argument against telecommuting, you may not be able to unless your company just happens to open a satellite office in the small town where you want to work and live. Make no mistake, the Yahoo memo was a shot across the bow for all telecommuters out there, not just at Yahoo. If Marisa turns Yahoo around it could mean the end of telecommuting for anyone outside the C-suite.
Slashdot Mirror
The disabled always want to be treated equally. Well, now they can be. The harassment dispensed by the TSA at our airports is shared equally by all Americans, whether disabled or not.
no armistice was signed when the Korean War ended.
No formal peace treaty ending hostilities was signed. There was an armistice in place from the end of the fighting and the establishment of the DMZ until the North Koreans abandoned it during the recent kerfuffle.
How do we know that this is just a game that is being played between them so that all of the local populations will not question those expenses?
Military expenses can be cut, just like other government expenses, but think of the cost if you're wrong. Whatever problems you have under your current government would intensify a hundred fold if your nation was conquered and occupied by a foreign army. When weighed against those tremendously costly consequences, a military capable of providing a credible defense is definitely worth funding.
North Korea doesn't have enough resources for a sustained military campaign. They're short on everything from fuel to spare parts and even ammunition. Moreover, their equipment is mostly antique and obsolete and they're not able to replace losses. If they do attack, the US and South Korea should seize upon the opportunity to wreck as much of their military equipment as possible, as we did with the Iraqi army in Gulf War I, so as to limit their future offensive capabilities and degrade their military effectiveness. I'm not suggesting that the US or South Korea shoot first, but if the North Attacks the US and South Korea should ensure that they pay for it.
That's your opinion. However, as I understand the English language the word activist is defined as one who is an especially active and vigorous advocate of a cause. In the case of Carl Ichan the cause is the financial best interests of the shareholders. A less noble cause perhaps than what you have in mind when you use the word but a cause none the less.
There are mechanisms in the marketplace that tend to select out bad directors over time or at least put them into marginal and less profitable firms:
The first line of defense against bad management and bad directors are the shorts. I presume that most of you know what I mean when I say that but for the benefit of those who don't a short is somebody who, in exchange for payment of a fee to the owner, borrows shares with a promise to return them at a future date. In the meantime the short controls the shares. This means that the short can vote the shares at the annual meeting, receive any dividends paid on the shares and the like. However, in practice the borrowed shares are immediately sold with the expectation that the future value of the shares will decline and the short will profit from this decline when they buy back shares to return to the original owner at a lower price. The professional shorts are merciless and seek out bad directors and bad management just like sharks seek out blood in the water. So bad management is discovered and punished by shorts who are rewarded for their efforts by profiting on the sales. This works best with small or medium sized companies whose share prices can be utterly smashed by the shorts.
With larger companies there are independent investor activists who make a career of acquiring minority stakes in badly managed companies and then leading the common shareholders in an organized campaign against management. Even if the activists cannot secure enough votes to actually replace directors or force the issues outright, management can often be pressured into concessions by the prospect of a knock down drag out fight in public with these famous activists. Carl Ichan is prominent amongst these types of activist investors.
Finally, the major institutional investors, including hedge funds, wealth management firms and pension funds keep dossiers on corporate directors and actively vote against those whom they don't like or in whom they have low confidence. Eventually these bad directors get a bad reputation and their careers as corporate directors are effectively ended.
Deterrent punishment is only useful in a society where people copy each other mindlessly, and clearly everyone in the United States is too smart for that.
Perhaps my sarcasm detector is malfunctioning today, but are we living in the same country?
Ok this guy did something monumentally stupid which, most certainly should serve as example for others. Done. Now whats with the 30 months in prison?
Justice?
Why must this guy be a felon? Now unable to leave the country, unable to vote in most places, unable to own a firearm
Do you really want an idiot like laser man voting or having access to a firearm? People like this ought to be disenfranchised, at least until such time as they've proven to the rest of us that they have reformed and are worthy again of responsibility. Let this young man live and learn for another 10 years and we'll take another look at age 30.
all for something stupid that, he is unlikely to ever do again.
Ignorance and stupidity sure are expensive aren't they? A worthwhile lesson for his peers to be sure.
The punishment fetish in this country really needs to be checked
For certain crimes that's true. Legalize drugs, gambling and prostitution but those who recklessly endanger the lives of others must be punished.
punishments are totally out of whack with crimes when we have people losing their rights indefinitely over something which, while it could have been disasterous wasn't
Rights aren't removed indefinitely in most states. Only Kentucky and Virginia permanently disenfranchise convicted felons. If the plane had crashed then he could have been charged with felony murder which is a much more serious crime. The 30 month sentence seems fair given the circumstances and the reckless disregard for the lives of dozens of other people.
using it as a teaching moment than by ruining this guys life and making crime one of his best options going forward.
Teachable moments are for toddlers, not adults. After age 18 we don't coddle, we punish.
Apparently, California's prison lobby has not been deterred by the budget problems and overcrowding.
Why would they be deterred? They have the people of California over a barrel now and it's the people themselves who've obediently assumed the position over it by passing all of the "get tough on crime" propositions over the years. The liberals who run this state are now scared to death of the hardened career criminals and gangs that inhabit these gladiator schools and what might happen if any significant number of them were to be released back onto the streets. Indeed, the vulnerability of the general population is heightened further still by the fact that many Californians don't own guns and have no idea how to use them even as law enforcement is cut back and prisoners are released early from overcrowded and violent institutions. Locking more people up and hardening them in these institutions only further strengthens the hands of the prison guards and the lobbyists representing the private prisons because they know that the California politicians will pay almost any price to keep the peace and maintain the status quo.
The reports say that the algorithm written by the teen was based upon or is part of the family of iterative algorithms more commonly referred to as genetic algorithms. The basic idea is to start with a set of possible solution candidates, article summaries in this case, and then pick the best ones iteratively while using so called genetic operations like crossover and mutation to modify the sets before each successive iterative evaluation. In the context of summarizing a body of text one might consider the set of all possible five sentence paragraphs that could be constructed by breaking the article down into sentences. Then, depending upon how well or not each sentence matches certain heuristic qualities, it might be trimmed from the paragraph or promoted and crossed into other paragraphs and so on. The final result after a certain number of iterations is an increasingly good "fit" on the solution candidate or in this case a "good" summary of the article as judged by the intended human audience. Although text processing and heuristic analysis is a relatively well developed field, with many good evaluation heuristics to borrow, this teenager is never the less to be commended for his efforts. I certainly wasn't sophisticated enough at age 15 to even be thinking about doing something like this. That being said, this algorithm probably has limitations. It may be good at summarizing pop culture articles (draw your own conclusions on what that says about modern "journalism") but there's really only so much that one can do with 5 or even 8 sentences. This may not end up being as valuable as Yahoo thinks because I'm virtually certain that both Google and Microsoft have people that can match and probably exceed it. Indeed, for all we know Google has already doing this for years with it's news summaries and just hasn't publicized it. Still, 30 million is nothing to be sneezed at and I salute this young man for his achievement.
How can states enforce this against sellers with no financial interest in the state? If the out of state seller doesn't pay, what recourse is there?
now I have to worry that if I walk up to another developer, their first thought will be, "Oh shit, it's a woman. Gotta scoot!"
Which is exactly what will happen. Many developers already suspect that women in general are more trouble than they're worth so incidents like this will only serve to reinforce that woman == trouble association.
But I'm also aware without government subsidies, it's not economically viable. On the large scale.
And I have a strong suspicion that it never will be so can we please stop wasting tax money on subsidizing it?
So I'm sorry for the guys but after reading her comments I say good riddance to Ms PC Police
Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch! Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead!
I've ripped most of my DVDs, but VLC plays them just fine on my system.
I didn't say that you couldn't get them, merely that there weren't as available as regular consumer gear. This is especially true if you want a specific set of options, not just the stock model. For example, if you really want the built in GPS receiver, the touchscreen with stylus and the special hard drive heater (for those really cold days on the arctic tundra) then you'll almost certainly have to go through a Panasonic dealer to special order it which means full retail prices plus a few weeks for delivery.
Seriously, one of the best drone pilots to come out of the Iraq war was actually a high school dropout who was an avid gamer: High School Dropout turns Drone Pilot, thanks to Computer Games.
It may seem strange, but remember that Toughbooks and related devices are almost always sold through distribution channels to institutional buyers who need the specs and are willing to pay what it costs to get them. They're actually somewhat difficult to come buy in the consumer market, especially new, and the prices are relatively high by PC standards. A fully rugged Toughbook 31 can easily cost between $6000-$10000 new, depending upon what options are selected. This is easily more than twice as expensive as any equivalent non-tough notebook of equal or even slightly better computing spec. The marketing is intended to target corporate buyers who are placing large orders, not consumers or individual users. That's why it seems strange compared to what you might see in an advertisement for a consumer device. The Toughpad android tablet looks nice, but for $1300 I'd rather have the Galaxy Tab with an OtterBox Defender case. The Toughpad would still be tougher, but I don't spend my days changing pipes on a drilling rig so I don't need the extra toughness enough to pay at least $800 more for it.
I prefer VLC but the point is well taken. Reclaim your freedom to watch the content you paid for in the manner that you wish by using open source software to re-enable your rights as a consumer.
If they are entering into an agreement that includes training he is indeed needing to "train him in comp sci".
He'd probably have more success teaching his dog to speak Spanish. There are good reasons why most people who begin a Computer Science degree at university don't complete it. It takes a certain kind of person to "get it" and those who cannot "get it" rarely turn that around simply by working harder at it.
They both should take the time to write down specifically what needs to be done.
Could you write down all of the things that you did in the 10,000+ hours of study, learning and doing that it took you to acquire the expertise and even if you could does the company seriously expect that bob from accounting can just pick up this "code thing" no problem?
It has been my experience both are going to end up very unhappy if they do not.
A more experienced contractor, if they did agree to this, would be wise to avoid open ended commitments. Exactly what will be taught and how should be specified in the contract. Anything not in the contract won't be taught. Whether or not the student successfully learns the materials or not has no bearing on whether or not the contractor gets paid. Finally, there is a limited amount of time available for questions and or a limited number of questions allowed after instruction is complete. Anything more than that and you're asking for trouble. Personally, I'd quote them such a high rate on this contract that hopefully they'd take the hint and quit pursuing it.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but wasn't there supposed to be this notion of "good faith" in the bankruptcy process? If not, then what separates a "bankruptcy" from outright fraud? Borrowing money that you knowingly plan to default on strikes me as being fraudulent. Somehow I doubt that the bankruptcy Judge will be happy with the debtor attempting to use the bankruptcy laws in this way.
which is presumably not the case with these loans, so they are a great deal for the student that doesn't plan to actually pay the money back
Surely that problem has occurred to these ex-Googlers? The first thing that any "success" algorithm would have to do is filter out opportunists of the sort you describe from the lending pool; otherwise, this venture of theirs will be swiftly bankrupted by those looking to unload their student loan debt on a bunch of suckers so that they can turn around and default.
Must be getting a lot dumber.
I don't believe that they're dumb. Consider for a moment if you will what their true purpose in this venture might be, never mind the Silicon Valley bullshit about "changing the world". They're providing just enough money to get started, but not enough to really get going. Suppose that 19 out of 20 loans eventually gets sold or goes bad. They can still take the one that actually got off the ground into their 1st round of VC funding, making the introduction for a cut, or funding it further themselves for a 60%+ cut of the equity in the new venture. Even if most of these also fail, the one or two that hit and get sold for $1 billion or more will make up for all of the failures and then some. The real losers here are the young people with the bright ideas. They get suckered out of their first big grub stake by a handful of slick VCs and experienced ex-Googlers who take advantage of their youth, naivety and smarts to capture the payday that in the old days actually went to those who founded the businesses. By the time these ex-Googlers, the VCs and the private equity types have all cashed out, the founder gets a pittance for years of hard work before being shown the door at the company they founded. The investor types are the ones who end up with the profits these days, not the geeks or at least not most of them anyway.
Some of us are not fooled and call bullshit.
What did you expect would happen? The miners would just throw up their hands and say, "Oh well, if we cannot use or sell this coal in the United States, I guess we'll just leave it all in the ground. You win greens!" Of course they were going to sell it overseas. That's the problem with people who don't understand economics and the way that the real world works, they fail to realize that their "solutions" might actually make the problems they want to solve worse. If that coal were burned here in the United States there's at least a chance that it could be somewhat regulated. Meanwhile, the Chinese are going to burn it in open cycle power plants with exhaust discharged directly into the atmosphere without benefit of scrubbing. So yeah, it's a real "win" for the environment to force all the coal out of the US market. Way to go greens!
The U.S. can be very cheap -- you just have to get away from the coasts.
If Marisa Myers and the rest of the "Face Time" boosters win the argument against telecommuting, you may not be able to unless your company just happens to open a satellite office in the small town where you want to work and live. Make no mistake, the Yahoo memo was a shot across the bow for all telecommuters out there, not just at Yahoo. If Marisa turns Yahoo around it could mean the end of telecommuting for anyone outside the C-suite.