The problem with raising teacher pay is that it will attract more people. Teaching is not something that everyone is good at. Just because you can get a doctorate doesn't mean you have the skill. There is a big difference....
Sure, I'd love to get paid more, but I also want kids to learn from people who LOVE teaching.
This was modded insightful? I'm glad you love teaching and are willing to jump closer to the 22K poverty line to do it, but hopefully you aren't going to teach economics.
Couple of thoughts: 1) Raising salaries expands the market for all different qualities of teachers, not just the bad teachers, as you are so fearful of. Now you can afford more good teachers to replace the bad teachers you already had (assuming you're not expanding the head count) because more good teachers are also available. Expanding the market means you, as the education system, can choose.
1a) The counter point to your logic is we should lower teacher salaries. Therefore only the best teachers who LOVE teaching would be willing to work in poverty. Clearly, that way lies madness.
Even for a passionate teacher like you, if the salary were $22,000, I doubt you'd be able to afford to be a teacher. For many, $28,000 is below their threshold.
1b) If teachers were paid $100,000 salary, I suspect you would get top-rate, passionate, teachers. People who give up being business executives and academic researchers to become teachers. Extrapolate a little farther, and pay $200,000 and you pretty much have access to the smartest, most caring, most skilled teachers in the world. Your market is pretty much everyone in the world and you can choose just the best.
So I really don't buy your argument.
2) Another fallacy is that you have to love what you do to do a good job. This is often argued in the medical field, but is argued in all fields.
The best of the best probably need that extra passion to become the best. (eg Tiger Woods probably loves what he does) But you can still be good, even excellent, without loving what you do. You could just really like it. Or you could not like it and just be really good.
Most engineers I know have found themselves stuck maintaining something they've developed only because they're really good at maintaining it, not because they enjoy it. They get their enjoyment some other way, like using the money they earn playing games or going on diving trips or buying fast cars.
I guess my point is:
Work is work. As long as you do a good job, who cares.
There is an interesting issue of police using private companies as proxies to get around search and seizure rules.
For example, it is illegal search and seizure for police to take from a phone company a list of cell phone calls that a person makes. They need 'probable cause' to get a search warrant from a judge.
But what if the police just orders your list from a private information gathering company that anyone can get information from? Is that considered 'at the behest' of law enforcement?
"...and a private citizen may use illegally obtained evidence, as long as he or she did not obtain it on orders from law-enforcement personnel. Moreover, the exclusionary rule applies only to criminal trials: evidence obtained illegally is not forbidden in civil cases, or in grand jury proceedings."
Copying, on the other hand is absolutely natural. There was no concept of copyright until printing became semi-widely available, and it was originally meant to protect a select few who could afford a printing machine from each other.
I never thought about this angle, that copying is natural.
Your argument is something of a tautology, because you're saying there was no concept of copyright until it became easy to copy works on a large scale. Of course, just like there were no concepts of 55 miles/hour speed limits until vehicles could exceed 55 miles/hour.
There also needs to be governments. Previously, there may not have been adequate government.
You also need the governments to agree. As with China/India in modern times, if governments can't agree, then this law is ineffective. For example, it's legal to make as many copies of Mickey hats in China as you want, you just can't sell them in the US. But you can sell them anywhere that doesn't care about US copyright law.
Change your password. The rest of the info is already freely available from the resume you posted to Monster, right?
The biggest problem is that most users who are not technically savvy use the same username and password for all their online activities, including job sites and banking.
If Monster had encrypted their passwords, this would be a significanly smaller problem.
That's the only way to really get people to follow it. Look at Sarbanes-Oxley, whether you think it's efficient use of documentation, the risk of jail for top executives got them serious about covering their asses.
Corporations are perfectly willing to pay fines, since fines don't generally affect executive compensation.
I agree that it's difficult to find. 100% of the folks in my [small] office had to ask someone else how to print when 2007 rolled out.
Thing is, the UI isn't any more complicated than the old one (does putting the print function in the "File" menu any better?). It's just different. And when you have been trained for years where to go to print, and then you put it somewhere else, it's not nearly as obvious.
In this case, the main problem is the Orb in the top left looks like the title bar icon from other programs, where you would never go to find the print function, or any other meaningful function that wasn't more easily accessible in the top right. This has been ingrained in them as long as they've used windows.
So the Orb is a blind spot.
Once they knew about the Orb, they have no problem using the UI, so it's not complicated in a strict sense, just initially confusing, and that IS the designers' fault.
When a device does something that you don't understand and therefore you don't see any concrete benefit in whatever it is doing, you immediately believe it is it bad.
I suppose that means you would not use it.
I'm a software engineer and I barely know how computers work at their guts. I have never coded in binary. Compilers do some pretty nifty optimizations that, given the time and desire, I could figure out, but the projects I've worked on rarely require optimizing my coding for the compiler.
I don't have a lot of animosity for Vista, other than it's hard to learn something that's just a bit different in a lot of ways (you lose track of what things changed and what things didn't).
But the idea that one has to understand everything one uses is extreme and a poor starting point for an argument.
Interestingly, from what I read at your link, it's exactly what the linked article refers to:
"To obtain such information, the copyright owner must plead a prima facie case of copyright infringement. The Court found that Melaleuca had met this requirement by alleging that a work in which it held a copyright registration - its lawyer's demand letter - had been copied in its entirety and posted on a blog. As such, the Court held Melaleuca entitled to the identity of d2, as he was the person allegedly responsible for infringing this copyrighted work."
"In reaching this result, the Court rejected the blog owner's argument that the demand letter was not sufficient original to be entitled to the protections of the Copyright Act."
Frequently, significant legal precedent is set on what appears to be an incidental issue to the case at hand. This seems to be what happened here.
This is an example of white collar bias that people are frequently blind to.
Indeed, let's keep things into perspective: who is more evil? Someone who kills someone after stalking them for weeks, or someone who defrauds billions of dollars from investors and causes the bankruptcy of an entire company and all of its employees to lose their life's savings, ruining the lives of hundreds of families (thin Enron)? And what about all those underlings who profited greatly from the fraud (think traders, who didn't get prosecuted).
Well, clearly in our society, the murderer actually has a chance of getting killed for their crime, but from a total measure of damage, I'd argue the fraudsters are much more evil.
Similarly, Yahoo may have turned over 1 person to the Chinese (as far as we know). Yes, it is evil.
But Google's support of Domain Parking profits clearly has a significant drag on worldwide innovation. For instance, how many people have searched for a meaningful domain for their site just to find it serving Google ads? How many great ideas were lost because it was difficult to find them at myreallydifficulttorememberdomain.com?
So what is the societal cost of Google's policy? I'd say it has a greater negative effect on the world than the single Yahoo action mentioned. Thus, I would deem it as more Evil.
So yes, let's keep it in perspective. Google does do Evil. And yes, potentially Great Evil.
It's just the white collar kind. The kind that is ok.
The submitted article is extremely poor at discussing the background and motivation.
Apparently, this rule boils down to the technicalities of who is considered an "Applicant" for a job.
1) Just because a company searches a database of resumes does not make the returned resumes "Applicants". So the company doesn't have to track all the resumes to report to the gov't. If you post a job and people respond, then those have to be tracked.
2) If you apply through some non-standard means, e.g. email instead of website, then companies don't have to retain your resume. This allows companies to rely on an automated process for reporting purposes. If I send my resume by homing pigeon on a napkin, then they don't have to track that.
3) Simply posting your resume online doesn't qualify you as an "Applicant" to the thousands of jobs out there. Clearly this makes sense. You must show active interest IN A PARTICULAR JOB, not just general interest in all available jobs.
HR people actually want even tighter restrictions on who is considered an "Applicant" because they don't want to track all of this spurious information. Less tracking, the easier their lives. Of course, they would prefer that no internet resumes would be considered "Applicants", but that's precisely the problem this rule is meant to address.
So clearly, this is just a rule to help reduce record keeping when the EEOC tries to enforce its broader record keeping mandate. Not a rule that makes it that much harder to apply for a job.
I didn't see any mention of the "Must meet all requirements" paranoia.
Why does Symantec require you to go download their 'real' uninstaller? Why doesn't the uninstaller do a full uninstall?
This is clearly not an accident. They obviously have the 'technology' to do a full uninstall. And yet they choose leave their refuse all over your computer.
What's their goal in making it hard to remove their crap?
Unsolicited-fax law is based on theft of resources: you use my paper and my ink to print your "speech". This costs me the money that it should cost you [you should have to print it and send me a flier in the mail where you pay postage too]. So "we" made it illegal.
It is not a major logical hurdle to show the similarities of fax-spam with e-spam.
1) ISP bandwidth costs money. ISP's have to pay for enough bandwidth to handle their customers' traffic. If they had less spam coming into their network, then they would have lower bandwidth needs and could charge customers less. [You may not pay metered bandwidth charges, but your ISP probably does, and those charges ARE passed on to you and ARE built in to your flat rate]
2) Space costs money. A similar argument to bandwidth can be made for space. In addition, more people are metered by their space. Many ISP's provide a limited amount of space for email storage and additional space does cost money. Also, go off on vacation for a week and what happens when your inbox gets filled up? What's the cost of having all your legitimate emails bounce because spam used all your space?
When you consider the numbers (a recent article said 70% of email volume to hotmail is spam), it's plain to see the costs are not small.
Despite your narrow interpretation of what constitutes "cost", anyone who has taken a high school economics course knows that there is no free lunch. Someone is paying for the spam to reach you. And odds are that it's coming out of YOUR pocket, not the spammers'.
Somehow, I don't think we'll have a problem controlling the wooly mammoth population. What, are they going to hide under rocks and sneak into crevices? Or maybe stand underwater and use their trunks to breath like snorklers?
I enjoyed "The Way Things Work" as much as the next guy, but I don't think mammoth's are really THAT clever.
Of course, I'm glad the Internet isn't infringing a patent. But it'd be good to know that we won for the right reasons. (bye bye karma)
Yes, I did read the opinion, and I actually disagree wholeheartedly with the judge regarding the interpretation of "central computer".
The judge basically equated "central" with "single" and spent quite a while explaining why "central computer" by anyone's definition must mean a "single" computer. Ask anyone on Slashdot and they'll tell you that when I say you've got to connect to the central computer system to get your payroll information, it doesn't preclude that "central computer" from being a rack full of servers. From now on, when you patent something that requires a server, you'll have to be sure to specify ther plural as well, just to be sure it handles distribution. It's a bit silly, but I guess that's why IANAL.
I also think that, although the Internet as a whole is not infringing, a company that sets up a webserver on a single machine that is connected to by remote hosts may still look like good targets.
I think in most cases, a steep learning curve means amount learned vs. effort. Or more verbosely, how much one learns to do vs. the amount of effort put into the learning.
Time is a secondary factor because something that requires more effort often requires more time.
So the term "steep learning curve" is correctly used in the general case.
A lot of people think that because Flash has 95% browser penetration that it is effectively a "standard". This has lots of benefits for developers in that highly interactive pages can be created that really are cross-browser/cross-platform. How many of us have tried to get javascript/DHTML to work cross-platform and have to resort to browser sniffing and browser specific code? This could be a boon.
Problem is, Flash is 100% proprietary. So it is a "standard" in the sense that Visual Basic is a standard or AIM protocol is a standard. In the case of AIM, at AOL's whim, everybody else's client breaks and there's nothing anyone can do about.
There is high risk with a proprietary solution becoming a "standard". Sure, for now, Macromedia makes money off the tools to create Flash animations, but what if they decide that this quarter, they need a little more revenue? Then they change the license (without notice) so that you are "free to deploy flash pages for non-commercial use, but you need to license the technology to deploy in a commercial environment."
I suspect that to avoid this kind of FUD, they'll try to make Flash an "open proprietary standard" in the same sense that Java is an "open proprietary standard". They'll pretend to submit the specs to a standards organization, but then drag their feet and then finally just say "we'll create an open design committee but we'll make the final call".
This is not what we want.
But to leave on a positive note: for functions that are already built into HTML or that can be done using javascript/DHTML, Flash is bloated and slow. But Flash does have the benefit of allowing more customization of widgets and behavior, which from a UI/UE standpoint is a very important part of good design (making the interface do what the user want instead of forcing the user to do what the interface wants).
Strike one for the little guy in Canada -- and maybe move here if you want to avoid the DMCA?
Obviously, baseball isn't a huge part of Canadian culture. Can you say "contraction?"
[strikes are usually considered bad in the States. 3 strikes can put you in prison for life for shoplifting. or get you out.]
Look a little deeper. Yes, the office suite may not be Open Source, but look at what it's doing: it's displacing Microsoft... ALL MICROSOFT PRODUCTS!
That's 120,000 machines that won't have MS Windows, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Money, MSN,.Net, IIS, IE, ANY MICROSOFT!
That's step 1. Step 2 is that now you have some economic motivation for people to actually DEVELOP Linux apps. Hey, even if it's proprietary, they're developing on the platform. [So how much you wanna bet more Linux games will be coming out of Korea than anywhere else in the world?] So is more proprietary stuff bad? NO! The people developing proprietary software on Linux will likely use AND HELP IMPROVE open source tools.
They'll be using Gnome as their wm (or that other one), gimp to edit graphics, Kword to edit docs. There is now MOTIVATION OTHER than the religions of OSS or anti-MS.
In the real world, this is the kind of government endorsed monopolies that changes the course of technological development.
Step 3, presumably, the 120,000 licenses will be for DESKTOP WORKSTATIONS, not servers or developers. Now that there's money to be made in the Linux world, development shops will pop up all over the place, further expanding the reach of Linux and associated OSS tools.
Step 4, all these office workers working day in and day out with Linux will go home and want their home machines to look/act like the ones at work. And since Linux is free, no reason for them not to try it (ed: except that no average office worker could install Linux in less than 3 months).
Step 5, repeat 2-4 a few times and you get a huge rise in the user base.
Step 6, all of this means there will be more installations of Linux in S. Korea than any other country in the world. [You heard it here first!] Pretty soon, we'll be using software that's named K-*#$%@. We won't know what it means (being Korean), but we'll know it's the best damned OSS DVD player out there.
And all this because the S. Korean government standardized on a Linux based proprietary office suite. We've all said that as soon as there's an office suite that rivals MS Word, then maybe Linux will have a chance at displacing Windows.
PEOPLE, THIS IS WHAT WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR!
[Hey, anyone need a UI designer to help break into this market?]
Part of the process of 'stopping' the light is turning off the second laser. It IS a form of optical storage.
When the 'material' is beamed with the second laser, it makes the material 'liquid'-like to light, allowing the light to travel through. As the second laser is reduced in energy, the 'material' becomes more and more viscous until it totally absorbs the energy of the light that is in it (becoming 'solid' to light). It stores the light's energy AND it's wave pattern.
Frodo also puts the Ring on during times he wants to be invisible (in the Prancing Pony, or when trying to escape Ringwraiths, etc.) So it makes him invisible.
Hmmm, as others have stated, this isn't what happened in the book. Frodo was just singing a song in front of everyone on a table. He was having fun and definitely did NOT want to disappear. This is different from the movie. All I can add to the evidence is the passage from the book:
There was loud and long applause. Frodo had a good voice, and the song tickled their fancy. Where's old Barley? they cried. He ought to hear this. Bob ought to learn his cat the fiddle, and then we d have a dance. They called for more ale, and began to shout: Let's have it again, master! Come on now! Once more!
They made Frodo have another drink, and then begin his song again, while many of them joined in; for the tune was well known, and they were quick at picking up words. It was now Frodo's turn to feel pleased with himself. He capered about on the table; and when he came a second time to the cow jumped over the Moon, he leaped in the air. Much too vigorously; for he came down, bang, into a tray full of mugs, and slipped, and rolled off the table with a crash, clatter, and bump! The audience all opened their mouths wide for laughter, and stopped short a gaping silence; for the singer disappeared. He simply vanished, as if he had gone slap through the floor without leaving a hole!
[snip 1 paragraph]
Frodo felt a fool. Not knowing what else to do, he crawled away under the tables to the dark comer by Strider, who sat unmoved, giving no sign of his thoughts. Frodo leaned back against the wall and took off the Ring. How it came to be on his finger he could not tell. He could only suppose that he had been handling it in his pocket while he sang, and that somehow it had slipped on when he stuck out his hand with a jerk to save his fall. For a moment he wondered if the Ring itself had not played him a trick; perhaps it had tried to reveal itself in response to some wish or command that was felt in the room. He did not like the looks of the men that had gone out.
Slashdot Mirror
The search and seizure rule applies to government entities only (requiring a warrant), not private citizens.
For private citizens, you're probably protected more by trespassing, burglary, and theft laws.
In the stolen Mac notebook case, search and seizure is irrelevant because the police didn't perform the remote snapshot.
The problem with raising teacher pay is that it will attract more people. Teaching is not something that everyone is good at. Just because you can get a doctorate doesn't mean you have the skill. There is a big difference. ...
Sure, I'd love to get paid more, but I also want kids to learn from people who LOVE teaching.
This was modded insightful? I'm glad you love teaching and are willing to jump closer to the 22K poverty line to do it, but hopefully you aren't going to teach economics.
Couple of thoughts:
1) Raising salaries expands the market for all different qualities of teachers, not just the bad teachers, as you are so fearful of. Now you can afford more good teachers to replace the bad teachers you already had (assuming you're not expanding the head count) because more good teachers are also available. Expanding the market means you, as the education system, can choose.
1a) The counter point to your logic is we should lower teacher salaries. Therefore only the best teachers who LOVE teaching would be willing to work in poverty. Clearly, that way lies madness.
Even for a passionate teacher like you, if the salary were $22,000, I doubt you'd be able to afford to be a teacher. For many, $28,000 is below their threshold.
1b) If teachers were paid $100,000 salary, I suspect you would get top-rate, passionate, teachers. People who give up being business executives and academic researchers to become teachers. Extrapolate a little farther, and pay $200,000 and you pretty much have access to the smartest, most caring, most skilled teachers in the world. Your market is pretty much everyone in the world and you can choose just the best.
So I really don't buy your argument.
2) Another fallacy is that you have to love what you do to do a good job. This is often argued in the medical field, but is argued in all fields.
The best of the best probably need that extra passion to become the best. (eg Tiger Woods probably loves what he does) But you can still be good, even excellent, without loving what you do. You could just really like it. Or you could not like it and just be really good.
Most engineers I know have found themselves stuck maintaining something they've developed only because they're really good at maintaining it, not because they enjoy it. They get their enjoyment some other way, like using the money they earn playing games or going on diving trips or buying fast cars.
I guess my point is:
Work is work. As long as you do a good job, who cares.
There is an interesting issue of police using private companies as proxies to get around search and seizure rules.
For example, it is illegal search and seizure for police to take from a phone company a list of cell phone calls that a person makes. They need 'probable cause' to get a search warrant from a judge.
But what if the police just orders your list from a private information gathering company that anyone can get information from? Is that considered 'at the behest' of law enforcement?
And here are the nuggets from jrank.org
"...and a private citizen may use illegally obtained evidence, as long as he or she did not obtain it on orders from law-enforcement personnel. Moreover, the exclusionary rule applies only to criminal trials: evidence obtained illegally is not forbidden in civil cases, or in grand jury proceedings."
Toss a couple of bucks to the defendant instead of winning is not exactly an eternity having your liver eaten while chained to a rock*...
*Also known as "justice", around these parts.
You're from Greece?
Some would consider Prometheus' punishment for giving fire to humans an injustice.
Copying, on the other hand is absolutely natural. There was no concept of copyright until printing became semi-widely available, and it was originally meant to protect a select few who could afford a printing machine from each other.
I never thought about this angle, that copying is natural.
Your argument is something of a tautology, because you're saying there was no concept of copyright until it became easy to copy works on a large scale. Of course, just like there were no concepts of 55 miles/hour speed limits until vehicles could exceed 55 miles/hour.
There also needs to be governments. Previously, there may not have been adequate government.
You also need the governments to agree. As with China/India in modern times, if governments can't agree, then this law is ineffective. For example, it's legal to make as many copies of Mickey hats in China as you want, you just can't sell them in the US. But you can sell them anywhere that doesn't care about US copyright law.
That's true.
Change your password. The rest of the info is already freely available from the resume you posted to Monster, right?
The biggest problem is that most users who are not technically savvy use the same username and password for all their online activities, including job sites and banking.
If Monster had encrypted their passwords, this would be a significanly smaller problem.
Does anyone go to jail for breaking this law?
That's the only way to really get people to follow it. Look at Sarbanes-Oxley, whether you think it's efficient use of documentation, the risk of jail for top executives got them serious about covering their asses.
Corporations are perfectly willing to pay fines, since fines don't generally affect executive compensation.
I agree that it's difficult to find. 100% of the folks in my [small] office had to ask someone else how to print when 2007 rolled out.
Thing is, the UI isn't any more complicated than the old one (does putting the print function in the "File" menu any better?). It's just different. And when you have been trained for years where to go to print, and then you put it somewhere else, it's not nearly as obvious.
In this case, the main problem is the Orb in the top left looks like the title bar icon from other programs, where you would never go to find the print function, or any other meaningful function that wasn't more easily accessible in the top right. This has been ingrained in them as long as they've used windows.
So the Orb is a blind spot.
Once they knew about the Orb, they have no problem using the UI, so it's not complicated in a strict sense, just initially confusing, and that IS the designers' fault.
When a device does something that you don't understand and therefore you don't see any concrete benefit in whatever it is doing, you immediately believe it is it bad.
I suppose that means you would not use it.
I'm a software engineer and I barely know how computers work at their guts. I have never coded in binary. Compilers do some pretty nifty optimizations that, given the time and desire, I could figure out, but the projects I've worked on rarely require optimizing my coding for the compiler.
I don't have a lot of animosity for Vista, other than it's hard to learn something that's just a bit different in a lot of ways (you lose track of what things changed and what things didn't).
But the idea that one has to understand everything one uses is extreme and a poor starting point for an argument.
Interestingly, from what I read at your link, it's exactly what the linked article refers to: "To obtain such information, the copyright owner must plead a prima facie case of copyright infringement. The Court found that Melaleuca had met this requirement by alleging that a work in which it held a copyright registration - its lawyer's demand letter - had been copied in its entirety and posted on a blog. As such, the Court held Melaleuca entitled to the identity of d2, as he was the person allegedly responsible for infringing this copyrighted work."
"In reaching this result, the Court rejected the blog owner's argument that the demand letter was not sufficient original to be entitled to the protections of the Copyright Act."
Frequently, significant legal precedent is set on what appears to be an incidental issue to the case at hand. This seems to be what happened here.
This is an example of white collar bias that people are frequently blind to.
Indeed, let's keep things into perspective: who is more evil? Someone who kills someone after stalking them for weeks, or someone who defrauds billions of dollars from investors and causes the bankruptcy of an entire company and all of its employees to lose their life's savings, ruining the lives of hundreds of families (thin Enron)? And what about all those underlings who profited greatly from the fraud (think traders, who didn't get prosecuted).
Well, clearly in our society, the murderer actually has a chance of getting killed for their crime, but from a total measure of damage, I'd argue the fraudsters are much more evil.
Similarly, Yahoo may have turned over 1 person to the Chinese (as far as we know). Yes, it is evil.
But Google's support of Domain Parking profits clearly has a significant drag on worldwide innovation. For instance, how many people have searched for a meaningful domain for their site just to find it serving Google ads? How many great ideas were lost because it was difficult to find them at myreallydifficulttorememberdomain.com?
So what is the societal cost of Google's policy? I'd say it has a greater negative effect on the world than the single Yahoo action mentioned. Thus, I would deem it as more Evil.
So yes, let's keep it in perspective. Google does do Evil. And yes, potentially Great Evil.
It's just the white collar kind. The kind that is ok.
The more immediate question is what kind of political appointee anointed with an anti-science agenda will be next?
Rest assured he'll be just as bad as this kid, but won't claim he graduated from college.
The link to washington.com is a much much clearer discussion of this new rule. Again: http://www.lctjournal.washington.edu/Vol2/a008Stre ge.html
The submitted article is extremely poor at discussing the background and motivation.
Apparently, this rule boils down to the technicalities of who is considered an "Applicant" for a job.
1) Just because a company searches a database of resumes does not make the returned resumes "Applicants". So the company doesn't have to track all the resumes to report to the gov't. If you post a job and people respond, then those have to be tracked.
2) If you apply through some non-standard means, e.g. email instead of website, then companies don't have to retain your resume. This allows companies to rely on an automated process for reporting purposes. If I send my resume by homing pigeon on a napkin, then they don't have to track that.
3) Simply posting your resume online doesn't qualify you as an "Applicant" to the thousands of jobs out there. Clearly this makes sense. You must show active interest IN A PARTICULAR JOB, not just general interest in all available jobs.
HR people actually want even tighter restrictions on who is considered an "Applicant" because they don't want to track all of this spurious information. Less tracking, the easier their lives. Of course, they would prefer that no internet resumes would be considered "Applicants", but that's precisely the problem this rule is meant to address.
So clearly, this is just a rule to help reduce record keeping when the EEOC tries to enforce its broader record keeping mandate. Not a rule that makes it that much harder to apply for a job.
I didn't see any mention of the "Must meet all requirements" paranoia.
Why does Symantec require you to go download their 'real' uninstaller? Why doesn't the uninstaller do a full uninstall?
This is clearly not an accident. They obviously have the 'technology' to do a full uninstall. And yet they choose leave their refuse all over your computer.
What's their goal in making it hard to remove their crap?
Said it once, said it a thousand times:
Unsolicited-fax law is based on theft of resources: you use my paper and my ink to print your "speech". This costs me the money that it should cost you [you should have to print it and send me a flier in the mail where you pay postage too]. So "we" made it illegal.
It is not a major logical hurdle to show the similarities of fax-spam with e-spam.
1) ISP bandwidth costs money. ISP's have to pay for enough bandwidth to handle their customers' traffic. If they had less spam coming into their network, then they would have lower bandwidth needs and could charge customers less. [You may not pay metered bandwidth charges, but your ISP probably does, and those charges ARE passed on to you and ARE built in to your flat rate]
2) Space costs money. A similar argument to bandwidth can be made for space. In addition, more people are metered by their space. Many ISP's provide a limited amount of space for email storage and additional space does cost money. Also, go off on vacation for a week and what happens when your inbox gets filled up? What's the cost of having all your legitimate emails bounce because spam used all your space?
When you consider the numbers (a recent article said 70% of email volume to hotmail is spam), it's plain to see the costs are not small.
Despite your narrow interpretation of what constitutes "cost", anyone who has taken a high school economics course knows that there is no free lunch. Someone is paying for the spam to reach you. And odds are that it's coming out of YOUR pocket, not the spammers'.
Somehow, I don't think we'll have a problem controlling the wooly mammoth population. What, are they going to hide under rocks and sneak into crevices? Or maybe stand underwater and use their trunks to breath like snorklers?
I enjoyed "The Way Things Work" as much as the next guy, but I don't think mammoth's are really THAT clever.
Of course, I'm glad the Internet isn't infringing a patent. But it'd be good to know that we won for the right reasons. (bye bye karma)
Yes, I did read the opinion, and I actually disagree wholeheartedly with the judge regarding the interpretation of "central computer".
The judge basically equated "central" with "single" and spent quite a while explaining why "central computer" by anyone's definition must mean a "single" computer. Ask anyone on Slashdot and they'll tell you that when I say you've got to connect to the central computer system to get your payroll information, it doesn't preclude that "central computer" from being a rack full of servers. From now on, when you patent something that requires a server, you'll have to be sure to specify ther plural as well, just to be sure it handles distribution. It's a bit silly, but I guess that's why IANAL.
I also think that, although the Internet as a whole is not infringing, a company that sets up a webserver on a single machine that is connected to by remote hosts may still look like good targets.
chiguy
I think in most cases, a steep learning curve means amount learned vs. effort. Or more verbosely, how much one learns to do vs. the amount of effort put into the learning.
Time is a secondary factor because something that requires more effort often requires more time.
So the term "steep learning curve" is correctly used in the general case.
Van
A lot of people think that because Flash has 95% browser penetration that it is effectively a "standard". This has lots of benefits for developers in that highly interactive pages can be created that really are cross-browser/cross-platform. How many of us have tried to get javascript/DHTML to work cross-platform and have to resort to browser sniffing and browser specific code? This could be a boon.
Problem is, Flash is 100% proprietary. So it is a "standard" in the sense that Visual Basic is a standard or AIM protocol is a standard. In the case of AIM, at AOL's whim, everybody else's client breaks and there's nothing anyone can do about.
There is high risk with a proprietary solution becoming a "standard". Sure, for now, Macromedia makes money off the tools to create Flash animations, but what if they decide that this quarter, they need a little more revenue? Then they change the license (without notice) so that you are "free to deploy flash pages for non-commercial use, but you need to license the technology to deploy in a commercial environment."
I suspect that to avoid this kind of FUD, they'll try to make Flash an "open proprietary standard" in the same sense that Java is an "open proprietary standard". They'll pretend to submit the specs to a standards organization, but then drag their feet and then finally just say "we'll create an open design committee but we'll make the final call".
This is not what we want.
But to leave on a positive note: for functions that are already built into HTML or that can be done using javascript/DHTML, Flash is bloated and slow. But Flash does have the benefit of allowing more customization of widgets and behavior, which from a UI/UE standpoint is a very important part of good design (making the interface do what the user want instead of forcing the user to do what the interface wants).
Vanguard
Strike one for the little guy in Canada -- and maybe move here if you want to avoid the DMCA? Obviously, baseball isn't a huge part of Canadian culture. Can you say "contraction?" [strikes are usually considered bad in the States. 3 strikes can put you in prison for life for shoplifting. or get you out.]
That's 120,000 machines that won't have MS Windows, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Money, MSN, .Net, IIS, IE, ANY MICROSOFT!
That's step 1. Step 2 is that now you have some economic motivation for people to actually DEVELOP Linux apps. Hey, even if it's proprietary, they're developing on the platform. [So how much you wanna bet more Linux games will be coming out of Korea than anywhere else in the world?] So is more proprietary stuff bad? NO! The people developing proprietary software on Linux will likely use AND HELP IMPROVE open source tools.
They'll be using Gnome as their wm (or that other one), gimp to edit graphics, Kword to edit docs. There is now MOTIVATION OTHER than the religions of OSS or anti-MS.
In the real world, this is the kind of government endorsed monopolies that changes the course of technological development.
Step 3, presumably, the 120,000 licenses will be for DESKTOP WORKSTATIONS, not servers or developers. Now that there's money to be made in the Linux world, development shops will pop up all over the place, further expanding the reach of Linux and associated OSS tools.
Step 4, all these office workers working day in and day out with Linux will go home and want their home machines to look/act like the ones at work. And since Linux is free, no reason for them not to try it (ed: except that no average office worker could install Linux in less than 3 months).
Step 5, repeat 2-4 a few times and you get a huge rise in the user base.
Step 6, all of this means there will be more installations of Linux in S. Korea than any other country in the world. [You heard it here first!] Pretty soon, we'll be using software that's named K-*#$%@. We won't know what it means (being Korean), but we'll know it's the best damned OSS DVD player out there.
And all this because the S. Korean government standardized on a Linux based proprietary office suite. We've all said that as soon as there's an office suite that rivals MS Word, then maybe Linux will have a chance at displacing Windows.
PEOPLE, THIS IS WHAT WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR!
[Hey, anyone need a UI designer to help break into this market?]
When the 'material' is beamed with the second laser, it makes the material 'liquid'-like to light, allowing the light to travel through. As the second laser is reduced in energy, the 'material' becomes more and more viscous until it totally absorbs the energy of the light that is in it (becoming 'solid' to light). It stores the light's energy AND it's wave pattern.
Cool idea.
There was loud and long applause. Frodo had a good voice, and the song tickled their fancy. Where's old Barley? they cried. He ought to hear this. Bob ought to learn his cat the fiddle, and then we d have a dance. They called for more ale, and began to shout: Let's have it again, master! Come on now! Once more! They made Frodo have another drink, and then begin his song again, while many of them joined in; for the tune was well known, and they were quick at picking up words. It was now Frodo's turn to feel pleased with himself. He capered about on the table; and when he came a second time to the cow jumped over the Moon, he leaped in the air. Much too vigorously; for he came down, bang, into a tray full of mugs, and slipped, and rolled off the table with a crash, clatter, and bump! The audience all opened their mouths wide for laughter, and stopped short a gaping silence; for the singer disappeared. He simply vanished, as if he had gone slap through the floor without leaving a hole!
[snip 1 paragraph]
Frodo felt a fool. Not knowing what else to do, he crawled away under the tables to the dark comer by Strider, who sat unmoved, giving no sign of his thoughts. Frodo leaned back against the wall and took off the Ring. How it came to be on his finger he could not tell. He could only suppose that he had been handling it in his pocket while he sang, and that somehow it had slipped on when he stuck out his hand with a jerk to save his fall. For a moment he wondered if the Ring itself had not played him a trick; perhaps it had tried to reveal itself in response to some wish or command that was felt in the room. He did not like the looks of the men that had gone out.