"Nowhere is the restriction of access to the Internet suggested. There should just exist protection of citizens' moral and ethical honor," said Villalba, who heads the National Assembly's media commission.
Doesn't that sound kind of contradictory? And doesn't seem the statement "protecting moral and ethical honour" just a tad on the broad side if it's just about porn and death threats? But it really doesn't matter why they implement this law, it's all about gaining a foothold, the stated reasons are just pretexts. For them it's porn and death threats. In the US, it's threats to national security. In my own country it's child pornography. Something a lot of citizens like yourself will approve of, thinking: "yes, we need to control that sort of thing". Something which it is hard to be against... hey, you are not in favour of getting the president shot, terruhrists, or kiddie porn, are you!?
And once the controls are in place, they are extended. In Venezuela it'll be anything opposing Chavez, for "destabilizing the country". In the US it's the DMCA. In the Netherlands, there was a proposal to extend the DA's power to take down kiddie porn sites with the power to remove sites "inciting violence" and then "inciting hatred". Another broad brush with which to tar undesirable opinions of a certain nature. Thankfully the proposal was shot down, but what struck me is that no one, not even the opponents of the bill, attacked the principle of such a law.
It would appear that the semi-professional gear is also coming down in price. There's already a few labs here where you can send your designs to do 3D printing, PCBs or CNC mill/lathe jobs (even in steel). The quality is quite good... good enough to produce a working model IC engine from plans, for instance. I've had them make a weird driveshaft for a model airplane, and my brother sometimes orders PCBs from these labs. It's not what I would call cheap, but it comes out looking as good as anything you'd find in a commercial production run, and in the past 2 decades that level of quality has gone from unavailable to prohibitively expensive to affordable for hobbyists.
The one reason I'd want a machine for myself is to experiment... I can afford to order parts from a fablab, but when experimenting I can't afford the wait.
What if she broke into the office and set fire to a couple of file cabinets, and burned the company's financial books and payroll records as well (assuming they'd have none of it on computers)? Even if her actions wouldn't burn down the whole building, I should think she'd get a stiff penalty for that, including some jail time.
The silly part is that the prosecutors really went all out to push what flimsy case they had to the max... and came up with some weird interpretation of the law that says "having sex without a condom is illegal if you do not have the lady's consent signed in her own blood", or some such. A ridiculous, trumped up case even under Sweden's somewhat broad definition of rape/sexual assault. And for this he makes Interpol's most wanted list? Something smells awfully fishy....
It's not cheap; solar (photovoltaic or molten salt) is still by far the most expensive way to generate electricity, in $/KWh, factoring in plant commissioning, operating cost & maintenance, and waste disposal. More expensive than non-subsidised nuclear power.
With that said, solar is also the energy source that is expected to drop in price the most. The technology is being improved upon, and the price is dropping steadily.
Calling him a rape suspect is a bit like calling someone caught urinating in public a "sex offender". The charges are for sexual assault, or molest, or whatever the legal term is, and in many countries (Sweden included) this can range from actual rape down to "looking at women in a funny way". The charges brought against him in Sweden are of the latter category as far as I know, although perhaps the women involved have amplified their original charges to include something more serious, which would explain the decision to issue an arrest warrant after all.
Unemployment in the Netherlands is a lot higher than the official figures indicate. We used to "park" a great many hard-to-employ people in our Medical Disability scheme, which is why at some point we have stopped counting people on Medical Disability as unemployed, because the figures became something of an embarrasment. That practise has recently picked up again in the form of the new Medical Disability for Young people (WaJong); a scheme which according to the Bureau of Statistics is set to become as large as the original disability scheme.
We've about 900.000 people on Medical Disability in NL, that's roughly 6% of the population and 12% of our labour force. You can stop wondering why our unemployment is so low, because it isn't. Start wondering instead why our taxes are so high....
While Iceland did not take the bank debts as public debts, they did stand as guarantor for them. See this quote from a letter from the Icelandic ministry of finance:
The Icelandic government will support the Depositors' and Investors' Guarantee Fund in raising the necessary funds, so that the fund would be able to meet the minimum compensation limits in the event of a failure of Landsbanki and its U.K. branch
Once Landsbanki collapsed the debt did become a public debt, and in a way Iceland did default: in a referendum, its people decided to compensate only Icelandic citizens. The clever part is the way they did it: simply deciding not to honour the guarantees on their bank, they avoided being punished by a poor credit rating. Of course no Iceland bank will ever get a European banking license again, but at this point who cares?
You are right... except that in pretty much all places I have worked (ranging from small outfits to large multinationals), the processes so prevalent in IT today have proven to do a piss-poor job of preventing mishaps. In some cases they make it worse, because many people have a tendency to replace thinking with process. In fact, in some cases managers think they can get by with lesser qualified or more junior staff, because they think their processes will cover for any shortcomings. Now there's an accident waiting to happen.
On large software projects you'll need process to handle project management, information management, QA, etc... and even small projects can benefit from a process-minded approach there. But I agree with the GP to do the minimum amount. The minimum amount necessary. Which often is a great deal less than the industry-standard processes prescribe. The most succesful projects I've seen have invariably those led a clever PM with a keen sense of process. Not a deep knowledge of Prince2, ITIL or other formal process descriptions, in other words not a box-ticker, but having a good understanding of why certain things are important to control, and how to control them in a lean, effective manner. You do not need a 3 book methodology to manage projects, or manage a service organisation. Really, you don't.
Sure, the idea is not new, in fact there's probably some ancient religions with the same notion. The news is that these scientists appear to have measured something that corroborates this idea.
I'd like to see some more proof as well. Google a little, and the same number keeps popping up: one ship equals 50 million cars in pollution. And all of these articles reference the same single 2009 study...
Another study done by the Friends of the Earth no less (in 2005), finds one container ship polluting as much as 2000 trucks. That sounds a lot better, especially since a container ship hauls more than 2000 trucks.
You can build a stable and scalable infrastructure with any of the major OSes out there, so I would no be afraid to choose. The catch is: you have to know what you are doing. If it is just going to be you designing and supporting the infrastructure, pick whatever technology you are most competent with. Same for video servers and web server technology... but in this case, try and use server software that does not lock your content to that particular software, so you can change later. Standards help... though be careful: using an open standard like ODF seems nice, but you will find the rest of the business world pretty much 100% on MS Office.
If you plan to use technology or software with which you are not too familiar, I would seriously consider hiring a competent contractor to help, even if it's just for a few weeks of design work.
I can't say much about hardware. Whatever brand you pick, some people will praise it while others will have their horror stories about that brand. Desktops or laptops? That depends a lot on who will be using them. Why not let the users choose?
It'll be even more embarrasing when the machine puts you in the "used girl's panties" demographic.
They have nice vending machines over there... In a little alley near my hotel they had one that sold a selection of *bottles* of whisky. Funny how that would never work ovr here because
1) Politicians would go apeshit... encouragingpeopleotdrinkwecanthavethatohnoes.
2) After sundown the machine would last less than 5 minutes before someone would smash the glass and steal the whisky.
I agree, context needs to be taken into account. The problem is that Twitter does not really provide a lot of context... The fact that this is by no means the first time a tweet was taken out of context and taken the wrong way, has little to do with people misunderstanding the medium, and a lot with the medium itself.
People in Europe should rightly be worried about free speech laws. They are already a lot stricter than the US ones, and I am very much in favour of allowing more free speech in Europe, not less. I think all speech should be allowed...
...except direct calls for violence against individuals and groups. And that is exactly what this is. He didn't even add a smiley... how is this to be interpreted as a joke? The guy does not deserve full punishment for this, but arrest and prosecution are warranted IMHO, if only to give him a slap on the wrist for utterly irresponsibly behaviour. This is a bit like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre.
Textbooks and reference material also require faster screens, so that fast page flipping and quickly entering search terms become practical. I use an e-reader for prolongued reading (fiction, etc), but I have an iPad for reference material, textbooks and magazines; simply adding color to the e-reader would not make it good enough for those tasks.
I'd love a device that combines both display technologies. I remember a company called Pixel-Qi working on an LCD that had a backlit and reflective mode. It looked quite decent in both modes on the video I've seen of their screen, but that video seemed to have been shot with an ancient Nokia held by a drunken grandfather with Parkinsons, in other words it was hard to really judge the quality.
Let the damn companies have whatever policies they want, force them to be open about those policies
That is how it should be. And a number of European countries have data privacy laws to that effect. Companies have to publish what they are going to do with your data and are not allowed to do anything else with it. They also have to let you know, on request, what data they have on you. Not a bad law, but I would like to see it extended a little bit, as follows:
A company's data privacy disclaimer/statement shall not exceed half a page of text (A4/Letter in 12 point letters, in case someone wants to get smart with fine print). It shall not be embedded in a longer generic disclaimer, but stand on its own.
Better yet, the government could issue a generic, well-understood disclaimer in which companies provide the details about the data, access, retention, sharing, etc. Currently it is not humanly possible to read these disclaimers, being half a book's worth of legalese. This is done on purpose.
"People over process" is an important tenet in more ways than one, and not only in IT. Often, this message is taken to mean that teams and individuals are given more freedom to organise their own work, and are managed on outcome rather than activities. This is true in some ways,
but it's more than that.
"People over process" to me also means acknowledging the value of each individual's skills and abilities. That starts with resourcing: instead of posting jobs for "2 junior programmers, 1 senior programmer, 1 encryption specialist (part time) and 1 PM", one would think "Together, Alice and Bob are up to the task of writing this module, Alice knows enough about encryption to cover that part of the job, and Bob is a good team lead". No two people are alike, and if you value people, that means that you account for their differences as well. Yes, it also means that if Alice calls in sick, you have a problem on your hand, but it's by no means an insurmountable problem.
And it goes beyond that. "People over process" to me also means that you let people do what they are good at beyond the call of their assignment. (as long as it benefits the company). As an individual, it means that you sometimes take responsibility for stuff that is not strictly your job. If someone contacts me with a problem I can solve, I do not answer with "Contact the helpdesk"... if it's likely the problem will get kicked down 3 layers, taking 2 weeks to come up with a non-answer. Instead I will take an hour off my regular work to provide a helpful answer (of course with the suggestion that they contact the helpdesk, and copying in support as well). This helps everyone, including the company.
Yes, accounting for individual differences makes budgeting, resourcing, managing continuity, and people management a lot harder. That's why managers hate "people over process" and why Agile IT gets loaded down with more process: resources are so much easier to manage than people.
- it's used as nothing more than a gimmick rather than an actual way to put the viewer "on-stage
In the case of Avatar, I beg to differ. But that is the only movie I know of that has done 3d well, as a way to add immersion instead of adding gimmicks (like that stupid in-your-face spinning spear in Titans, come on...)
A few things are different in this round of the 3d fad. The hardware to deliver 3d in cinemas has gotten a lot cheaper and better. Extensive use of CGI (especially in movies where doing 3d also makes sense) makes adding 3d throughout relatively cheap. And perhaps more importantly, for the 1st time, 3d technology good enough to watch entire movies in is now coming to the home theater, at affordable prices. Other 3d applications such as sports coverage are on the rise, and from what I hear 3d does add something to that experience as well.
I have a feeling that if enough people buy into the fad and invest in 3d home cinema setups, there might be enough demand for content... the fad may not blow over this time round.
As someone who can see 3D, I'd say that 3D added immensely to the immersion in "Avatar". It doesn't really improve the movie, but it certainly enhances the way we experience it.
Funny you should bring up Ayn Rand. There's plenty of things wrong with her world view, but it seems to me Rand was a champion of anyone who labored to produce honest value. Patent trolls, people who compete not by offering a better value but by screwing the competition with bullshit patents or insane IP laws (Disney anyone?), those are the people Rand would class as the "moochers", leeches living off the work of others.
There probably is some benefit in getting kids a chair somewhere between a $40 torture device and a $700 designer's wet dream. Chairs are what HR drones call a "hygiene factor"; a bad one hurts performance, a good enough one doesn't, but there's no point in going beyond "good enough"
Even so, that Aeron is a really comfy chair. I had one at the workplace for a while and loved it, and I would love one for my home office. The price is stopping me though... at $700 I'd get one in a heartbeat, but over here the damn things start at 1200 for some reason... And those are euros.
Be careful. Procrastinating, lack of attention and goofing off can be a sign of a pending burn-out or being overworked. It isn't always, but I've seen it happen. A busy and usually diligent guy on a job that had already burned out another co-worker, has a few urgent but very do-able tasks in his inbox, some of which he could have handled or delegated in minutes... but he just sat there, then opened another browser window. And that went on for a few days, during which time very little work left his hands. After that he called in sick and didn't return to the job. Pretty sad...
You're right, it is hard to tell which is which. The guy who just moved in on your project and appears to be a slacker could already be on the verge of being overworked from his previous assignment. Very hard to tell, and the warning signs are often overlooked. In the past 2 years I've seen 4 cases of burn-out happen around me, and I've been close myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't that sound kind of contradictory? And doesn't seem the statement "protecting moral and ethical honour" just a tad on the broad side if it's just about porn and death threats? But it really doesn't matter why they implement this law, it's all about gaining a foothold, the stated reasons are just pretexts. For them it's porn and death threats. In the US, it's threats to national security. In my own country it's child pornography. Something a lot of citizens like yourself will approve of, thinking: "yes, we need to control that sort of thing". Something which it is hard to be against... hey, you are not in favour of getting the president shot, terruhrists, or kiddie porn, are you!?
And once the controls are in place, they are extended. In Venezuela it'll be anything opposing Chavez, for "destabilizing the country". In the US it's the DMCA. In the Netherlands, there was a proposal to extend the DA's power to take down kiddie porn sites with the power to remove sites "inciting violence" and then "inciting hatred". Another broad brush with which to tar undesirable opinions of a certain nature. Thankfully the proposal was shot down, but what struck me is that no one, not even the opponents of the bill, attacked the principle of such a law.
It would appear that the semi-professional gear is also coming down in price. There's already a few labs here where you can send your designs to do 3D printing, PCBs or CNC mill/lathe jobs (even in steel). The quality is quite good... good enough to produce a working model IC engine from plans, for instance. I've had them make a weird driveshaft for a model airplane, and my brother sometimes orders PCBs from these labs. It's not what I would call cheap, but it comes out looking as good as anything you'd find in a commercial production run, and in the past 2 decades that level of quality has gone from unavailable to prohibitively expensive to affordable for hobbyists.
The one reason I'd want a machine for myself is to experiment... I can afford to order parts from a fablab, but when experimenting I can't afford the wait.
What if she broke into the office and set fire to a couple of file cabinets, and burned the company's financial books and payroll records as well (assuming they'd have none of it on computers)? Even if her actions wouldn't burn down the whole building, I should think she'd get a stiff penalty for that, including some jail time.
The silly part is that the prosecutors really went all out to push what flimsy case they had to the max... and came up with some weird interpretation of the law that says "having sex without a condom is illegal if you do not have the lady's consent signed in her own blood", or some such. A ridiculous, trumped up case even under Sweden's somewhat broad definition of rape/sexual assault. And for this he makes Interpol's most wanted list? Something smells awfully fishy....
It's not cheap; solar (photovoltaic or molten salt) is still by far the most expensive way to generate electricity, in $/KWh, factoring in plant commissioning, operating cost & maintenance, and waste disposal. More expensive than non-subsidised nuclear power.
With that said, solar is also the energy source that is expected to drop in price the most. The technology is being improved upon, and the price is dropping steadily.
Calling him a rape suspect is a bit like calling someone caught urinating in public a "sex offender". The charges are for sexual assault, or molest, or whatever the legal term is, and in many countries (Sweden included) this can range from actual rape down to "looking at women in a funny way". The charges brought against him in Sweden are of the latter category as far as I know, although perhaps the women involved have amplified their original charges to include something more serious, which would explain the decision to issue an arrest warrant after all.
Unemployment in the Netherlands is a lot higher than the official figures indicate. We used to "park" a great many hard-to-employ people in our Medical Disability scheme, which is why at some point we have stopped counting people on Medical Disability as unemployed, because the figures became something of an embarrasment. That practise has recently picked up again in the form of the new Medical Disability for Young people (WaJong); a scheme which according to the Bureau of Statistics is set to become as large as the original disability scheme.
We've about 900.000 people on Medical Disability in NL, that's roughly 6% of the population and 12% of our labour force. You can stop wondering why our unemployment is so low, because it isn't. Start wondering instead why our taxes are so high....
Once Landsbanki collapsed the debt did become a public debt, and in a way Iceland did default: in a referendum, its people decided to compensate only Icelandic citizens. The clever part is the way they did it: simply deciding not to honour the guarantees on their bank, they avoided being punished by a poor credit rating. Of course no Iceland bank will ever get a European banking license again, but at this point who cares?
You are right... except that in pretty much all places I have worked (ranging from small outfits to large multinationals), the processes so prevalent in IT today have proven to do a piss-poor job of preventing mishaps. In some cases they make it worse, because many people have a tendency to replace thinking with process. In fact, in some cases managers think they can get by with lesser qualified or more junior staff, because they think their processes will cover for any shortcomings. Now there's an accident waiting to happen.
On large software projects you'll need process to handle project management, information management, QA, etc... and even small projects can benefit from a process-minded approach there. But I agree with the GP to do the minimum amount. The minimum amount necessary. Which often is a great deal less than the industry-standard processes prescribe. The most succesful projects I've seen have invariably those led a clever PM with a keen sense of process. Not a deep knowledge of Prince2, ITIL or other formal process descriptions, in other words not a box-ticker, but having a good understanding of why certain things are important to control, and how to control them in a lean, effective manner. You do not need a 3 book methodology to manage projects, or manage a service organisation. Really, you don't.
Sure, the idea is not new, in fact there's probably some ancient religions with the same notion. The news is that these scientists appear to have measured something that corroborates this idea.
I'd like to see some more proof as well. Google a little, and the same number keeps popping up: one ship equals 50 million cars in pollution. And all of these articles reference the same single 2009 study...
Another study done by the Friends of the Earth no less (in 2005), finds one container ship polluting as much as 2000 trucks. That sounds a lot better, especially since a container ship hauls more than 2000 trucks.
You can build a stable and scalable infrastructure with any of the major OSes out there, so I would no be afraid to choose. The catch is: you have to know what you are doing. If it is just going to be you designing and supporting the infrastructure, pick whatever technology you are most competent with. Same for video servers and web server technology... but in this case, try and use server software that does not lock your content to that particular software, so you can change later. Standards help... though be careful: using an open standard like ODF seems nice, but you will find the rest of the business world pretty much 100% on MS Office.
If you plan to use technology or software with which you are not too familiar, I would seriously consider hiring a competent contractor to help, even if it's just for a few weeks of design work.
I can't say much about hardware. Whatever brand you pick, some people will praise it while others will have their horror stories about that brand. Desktops or laptops? That depends a lot on who will be using them. Why not let the users choose?
It'll be even more embarrasing when the machine puts you in the "used girl's panties" demographic.
They have nice vending machines over there... In a little alley near my hotel they had one that sold a selection of *bottles* of whisky. Funny how that would never work ovr here because
1) Politicians would go apeshit... encouragingpeopleotdrinkwecanthavethatohnoes.
2) After sundown the machine would last less than 5 minutes before someone would smash the glass and steal the whisky.
I agree, context needs to be taken into account. The problem is that Twitter does not really provide a lot of context... The fact that this is by no means the first time a tweet was taken out of context and taken the wrong way, has little to do with people misunderstanding the medium, and a lot with the medium itself.
People in Europe should rightly be worried about free speech laws. They are already a lot stricter than the US ones, and I am very much in favour of allowing more free speech in Europe, not less. I think all speech should be allowed...
...except direct calls for violence against individuals and groups. And that is exactly what this is. He didn't even add a smiley... how is this to be interpreted as a joke? The guy does not deserve full punishment for this, but arrest and prosecution are warranted IMHO, if only to give him a slap on the wrist for utterly irresponsibly behaviour. This is a bit like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre.
Textbooks and reference material also require faster screens, so that fast page flipping and quickly entering search terms become practical. I use an e-reader for prolongued reading (fiction, etc), but I have an iPad for reference material, textbooks and magazines; simply adding color to the e-reader would not make it good enough for those tasks.
I'd love a device that combines both display technologies. I remember a company called Pixel-Qi working on an LCD that had a backlit and reflective mode. It looked quite decent in both modes on the video I've seen of their screen, but that video seemed to have been shot with an ancient Nokia held by a drunken grandfather with Parkinsons, in other words it was hard to really judge the quality.
He does do a vertical loop. Watch the video
That is how it should be. And a number of European countries have data privacy laws to that effect. Companies have to publish what they are going to do with your data and are not allowed to do anything else with it. They also have to let you know, on request, what data they have on you. Not a bad law, but I would like to see it extended a little bit, as follows:
A company's data privacy disclaimer/statement shall not exceed half a page of text (A4/Letter in 12 point letters, in case someone wants to get smart with fine print). It shall not be embedded in a longer generic disclaimer, but stand on its own.
Better yet, the government could issue a generic, well-understood disclaimer in which companies provide the details about the data, access, retention, sharing, etc. Currently it is not humanly possible to read these disclaimers, being half a book's worth of legalese. This is done on purpose.
"People over process" is an important tenet in more ways than one, and not only in IT. Often, this message is taken to mean that teams and individuals are given more freedom to organise their own work, and are managed on outcome rather than activities. This is true in some ways, but it's more than that.
"People over process" to me also means acknowledging the value of each individual's skills and abilities. That starts with resourcing: instead of posting jobs for "2 junior programmers, 1 senior programmer, 1 encryption specialist (part time) and 1 PM", one would think "Together, Alice and Bob are up to the task of writing this module, Alice knows enough about encryption to cover that part of the job, and Bob is a good team lead". No two people are alike, and if you value people, that means that you account for their differences as well. Yes, it also means that if Alice calls in sick, you have a problem on your hand, but it's by no means an insurmountable problem.
And it goes beyond that. "People over process" to me also means that you let people do what they are good at beyond the call of their assignment. (as long as it benefits the company). As an individual, it means that you sometimes take responsibility for stuff that is not strictly your job. If someone contacts me with a problem I can solve, I do not answer with "Contact the helpdesk"... if it's likely the problem will get kicked down 3 layers, taking 2 weeks to come up with a non-answer. Instead I will take an hour off my regular work to provide a helpful answer (of course with the suggestion that they contact the helpdesk, and copying in support as well). This helps everyone, including the company.
Yes, accounting for individual differences makes budgeting, resourcing, managing continuity, and people management a lot harder. That's why managers hate "people over process" and why Agile IT gets loaded down with more process: resources are so much easier to manage than people.
- it's used as nothing more than a gimmick rather than an actual way to put the viewer "on-stage
In the case of Avatar, I beg to differ. But that is the only movie I know of that has done 3d well, as a way to add immersion instead of adding gimmicks (like that stupid in-your-face spinning spear in Titans, come on...)
A few things are different in this round of the 3d fad. The hardware to deliver 3d in cinemas has gotten a lot cheaper and better. Extensive use of CGI (especially in movies where doing 3d also makes sense) makes adding 3d throughout relatively cheap. And perhaps more importantly, for the 1st time, 3d technology good enough to watch entire movies in is now coming to the home theater, at affordable prices. Other 3d applications such as sports coverage are on the rise, and from what I hear 3d does add something to that experience as well.
I have a feeling that if enough people buy into the fad and invest in 3d home cinema setups, there might be enough demand for content... the fad may not blow over this time round.
As someone who can see 3D, I'd say that 3D added immensely to the immersion in "Avatar". It doesn't really improve the movie, but it certainly enhances the way we experience it.
Utilitarianism negates free will, property rights and individuality when misapplied (and perhaps when correctly applied too).
The needs of the many should not outweigh the rights of the few.
Funny you should bring up Ayn Rand. There's plenty of things wrong with her world view, but it seems to me Rand was a champion of anyone who labored to produce honest value. Patent trolls, people who compete not by offering a better value but by screwing the competition with bullshit patents or insane IP laws (Disney anyone?), those are the people Rand would class as the "moochers", leeches living off the work of others.
There probably is some benefit in getting kids a chair somewhere between a $40 torture device and a $700 designer's wet dream. Chairs are what HR drones call a "hygiene factor"; a bad one hurts performance, a good enough one doesn't, but there's no point in going beyond "good enough"
Even so, that Aeron is a really comfy chair. I had one at the workplace for a while and loved it, and I would love one for my home office. The price is stopping me though... at $700 I'd get one in a heartbeat, but over here the damn things start at 1200 for some reason... And those are euros.
Be careful. Procrastinating, lack of attention and goofing off can be a sign of a pending burn-out or being overworked. It isn't always, but I've seen it happen. A busy and usually diligent guy on a job that had already burned out another co-worker, has a few urgent but very do-able tasks in his inbox, some of which he could have handled or delegated in minutes... but he just sat there, then opened another browser window. And that went on for a few days, during which time very little work left his hands. After that he called in sick and didn't return to the job. Pretty sad...
You're right, it is hard to tell which is which. The guy who just moved in on your project and appears to be a slacker could already be on the verge of being overworked from his previous assignment. Very hard to tell, and the warning signs are often overlooked. In the past 2 years I've seen 4 cases of burn-out happen around me, and I've been close myself.