Clearly, the lesson all developers should be taking from this project manager's example is that:
1. Your work for the current company isn't as valued as the new whiz-bang initiative that the VP is funding.
2. You should allocate your time accordingly. Instead of spending all of your time becoming proficient in the business requirements, and spending your extra hours trying to keep on top of your workload (which only results in their attaching that new kid with the whiz-bang resume like a limpet for you to mentor and transfer your business requirements knowledge), you should instead be spending your time learning new whiz-bang technologies and preparing your resume for jumping ship, since that is what the market is valuing.
3. Thus, by the time they try to screw you over, not only will you have a job at a competitor making a new whiz-bang salary, you'll be helping the rest of us by driving up the average market salary for experienced programmers!
There's a reason you don't want salespeople running a company.
Sales Exec (upon being told that the company is losing a dollar for every unit they sell at current pricing): "That's ok, we'll just make it up in volume!"
The (un)funny thing is that to salespeople, THIS MAKES SENSE - their bonuses are typically based on the amount of sales, not whether the sale actually made money...
Do you want to just write code? Do you want experience? Do you have minimum pay requirements (due to living expenses, loans, etc.)?
You may be better off finding an internship somewhere if you haven't already secured one. Barring that, I'd suggest developing your own software, or doing some contracting work.
Depending on your skill set and your career goals, you may not want an entry-level job.
On the other hand, working a shit job may very well get you the contacts you need to get a non-shit job.
Not to mention, if you want to do an electric vehicle conversion (where the old gas engine is removed and replaced with an electric drivetrain), scrapping old cars effectively destroys your source of donor vehicles!
"Should the bill pass, the "Cash for Clunkers" program would reimburse drivers with a credit of $2,500 to $4,500 for drivers who turn in fuel-inefficient vehicles to be scrapped and purchase a more fuel efficient vehicle."
Sounds like an automotive version of gun buybacks, and equally as silly.
If the goal is to save the environment, tying the credit to the purchase of a new vehicle just takes a perfectly good car whose environmental costs have already been incurred out of circulation.
If the goal is to reduce oil consumption, using taxpayer money to fund the purchase of new cars, instead of getting affordable, useful mass transit, seems like a horrible waste of money.
Clearly, this is designed to prop up the auto industry. By reducing the number of used cars on the market, which compete with new cars, and using taxpayer money for what normally would be the trade-in value of their car, they're artificially reducing the supply of cars in the country in order to drive sales of new cars. This has the effect of screwing over people who would never be able to buy a new car, since there will be a reduction in the supply of used cars.
But that's ok. The government wants you to get deeper into debt to buy things you can't afford. That's the ticket out of this recession!
A non-profit is not the same as a not-for-profit.
A non-profit can be just as greedy and evil (if not more so) than your typical company, and still retain certain tax advantages.
The heat's making its way to the atmosphere anyways... AC generates additional heat from the losses required to cool the air down. So direct air cooling actually is more environmentally friendly (from both a power consumption and heat dumping perspective) than using AC.
One benefit to going DC is that you can wire your battery modules directly into the DC distribution grid for the CPUs (with appropriate charge and cutover circuits), and forgo the inefficiencies in converting AC to DC at the UPS, and then back out again, only to convert the AC back to DC at the CPU.
Having multiple of a commonly used voltage used in renewable energy also helps if, for example, you want to feed your datacenter directly from say wind or solar, in addition to a set of AC to DC converter.
For every item deemed not notable on Wikipedia, is some future dissertation topic for some grad student.
Remember, nobody knows what is notable in any given time period until long after that time period is past.
Re:Quantitative techniques in business
on
Tech Vs. Business?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Amen. I think you've boiled it down to the basics - lack of respect from both sides.
The suits consider IT the corporate equivalent of burger-flipping - something dirty that needs to be done, but could be done "better", "cheaper", and "faster", and preferably by interchangable, known quantities (hence the reliance on things like certification over actual skills.)
The IT people who are any good basically see the suits as people who are full of shit who couldn't hack it in a real degree, so they went and got an MBA (and likely cheated in order to get it.) And then they get promoted despite having put in zero work compared to the engineers.
Moral of the story. If you're any good, don't work for suits. Consult for them when they're desperate and you dictate all the terms, and can walk all the way to the bank laughing when their house of cards collapses (make sure to get your consulting checks cut regularly - if they start coming late or at all, you can cut your losses.)
I think the problem was not that we bailed them out, but that we bailed BOTH of them out.
It would have been an object lesson had the feds let one of the two fail completely, with all of the reprecussions, and saved the other.
Instead of letting people see how bad it could have gotten, and let the unlucky lenders who couldn't get their repackaged debt bought by the surviving company fail, we're going to have a long and painful slide as everyone waits for the next shoe to drop.
There will be more banking failures, but my fear is by then there won't be any free capital left in the US to reinvest and reinvigorate when the whole process winds up - we'll have used it all up waiting, just like the Japanese did after their banking/real estate disaster in the early 90's.
I'm wondering how much of this is due to people not wanting to face up to the fact that they're holding on to worthless paper (much as the Japanese refused to let companies go bankrupt), and how much of this is due to recent changes in the bankruptcy code, pushed forward, ironically, by the finance companies...
Not to mention that there's no property tax (being taxed to occupy real estate), if the local business or economic climate goes bad you can pick up and be towed to a different location, and you can always add more units if demand increases.
The one problem I see is pirates. No, seriously - you anchor one of these away from an area patrolled by a decent navy/coast guard, and I can see someone paying you a visit late one night to haul away equipment...
Part of the problem is that lobbyists for various trade groups have gotten California to adopt existing books of industry standards as state code. The law basically incorporates whatever is the latest industry standard book... which requires money to get.
Same deal with things like medical terminology. There's a "standards group" which makes money off of licensing the billing codes and selling books of what the current billing codes are.
What makes me laugh (and cry at times) is these same businesses, who insist that programmers and administrators are hard to come by, turn to ridiculous metrics like "how many lines of code do you write per day", and require x number of years of experience with technologies which just came out this year (and have yet to be proven.)
Let them have their H1-Bs, and the deadwood with the inflated resumes. Good riddance.
I don't know how it is where you are, but physical property here in the US is taxed apart from the income you earn from that income.
In other words, even if the land is just sitting there, you still get taxed on it. If you don't pay the tax, the government seizes the property and sells it off to someone who will. Remember, this is completely apart from the income tax applied to any revenue you generate from the property, whether it's from building a house and renting it out, farming it, grazing animals on it, or paving it over and charging people to park on it.
There is no double standard because intellectual "property" isn't real property. There's a lot of impetus to treat it that way because there are a lot of business models built on being able to buy, sell, rent, and re-exploit movies, music, and writing, completely ignoring the fact that:
1. While they like to treat it as real property, real property doesn't expire after a set period of time. Anyone stupid enough to build a business model assuming an asset that is supposed to become free after a set period of time is going to retain value forever deserves to lose their investment.
2. The ability to control the property exclusively is a monopoly (generally a bad thing) granted by the government, as a trade off - we give you a monopoly for the time being, in exchange for you making the property available to the public, and ultimately part of the public domain when the monopoly ends.
3. Traditionally, there was no such thing as "intellectual property". If you saw some something cool and wanted your own copy, you'd copy it or hire someone to make you a copy. If you heard a great story, you'd retell it. This is why guilds formed - to protect "guild secrets", and create a competitive advantage for guild members. The problem is, anyone who was really innovative would more often than not, refuse to share their new process, forcing other people to have to rediscover the secret, a horrible waste of time and energy. To get rid of this waste, promote innovation, and enable those innovations to become public so that they're not lost, the idea of patents and copyrights was born.
4. Patents and copyrights are used today to print money, quash innovation by other people, and bribe politicians to extend monopolies (generally a bad thing) indefinitely, at the expense of the public. Because they don't have to pay property tax, they can sit indefinitely on IP and just sue anyone who starts making money on something that does or might infringe on it. You should either get a limited monopoly to exploit your work, or if you want to hold onto it forever, you should be required to pay property taxes on it as a royalty to the public who are guaranteeing your monopoly. Consider all the governmental resources that have been diverted by private parties to enforcing ever longer copyrights in court, and on the streets.
So to answer your question, there's a huge difference between how IP and real property are treated. There is no double standard. The fact that you think there is one is a strong indication of how badly the public has been misled about how copyrights and patents are supposed to work.
If I build a model plane, I can put it up on my mantle, gift it to someone, and take the skills I developed building that and put it towards other items requiring fine motor skills and and a sense of art and history.
I think someone mentioned in a post regarding WOW on a different Slashdot thread that raiding as part of an established group taught them how to manage time, coordinate with other people, and build leadership skills.
Pretty much, you get out of a hobby what you put into it. If it's just a way of killing time, then all you're going to get out of it is a lot of dead time. If your reason to play is the social dynamics (I knew people who played because their friends had moved away, and it was the regular "meetup"), then I think the test would be if these social networks survive beyond the game.
With that said, I detest games that require you to stay on the treadmill to "keep up". At least when I do work I hate during normal working hours, I get paid...
Well, assuming the root cause of this is some sort of transmissible pathogen, we need to:
1. Isolate all existing carriers, and all those the suspected carriers have had contact with. This would include staff, lobbyists, media, party officials, etc. 2. Destroy any item that carriers have come contact with. This would include checks and money from lobbyists, any any existing laws that were recently passed. 3. Institute a quarantine for any recently elected official - if the official exhibits any symptoms of the disease, pack them off to the isolation ward.
Unfortunately, what do you do when the infected control government and the media?
"The first thing to do is remove arbitrary barriers. IE, "must" have X years of experience, X degree, held X previous positions, must move to our area."
"Secondly, market the job -- make sure people can find out about it."
"Third, salary, salary, salary, and benefits (particularly insurance and family coverage)."
Dead on target. If you're hiring, and you're serious about bringing in quality talent, rather than another warm body, you should take these observations to heart.
I'm currently looking, and everywhere I'm looking I'm seeing entry-level drone positions (or what I would consider entry-level) - java, IT, support, etc. I rarely see any pay ranges, and I'm not going to waste my time or take the risk of raising red flags by applying to a position where I'm going to get offered several tens of k less than my last job, and be bored silly. The recruiters I've encountered have ranged from mediocre to indifferent, and have not made me very enthused about applying - ie, here's the website, apply online (this includes Google, btw).
My biggest problem is that I'm more interested in doing start-up work (I have background in multiple fields, with specializations in law and management), but apparently there's some super-secret recruiting network only known to VC's and their kin. Either that or their recruiters never bother to get back to you when you start asking questions about their super-secret startup. Too bad for them.
If I may add an addendum to the observation about companies treating programmers like a commodity - if this is what your process is geared for (ie, generic online applications filtered and processed by HR), commodity programmers is all that you're going to be getting from your applications pipeline.
And one more item. If you expect talent to treat you seriously, reply promptly to queries, especially if they're not coming through an internal jobs website.
Copyright is ultimately meant to make available and to preserve creative works for the public. It does this by declaring a temporary monopoly on distribution on behalf of the author or artist, similar to the temporary grants for patents. That this term has gradually been lengthened to a ridiculous amount (up to 120 years - see http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/ ), is an aberration which can probably be laid at the feet of corporate entities who wish to profit from the works indefinitely, to the detriment of the public, and an abuse of the artificial monopoly, which was meant as an inducement to both create and share works with the public, rather than sitting on them, or devoting one's energies and creative talents to something else (e.g. private commissions).
If an entity similar to wikipedia were to archive every single copy of every webcomic strip, the same way that the US Library of Congress does with every registered item sent to them, it would be for the public good, as it would mean that a centralized, independent collection exists in the event that the original is no longer available or accessible. Of course, they would likely be sued, in the same way that Google has, is, and probably will be sued in the future for trying to make available this information to the public. Recall that Amazon also ran into difficulties with publishers with their "See Inside" feature.
If you are a scholar in early science fiction then access to fanzines dating back to the 1920's, courtesy of collections donated to university archives, would be of great use to you, specifically because of the fact that they were so disposable (or in such limited runs) that few copies exist today. Similarly, in this context, having a centralized repository for items which other people currently may only consider "bulk pulp", is a very useful thing to have in a few decades - after all, we are poor judges of what might become history to a future culture, or thesis material for a doctoral student.
Consider what http://www.archive.org/ has done with out-of-copyright materials, for example. My impression is that there are two conflicting demands on information science (or library science, depending on which program you graduated from) - the idea that information should be sorted by relevance and access to the greatest number of people (which leads to things like eviscerating library collections of older books to make room for more computer desks), and the idea that rarer volumes should be conserved. The problem is that you don't get rarer volumes until people following the first school of thought have made that particular item rare, and by then, it may be too late to save a good copy...
I think you have just summarized what is essentially the current dilemma for Wikipedia - the idea that some articles are more important than others, and are thus more deserving for inclusion. Whether a piece of information is more important than another depends completely on local scope, and is relatively independent of the work put into the article.
I'm not sure that I buy the limited human resources argument, as it posits a fixed number of some scarce unit - editors? contributors? administrators? librarians? If vandalism and spamming are sucking away time, this would be true as the number of articles increases, no matter what subject those articles encompass.
Further following your argument, at some point there will come a time, because of "limited human resources", that a judgement will have to be made between an article between say, nonwestern cultures, and relativistic physics. I find it regrettable that long before that time, any interested contributors for whom Wikipedia has ceased to be a welcoming environment will have absented themselves.
Wouldn't it just be simpler to say "we're running out of people to police articles and maintain a minimum level of standards" and put articles that are little-used into cold storage, as conservators of potentially useful information and freely contributed work, rather than using that as an excuse to excise articles that do not meet the personal criteria of certain individuals for inclusion and resource allocation?
"it's a standard by which Wikipedia eliminates content that is not appropriate for an encyclopedia."
So, define what the scope of an encyclopedia is then? Should it only cover ground that Britannica, World Book, and Encarta have covered before? Because if so, then I'd take any of those professionally written, editor reviewed, and citable sources over Wikipedia any day.
Frankly, I think that imposing a limit on content for an encyclopedia is absolutely the wrong thing to do. I quote from Answers.com's definiton of Encyclopedia, taken from Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
"encyclopaedia Reference work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge comprehensively."
In other words, by definition (which seems to be echoed by the other definitions of encyclopedia), a general dumping ground for all human knowledge is EXACTLY what a virtual encyclopedia should be.
Wikipedia's utility comes in being a repository for anything and everything written in as close to an unbiased manner as possible, eyeball-checked by every single reader, and instead of trying to impose a dictatorial measure of editorial control, should allow the reader to judge the veracity of the information in the article for themselves. Hell, any decent researcher knows better than to trust just ONE source. Even better is the ability for users who have never before contributed content or written articles anywhere to use Wikipedia as a jumping-off point to start doing research on their own in order to improve Wikipedia content.
But I guess Wikipedia has gotten too big for that. And hence all that knowledge and information that used to be housed in one spot is going to be scattered to the four winds in a variety of very domain-specific wikis. I wouldn't mind that at all... if the minor articles that might lead one to these more specific wiki weren't themselves at risk for being purged from Wikipedia, thus removing the indication that these other subject domains even exist!
Again, I think Wikipedia could have easily handled this by promoting or demoting articles - ie, "This article adheres to Wikipedia editorial and citation guidelines" vs. "This article is unsubstantiated and is reserved for general informational search only"), instead of deleting people's work outright.
Here's a thought experiment. Do a search for every article which has been tagged "This article does not cite any references or sources." Now consider that any schmuck who wants to get some deletions under his or her belt can summarily challenge these articles. If it's a low traffic article, it WILL get deleted, with little or no debate (because nobody has a vested interest in saving it.) Not just shunted to a "if you want to be an awesome Wikipedia researcher, here's a pile of no-citation articles for you to proof and fact check" pile, or a "I'm sorry, but this article didn't make the cut, you have 4 months to move it to some other wiki", but removed completely, such that if you wanted to save that information after the fact without undeleting it, you'll have to dig through Wayback Machine or some non-Wikipedia resource to retrieve that data.
Remember, many articles in Wikipedia were written and researched long before the current editorial and notability rules were put into place. It wasn't that people were deliberately being sloppy about citing resources - there was no requirement for doing so. So theoretically, there might have been dozens of people who contributed bits of information over the course of several years... only to be completely erased in the span of a week by less than a handful of people.
That's what's pissing people off - the webcomic deletions were merely a high-profile example of domain-specific knowledge that was removed. I'll be bet you that there are other articles without such high-profile champions outside of wikipedia that just *poof* vanished. If it was a resource issue (ie, lack of space for storage, cpu time, d
What may be notable to you may not be notable to someone else. Almost by definition, smaller communities are not notable to larger communities - what the hell do you care about Civil War Reenactors or the AMC Gremlin, unless you're a Civil War buff or a collector of AMC Gremlins.
As Wikipedia tries to broaden its audience, the notability of much of its content, which is again almost by definition a reflection of interest, drops. Using that as a metric pretty much ensures a very bland collection of content which appeals only to the average schmoe, except that there's nobody to blame if the information is flat out wrong.
Why on earth at that point, after all the information that nobody else carries has been dropped from Wikipedia, would I want to use Wikipedia, when I can use Britannica, where I can have it all locally and not worry that someone's been screwing around with the article?
That's frankly the most stupid thing about this whole process - instead of demoting content from Wikipedia Prime to Wikipedia Everything, they're just throwing content out - articles in some cases where a lot of people devoted a lot of time to contribute and edit and crosslink with other articles. At some point, you're going to unravel a whole bunch of articles after whitewashing the more basic bits that they're built atop of.
Anyone else remember Fortress America? The scenario sounds strangely familiar... oil runs low, US deploys powersats which happen to be dual-purpose, war ensues.
Anyone remember the handheld pda/phone from that short-lived Earth: Final Conflict TV series? I always envied those handhelds, with the built in camera, videophone, computing/storage unit, color rollup screens and contact scanner.
Ten years later, we've got the camera, the phone, and the storage/computing unit as everyone's personal computing device. Now all we need to do is to integrate the rollup screens and this new invention... and of course, move everyone to Vancouver.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly, the lesson all developers should be taking from this project manager's example is that:
1. Your work for the current company isn't as valued as the new whiz-bang initiative that the VP is funding.
2. You should allocate your time accordingly. Instead of spending all of your time becoming proficient in the business requirements, and spending your extra hours trying to keep on top of your workload (which only results in their attaching that new kid with the whiz-bang resume like a limpet for you to mentor and transfer your business requirements knowledge), you should instead be spending your time learning new whiz-bang technologies and preparing your resume for jumping ship, since that is what the market is valuing.
3. Thus, by the time they try to screw you over, not only will you have a job at a competitor making a new whiz-bang salary, you'll be helping the rest of us by driving up the average market salary for experienced programmers!
There's a reason you don't want salespeople running a company.
Sales Exec (upon being told that the company is losing a dollar for every unit they sell at current pricing): "That's ok, we'll just make it up in volume!"
The (un)funny thing is that to salespeople, THIS MAKES SENSE - their bonuses are typically based on the amount of sales, not whether the sale actually made money...
You may be better off finding an internship somewhere if you haven't already secured one. Barring that, I'd suggest developing your own software, or doing some contracting work.
Depending on your skill set and your career goals, you may not want an entry-level job.
On the other hand, working a shit job may very well get you the contacts you need to get a non-shit job.
Not to mention, if you want to do an electric vehicle conversion (where the old gas engine is removed and replaced with an electric drivetrain), scrapping old cars effectively destroys your source of donor vehicles!
"Should the bill pass, the "Cash for Clunkers" program would reimburse drivers with a credit of $2,500 to $4,500 for drivers who turn in fuel-inefficient vehicles to be scrapped and purchase a more fuel efficient vehicle."
Sounds like an automotive version of gun buybacks, and equally as silly.
If the goal is to save the environment, tying the credit to the purchase of a new vehicle just takes a perfectly good car whose environmental costs have already been incurred out of circulation.
If the goal is to reduce oil consumption, using taxpayer money to fund the purchase of new cars, instead of getting affordable, useful mass transit, seems like a horrible waste of money.
Clearly, this is designed to prop up the auto industry. By reducing the number of used cars on the market, which compete with new cars, and using taxpayer money for what normally would be the trade-in value of their car, they're artificially reducing the supply of cars in the country in order to drive sales of new cars. This has the effect of screwing over people who would never be able to buy a new car, since there will be a reduction in the supply of used cars.
But that's ok. The government wants you to get deeper into debt to buy things you can't afford. That's the ticket out of this recession!
A non-profit is not the same as a not-for-profit. A non-profit can be just as greedy and evil (if not more so) than your typical company, and still retain certain tax advantages.
The heat's making its way to the atmosphere anyways... AC generates additional heat from the losses required to cool the air down. So direct air cooling actually is more environmentally friendly (from both a power consumption and heat dumping perspective) than using AC.
One benefit to going DC is that you can wire your battery modules directly into the DC distribution grid for the CPUs (with appropriate charge and cutover circuits), and forgo the inefficiencies in converting AC to DC at the UPS, and then back out again, only to convert the AC back to DC at the CPU.
Having multiple of a commonly used voltage used in renewable energy also helps if, for example, you want to feed your datacenter directly from say wind or solar, in addition to a set of AC to DC converter.
For every item deemed not notable on Wikipedia, is some future dissertation topic for some grad student. Remember, nobody knows what is notable in any given time period until long after that time period is past.
Amen. I think you've boiled it down to the basics - lack of respect from both sides.
The suits consider IT the corporate equivalent of burger-flipping - something dirty that needs to be done, but could be done "better", "cheaper", and "faster", and preferably by interchangable, known quantities (hence the reliance on things like certification over actual skills.)
The IT people who are any good basically see the suits as people who are full of shit who couldn't hack it in a real degree, so they went and got an MBA (and likely cheated in order to get it.) And then they get promoted despite having put in zero work compared to the engineers.
Moral of the story. If you're any good, don't work for suits. Consult for them when they're desperate and you dictate all the terms, and can walk all the way to the bank laughing when their house of cards collapses (make sure to get your consulting checks cut regularly - if they start coming late or at all, you can cut your losses.)
I think the problem was not that we bailed them out, but that we bailed BOTH of them out.
It would have been an object lesson had the feds let one of the two fail completely, with all of the reprecussions, and saved the other.
Instead of letting people see how bad it could have gotten, and let the unlucky lenders who couldn't get their repackaged debt bought by the surviving company fail, we're going to have a long and painful slide as everyone waits for the next shoe to drop.
There will be more banking failures, but my fear is by then there won't be any free capital left in the US to reinvest and reinvigorate when the whole process winds up - we'll have used it all up waiting, just like the Japanese did after their banking/real estate disaster in the early 90's.
I'm wondering how much of this is due to people not wanting to face up to the fact that they're holding on to worthless paper (much as the Japanese refused to let companies go bankrupt), and how much of this is due to recent changes in the bankruptcy code, pushed forward, ironically, by the finance companies...
Not to mention that there's no property tax (being taxed to occupy real estate), if the local business or economic climate goes bad you can pick up and be towed to a different location, and you can always add more units if demand increases. The one problem I see is pirates. No, seriously - you anchor one of these away from an area patrolled by a decent navy/coast guard, and I can see someone paying you a visit late one night to haul away equipment...
Part of the problem is that lobbyists for various trade groups have gotten California to adopt existing books of industry standards as state code. The law basically incorporates whatever is the latest industry standard book... which requires money to get. Same deal with things like medical terminology. There's a "standards group" which makes money off of licensing the billing codes and selling books of what the current billing codes are.
What makes me laugh (and cry at times) is these same businesses, who insist that programmers and administrators are hard to come by, turn to ridiculous metrics like "how many lines of code do you write per day", and require x number of years of experience with technologies which just came out this year (and have yet to be proven.)
Let them have their H1-Bs, and the deadwood with the inflated resumes. Good riddance.
I don't know how it is where you are, but physical property here in the US is taxed apart from the income you earn from that income.
In other words, even if the land is just sitting there, you still get taxed on it. If you don't pay the tax, the government seizes the property and sells it off to someone who will. Remember, this is completely apart from the income tax applied to any revenue you generate from the property, whether it's from building a house and renting it out, farming it, grazing animals on it, or paving it over and charging people to park on it.
There is no double standard because intellectual "property" isn't real property. There's a lot of impetus to treat it that way because there are a lot of business models built on being able to buy, sell, rent, and re-exploit movies, music, and writing, completely ignoring the fact that:
1. While they like to treat it as real property, real property doesn't expire after a set period of time. Anyone stupid enough to build a business model assuming an asset that is supposed to become free after a set period of time is going to retain value forever deserves to lose their investment.
2. The ability to control the property exclusively is a monopoly (generally a bad thing) granted by the government, as a trade off - we give you a monopoly for the time being, in exchange for you making the property available to the public, and ultimately part of the public domain when the monopoly ends.
3. Traditionally, there was no such thing as "intellectual property". If you saw some something cool and wanted your own copy, you'd copy it or hire someone to make you a copy. If you heard a great story, you'd retell it. This is why guilds formed - to protect "guild secrets", and create a competitive advantage for guild members. The problem is, anyone who was really innovative would more often than not, refuse to share their new process, forcing other people to have to rediscover the secret, a horrible waste of time and energy. To get rid of this waste, promote innovation, and enable those innovations to become public so that they're not lost, the idea of patents and copyrights was born.
4. Patents and copyrights are used today to print money, quash innovation by other people, and bribe politicians to extend monopolies (generally a bad thing) indefinitely, at the expense of the public. Because they don't have to pay property tax, they can sit indefinitely on IP and just sue anyone who starts making money on something that does or might infringe on it. You should either get a limited monopoly to exploit your work, or if you want to hold onto it forever, you should be required to pay property taxes on it as a royalty to the public who are guaranteeing your monopoly. Consider all the governmental resources that have been diverted by private parties to enforcing ever longer copyrights in court, and on the streets.
So to answer your question, there's a huge difference between how IP and real property are treated. There is no double standard. The fact that you think there is one is a strong indication of how badly the public has been misled about how copyrights and patents are supposed to work.
If I build a model plane, I can put it up on my mantle, gift it to someone, and take the skills I developed building that and put it towards other items requiring fine motor skills and and a sense of art and history.
I think someone mentioned in a post regarding WOW on a different Slashdot thread that raiding as part of an established group taught them how to manage time, coordinate with other people, and build leadership skills.
Pretty much, you get out of a hobby what you put into it. If it's just a way of killing time, then all you're going to get out of it is a lot of dead time. If your reason to play is the social dynamics (I knew people who played because their friends had moved away, and it was the regular "meetup"), then I think the test would be if these social networks survive beyond the game.
With that said, I detest games that require you to stay on the treadmill to "keep up". At least when I do work I hate during normal working hours, I get paid...
Well, assuming the root cause of this is some sort of transmissible pathogen, we need to:
1. Isolate all existing carriers, and all those the suspected carriers have had contact with. This would include staff, lobbyists, media, party officials, etc.
2. Destroy any item that carriers have come contact with. This would include checks and money from lobbyists, any any existing laws that were recently passed.
3. Institute a quarantine for any recently elected official - if the official exhibits any symptoms of the disease, pack them off to the isolation ward.
Unfortunately, what do you do when the infected control government and the media?
"The first thing to do is remove arbitrary barriers. IE, "must" have X years of experience, X degree, held X previous positions, must move to our area."
"Secondly, market the job -- make sure people can find out about it."
"Third, salary, salary, salary, and benefits (particularly insurance and family coverage)."
Dead on target. If you're hiring, and you're serious about bringing in quality talent, rather than another warm body, you should take these observations to heart.
I'm currently looking, and everywhere I'm looking I'm seeing entry-level drone positions (or what I would consider entry-level) - java, IT, support, etc. I rarely see any pay ranges, and I'm not going to waste my time or take the risk of raising red flags by applying to a position where I'm going to get offered several tens of k less than my last job, and be bored silly. The recruiters I've encountered have ranged from mediocre to indifferent, and have not made me very enthused about applying - ie, here's the website, apply online (this includes Google, btw).
My biggest problem is that I'm more interested in doing start-up work (I have background in multiple fields, with specializations in law and management), but apparently there's some super-secret recruiting network only known to VC's and their kin. Either that or their recruiters never bother to get back to you when you start asking questions about their super-secret startup. Too bad for them.
If I may add an addendum to the observation about companies treating programmers like a commodity - if this is what your process is geared for (ie, generic online applications filtered and processed by HR), commodity programmers is all that you're going to be getting from your applications pipeline.
And one more item. If you expect talent to treat you seriously, reply promptly to queries, especially if they're not coming through an internal jobs website.
Copyright is ultimately meant to make available and to preserve creative works for the public. It does this by declaring a temporary monopoly on distribution on behalf of the author or artist, similar to the temporary grants for patents. That this term has gradually been lengthened to a ridiculous amount (up to 120 years - see http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/ ), is an aberration which can probably be laid at the feet of corporate entities who wish to profit from the works indefinitely, to the detriment of the public, and an abuse of the artificial monopoly, which was meant as an inducement to both create and share works with the public, rather than sitting on them, or devoting one's energies and creative talents to something else (e.g. private commissions).
If an entity similar to wikipedia were to archive every single copy of every webcomic strip, the same way that the US Library of Congress does with every registered item sent to them, it would be for the public good, as it would mean that a centralized, independent collection exists in the event that the original is no longer available or accessible. Of course, they would likely be sued, in the same way that Google has, is, and probably will be sued in the future for trying to make available this information to the public. Recall that Amazon also ran into difficulties with publishers with their "See Inside" feature.
If you are a scholar in early science fiction then access to fanzines dating back to the 1920's, courtesy of collections donated to university archives, would be of great use to you, specifically because of the fact that they were so disposable (or in such limited runs) that few copies exist today. Similarly, in this context, having a centralized repository for items which other people currently may only consider "bulk pulp", is a very useful thing to have in a few decades - after all, we are poor judges of what might become history to a future culture, or thesis material for a doctoral student.
Consider what http://www.archive.org/ has done with out-of-copyright materials, for example. My impression is that there are two conflicting demands on information science (or library science, depending on which program you graduated from) - the idea that information should be sorted by relevance and access to the greatest number of people (which leads to things like eviscerating library collections of older books to make room for more computer desks), and the idea that rarer volumes should be conserved. The problem is that you don't get rarer volumes until people following the first school of thought have made that particular item rare, and by then, it may be too late to save a good copy...
I think you have just summarized what is essentially the current dilemma for Wikipedia - the idea that some articles are more important than others, and are thus more deserving for inclusion. Whether a piece of information is more important than another depends completely on local scope, and is relatively independent of the work put into the article.
I'm not sure that I buy the limited human resources argument, as it posits a fixed number of some scarce unit - editors? contributors? administrators? librarians? If vandalism and spamming are sucking away time, this would be true as the number of articles increases, no matter what subject those articles encompass.
Further following your argument, at some point there will come a time, because of "limited human resources", that a judgement will have to be made between an article between say, nonwestern cultures, and relativistic physics. I find it regrettable that long before that time, any interested contributors for whom Wikipedia has ceased to be a welcoming environment will have absented themselves.
Wouldn't it just be simpler to say "we're running out of people to police articles and maintain a minimum level of standards" and put articles that are little-used into cold storage, as conservators of potentially useful information and freely contributed work, rather than using that as an excuse to excise articles that do not meet the personal criteria of certain individuals for inclusion and resource allocation?
"it's a standard by which Wikipedia eliminates content that is not appropriate for an encyclopedia ."
So, define what the scope of an encyclopedia is then? Should it only cover ground that Britannica, World Book, and Encarta have covered before? Because if so, then I'd take any of those professionally written, editor reviewed, and citable sources over Wikipedia any day.
Frankly, I think that imposing a limit on content for an encyclopedia is absolutely the wrong thing to do. I quote from Answers.com's definiton of Encyclopedia, taken from Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
"encyclopaedia
Reference work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge comprehensively."
In other words, by definition (which seems to be echoed by the other definitions of encyclopedia), a general dumping ground for all human knowledge is EXACTLY what a virtual encyclopedia should be.
Wikipedia's utility comes in being a repository for anything and everything written in as close to an unbiased manner as possible, eyeball-checked by every single reader, and instead of trying to impose a dictatorial measure of editorial control, should allow the reader to judge the veracity of the information in the article for themselves. Hell, any decent researcher knows better than to trust just ONE source. Even better is the ability for users who have never before contributed content or written articles anywhere to use Wikipedia as a jumping-off point to start doing research on their own in order to improve Wikipedia content.
But I guess Wikipedia has gotten too big for that. And hence all that knowledge and information that used to be housed in one spot is going to be scattered to the four winds in a variety of very domain-specific wikis. I wouldn't mind that at all... if the minor articles that might lead one to these more specific wiki weren't themselves at risk for being purged from Wikipedia, thus removing the indication that these other subject domains even exist!
Again, I think Wikipedia could have easily handled this by promoting or demoting articles - ie, "This article adheres to Wikipedia editorial and citation guidelines" vs. "This article is unsubstantiated and is reserved for general informational search only"), instead of deleting people's work outright.
Here's a thought experiment. Do a search for every article which has been tagged "This article does not cite any references or sources." Now consider that any schmuck who wants to get some deletions under his or her belt can summarily challenge these articles. If it's a low traffic article, it WILL get deleted, with little or no debate (because nobody has a vested interest in saving it.) Not just shunted to a "if you want to be an awesome Wikipedia researcher, here's a pile of no-citation articles for you to proof and fact check" pile, or a "I'm sorry, but this article didn't make the cut, you have 4 months to move it to some other wiki", but removed completely, such that if you wanted to save that information after the fact without undeleting it, you'll have to dig through Wayback Machine or some non-Wikipedia resource to retrieve that data.
Remember, many articles in Wikipedia were written and researched long before the current editorial and notability rules were put into place. It wasn't that people were deliberately being sloppy about citing resources - there was no requirement for doing so. So theoretically, there might have been dozens of people who contributed bits of information over the course of several years... only to be completely erased in the span of a week by less than a handful of people.
That's what's pissing people off - the webcomic deletions were merely a high-profile example of domain-specific knowledge that was removed. I'll be bet you that there are other articles without such high-profile champions outside of wikipedia that just *poof* vanished. If it was a resource issue (ie, lack of space for storage, cpu time, d
What may be notable to you may not be notable to someone else. Almost by definition, smaller communities are not notable to larger communities - what the hell do you care about Civil War Reenactors or the AMC Gremlin, unless you're a Civil War buff or a collector of AMC Gremlins.
As Wikipedia tries to broaden its audience, the notability of much of its content, which is again almost by definition a reflection of interest, drops. Using that as a metric pretty much ensures a very bland collection of content which appeals only to the average schmoe, except that there's nobody to blame if the information is flat out wrong.
Why on earth at that point, after all the information that nobody else carries has been dropped from Wikipedia, would I want to use Wikipedia, when I can use Britannica, where I can have it all locally and not worry that someone's been screwing around with the article?
That's frankly the most stupid thing about this whole process - instead of demoting content from Wikipedia Prime to Wikipedia Everything, they're just throwing content out - articles in some cases where a lot of people devoted a lot of time to contribute and edit and crosslink with other articles. At some point, you're going to unravel a whole bunch of articles after whitewashing the more basic bits that they're built atop of.
Anyone else remember Fortress America? The scenario sounds strangely familiar... oil runs low, US deploys powersats which happen to be dual-purpose, war ensues.
I call BS:
"- being at a library without their library card (guy got tasered _repeatedly_ after he had already accepted to leave)"
Source?
Anyone remember the handheld pda/phone from that short-lived Earth: Final Conflict TV series? I always envied those handhelds, with the built in camera, videophone, computing/storage unit, color rollup screens and contact scanner.
Ten years later, we've got the camera, the phone, and the storage/computing unit as everyone's personal computing device. Now all we need to do is to integrate the rollup screens and this new invention... and of course, move everyone to Vancouver.