I had a long reply about what would have to be true convince me to hire someone for a job for which they demonstrated no passion.
But you know what? If someone just wants a job to pay the bills, and no passion for the work, and is just in it to be a 9-5 chair-warmer... I think they can go find another employer. Maybe a civil service job would suit them.
Then, when they finally snap because they wake up one day, chronically depressed that they've been working at a job for which they had no passion for the last 20 years, it won't be my office where they go postal, it'll be someone else's.
"Yep. Otherwise we should stop bullshitting people about how important education is."
Education is important as a long term investment. Credentials are less important, except under certain restricted conditions (some of which are highly desirable to some people, subch as the ability to get a research position doing your own research isntead of someone else's).
Just because someone has a set of credentials does not make them educated; conversely, not having the credentials doesn't make you uneducated.
One of the big mistakes we've made in our society is attempting to measure people by their credentials. We've seen that in this thread, with everyone piping up about Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard; while it's true, he dropped out before obtaining more advanced credentials, the lack of those credentials doesn't make him uneducated.
Likewise, we see it in the value of certain certifications; for example, comparing wages offered to people with and without MSCE credentials, we see (as reported on Slashdot last spring) that and MSCE actually reduces your earning potential.
Finally, I'm sure that all of us have had classes with people who were only there to get the credentals, and rarely thought outside the box, or did more than the required coursework - straight A or even B students who we would personally not hire because they lacked the passion for their subject.
The 1990's was absolutely *filled* with people who took a CS major because, like those same people who pursued a JD or MBA in the 1980's, or an MD before that, they were looking for a quick path to money, rather than doing something that they felt was worthwhile. And like the JD's, MBA's, and MD's before them, we rewarded that thinking by giving everyone with a pulse and 1 year of CS under their belt a cublicle to sit in and a monitor in front of them. Until, lke the JD's, MBA's, and MD's before them - we didn't.
And the bubble burst, and now we have a lot of people who were short term thinkers that have neither credentials nor desirable work experience.
Don't get me wrong - credentials are important *now* - but the reason they are important is *not* to get you a higher starting salary, it's to get you in the door at all vs. those people who jumped on the Internet boom before getting their credentials, and now have to face a job market now that its bust.
Personally, I'm not going to hire someone who thinks "this is my 9 to 5 day job", and has no passion for their field of supposed expertise otherwise. Such people live on their marginal ability to produce, and they're the first people you throw overboard when or if the margin shrinks, because they're the first to lose their economic value to the company.
Finally, somone's MS in CS from a state univerity in the U.S. is no more valuable than the MS in CS from IIT of someone in Bangalore, and if they price thenselves out of the market because of an inflated sense of their own value, don't be surprised when their potential employer, now firmly convinced of the value of credentials, realizes that they can get someone with equivalent credentials cheaper elsewhere.
I assume you mean you sent email to college@apple.com with a subject line starting with "internship", per the instructions at the Apple Intern program web site, right?
I also asume you went looking for the campuses that Apple would be visiting to see if one was close enough for you to take a road trip and show up in person, to demonstrate that you were earnest about an Apple internship? Showing up at an even at a college or university that you don't personally attend, just to talk to the Apple Intership people would be very likely to make you stand out from the other possible candidates.
The CS Department head where I went to college called getting your degree "getting a union card". Initially, I thought that it was somewhat of a cynical attitude for someone in that position.
However, from personal experience, I will say that he was right on the money. Getting a degree or an advanced degree is al well and good, but it will only impact the rate at which you are able to advance in your career in certain limited environments that are not very representative. I.e. you will get better promotions if you work for a large governement agency or government contractor, and it's a requirement for advancement in academia itself. So if you want to teach and/or do research in certain companies *eventually*, you will need to have an upper level degree to do so. You will need your "union card" if you want to work for IBM's T.J. Watson research center as something more than a scut worker. You will need it also for Google, which likes you to have more letters after your name than in your name, or you get treated as a second class citizen. You will need it to work on anything interesting at Nasa or Genentech. And so on.
BUT - and this is a *big* one - you will start out at the bottom just like everyone else, until you "prove your chops". The world is full of highly trained specialsts that aren't necessarily that good at what their paperwork says they know.
Should someone with a Masters degree be paid for having spent another couple of years becoming more educated, instead of spending those years getting job experience? Not initially, in my opinion. Yes, they should be able to negotiate up front that they want a three or six month review, based on their ability to do the work, at which time they get their value to the organization fairly evaluated, and a pay bump, if they merit it. Just having a union card is not enough to merit a high starting salary, any more than an electrician starting out is automatically a journeyman because they hold an electrician's ticket.
Most people don't do this type of negotiation - abbreviated review cycle, etc. - when starting their first job, because, well, they lack real world experience, so it never occurs to them that this type of thng is at all negotiable.
When the 11/785 was still pretty cool technology, the Soviet Union attempted to purchase one and trans-ship it through Basel, Switzerland to try and hide the paper trail.
DOD security people found out about it, opened the crates, took the machines out, filled the crates with cement, and let the Soviets pay shipping on them.
The way one of my relatives tells it, they also wrote things in the cement.
If they did, then they'd have to actually address the issue of which state the transaction on the Internet takes place in: the buyers state, or the sellers state.
They don't want to do that, because in doing so, they either have declare the transaction takes place in the buyers state - and limit online gaming to people in physical locations where it's legal to gamble - or the sellers state - and render illegal all those state laws regarding "use tax".
They can't limit it to the buyers state, because if they do that, there's no way to tax it or prove what state the buyer is actually in at the time of the transaction, because there's no geotracking information associated with Internet connectivity.
They can't limit it to the sellers state, because if they do that, there's no way that an online seller is going to be able to collect the tax on behalf of 50 states, Midway, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, and they effectively squelch a large part of the economy.
Sowhat the Wire Act enables them to do is to stick their collective heads in the sand and pretend that there's nothing to see here, and that people who buy things on the Internet are paying their local used tax, and that sellers in the same state as the shipping address are collecting and forwarding the state sales tax to the state they are located in.
This basically lets them ignore the whole problem that derives from having non-uniform state tax laws for a little while longer.
From the point of view of someone who occaasionally makes purchaes over the Internet, I have to say that I actually approve of this tack; I'd hate to have to provide strong identification couple with strong locality information, just to access the Internet, "just in case" I decided to try to buy something online.
If you want to learn more about the universe, go out there and personallly and look.
One geologist on site with comparatively primitive tools would learn more in 1 month than all of the missions all the nations on Earth have sent to Mars so far.
What we've done so far is tantamount to trying to study Antarctica with remote probes with a huge time delay to prevent them from being used interactively. I'd like to see what kind of information you scrape out of Antarctica with nothing but Viking, Sojorner, and similar types of automated remote probes.
People who believe we can do everything with science packages are the same people who believe that they can understand humans by watching "Reality TV"; they don't see that intermediation by a poor technology results in poorer results.
Why am I imagining a rectangular, slighly curved khaki-green metal box with raised letters saying "This Side Towards Reality" proudly displayed on top of a filing cabinet behind his desk....
What happened was that Real reverse engineered the FairPlay copy protection, which basically uses a iPod-specific key to decrypt a song specific key that was encrypted with the iPod specific key (all encrypted songs from ITMS are the same).
So this lets them translate copy protected content from their format to the FairPlay (still copy protected) format.
Sorry: if potato-shaped things can't be planets...
Then we physicists are in a lot of trouble: the only thing we ever teach students to calculate moments of inertia on are rigid bodies. And, as any physicist knows, "a general rigid body is a potato-shaped object, able to undergo rotational and translational motion. It may be considered to be assembled out of a large number of point masses."
The only way any of these calculations make sense for planets is if we assume planets are also potato-shaped.
We can only thank God the Michelson-Morley experiment proved once and for all that the Earth was at the center of the universe by demonstrating that an Earth-based experment observed no drift through the luminiferous aether, or we'd all be in deep doo-doo...
Moral scientists and engineers would not/should not enable certain technologies.
It's a hard problem to damage the Internet as a whole these days because it was designed in such a way as to preclude strong central control; people are slowly steadily chipping away at that.
I don't think insurance companies are any less motivated by profit in setting their public policies that, say, RIAA.
Remember that the primary driving force behind the amount of money you need to pay an insurance company is their outlay to medical providers (plus their profit margin). The primary driving force behind that cost is facilities costs (plus individual malpractice insurance). The primary driving force behind individual malpractice insurance is the insurance companies outlay (plus their profit margin). The primary driving force behind facilities cost is real estate costs and equipment costs (plus administrative malpractice insurance, plus facility liability insurance). The primary driving force behind administrative malpractice insurance is the insurance companies outlay (plus their profit margin), and the primary driving force behind facility liability insurance is the insurance companies outlay (plus their profit margin). And finally, the primary driving force behind equipment costs is COGS, R&D (plus manufacturer liability insurance). The primary driving force behind manufacturer liability insurance is the insurance companies outlay (plus their profit margin).
So for every $ of medical benefit, we have basically the real costs, plus 5 profit margins for insurance companies, 1 profit margin for equipment manufacturers, 1 profit margin for the hospital, and one profit margin for the healthcare provider.
Seems a little unfair that the insurance company gets to deduct money paid by its right hand to its left hand as a business expense, and it seems ridiculous that, out of the bites that get taken from the pie, 5/8ths - 62.5% - of them go to what is likely the same insurance company. I might back off on that, if it were illegal for insurance companies to participate in adjacent vertical market segments, or share information between divisions to achive horizotal integration of risk management databases.
So despite your arguments here, I'm pretty much unconvinced that an inability to "share" personal health information between its components will drive insurance companies ot of business.
To speak directly to the argument on individual discrimination vs. risk pooling: there is no way, at present, to sufficiently control genetically-based risk of your children, let alone yourselves. Maybe when it's possible to edit our childrens genes, we can restart that discussion - ignoring that the technology will take a long time to become egalitarian in its availability.
As to giving up privacy for money/convenience: this keeps getting suggested everywhere in society these days, and I'm not buying it. The data mining done by stores based on their "club card" or whatever their loyalty marketing mechanism happens to be is only done statistically. Yes, it *could* be done individually - for example, they could correlate ingredients in purchased products at the grocery store vs. what you don't buy - and perhaps disclosed information - and keep some of their customers from dying from peanut allergies (as an example). Heck, this might even be a service *I'd* find worth disclosing information over. But no one is doing this, because as soon as you do that, you become part of the liability chain if the person dies from a product you sold. Instead, they use the aggregate information themselves, and sell the indiviual information to marketing companies, who then are permitted to invade your privacy because of "a prexisting business relationship".
People bitch about government being invasive of individual privacy in the U.S., but business is 10 or 100 times worse. The people who develop the technologies that enable this kind of crap should be ashamed of themselves": they are part of the problem.
How cool: it can analyze a photo of you... and then your medical insurance provider can deny you medical insurance or charge you a higher premium due to your being in a higher "risk group".
Just like they can look at whether you have an attached or detached ear lobe, and know whether or not you have a family history of coronary artery disease, or look at your thumb print, and know whether or not you have one of the three identified high risk genes for liver cancer, or see that you're black, and so have a higher risk of sicle cell.
Unfortunately, a given gene can express in more than one way, including ways which are visible to biometric devices, or even the naked eye of a trained person. This is just another reason why biometric information should not be allowed to be collected or disclosed except under very specific conditions (e.g. HIPPA rules keep your doctor's office from selling information to drug companies or, worse, insurance companies).
For people who don't know, Yasuo Hamanaka attempted to corner the copper market for Sumitomo in the mid 1990's; there was a "shortage" then, too, which was used to manipulate the market price. Also involved were Merrill Lynch, Global Minerals and Metals Corporation, David Campbell, and Carl Alm.
It's actually an interesting story - more interesting than this "Chicken Little" piece:
Hmmm... I guess that begs the question that, if the sky actually was falling, it'd solve our "copper problem" in short order; as it is, we'll probably have to send ships to the copper, instead of the copper coming to us... 8-).
-- Terry
$2B/$12B gross - so what was the artists net?
on
The Odds at Macworld
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· Score: 1
$2B/$12B gross - so what was the artists net?
"In 2003, US gross numbers for live music totalled $2 billion. That same year, recorded music grossed $12 billion."
I suspect that the artists saw more from the live music, and a heck of a lot less from the recorded music, with the money largely going to the middlemen, like Clear Channel, which owns ~9% (~1200 out of ~13,000 stations). The only thing that really matters to the artist is "mall money", and gross receipts don't tell anywhere near the whole story.
I'm all for it... as long as I'm not the "anyone" being found anywhere, anytime.
Personally, I'm too damn wired as it is, and this bozo wants to make my life worse by enabling anyone to interupt me at anywhere, anytime. No thank you.
"President is only voted for by the Electoral College, any member of whom can vote for anybody they want."
is substantially incorrect. It's much closer to your next sentence about the "all-or-none nature of each state" - 29 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia have what are called "Faithless Elector" laws, in which an elector is required by state law, and is in violation of that law, if they do not vote for the majority candidate for the state.
Further, there is no provision for apportioning electors between multiple candidates - these laws are in fact "majority rule", where all electoral votes go to a signle candidate based on the state popular vote.
Several states impose fines on electors who violate these laws, and one, New Mexico, treats it as a 4th degree felony (the penalty for a felony includes stripping certain rights of citizenship, including the right to vote in future elections, until and unless the felon is pardoned or the stripped rights are otherwise restored by an act of government).
"And the electoral college came about becuase they decided that stupid people shouldn't vote and that an intelligent person should represent their overall preference."
Isn't really that correct, although that was the rationalization used to sell the idea to the Federalists. The actual explanation has more to do with voing technology and communications delays than a plot to disenfranchise "the unwashed masses". It would have been nearly impossible, in the early days of the Republic, to communicate results from polling places to the county seat, and then to the secretary of state, and then to Washington, in under some number of months, effectively leaving us without a rubber-stamped government for large stretches of time following each election.
"...how many of the products that you use on a daily basis are truly innovative in their own rights?"
It's not so much how many *ARE* innovative, it's how many *WERE* innovative at the time they were introduced.
There's a big long adoption curve between the Innovators and Technology enthusiats through the early adopters, before you get to everyday use by pragmatists (and longer, before you get through to the conservative back end).
Pretty much *everything* you use on a daily basis was, at one point or another in its adoption cycle, innovative for its time.
If you don't see this, I'd probably have to class you as a late adopter conservative, or even a skeptic/laggard: the reason you're not seeing everyday use of things that are innovative is that by the time you choose to use them, they are no longer innovative, they're established products and technology.
What you're actually talking about - and the book is talking about - is Theodore Levitt's "Whole Product" idea... which, while it has some merit if you're trying to take a product to market, is not really related to innovation, at least in the sense of Geoffrey Moore's "The Innovator's Dilemma".
The bottom line is that these machines will not be field servicable at all, without additional, more complex hardware available to reflash the storage media, and they do not have sufficient storage or a removable media storage device like a CDROM drive, so the source code is not going to go out with them.
These are the moral equivalent of electric books and writing pads, combined with a semi-uncontrolled communications infrastructure that will probably be lobotomized out of them at the first opportunity by any even mildly control-happy government, with no way for their users to undo the damage once they're deployed in the field.
The intent of the machine is to provide a tool that can be used by a large number of people who are otherwise computer illiterate, and on the wrong side of a steep learning curve.
Until Linux has software enforced compliance with usability standards and style guidelines, and a single, uniform UI, so that knowledge is portable, not only between machines, but between applications on a single machine, it's just not suitable for this use.
One of the major intents of the machine is to effectively promote literacy - not computer literacy, but the real thing.
This is not intended to grow the next generation of uber-hackers in Benin, where 66% of the population can't read, or it's neighbor Burkina Faso, where illiteracy is 73%, or the 82% in Niger or the 60% in Iraq or the 62% in Somalia or the 64% in Afghanistan or the 40% in India - total ~750M people worldwide.
The predominant use and limited capability of the hardware platform would make the locals hacking it unlikely, at best. Software is likely to be contained in a read-only partition, since these machines are not field servicable without additional equipment (specifically, the ability to reload the flash contents from a doorstop state back to a working machine).
MacOS X has a large number of advantages over Linux in this environment, not the least of which is full Unicode support, already isolated translation strings, and translation consoles for use by translaters who will need to push these machines into environments requiring localized UI (and do it reasonably quickly).
If the translation infrastructure already built into MacOS X has to be redeveloped from scratch for Linux, we are talking adding years to the deployment cycle.
I'm sure everyone already realizes that MacOS X is Open Source. As one of the ~dozen full time people responsible for maintaining the MacOS X kernel, I can assure that the Open Source nature of MacOS X is not about to change overnight: as a worst-case scenario, you could always fork the code base.
Nothing you are going to do in user space on Linux can't be done the same way on MacOS X, if you didn't want to take the UI parts because they contain proprietary code. The GNU HURD is also Mach-based, and is an MIT project. The choice to use Linux instead of something else was purely a political play on their part; their argument about hacking the code themselves is a minor consideration, at best, and doesn't argue against a non-Linux implmentation.
For this particular project, the native language capability is probably the single overriding factor that should be considered in the decision making process, after the price point.
It also doesn't hurt that there are some advantages to use of closed source components - at least *some* closed source components - to prevent governments from pithing the machines. The first thing I would expect to be chopped in many locations is the mesh networking - it's a subversive technology, particularly for countries whose goverments rely on the ability to control their citizens communication channels. Being unable to rebuild the system from modified sources in order to prevent this from becoming a village communications network not under government control could only be a good thing.
When these machines get where they are going, they are *NOT* going to have the source code included with them - there are no CDROM drives, and there isn't enough storage to contain the full source code for everything, nor is there a way, without additional more technologically advanced resources for someone to undo a government lobotomy on the machines.
Yeah, it'd be fun to be in a first world country and have a $200 machine (our price) to hack on, with all the source code for everything - but guess what? The damn things are not intended for us geeks. And that includes the geeks building them and making decisions which are likely not in the best interests of the people they are supposedly intending to help with them.
Didn't you mean "an ad homid" attack? 8-). Start with a joke, when delivering the bitter truth, I say...
Actually, "ad hominim" is Latin for "to the man"; it refers to an attack on the character of the person presenting an argument in an attempt to discredit the argument by tarring it with the same brush.
I think the logical fallacy you were looking for is actually "a strawman argument", which creates an absurd position in order to be able to disprove it.
In this particular case, though, he's not proving the parent's point, since his statement is a pretty fair and balanced take on what's normally presented as main-stream creationism.
You can put as much lipstick on the idea as you want, and it's still going to fail the test of Occam's razor, which states that the simplest explanation fitting all the observed facts is considered to be the correct one, barring additional observed evidence to the contrary.
This principle is why scientists call "theory" what the layman would consider to be "scientific fact": to leave open the possibility of future observed evidence invalidating the theory. And yes, this includes the "theory of gravity".
"Why do you assume that it is for the same thing?"
Because these are entry level programmers, in both cases - "new jobs".
If it's not the same thing, then IBM is paying even a higher multiplier than they should: IBM is predominantly a contract services comany (IBM Global Services), which is much less demanding work in user space than hacking the Linux kernel, or doing other work.
Even so, as someone who formerly worked for IBM, I can tell you that the researchers at IRL (IBM's India Resaerch Lab) do *NOT* get a large premium relative to those hired for other work by IBM in India - the multiplier at best is 1.5X. In this case, we are talking 4.5X. A multiplier of 1.5X is roughly comparable to the difference in what IBM would pay me to work at IBM Almaden vs. working in a non-research position at Santa Teresa (both in Silicon Valley).
If the idea of moving work offshore to India is to get cheaper labor (I include knowledge-workers in this), then inflating your costs for no good reason doesn't make a lot of sense.
OK, RedHat is gettting 300 programmers for $20 million "over several years" or "in the next 2 to 3 years".
IBM is getting 3000 programmers for $1.7 billion "over 4 years".
So for 10 times as many programs for 2 times as many years, IBM is paying 85 times as much money (as opposed to 20 times).
Someone at IBM needs to figure out why it's costing them 4.25 times as much for the same thing RedHat is buying... IBM appears to be paying ~$142,000 per job per year, whicle RedHat is only paying ~33,500 per job per year (assuming that's only 2 years for RedHat).
Slashdot Mirror
"Maybe they just wanted a job to pay the bills."
I had a long reply about what would have to be true convince me to hire someone for a job for which they demonstrated no passion.
But you know what? If someone just wants a job to pay the bills, and no passion for the work, and is just in it to be a 9-5 chair-warmer... I think they can go find another employer. Maybe a civil service job would suit them.
Then, when they finally snap because they wake up one day, chronically depressed that they've been working at a job for which they had no passion for the last 20 years, it won't be my office where they go postal, it'll be someone else's.
-- Terry
"Yep. Otherwise we should stop bullshitting people about how important education is."
Education is important as a long term investment. Credentials are less important, except under certain restricted conditions (some of which are highly desirable to some people, subch as the ability to get a research position doing your own research isntead of someone else's).
Just because someone has a set of credentials does not make them educated; conversely, not having the credentials doesn't make you uneducated.
One of the big mistakes we've made in our society is attempting to measure people by their credentials. We've seen that in this thread, with everyone piping up about Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard; while it's true, he dropped out before obtaining more advanced credentials, the lack of those credentials doesn't make him uneducated.
Likewise, we see it in the value of certain certifications; for example, comparing wages offered to people with and without MSCE credentials, we see (as reported on Slashdot last spring) that and MSCE actually reduces your earning potential.
Finally, I'm sure that all of us have had classes with people who were only there to get the credentals, and rarely thought outside the box, or did more than the required coursework - straight A or even B students who we would personally not hire because they lacked the passion for their subject.
The 1990's was absolutely *filled* with people who took a CS major because, like those same people who pursued a JD or MBA in the 1980's, or an MD before that, they were looking for a quick path to money, rather than doing something that they felt was worthwhile. And like the JD's, MBA's, and MD's before them, we rewarded that thinking by giving everyone with a pulse and 1 year of CS under their belt a cublicle to sit in and a monitor in front of them. Until, lke the JD's, MBA's, and MD's before them - we didn't.
And the bubble burst, and now we have a lot of people who were short term thinkers that have neither credentials nor desirable work experience.
Don't get me wrong - credentials are important *now* - but the reason they are important is *not* to get you a higher starting salary, it's to get you in the door at all vs. those people who jumped on the Internet boom before getting their credentials, and now have to face a job market now that its bust.
Personally, I'm not going to hire someone who thinks "this is my 9 to 5 day job", and has no passion for their field of supposed expertise otherwise. Such people live on their marginal ability to produce, and they're the first people you throw overboard when or if the margin shrinks, because they're the first to lose their economic value to the company.
Finally, somone's MS in CS from a state univerity in the U.S. is no more valuable than the MS in CS from IIT of someone in Bangalore, and if they price thenselves out of the market because of an inflated sense of their own value, don't be surprised when their potential employer, now firmly convinced of the value of credentials, realizes that they can get someone with equivalent credentials cheaper elsewhere.
-- Terry
I assume you mean you sent email to college@apple.com with a subject line starting with "internship", per the instructions at the Apple Intern program web site, right?
http://www.apple.com/jobs/intern/index.html
I also asume you went looking for the campuses that Apple would be visiting to see if one was close enough for you to take a road trip and show up in person, to demonstrate that you were earnest about an Apple internship? Showing up at an even at a college or university that you don't personally attend, just to talk to the Apple Intership people would be very likely to make you stand out from the other possible candidates.
-- Terry
The CS Department head where I went to college called getting your degree "getting a union card". Initially, I thought that it was somewhat of a cynical attitude for someone in that position.
However, from personal experience, I will say that he was right on the money. Getting a degree or an advanced degree is al well and good, but it will only impact the rate at which you are able to advance in your career in certain limited environments that are not very representative. I.e. you will get better promotions if you work for a large governement agency or government contractor, and it's a requirement for advancement in academia itself. So if you want to teach and/or do research in certain companies *eventually*, you will need to have an upper level degree to do so. You will need your "union card" if you want to work for IBM's T.J. Watson research center as something more than a scut worker. You will need it also for Google, which likes you to have more letters after your name than in your name, or you get treated as a second class citizen. You will need it to work on anything interesting at Nasa or Genentech. And so on.
BUT - and this is a *big* one - you will start out at the bottom just like everyone else, until you "prove your chops". The world is full of highly trained specialsts that aren't necessarily that good at what their paperwork says they know.
Should someone with a Masters degree be paid for having spent another couple of years becoming more educated, instead of spending those years getting job experience? Not initially, in my opinion. Yes, they should be able to negotiate up front that they want a three or six month review, based on their ability to do the work, at which time they get their value to the organization fairly evaluated, and a pay bump, if they merit it. Just having a union card is not enough to merit a high starting salary, any more than an electrician starting out is automatically a journeyman because they hold an electrician's ticket.
Most people don't do this type of negotiation - abbreviated review cycle, etc. - when starting their first job, because, well, they lack real world experience, so it never occurs to them that this type of thng is at all negotiable.
-- Terry
Well, they wanted an 11/785 pretty badly...
When the 11/785 was still pretty cool technology, the Soviet Union attempted to purchase one and trans-ship it through Basel, Switzerland to try and hide the paper trail.
DOD security people found out about it, opened the crates, took the machines out, filled the crates with cement, and let the Soviets pay shipping on them.
The way one of my relatives tells it, they also wrote things in the cement.
-- Terry
They can't repeal the laws here.
If they did, then they'd have to actually address the issue of which state the transaction on the Internet takes place in: the buyers state, or the sellers state.
They don't want to do that, because in doing so, they either have declare the transaction takes place in the buyers state - and limit online gaming to people in physical locations where it's legal to gamble - or the sellers state - and render illegal all those state laws regarding "use tax".
They can't limit it to the buyers state, because if they do that, there's no way to tax it or prove what state the buyer is actually in at the time of the transaction, because there's no geotracking information associated with Internet connectivity.
They can't limit it to the sellers state, because if they do that, there's no way that an online seller is going to be able to collect the tax on behalf of 50 states, Midway, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, and they effectively squelch a large part of the economy.
Sowhat the Wire Act enables them to do is to stick their collective heads in the sand and pretend that there's nothing to see here, and that people who buy things on the Internet are paying their local used tax, and that sellers in the same state as the shipping address are collecting and forwarding the state sales tax to the state they are located in.
This basically lets them ignore the whole problem that derives from having non-uniform state tax laws for a little while longer.
From the point of view of someone who occaasionally makes purchaes over the Internet, I have to say that I actually approve of this tack; I'd hate to have to provide strong identification couple with strong locality information, just to access the Internet, "just in case" I decided to try to buy something online.
-- Terry
If you want to learn more about the universe, go out there and personallly and look.
One geologist on site with comparatively primitive tools would learn more in 1 month than all of the missions all the nations on Earth have sent to Mars so far.
What we've done so far is tantamount to trying to study Antarctica with remote probes with a huge time delay to prevent them from being used interactively. I'd like to see what kind of information you scrape out of Antarctica with nothing but Viking, Sojorner, and similar types of automated remote probes.
People who believe we can do everything with science packages are the same people who believe that they can understand humans by watching "Reality TV"; they don't see that intermediation by a poor technology results in poorer results.
-- Terry
Dvorak and reality distortion...
Why am I imagining a rectangular, slighly curved khaki-green metal box with raised letters saying "This Side Towards Reality" proudly displayed on top of a filing cabinet behind his desk....
-- Terry
That's not the story with Real's "Harmony".
s /2004/harmony.html
What happened was that Real reverse engineered the FairPlay copy protection, which basically uses a iPod-specific key to decrypt a song specific key that was encrypted with the iPod specific key (all encrypted songs from ITMS are the same).
So this lets them translate copy protected content from their format to the FairPlay (still copy protected) format.
Here's their press release from 2004: http://www.realnetworks.com/company/press/release
And here's proof that they're still doing it today: http://music.guide.real.com/musicstoredevices
-- Terry
Sorry: if potato-shaped things can't be planets...
Then we physicists are in a lot of trouble: the only thing we ever teach students to calculate moments of inertia on are rigid bodies. And, as any physicist knows, "a general rigid body is a potato-shaped object, able to undergo rotational and translational motion. It may be considered to be assembled out of a large number of point masses."
The only way any of these calculations make sense for planets is if we assume planets are also potato-shaped.
We can only thank God the Michelson-Morley experiment proved once and for all that the Earth was at the center of the universe by demonstrating that an Earth-based experment observed no drift through the luminiferous aether, or we'd all be in deep doo-doo...
-- Terry
I think Google should comply with the request... ...by running it through something like CAPTCHA and providing the information as hard copy.
-- Terry
Moral scientists and engineers would not/should not enable certain technologies.
It's a hard problem to damage the Internet as a whole these days because it was designed in such a way as to preclude strong central control; people are slowly steadily chipping away at that.
I don't think insurance companies are any less motivated by profit in setting their public policies that, say, RIAA.
Remember that the primary driving force behind the amount of money you need to pay an insurance company is their outlay to medical providers (plus their profit margin). The primary driving force behind that cost is facilities costs (plus individual malpractice insurance). The primary driving force behind individual malpractice insurance is the insurance companies outlay (plus their profit margin). The primary driving force behind facilities cost is real estate costs and equipment costs (plus administrative malpractice insurance, plus facility liability insurance). The primary driving force behind administrative malpractice insurance is the insurance companies outlay (plus their profit margin), and the primary driving force behind facility liability insurance is the insurance companies outlay (plus their profit margin). And finally, the primary driving force behind equipment costs is COGS, R&D (plus manufacturer liability insurance). The primary driving force behind manufacturer liability insurance is the insurance companies outlay (plus their profit margin).
So for every $ of medical benefit, we have basically the real costs, plus 5 profit margins for insurance companies, 1 profit margin for equipment manufacturers, 1 profit margin for the hospital, and one profit margin for the healthcare provider.
Seems a little unfair that the insurance company gets to deduct money paid by its right hand to its left hand as a business expense, and it seems ridiculous that, out of the bites that get taken from the pie, 5/8ths - 62.5% - of them go to what is likely the same insurance company. I might back off on that, if it were illegal for insurance companies to participate in adjacent vertical market segments, or share information between divisions to achive horizotal integration of risk management databases.
So despite your arguments here, I'm pretty much unconvinced that an inability to "share" personal health information between its components will drive insurance companies ot of business.
To speak directly to the argument on individual discrimination vs. risk pooling: there is no way, at present, to sufficiently control genetically-based risk of your children, let alone yourselves. Maybe when it's possible to edit our childrens genes, we can restart that discussion - ignoring that the technology will take a long time to become egalitarian in its availability.
As to giving up privacy for money/convenience: this keeps getting suggested everywhere in society these days, and I'm not buying it. The data mining done by stores based on their "club card" or whatever their loyalty marketing mechanism happens to be is only done statistically. Yes, it *could* be done individually - for example, they could correlate ingredients in purchased products at the grocery store vs. what you don't buy - and perhaps disclosed information - and keep some of their customers from dying from peanut allergies (as an example). Heck, this might even be a service *I'd* find worth disclosing information over. But no one is doing this, because as soon as you do that, you become part of the liability chain if the person dies from a product you sold. Instead, they use the aggregate information themselves, and sell the indiviual information to marketing companies, who then are permitted to invade your privacy because of "a prexisting business relationship".
People bitch about government being invasive of individual privacy in the U.S., but business is 10 or 100 times worse. The people who develop the technologies that enable this kind of crap should be ashamed of themselves": they are part of the problem.
-- Terry
Another reason to outlaw collecting biometrics...
How cool: it can analyze a photo of you... and then your medical insurance provider can deny you medical insurance or charge you a higher premium due to your being in a higher "risk group".
Just like they can look at whether you have an attached or detached ear lobe, and know whether or not you have a family history of coronary artery disease, or look at your thumb print, and know whether or not you have one of the three identified high risk genes for liver cancer, or see that you're black, and so have a higher risk of sicle cell.
Unfortunately, a given gene can express in more than one way, including ways which are visible to biometric devices, or even the naked eye of a trained person. This is just another reason why biometric information should not be allowed to be collected or disclosed except under very specific conditions (e.g. HIPPA rules keep your doctor's office from selling information to drug companies or, worse, insurance companies).
-- Terry
For people who don't know, Yasuo Hamanaka attempted to corner the copper market for Sumitomo in the mid 1990's; there was a "shortage" then, too, which was used to manipulate the market price. Also involved were Merrill Lynch, Global Minerals and Metals Corporation, David Campbell, and Carl Alm.
It's actually an interesting story - more interesting than this "Chicken Little" piece:
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/copper.html
And the 1999 FTC docket for the case:
http://www.cftc.gov/enf/99orders/enfglobalmm.htm
Hmmm... I guess that begs the question that, if the sky actually was falling, it'd solve our "copper problem" in short order; as it is, we'll probably have to send ships to the copper, instead of the copper coming to us... 8-).
-- Terry
$2B/$12B gross - so what was the artists net?
"In 2003, US gross numbers for live music totalled $2 billion. That same year, recorded music grossed $12 billion."
I suspect that the artists saw more from the live music, and a heck of a lot less from the recorded music, with the money largely going to the middlemen, like Clear Channel, which owns ~9% (~1200 out of ~13,000 stations). The only thing that really matters to the artist is "mall money", and gross receipts don't tell anywhere near the whole story.
-- Terry
I'll say what we're all thinking...
I'm all for it... as long as I'm not the "anyone" being found anywhere, anytime.
Personally, I'm too damn wired as it is, and this bozo wants to make my life worse by enabling anyone to interupt me at anywhere, anytime. No thank you.
-- Terry
Actually, your statement:
a lCollege.htm
"President is only voted for by the Electoral College, any member of whom can vote for anybody they want."
is substantially incorrect. It's much closer to your next sentence about the "all-or-none nature of each state" - 29 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia have what are called "Faithless Elector" laws, in which an elector is required by state law, and is in violation of that law, if they do not vote for the majority candidate for the state.
Further, there is no provision for apportioning electors between multiple candidates - these laws are in fact "majority rule", where all electoral votes go to a signle candidate based on the state popular vote.
Several states impose fines on electors who violate these laws, and one, New Mexico, treats it as a 4th degree felony (the penalty for a felony includes stripping certain rights of citizenship, including the right to vote in future elections, until and unless the felon is pardoned or the stripped rights are otherwise restored by an act of government).
http://www.ncsl.org/programs/legman/elect/Elector
Also, your statement:
"And the electoral college came about becuase they decided that stupid people shouldn't vote and that an intelligent person should represent their overall preference."
Isn't really that correct, although that was the rationalization used to sell the idea to the Federalists. The actual explanation has more to do with voing technology and communications delays than a plot to disenfranchise "the unwashed masses". It would have been nearly impossible, in the early days of the Republic, to communicate results from polling places to the county seat, and then to the secretary of state, and then to Washington, in under some number of months, effectively leaving us without a rubber-stamped government for large stretches of time following each election.
-- Terry
I don't think that's a fair statement...
"...how many of the products that you use on a daily basis are truly innovative in their own rights?"
It's not so much how many *ARE* innovative, it's how many *WERE* innovative at the time they were introduced.
There's a big long adoption curve between the Innovators and Technology enthusiats through the early adopters, before you get to everyday use by pragmatists (and longer, before you get through to the conservative back end).
Pretty much *everything* you use on a daily basis was, at one point or another in its adoption cycle, innovative for its time.
If you don't see this, I'd probably have to class you as a late adopter conservative, or even a skeptic/laggard: the reason you're not seeing everyday use of things that are innovative is that by the time you choose to use them, they are no longer innovative, they're established products and technology.
What you're actually talking about - and the book is talking about - is Theodore Levitt's "Whole Product" idea... which, while it has some merit if you're trying to take a product to market, is not really related to innovation, at least in the sense of Geoffrey Moore's "The Innovator's Dilemma".
-- Terry
Please see my other comment in this thread.
The bottom line is that these machines will not be field servicable at all, without additional, more complex hardware available to reflash the storage media, and they do not have sufficient storage or a removable media storage device like a CDROM drive, so the source code is not going to go out with them.
These are the moral equivalent of electric books and writing pads, combined with a semi-uncontrolled communications infrastructure that will probably be lobotomized out of them at the first opportunity by any even mildly control-happy government, with no way for their users to undo the damage once they're deployed in the field.
-- Terry
You are missing the point of the machine.
The intent of the machine is to provide a tool that can be used by a large number of people who are otherwise computer illiterate, and on the wrong side of a steep learning curve.
Until Linux has software enforced compliance with usability standards and style guidelines, and a single, uniform UI, so that knowledge is portable, not only between machines, but between applications on a single machine, it's just not suitable for this use.
One of the major intents of the machine is to effectively promote literacy - not computer literacy, but the real thing.
This is not intended to grow the next generation of uber-hackers in Benin, where 66% of the population can't read, or it's neighbor Burkina Faso, where illiteracy is 73%, or the 82% in Niger or the 60% in Iraq or the 62% in Somalia or the 64% in Afghanistan or the 40% in India - total ~750M people worldwide.
The predominant use and limited capability of the hardware platform would make the locals hacking it unlikely, at best. Software is likely to be contained in a read-only partition, since these machines are not field servicable without additional equipment (specifically, the ability to reload the flash contents from a doorstop state back to a working machine).
MacOS X has a large number of advantages over Linux in this environment, not the least of which is full Unicode support, already isolated translation strings, and translation consoles for use by translaters who will need to push these machines into environments requiring localized UI (and do it reasonably quickly).
If the translation infrastructure already built into MacOS X has to be redeveloped from scratch for Linux, we are talking adding years to the deployment cycle.
I'm sure everyone already realizes that MacOS X is Open Source. As one of the ~dozen full time people responsible for maintaining the MacOS X kernel, I can assure that the Open Source nature of MacOS X is not about to change overnight: as a worst-case scenario, you could always fork the code base.
Nothing you are going to do in user space on Linux can't be done the same way on MacOS X, if you didn't want to take the UI parts because they contain proprietary code. The GNU HURD is also Mach-based, and is an MIT project. The choice to use Linux instead of something else was purely a political play on their part; their argument about hacking the code themselves is a minor consideration, at best, and doesn't argue against a non-Linux implmentation.
For this particular project, the native language capability is probably the single overriding factor that should be considered in the decision making process, after the price point.
It also doesn't hurt that there are some advantages to use of closed source components - at least *some* closed source components - to prevent governments from pithing the machines. The first thing I would expect to be chopped in many locations is the mesh networking - it's a subversive technology, particularly for countries whose goverments rely on the ability to control their citizens communication channels. Being unable to rebuild the system from modified sources in order to prevent this from becoming a village communications network not under government control could only be a good thing.
When these machines get where they are going, they are *NOT* going to have the source code included with them - there are no CDROM drives, and there isn't enough storage to contain the full source code for everything, nor is there a way, without additional more technologically advanced resources for someone to undo a government lobotomy on the machines.
Yeah, it'd be fun to be in a first world country and have a $200 machine (our price) to hack on, with all the source code for everything - but guess what? The damn things are not intended for us geeks. And that includes the geeks building them and making decisions which are likely not in the best interests of the people they are supposedly intending to help with them.
-- Terry
Didn't you mean "an ad homid" attack? 8-). Start with a joke, when delivering the bitter truth, I say...
Actually, "ad hominim" is Latin for "to the man"; it refers to an attack on the character of the person presenting an argument in an attempt to discredit the argument by tarring it with the same brush.
I think the logical fallacy you were looking for is actually "a strawman argument", which creates an absurd position in order to be able to disprove it.
In this particular case, though, he's not proving the parent's point, since his statement is a pretty fair and balanced take on what's normally presented as main-stream creationism.
You can put as much lipstick on the idea as you want, and it's still going to fail the test of Occam's razor, which states that the simplest explanation fitting all the observed facts is considered to be the correct one, barring additional observed evidence to the contrary.
This principle is why scientists call "theory" what the layman would consider to be "scientific fact": to leave open the possibility of future observed evidence invalidating the theory. And yes, this includes the "theory of gravity".
-- Terry
Underdog != instant success... it could still fail
"The fact that this project contains so many underdogs just might make it succeed. Their egos won't make it fall apart."
This is inconsistent with their refusal to take OS X when it was offered to them; if that wasn't ego-driven, then I don't know what that means.
-- Terry
"Why do you assume that it is for the same thing?"
Because these are entry level programmers, in both cases - "new jobs".
If it's not the same thing, then IBM is paying even a higher multiplier than they should: IBM is predominantly a contract services comany (IBM Global Services), which is much less demanding work in user space than hacking the Linux kernel, or doing other work.
Even so, as someone who formerly worked for IBM, I can tell you that the researchers at IRL (IBM's India Resaerch Lab) do *NOT* get a large premium relative to those hired for other work by IBM in India - the multiplier at best is 1.5X. In this case, we are talking 4.5X. A multiplier of 1.5X is roughly comparable to the difference in what IBM would pay me to work at IBM Almaden vs. working in a non-research position at Santa Teresa (both in Silicon Valley).
If the idea of moving work offshore to India is to get cheaper labor (I include knowledge-workers in this), then inflating your costs for no good reason doesn't make a lot of sense.
-- Terry
OK, RedHat is gettting 300 programmers for $20 million "over several years" or "in the next 2 to 3 years".
IBM is getting 3000 programmers for $1.7 billion "over 4 years".
So for 10 times as many programs for 2 times as many years, IBM is paying 85 times as much money (as opposed to 20 times).
Someone at IBM needs to figure out why it's costing them 4.25 times as much for the same thing RedHat is buying... IBM appears to be paying ~$142,000 per job per year, whicle RedHat is only paying ~33,500 per job per year (assuming that's only 2 years for RedHat).
-- Terry
Did you accidently space in the wrong place?
It looks like you typed "the masses"; are you sure you didn't mean to put the space *after* the 'm' instead of before it?
-- Terry