I don't see anywhere that mentions telemarketers at all (except in the "summary"). The article only mentions call centers, which are more likely to be customer service centers than someone trying to sell you carpet cleaning.
This could potentially be a good thing for the public. If you could measure how upset people get by certain people, then you could fire the ones that make people the most upset. Of course this could also lead to other problems as the goal of support is to solve peoples problems, not make them feel nice.
It could also be a bad thing. Imagine if your called up customer service a few times in a bad mood, and the system flags you as a problem child (or maybe you're just a false positive as it isn't perfect). You then always get treated like you're a jerk.
It's much more like a bar than you'd care to admit. There's tough guys, weak guys, cliches of friends who'll defend each other in a fight, etc. The only difference is there's no management or ownership of the bar. Do you walk into a bar and think about how you would defend yourself against everyone of those people, if they attacked one at a time, 2 at a time, 3 at a time, the short guy and that fat guy in the corner?
Depends on the bar. But the point is that you probbably wouldn't want to suddenly make an announcement that you'll start a fight with anyone that gets within 50 feet of you that looks funny, or makes any "sudden moves". Thinking about defending yourself is entirely different from making public announcements. That's what's happened here, and that's why people are saying this is a foolish move that'll only cause trouble.
Well, in the case of the environment it means that enormous amount of disruption to the economy, culture, and way of life. If your entire village is dependant on fishing and has been for 200 years it's a little hard to adapt to the change. If NYC goes underwater from rising sea levels that just might be a burden on society that would be best avoided.
In short people resist change because they've invested a lot in the way things are. Sometimes that change is inevitable and you have no chance of changing it. Earthquakes happen and there's nothing we can do about them but plan for them. De-populating the fish in the oceans, rising sea levels, and climate change are things we can and should try to stop from happening.
The thing you seemed to have missed is that environmentalism is about human existance, not some dumb "save the planet" crap that the wingnuts have promoted. As George Carlin said "The planet is fine, the people are fucked".
But we're not talking about just shining lights here, we're talking about moving an object. That involves modeling the frictional forces, possibly balance, etc. Modeling parts of the co-operative aspects before hand would probbably help in the programming design of the robots, but if you want to know if it's actually going to work (how quickly does each robot need to respond to change X, etc), it's probbably easier to just build the damn things.
What, precisely, was gained by doing this with actual physical robots, rather than a computer simulation?
Gee, maybe things like accounting for things you never thought or had the ability to simulate? What makes you think that a computer can model every single thing (frictional forces, heat and stress on motors, etc) as well as actual reality?
Then again, I'm pretty good at hiring. We don't really have a "slack" problem in my department.
Uh huh. Keep telling yourself that. My guess is your employees are just better at "looking busy" all the time. Or maybe they all overwork themselves and wind up making dumb mistakes they wouldn't have if they "slacked". What a pissant little boss you must be. I feel sorry for your employees.
It's just been my experience that there are plenty of people out there who DON'T require thinking "down time", who are exceptionally productive and more often than not, less troublesome employees. What you are describing sounds to me to be stress coping rather than thought processing -- which, as management -- suggests to me you have poor stress coping skills or are more prone work poorly under work-related pressure.
And it's been my experience that the type of control-freak management style that you seem to exhibit only lowers peoples productivity. You think all people are easily replaceable so you don't value them. You think every problem is one of employees and it can be fixed with just a few firings.
If there's one single factor in a workplace that leads to it's success or failure it's management. Creating a workplace where people feel constantly watched only creates paranoia and miss-trust. People don't work well under those conditions, and that usually leads to the best people leaving.
The two people lived 70 miles apart. Without the invention of the automobile this would be at least a 4 day trip both ways. Or maybe we can blame the pick-axe for this one. Without the damn pick-axe he'd have to attack him with his bare hands.
The GP is right. The story has little to do with the internet. It has at least as much to do with automobiles as it does the internet.
Everybody is saying this is bad for you, that is bad for you. Oh, don't drink milk, it causes cancer. Don't eat peanut butter at school, people have allergy's. Freakin peanut butter, I grew up on that. Something is always bad for you. You have to eat something. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my life eating rabbit food. Screw that.
Stop listening to just anyone and everybody, and start getting information from actual scientists and not dumb journalists out to sell eyeballs. Educate yourself about your disease and how foods affect your blood sugar. Don't just simply rely on someone to tell you what to eat, find out the reasons for it.
There seems to be a belief out there that all science is just whooey because it's all influenced by politics and self interest. That's largely not true. The self interest comes from the people reporting the science. Some of them are just reporters looking to sell eyeballs. Some are people with an agenda against meat, GM food, corporations, etc. These kind of people will ignore evidence, miss-report and miss-interpret evidence, listen to pseudo-scientists as if they were real scientists, etc.
If you want to eat candy bars all day and advance yourself to insulin dependent diabetes, go blind at 50, or worse, go right ahead. But don't bundle all claims about food together in one category as if they're all equally bad (or good for that matter).
In both cases the "workaround: switch" advice is really not very helpfull.
Obviously I disagree. For people that exclusively use their computer for running games, you're right. But the vast majority of people don't do that. The workaround still leaves all the rest of the functionality with no impact on anything but 3d games. Comparing this solution to switching from windows to linux is simply ridiculous. Switching operating systems is entirely impractical since you're affecting every application, not just one.
Never eat another apple. Yes, every single apple is a clone of the first tree of that type of apple. Apple trees in agriculture are propogated by cuttings. The seeds inside will likely produce a tree with apples that tastes nothing like its parent.
This is as useless as suggesting "Install Linux" when a Windows vulnerability has been found!
Not really. You assume that this is somehow incredibly difficult. In actuallity the difficult part has already been done. That happened when the end user installed the binary only nVidia driver. Going back to the driver supplied by the distribution should be easy by comparison.
Sure you're not going to get the 3-D performance benefits, but you'll at least not get your machine rooted.
You're right, few people are going to bother with replacing power supplies because it's just not worth it economically to replace them.
But, the point is that if the industry had spent just a few dollars (maybe pennies) more in designing the devive, they'd be saving you money and it's be worth the extra costs. Right now most consumers have no idea the amount of money it costs them for these inefficient electronics, so there's no incentive for manufacturers to bother.
I find it very implausible that it could have "fizzled." It's a damn chain reaction - set it and forget it, as the saying goes.
Then you need to learn a bit more about nuclear physics. Plutonium is a bit trickier to set off as a nuclear weapon do the fact that it can start a reaction before it's compressed down to the intended size. What happens is the chain reaction stops short of the intended yield because the ball of plutonium literally blows itself apart before you get enough generations of neutron reactions to yield enough energy.
t's not so hard to pile up ten thousand tons of conventional explosive, and as discussed in the previous thread on the test itself there is some value in convincing your neighbors that you have nuclear weapons regardless of whether you actually have them.
No it's not, but it's pretty hard to pile up ten thousand tons of conventional explosive in a remote area and not have anyone with a satellite see you do it.
Strange. I thought censorship was actually preventing people from seeing things, not simply labeling them and letting others decide if they should be viewed or not. I guess I never knew that when someone told me that Gigli was a really bad movie they were actually CENSORING Gigli.
I guess that makes Siskel And Ebert some of the most successfull censors of our time.
If the far right can deem anything containing boobies "harmful to minors", why can't I deem anything that contains idiotic crap harmful to minors? I'd love to see Limbaugh, Hannity, or O'Reilly labled as harmful and "not appropriate for anyone under 18". In fact I know a kid who faked laryngitis to stay home and phone in on Limbaugh's talk show. Yup, that's right, Limbaugh is encouraging truancy among our children!
I had the same experience at the Univ of Wisconsin Madison when I started in 1990. They used the SSN+1 digit as a student ID. I think it was the last digit that was the student ID. Hopefully they've eliminated that practice by now.
And your landlord doesn't have to give you a lease if you don't provide him with a SSN either. My landlord wanted all this crazy information about me. SSN, monthly income, drivers license #, my checking and savings account numbers. Way more information you'd ever need to do some very easy identify theft. He may not be a crook, but how do I know he keeps the information secure? How do I know no one he employees is a crook, or any future people he employees are crooks?
I told the landlord to stuff it, no one needs to know my damn bank account numbers but me. He eventually agreed to let me rent from him, but he was under no obligation to do so.
It's not like modifying packages for the distribution is something weird that no one does. EVERY distribution takes the linux kernel and modifies it to their own end. Linus doesn't seem to mind that people still call their product Linux (as long as it's Redhat Linux, Debian Linux, etc). Do you get all pissed off at Linus when there's a bug in your Debian/Redhat/Ubuntu/whatever derived kernel, or do you get mad at the distribution? Personally I blame the distribution first, and the kernel maintainers if it wasn't a bug created by the distribution. The distributions are the place people go to FIRST for support. It stands to reason they should be able to distribute their own versions of free software with their distribution.
The more I think about it, the more I think that Debian is doing the right thing here. It's not like they're the only distribution that cares about this sort of thing, they're just more able to act on it first. There's no corporate handlers to hold them back when they want to fight a "free software battle". If the Mozilla people want to be all weeny about anyone modifying their software, but still call it firefox then the rest of the world will just make up a new name and logo and use the nice free software that they produce.
And again, I'd like to remind you that the topic at hand here is liability, not responsibility. Not trying to be self-righteous here, but with parenting being replaced by videogames, TV shows and the internet it's no mystery why many of today's kids have lost their moral ground.
Why is it that every generation, going back as far as the greeks has to believe that THIS generation of kids has lost the moral teachings that THEIR generation had in spades? If you want to look at actually comparisons, teen pregnancy is down since the 50s.
Well almost. Children have no right to privacy from their parents. They can earn some privilege to some privacy, but this is not a right.
So because children have no right to privacy, parents should simply not give them any rights or freedom? Err. ok. That is for the courts to determine on a case-by-case basis. But, it is right that parents should be prosecuted, even if they are not guilty, or found guilty, in this case
Are you really saying that anytime a kid does something legally wrong, the parents should automatically be prosecuted, even if there's no real basis for liability and there's no change of winning? Kind of a scary thought that can ruin peoples lives, waste tax dollars, waste resources that are better spent elsewhere, and creates a police state all at the same time. Nice solution you have there.
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I don't see anywhere that mentions telemarketers at all (except in the "summary"). The article only mentions call centers, which are more likely to be customer service centers than someone trying to sell you carpet cleaning.
This could potentially be a good thing for the public. If you could measure how upset people get by certain people, then you could fire the ones that make people the most upset. Of course this could also lead to other problems as the goal of support is to solve peoples problems, not make them feel nice.
It could also be a bad thing. Imagine if your called up customer service a few times in a bad mood, and the system flags you as a problem child (or maybe you're just a false positive as it isn't perfect). You then always get treated like you're a jerk.
The world isn't a bar.
It's much more like a bar than you'd care to admit. There's tough guys, weak guys, cliches of friends who'll defend each other in a fight, etc. The only difference is there's no management or ownership of the bar.
Do you walk into a bar and think about how you would defend yourself against everyone of those people, if they attacked one at a time, 2 at a time, 3 at a time, the short guy and that fat guy in the corner?
Depends on the bar. But the point is that you probbably wouldn't want to suddenly make an announcement that you'll start a fight with anyone that gets within 50 feet of you that looks funny, or makes any "sudden moves". Thinking about defending yourself is entirely different from making public announcements. That's what's happened here, and that's why people are saying this is a foolish move that'll only cause trouble.
Why do people resist change so much?
Well, in the case of the environment it means that enormous amount of disruption to the economy, culture, and way of life. If your entire village is dependant on fishing and has been for 200 years it's a little hard to adapt to the change. If NYC goes underwater from rising sea levels that just might be a burden on society that would be best avoided.
In short people resist change because they've invested a lot in the way things are. Sometimes that change is inevitable and you have no chance of changing it. Earthquakes happen and there's nothing we can do about them but plan for them. De-populating the fish in the oceans, rising sea levels, and climate change are things we can and should try to stop from happening.
The thing you seemed to have missed is that environmentalism is about human existance, not some dumb "save the planet" crap that the wingnuts have promoted. As George Carlin said "The planet is fine, the people are fucked".
But we're not talking about just shining lights here, we're talking about moving an object. That involves modeling the frictional forces, possibly balance, etc. Modeling parts of the co-operative aspects before hand would probbably help in the programming design of the robots, but if you want to know if it's actually going to work (how quickly does each robot need to respond to change X, etc), it's probbably easier to just build the damn things.
That sounds about right. Don't tell that to the GGP though, he'll just fire everyone and get people that look like they're working 7.5 hour days.
What, precisely, was gained by doing this with actual physical robots, rather than a computer simulation?
Gee, maybe things like accounting for things you never thought or had the ability to simulate? What makes you think that a computer can model every single thing (frictional forces, heat and stress on motors, etc) as well as actual reality?
it is giving a cautionary tale - don't put out information that will give people a chance to track you down , because someone might be crazy.
And that's news? Duh. We all know there's crazy people in the world, it should come as no surprise that there's crazy people on the internet as well.
Then again, I'm pretty good at hiring. We don't really have a "slack" problem in my department.
Uh huh. Keep telling yourself that. My guess is your employees are just better at "looking busy" all the time. Or maybe they all overwork themselves and wind up making dumb mistakes they wouldn't have if they "slacked". What a pissant little boss you must be. I feel sorry for your employees.
It's just been my experience that there are plenty of people out there who DON'T require thinking "down time", who are exceptionally productive and more often than not, less troublesome employees. What you are describing sounds to me to be stress coping rather than thought processing -- which, as management -- suggests to me you have poor stress coping skills or are more prone work poorly under work-related pressure.
And it's been my experience that the type of control-freak management style that you seem to exhibit only lowers peoples productivity. You think all people are easily replaceable so you don't value them. You think every problem is one of employees and it can be fixed with just a few firings.
If there's one single factor in a workplace that leads to it's success or failure it's management. Creating a workplace where people feel constantly watched only creates paranoia and miss-trust. People don't work well under those conditions, and that usually leads to the best people leaving.
The two people lived 70 miles apart. Without the invention of the automobile this would be at least a 4 day trip both ways. Or maybe we can blame the pick-axe for this one. Without the damn pick-axe he'd have to attack him with his bare hands.
The GP is right. The story has little to do with the internet. It has at least as much to do with automobiles as it does the internet.
Everybody is saying this is bad for you, that is bad for you. Oh, don't drink milk, it causes cancer. Don't eat peanut butter at school, people have allergy's. Freakin peanut butter, I grew up on that. Something is always bad for you. You have to eat something. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my life eating rabbit food. Screw that.
Stop listening to just anyone and everybody, and start getting information from actual scientists and not dumb journalists out to sell eyeballs. Educate yourself about your disease and how foods affect your blood sugar. Don't just simply rely on someone to tell you what to eat, find out the reasons for it.
There seems to be a belief out there that all science is just whooey because it's all influenced by politics and self interest. That's largely not true. The self interest comes from the people reporting the science. Some of them are just reporters looking to sell eyeballs. Some are people with an agenda against meat, GM food, corporations, etc. These kind of people will ignore evidence, miss-report and miss-interpret evidence, listen to pseudo-scientists as if they were real scientists, etc.
If you want to eat candy bars all day and advance yourself to insulin dependent diabetes, go blind at 50, or worse, go right ahead. But don't bundle all claims about food together in one category as if they're all equally bad (or good for that matter).
In both cases the "workaround: switch" advice is really not very helpfull.
Obviously I disagree. For people that exclusively use their computer for running games, you're right. But the vast majority of people don't do that. The workaround still leaves all the rest of the functionality with no impact on anything but 3d games. Comparing this solution to switching from windows to linux is simply ridiculous. Switching operating systems is entirely impractical since you're affecting every application, not just one.
Never eat another apple. Yes, every single apple is a clone of the first tree of that type of apple. Apple trees in agriculture are propogated by cuttings. The seeds inside will likely produce a tree with apples that tastes nothing like its parent.
This is as useless as suggesting "Install Linux" when a Windows vulnerability has been found!
Not really. You assume that this is somehow incredibly difficult. In actuallity the difficult part has already been done. That happened when the end user installed the binary only nVidia driver. Going back to the driver
supplied by the distribution should be easy by comparison.
Sure you're not going to get the 3-D performance benefits, but you'll at least not get your machine rooted.
You're right, few people are going to bother with replacing power supplies because it's just not worth it economically to replace them.
But, the point is that if the industry had spent just a few dollars (maybe pennies) more in designing the devive, they'd be saving you money and it's be worth the extra costs. Right now most consumers have no idea the amount of money it costs them for these inefficient electronics, so there's no incentive for manufacturers to bother.
I find it very implausible that it could have "fizzled." It's a damn chain reaction - set it and forget it, as the saying goes.
Then you need to learn a bit more about nuclear physics. Plutonium is a bit trickier to set off as a nuclear weapon do the fact that it can start a reaction before it's compressed down to the intended size. What happens is the chain reaction stops short of the intended yield because the ball of plutonium literally blows itself apart before you get enough generations of neutron reactions to yield enough energy.
I don't know of many underground mines that come pre-equipped with a few thousand tons of explosive. Do you?
t's not so hard to pile up ten thousand tons of conventional explosive, and as discussed in the previous thread on the test itself there is some value in convincing your neighbors that you have nuclear weapons regardless of whether you actually have them.
No it's not, but it's pretty hard to pile up ten thousand tons of conventional explosive in a remote area and not have anyone with a satellite see you do it.
Strange. I thought censorship was actually preventing people from seeing things, not simply labeling them and letting others decide if they should be viewed or not. I guess I never knew that when someone told me that Gigli was a really bad movie they were actually CENSORING Gigli.
I guess that makes Siskel And Ebert some of the most successfull censors of our time.
If the far right can deem anything containing boobies "harmful to minors", why can't I deem anything that contains idiotic crap harmful to minors? I'd love to see Limbaugh, Hannity, or O'Reilly labled as harmful and "not appropriate for anyone under 18". In fact I know a kid who faked laryngitis to stay home and phone in on Limbaugh's talk show. Yup, that's right, Limbaugh is encouraging truancy among our children!
I had the same experience at the Univ of Wisconsin Madison when I started in 1990. They used the SSN+1 digit as a student ID. I think it was the last digit that was the student ID. Hopefully they've eliminated that practice by now.
Your landlord can not demand you give it to him.
And your landlord doesn't have to give you a lease if you don't provide him with a SSN either. My landlord wanted all this crazy information about me. SSN, monthly income, drivers license #, my checking and savings account numbers. Way more information you'd ever need to do some very easy identify theft. He may not be a crook, but how do I know he keeps the information secure? How do I know no one he employees is a crook, or any future people he employees are crooks?
I told the landlord to stuff it, no one needs to know my damn bank account numbers but me. He eventually agreed to let me rent from him, but he was under no obligation to do so.
It's not like modifying packages for the distribution is something weird that no one does. EVERY distribution takes the linux kernel and modifies it to their own end. Linus doesn't seem to mind that people still call their product Linux (as long as it's Redhat Linux, Debian Linux, etc). Do you get all pissed off at Linus when there's a bug in your Debian/Redhat/Ubuntu/whatever derived kernel, or do you get mad at the distribution? Personally I blame the distribution first, and the kernel maintainers if it wasn't a bug created by the distribution. The distributions are the place people go to FIRST for support. It stands to reason they should be able to distribute their own versions of free software with their distribution.
The more I think about it, the more I think that Debian is doing the right thing here. It's not like they're the only distribution that cares about this sort of thing, they're just more able to act on it first. There's no corporate handlers to hold them back when they want to fight a "free software battle". If the Mozilla people want to be all weeny about anyone modifying their software, but still call it firefox then the rest of the world will just make up a new name and logo and use the nice free software that they produce.
And again, I'd like to remind you that the topic at hand here is liability, not responsibility.
Not trying to be self-righteous here, but with parenting being replaced by videogames, TV shows and the internet it's no mystery why many of today's kids have lost their moral ground.
Why is it that every generation, going back as far as the greeks has to believe that THIS generation of kids has lost the moral teachings that THEIR generation had in spades? If you want to look at actually comparisons, teen pregnancy is down since the 50s.
Well almost. Children have no right to privacy from their parents. They can earn some privilege to some privacy, but this is not a right.
So because children have no right to privacy, parents should simply not give them any rights or freedom? Err. ok.
That is for the courts to determine on a case-by-case basis. But, it is right that parents should be prosecuted, even if they are not guilty, or found guilty, in this case
Are you really saying that anytime a kid does something legally wrong, the parents should automatically be prosecuted, even if there's no real basis for liability and there's no change of winning? Kind of a scary thought that can ruin peoples lives, waste tax dollars, waste resources that are better spent elsewhere, and creates a police state all at the same time. Nice solution you have there.