Depends where you go... in 1994 (which is the year I graduated from university), my uni started their applied IT course. Nor were they the first one to do so (in Australia, I know ANU had one in the early '80s).
Personally, I _liked_ my Bachelor of Science (Computer Science)...
Then don't do a computer science course... do some sort of applied computing or software engineering course.
Yes, 0.01% of real-world programmers give a shit about those things. But then, less than 0.01% of engineers would really give a shit about high-energy physics, as well.
Computer _science_ courses should be about _computer science_.
Unfortunately, voters talk "waaay" more than they vote. Voter turnout in a presidental election year hasn't hit 60% of eligible voters since the Vietnam War; the "off-season" Congressional elections don't even get to 40% of the eligible voters. Heck, at the last election, 20% of the eligible voters didn't even bother to get registered!
Politicians know that the vast bulk of voters don't really care about these issues. Not one politican has lost office over this issue. A lot of them took the money offered by lobbyists and used it to fund their campaign or retirement. So, the politicians ignore the protests and take the cash.
The RIAA and MPAA don't take orders from the US government, they give them, primarily through their bought-and-paid-for senators and congresscritters.
Oh, and said politicians for hire are actively trying to make copyright infrigment a crime worthy of prison time. One of the reasons for hammering the "piracy is theft" mantra is to equate copyright violations with shoplifting - a crime that is jail-worthy. Already the DMCA makes any attempt to bypass a copy-protection mechanism (such as the CSS encryption on a DVD) a crime worthy of jail.
Terrorists being Muslims is just the current fad. In the '80s, the terrorists were communist revolutionaries.
Furthermore, the terrorists aren't idiots. All an Arabic terrorist would have to do to get around such a ban would be to wear jeans, work on their accent, use hair dye to lighten their hair a bit, and make out that they've been to a tanning salon.
Actually, there's an evolutionary-based hypothesis for the origin of life:
Take random disorganised matter. Some forms of that matter will cause nearby matter to be shaped into similar forms (e.g. how crystals grow in water).
The similar forms will either be slightly better, slightly worse, or exactly the same in their ability to cause more nearby matter to be shaped in similar forms.
Later, rinse, and repeat - over time, the better forms will dominate, via the "law of natural selection", just like any other mutation.
One such event may have resulted in life as we know it. Or maybe not.
This is the fault of the US. The US, post-911, brought out new guidelines for foreign carriers, similar to the ones for US-based carriers. They then told the foreign carriers - and the governments of the carriers - that they would be refused landing permissions in the US if they did not collect the data as listed under the guidelines and make it available to the US. To add insult to injury, they also insisted this data be available for _all_ international flights, not just those inbound to the US. (The rationale for this is to detect people taking indirect routes)
The French government and carriers fought this for a while and caved - it made the news because a whole heap of flights got cancelled from France, stranding a lot of tourists (mostly American tourists). The rest of the world caved without the fight - the US is too important a destination for most international airlines to ignore.
(You can feel free to blame British Airways for the insecure system, though)
So it's perfectly fair to blame the US for this - the US practices economic warfare on its supposed allies to force these sort of regulations down their throats. Another example would be how the US keeps lobbying Europe for stricter anti-copying legislation, ala the wonderful effective DCMA.
Yes, and Apple sells non-DRM music on iTunes as well. The point, however, is that if you want a mass market music store, you need to accomodate the RIAA somewhat.
The independent labels are a small part of the market; a growing part, and a vital part, and hopefully the future of the market, but let's be real - right now, if you limted yourself to independents, you have a niche store.
It's also worth pointing out that the RIAA does not allow _any_ music to be legally sold online without some form of DRM, and is pushing it onto CDs now as well.
Fairplay is actually the most permissive DRM the RIAA allows online resellers to use. Every other DRM solution restricts the rights of the user more. Apple stood up to the RIAA and drew a line in the sand: "We will compromise up to here, and no more".
If you have content, which you wish to sell through the iTunes Music Store, you don't have to use Fairplay - you can choose not to use any DRM. Apple are saying "This is the only DRM we will accept", which is why the iPod can play MP3s as well (if they were really strict, they wouldn't allow that). About the only reason Ogg isn't supported is that, frankly, there's no market.
There is no "Free-as-in-speech(-or-beer)" DRM solutions; yes, you can license WMA, but it's not cheap at all. The whole problem with DRM is that it is a "security-via-obscurity" approach that is 100% incompatible with "Free-as-in-speech".
yeah, but that's a change that is a deliberate attempt to get around the hash; the ones I mentioned are changes the people copying the images are likely to make in any case.
The real question is: How is Google meant to identify that the images come from Perfect 10? Google is no more capable of recognising the copyright theft than it is of recognising someone plagarising from a NYT article (and violating copyright that way).
OTH: If Google had even better image search, then the copyright owners could use Google to help track down the people who infringed by copying (not stealing) the images in the first place.
What are the tapes in? They're probably in a nicy shiny briefcase or other bag. Thieves love to steal bags and briefcases... it's fast to grab, it doesn't look odd when they walk down the street, and they can ditch it fairly easily afterwards.
Re: Rant. Because a good doctor actually takes time to sit down with their patients and diagnose the issue. If a particular appointment takes an hour instead of the 15 minutes scheduled, then it takes an hour. Doctors schedule their days around average appointment durations, but this invariably means that there will be overruns that will cause delays. These delays get absorbed by the appointments that run short, or by the various buffer periods that doctors schedule in.
On those (rare!) occasions when the buffer period isn't used in catchup, the doctors fit in other work.
Running late is actually a sign of a good doctor - if there's never a delay, the doctors are working to the clock, not the patient.
You were a single celled organism, straight after conception. This single-celled organism grew into you, passing through a stage incredibly similar to fish embryos, including gills.
The reason most successful mutations have a survival advantage is that in order to spread, it has to be passed on to more descendants than other similar patterns (such as the original). This is more likely if the mutation contributes to survival - it's purely a statistical thing.
However, not all successful mutations have a survival advantage, as you point out. Also, the nature of a "survival advantage" changes as conditions change.
Furthermore, the "survival advantage" isn't necessarily of the individual. One of the (vastly simplified) arguments for genetic pre-disposition of homosexuality is that homosexuals tend to be more creative; creative societies tend to out-compete non-creative societies; ergo, societies that spawn homosexuals tend to be more successful, thus the hypothetical "gay gene" propogates even though homosexuals themselves don't.
(Purely example - I'm not trying to say that homosexuality is or is not genetic in nature)
In Australia, our equivalent is the Tax File Number. By law, the only reason someone is even allowed to ask you for it is for purposes related to taxation - e.g. your employer (to file income tax), banks (interest on savings), investment funds (similar), some government agencies (Social Security, mostly), and of course the Australian Tax Office (ATO). Even amongst the organisations that can ask for it, it's not allowed to be a unique ID - even the ATO can only use it as a unique id for your actual tax file.
Now, here's the kicker: you are allowed to refuse to give your Tax File Number to all of these people. Even the ATO! There are some annoyances in doing this - the chief is that all tax is taken out at the top marginal rate.
So, if you really get paranoid about protecting your TFN, you don't give it out to anyone but the ATO, and you only give it them when you file your tax return. You _do_ need to keep good records, so that you can sort out how much excess tax you've paid (so you can get a refund), and you'll get audited a bit more (because your refunds will be abnormally large for your income level - a common sign of income scammers), but you can do it.
The USA is not at war, despite all the rhetoric that gets thrown around about the "war on terror".
To go to war, a formal declaration from the Congress is required under the War Powers Resolution. No such declaration has been issued. Instead, a more limited "resolution authorizing the use of force" has been granted by the Congress. This resolution allows the President of the US to order troops into a military conflict, but doesn't grant the wider powers that the office of the President is granted in real wars.
The authority granted to the President under a resolution authorizing the use of force does not extend to spying on its own citizens, or torturing them, or holding them without charges for extended periods of time. It does not extend to the right to fabricate intelligence material. Nor does it extend to creating a new category of enemy, namely "illegal combatants", who are neither civilans nor enemy soliders. (FWIW, the US treated captive Viet Cong as prisoners of war). Heck, the US doesn't even follow this division that well... many Taliban soliders, who were members of the armed forces of an officially recognised (by the US!) government were treated as "illegal combtatants". All of these actions, and many others, have been taken by the President without authorization, because he knows that neither Congress or the courts are about to slap him down despite their illegality.
When you buy a house, you need to record your ownership details. Anyone can go and see who owns a block of land. How horrible. God forbid that anyone would exploit this private information.
Simply put: you lease a domain name, you are entering the area of publc property. Nobody is pointing a gun at your head and saying you have to get a domain name. Deal with it.
That's my point. That's also why it was more cost-effective not to just let me go immediately - by actively participating in my handover, I made it easier for the "new cog" to slot in.
Now, that's just silly. It was a business decision: the cost of cutting my access was more than the cost of not cutting it.
The business could have survived without me - however, it was more cost effective for me to partake in a smooth handover. The idea that you need to make your position so replaceable that there is absolutely zero impact if you get hit by a bus is crazy.
But the "disgruntled employee" had as much opportunity as he/she wanted prior to submitting the resignation letter. So what risk have you successfully avoided?
There are a number of reasons to terminate an employement agreement with an employee. I use the term "let go" to cover all of them. Firing is only one of them, which I use to indicate where an employee has been terminated for reasons related to their own behaviour.
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Depends where you go... in 1994 (which is the year I graduated from university), my uni started their applied IT course. Nor were they the first one to do so (in Australia, I know ANU had one in the early '80s).
Personally, I _liked_ my Bachelor of Science (Computer Science)...
Then don't do a computer science course... do some sort of applied computing or software engineering course.
Yes, 0.01% of real-world programmers give a shit about those things. But then, less than 0.01% of engineers would really give a shit about high-energy physics, as well.
Computer _science_ courses should be about _computer science_.
Unfortunately, voters talk "waaay" more than they vote. Voter turnout in a presidental election year hasn't hit 60% of eligible voters since the Vietnam War; the "off-season" Congressional elections don't even get to 40% of the eligible voters. Heck, at the last election, 20% of the eligible voters didn't even bother to get registered!
Politicians know that the vast bulk of voters don't really care about these issues. Not one politican has lost office over this issue. A lot of them took the money offered by lobbyists and used it to fund their campaign or retirement. So, the politicians ignore the protests and take the cash.
The RIAA and MPAA don't take orders from the US government, they give them, primarily through their bought-and-paid-for senators and congresscritters.
Oh, and said politicians for hire are actively trying to make copyright infrigment a crime worthy of prison time. One of the reasons for hammering the "piracy is theft" mantra is to equate copyright violations with shoplifting - a crime that is jail-worthy. Already the DMCA makes any attempt to bypass a copy-protection mechanism (such as the CSS encryption on a DVD) a crime worthy of jail.
Only if they're not pretending to be from Texas.
Terrorists being Muslims is just the current fad. In the '80s, the terrorists were communist revolutionaries.
Furthermore, the terrorists aren't idiots. All an Arabic terrorist would have to do to get around such a ban would be to wear jeans, work on their accent, use hair dye to lighten their hair a bit, and make out that they've been to a tanning salon.
Actually, there's an evolutionary-based hypothesis for the origin of life:
Take random disorganised matter. Some forms of that matter will cause nearby matter to be shaped into similar forms (e.g. how crystals grow in water).
The similar forms will either be slightly better, slightly worse, or exactly the same in their ability to cause more nearby matter to be shaped in similar forms.
Later, rinse, and repeat - over time, the better forms will dominate, via the "law of natural selection", just like any other mutation.
One such event may have resulted in life as we know it. Or maybe not.
*sigh* Don't people have any memory any more?
This is the fault of the US. The US, post-911, brought out new guidelines for foreign carriers, similar to the ones for US-based carriers. They then told the foreign carriers - and the governments of the carriers - that they would be refused landing permissions in the US if they did not collect the data as listed under the guidelines and make it available to the US. To add insult to injury, they also insisted this data be available for _all_ international flights, not just those inbound to the US. (The rationale for this is to detect people taking indirect routes)
The French government and carriers fought this for a while and caved - it made the news because a whole heap of flights got cancelled from France, stranding a lot of tourists (mostly American tourists). The rest of the world caved without the fight - the US is too important a destination for most international airlines to ignore.
(You can feel free to blame British Airways for the insecure system, though)
So it's perfectly fair to blame the US for this - the US practices economic warfare on its supposed allies to force these sort of regulations down their throats. Another example would be how the US keeps lobbying Europe for stricter anti-copying legislation, ala the wonderful effective DCMA.
Yes, and Apple sells non-DRM music on iTunes as well. The point, however, is that if you want a mass market music store, you need to accomodate the RIAA somewhat.
The independent labels are a small part of the market; a growing part, and a vital part, and hopefully the future of the market, but let's be real - right now, if you limted yourself to independents, you have a niche store.
It's also worth pointing out that the RIAA does not allow _any_ music to be legally sold online without some form of DRM, and is pushing it onto CDs now as well.
Fairplay is actually the most permissive DRM the RIAA allows online resellers to use. Every other DRM solution restricts the rights of the user more. Apple stood up to the RIAA and drew a line in the sand: "We will compromise up to here, and no more".
If you have content, which you wish to sell through the iTunes Music Store, you don't have to use Fairplay - you can choose not to use any DRM. Apple are saying "This is the only DRM we will accept", which is why the iPod can play MP3s as well (if they were really strict, they wouldn't allow that). About the only reason Ogg isn't supported is that, frankly, there's no market.
There is no "Free-as-in-speech(-or-beer)" DRM solutions; yes, you can license WMA, but it's not cheap at all. The whole problem with DRM is that it is a "security-via-obscurity" approach that is 100% incompatible with "Free-as-in-speech".
yeah, but that's a change that is a deliberate attempt to get around the hash; the ones I mentioned are changes the people copying the images are likely to make in any case.
Even a very simple change to the image (like resizing it so it doesn't blow your bandwidth out, or removing the Perfect10 logo) would change the hash.
The real question is: How is Google meant to identify that the images come from Perfect 10? Google is no more capable of recognising the copyright theft than it is of recognising someone plagarising from a NYT article (and violating copyright that way).
OTH: If Google had even better image search, then the copyright owners could use Google to help track down the people who infringed by copying (not stealing) the images in the first place.
What are the tapes in? They're probably in a nicy shiny briefcase or other bag. Thieves love to steal bags and briefcases... it's fast to grab, it doesn't look odd when they walk down the street, and they can ditch it fairly easily afterwards.
You could always try, oh, calling the doctor's office first to find out how late they're running...
Re: Rant. Because a good doctor actually takes time to sit down with their patients and diagnose the issue. If a particular appointment takes an hour instead of the 15 minutes scheduled, then it takes an hour. Doctors schedule their days around average appointment durations, but this invariably means that there will be overruns that will cause delays. These delays get absorbed by the appointments that run short, or by the various buffer periods that doctors schedule in.
On those (rare!) occasions when the buffer period isn't used in catchup, the doctors fit in other work.
Running late is actually a sign of a good doctor - if there's never a delay, the doctors are working to the clock, not the patient.
Happy?
You were a single celled organism, straight after conception. This single-celled organism grew into you, passing through a stage incredibly similar to fish embryos, including gills.
The reason most successful mutations have a survival advantage is that in order to spread, it has to be passed on to more descendants than other similar patterns (such as the original). This is more likely if the mutation contributes to survival - it's purely a statistical thing.
However, not all successful mutations have a survival advantage, as you point out. Also, the nature of a "survival advantage" changes as conditions change.
Furthermore, the "survival advantage" isn't necessarily of the individual. One of the (vastly simplified) arguments for genetic pre-disposition of homosexuality is that homosexuals tend to be more creative; creative societies tend to out-compete non-creative societies; ergo, societies that spawn homosexuals tend to be more successful, thus the hypothetical "gay gene" propogates even though homosexuals themselves don't.
(Purely example - I'm not trying to say that homosexuality is or is not genetic in nature)
In Australia, our equivalent is the Tax File Number. By law, the only reason someone is even allowed to ask you for it is for purposes related to taxation - e.g. your employer (to file income tax), banks (interest on savings), investment funds (similar), some government agencies (Social Security, mostly), and of course the Australian Tax Office (ATO). Even amongst the organisations that can ask for it, it's not allowed to be a unique ID - even the ATO can only use it as a unique id for your actual tax file.
Now, here's the kicker: you are allowed to refuse to give your Tax File Number to all of these people. Even the ATO! There are some annoyances in doing this - the chief is that all tax is taken out at the top marginal rate.
So, if you really get paranoid about protecting your TFN, you don't give it out to anyone but the ATO, and you only give it them when you file your tax return. You _do_ need to keep good records, so that you can sort out how much excess tax you've paid (so you can get a refund), and you'll get audited a bit more (because your refunds will be abnormally large for your income level - a common sign of income scammers), but you can do it.
The USA is not at war, despite all the rhetoric that gets thrown around about the "war on terror".
To go to war, a formal declaration from the Congress is required under the War Powers Resolution. No such declaration has been issued. Instead, a more limited "resolution authorizing the use of force" has been granted by the Congress. This resolution allows the President of the US to order troops into a military conflict, but doesn't grant the wider powers that the office of the President is granted in real wars.
The authority granted to the President under a resolution authorizing the use of force does not extend to spying on its own citizens, or torturing them, or holding them without charges for extended periods of time. It does not extend to the right to fabricate intelligence material. Nor does it extend to creating a new category of enemy, namely "illegal combatants", who are neither civilans nor enemy soliders. (FWIW, the US treated captive Viet Cong as prisoners of war). Heck, the US doesn't even follow this division that well... many Taliban soliders, who were members of the armed forces of an officially recognised (by the US!) government were treated as "illegal combtatants". All of these actions, and many others, have been taken by the President without authorization, because he knows that neither Congress or the courts are about to slap him down despite their illegality.
When you buy a house, you need to record your ownership details. Anyone can go and see who owns a block of land. How horrible. God forbid that anyone would exploit this private information.
Simply put: you lease a domain name, you are entering the area of publc property. Nobody is pointing a gun at your head and saying you have to get a domain name. Deal with it.
That's my point. That's also why it was more cost-effective not to just let me go immediately - by actively participating in my handover, I made it easier for the "new cog" to slot in.
Now, that's just silly. It was a business decision: the cost of cutting my access was more than the cost of not cutting it.
The business could have survived without me - however, it was more cost effective for me to partake in a smooth handover. The idea that you need to make your position so replaceable that there is absolutely zero impact if you get hit by a bus is crazy.
But the "disgruntled employee" had as much opportunity as he/she wanted prior to submitting the resignation letter. So what risk have you successfully avoided?
There are a number of reasons to terminate an employement agreement with an employee. I use the term "let go" to cover all of them. Firing is only one of them, which I use to indicate where an employee has been terminated for reasons related to their own behaviour.