Insurance companies not only insure yuo against monetary losses, they also must provide a reasonable defense. So, yes, they will "defend" you. More importantly, if they try to defend you too aggressively (i.e. by not settling a valid claim within the policy limits, which results in a judgment against you in excess of the policy limits), you can then sue the insurance company for handling the claim against you in bad faith.
Essentially, the "bad faith" claim is there to protect the insured from the insurance company from betting with someone else's money. For instance:
Joe Negligent has an auto policy with a $100,000 limit for liability. Joe hits Wally Whiplash. Wally's suffers facial scarring and he is young and unmarried. Wally goes to Larry Lawyer who sues Joe Negligent.
Idiot Insurance is notified by Joe Negligent of the claim. Idiot Insurance analyzes the claim and figures the case might be worth about 90,000. Larry Lawyer sends in a demand letter for the policy limits. Idiot Insurance refuses to pay.
Larry Lawyer tries the case, and a jury comes back with a $125,000 verdict for Wally Whiplash, which exceeds Joe Negligent's policy limits. Joe is on the hook because Idiot Insurance gambled (and lost) on the value a jury would assign to the claim, and Joe Negligent suffered as a result, since Wally Whiplash was willing to settle for the policy limits but Idiot Insurance refused to do it.
Joe Negligent can then sue Idiot Insurance for "bad faith." Alternatively (and this is what usually happens) He assigns his claim to Wally Whiplash to settle his case with Wally (Joe Negligent is frequently judgment-proof), and Wally Whiplash sues Idiot Insurance, who must then pay the excess in virtually all cases.
In any case, that's an overview of a "get sued and have insurance company defend it"-gone-bad scenario.
The idea is so preposterous that it is unimaginable (just like the laptop story earlier today). All the posts explaining *precisely* why the idea is idiotic probably took something like a few thousand man hours to write/read.
What a waste of space. Nobody is going to make money going to Mars in the next 20 years. Bank on it. Nobody is going to Mars in the next 20 years. Bank on it.
The only money to be made on this boondoggle is by fleecing money from dreamers.
Space exploration with meat in the exploration vehicles is a total waste of time and money. Send a robot. The current Mars successes are wonderful reasons why we shouldn't send meat to Mars.
By 2025, we'll all be so jacked into our VR worlds banging Jenna Haze that we won't give a shit if we go to Mars anyway.
As a reference, I cite Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, which I refer to by shorthand as "the porn fantasy book." We're all going to be circuits and software someday anyway, so the idea of saving humanity by exploring space is ridiculous anyway. We'll be able to send ourselves anywhere in the universe without the meat, given enough time, starting in about a hundred years, if we haven't solved Fermi's Paradox ourselves the hard way.
I felt a tinge of regret for a nano second after seeing the iPod phone release. What's the big deal? My Treo 650 plays video, it displays pictures, it plays mp3 files (I have a 512mb card stuffed into it and could get bigger ones pretty easily), it takes pictures (not great, just VGA, but nice for a phone), and it takes movies w/ sound, which have been a nice addition to my personal blog or my family (mostly pictures of the chilluns). Oh yeah, it also works as a PDA and a phone.
I don't see why the iPod phone is that big a deal. The Treos have been able to play mp3s for a while now. Too bad palm didn't name them r0x0rz or whatever. Apple is so about image.
I seriously considered getting a Google Mini for my law office. The desktop search stuff wasn't really doing it for us, and we have boatloads of work that we reuse on a regular basis -- pleadings/contracts/settlement agreements, etc. are sort of like code in that respect -- we always want to reuse our knowledge rather than reinventing the wheel. My concern was that the regular Google appliance was too expensive. The mini seemed reasonable, but I still was resisting the idea of paying that much for search.
In any case, I had searched high and low for a decent search function when I happened upon swish-e. I am exceptionally pleased with it. It can be found at swish-e.org.
I am not an uber geek, but I was capable of spending an afternoon monkeying with it to install it, set up regular indexing as a cron job, get it to properly read and index OpenOffice documents, and to launch them from the browser. This involved some frightening security settings, but I have a small enough office (three people) that I'm not too torqued about this. The wide open settings I used were not swish-e's fault, as near as I could tell. Rather, they resulted from my laziness -- "It works well enough now, and the likelihood of malicious use is pretty low, so fuck it".
Obviously, it could be set up a bit more cleanly on my end, but I am really, really happy with it apart from that. Currently, it runs on a used SCSI-RAIDed IBM Netfinity box that I picked up for a little under $500.
The time and money I spent on the hardware plus getting it running has paid immense dividends. I have benefitted in two primary ways:
First: my office minions use the network for storage and do not store anything locally. This means that everything is indexed (and can be found!) and because they like the search so much, they also (unwittingly, perhaps) give me the peace of mind knowing that our data also gets the other benefits of being on the network (everything is backed up automatically/regularly, etc.).
They like being able to find stuff, so the search has really encouraged saving stuff on the network. I could mandate this in other ways, but I'd rather have them drinking my Kool Aid than simply imposing the idea.
Second: My minions and I have saved tons of time using the search feature. Any good search does that. The additional bonus is that I no longer have to worry about the next version of Google Desktop or Copernic or installing it on various machines, blah, blah, blah. It's all centrally saved and configured. Administration is essentially zero since I am getting good search results on all the document types that I need - some old MS Office leftovers, Open Office, and PDF.
I don't see needing to change this in any significant way for at least as long as I keep the hardware. I think that the next time I'll need to touch it will be when the index outgrows the box serving the searches.
The box I'm running has dual 1.something gig pentiums with a gig of RAM. The drives are the weak link, with only 9.1 GB of space available for storage of OS, index, etc. The box also has redundant power supplies, redundant power supplies , redundant ethernet connections (100MB), and redundant ethernet connections (100MB).
The front end to the search is just a standard, "came with it" CGI script (swish.cgi). It works just fine. It gets called up as a webpage locally, and it spits our results.
On a final note, we are pretty aggressive in enforcing standardized file naming conventions. The naming conventions typically include te client name, the matter, a date, the type of document, and the subject of the document. Swish-e has document path, title, title and body searches off the interface we use, and you'll usually find exactly what you're looking for if you're reasonably specific.
On a final note, swish-e has been unsuccessful when I have used the following search terms "nubile blonde woman" and "willing to get with me". In that respect, swish-e has been an outright failure, though it is conceivable that the fault lies with operator error.
"Emergency medical teams from across the country were sent into the region and President Bush cut short his Texas vacation Tuesday to return to Washington to focus on the storm damage."
While it's not obvious from the timing of your post, many of the "anti-Bush" follow-up posts were made well after Bush had already cut his vacation short.
Mindless anti-Bushism is just as bad as mindless pro-Bushism. And no, I'm not suggesting that your comment, though inflammatory, was motivated by the former. Clearly some "me-too" posts were, however.
Transitioning from one platform to another can be incredibly expensive. It doesn't matter what kind of license the software has.
Bingo. I had the option of starting my business from scratch. Nothing was in place, and I picked and chose from OSS and traditional software. I run a law office, and I ended up with the following:
1. Windows XP (needed it for my accounting package, plus training my minions on LInux was not an appealing idea) 2. Server OS: GNU/Linux 3. Website/Content management: PHP-Nuke 4. File server: Samba 5. Search tool for office network: Swish-e 6. Mail: Thunderbird 7. Office suite: Open Office 8. Browser: Firefox 9. Accounting: Quickbooks 10. AV: AVG
That's really all I need. I have a few pieces here and there: Paperport (which came OEM with my MFC machine) and Palm Desktop (came OEM with my Treo) for instance. I tried to mix and match based on my needs, budget, and consideration of implementation costs (that killed the idea of Linux on the desktop, though that's not out the window (so to speak) just yet -- I may ultimately make that move).
My standard rule in-house is to look OSS first, commercial second. I am clearly the exception in my community right now, by I am spreading the word. I'm not taking a ideological standpoint, simply a cost/beneift approach when spreading the word. I know OSS wins on initial cost (which is important to me now) and my staff has transitioned to Open Office pretty easily since there isn't a huge installed base of MS Office forms in place. In other areas, if an OSS app scratches an itch, I go that route if the software works inthe manner I need it to. If there is no OSS option, or there is a bad one, I do not hesitate to go commercial, and I don't feel badly about it.
FWIW, I know people who still run their offices on DOS Wordperfect versions, and these folks are giving serious consideration to OOO right now as a way to upgrade to a GUI office suite. They don't want to shell out hundreds per seat for MS Office.
YMMV, but ultimately, I think OSS will win/lose on the merits of the software rather than any ideological notion about how software should be created/licensed/distributed, etc. Upfront costs are a significant issue for me as well, but if the OSS software was not good, I wouldn't use it, even if it were free.
Hillary is doing what Presidential candidate hopefuls always do. She's getting some media time.
Yes and no. Obviously, media time is a key element of any public move by a politician -- if a politician speaks in a forest and nobody hears it...yadda, yadda, yadda.
No, what she is after here is some street cred on values issues. Remember Bill Clinton's "Sister Souljah moment? He went out and whacked some rapper chick who was on the fringes of media/Hollywood to give himself some distance and breathing room from criticisms that he was just part of the New York/LA liberal axis. It made him seem more centrist to the people in the middle of the country.
It is astonishing how similar this play is to that one. It's right out of the same handbook.
I hire people for my business. I want talented people. On the other hand, I want the clients in my conservative, right-wing community to feel comfortable when they come to my office. I want a professional atmosphere.
I was raised ever so slightly before tatoos and (to a lesser extent) piercings became a big deal. My opinion is that tattoos are for hookers and sailors.
On the other hand, I don't want to exclude people with tattoos and odd piercings from my labor force if it hurts my business.
All things being equal, I will take the non-tattooed, non-pierced person over his/her body modded competitor for a job at my office. Talent will rule, however, to some extent.
I view tattoos/mods (that my clients can see and may be offended/unnerved by) as being a "cost" of hiring the employee. If the cost exceeds the expected benefit, they won't get hired.
Another interesting issue comes up as well -- what to do with Plain Jane who comes into my office unmodded who hits 30 years old and wants to have a lifestyle change to shake things up? She goes out and gets a Mike Tyson tiger tattoo on part of her face. She is in a face-to-face customer relations position. What do I do? My answer is that she'd be canned.
Am I a right-wing fascist dickhead? Nope. I'm simply making an economic decision that results in putting more food on my table. I have no duty or obligation to carry the costs of an employee's body mod. To the extent that prejudice against body mods remains in my community which prejudice can cost me business, I am not allowing my employees to transfer the payment of that cost so that it comes out of my wallet. It's your decision to body mod, you should pay all the costs.
Until body modded people have protected status under nondiscrimination statutes, I have the right to fire (so long as I have a written policy, etc.), and I will. Not because I hate boddy modding, but because I don't want it to hurt my business.
If you smoke, you choose to pay the costs of smoking, and hyour employer shouldn't have to subsidize you. Likewise, if you body mod, your employer has no obligation to subsidize your lifestyle choice.
If you're gay, black, hispanic, disabled, etc., you cannot be discriminated against unreasonably because it is not a choice. I certainly won't discriminate on any of those grounds. On the other hand, body modders are not "forced" to do anything, and businesses are certainly free to discriminate. They get to make a choice as to whether forgoing that portion of the labor pool is good or bad for business. Based on my experiences, I think people will make similar business decisions as I would -- people with body-mods (obvious ones) will pay a penalty in the workforce as a result.
In today's employment market, I would be loathe (as an employee) to hurt my career prospects by body modding in a way that forces me into a competitive disadvantage. If your choices are based on non-monetary concerns, by all means mod away, but don't cry about it if it hurts your job prospects. If you do, you're being either whiny or naive, and neither of those characteristics are things I look for in my employees.
Everyone keeps going on about how OS X on intel will be "familiar" to Windows users, enticing them to switch. I don't see it. It'll still be OS X. Maybe porting software will be easier since the chip architecture is the same, but the interface will still be different, the mode/method of operation will still be different, and it will still look and feel different than Windows v.whatever.
Apple will likely have a more secure OS, which will likely continue to attract users (and corporate IT types) and I think it will ultimately be cheaper to buy Apple stuff than it is now. On the other hand, there is still a huge base of Windows users who will still (for the most part) get most apps developed for them (first).
In addition, the Linux crowd will stil chafe at using Apple, since Apple is not OSS, though it is more OSS than MSFT. Also, the cheapo people in the crowd (like me) will still look for commodity hardware on which to install OSS *nices because we won't fork over for an OSS where you can't see all the bits and fiddle with same. Plus, there it is virtually assured that Apple will not guarantee/support their OS on everything that *nix can be run on.
Is this a revolution? Sort of, but maybe not. It'll piss off that Mac fan-boys, it'll inconvenience some MacUsers and MacDevelopers while there is a changeover from to Intel chips. On the other hand, getting Windows software to work on Macs will be much, much easier, and that should be a "good thing" (tm).
The idea that Apple has been building for Intel for a while (in tests) is encouraging, but it is no guarantee that you'll be able to go to Part R Us and buy a beige box and install OS X on it. Far from it.
One of the problems people run into is that buying stuff makes them feel better. I'm way past that. I buy things that I need, and I constantly try to evaluate the things I already have to see if I can make better use of them to fulfill a perceived need I may think I have.
When buying stuff, I also wait. To wit: I recently wanted to get a new mountain bike. I waited for a local police department's auction of bikes that were lost/confiscated over the course of the last year. I got a nearly mint (needed a rear tire tube) Trek bike for $30.00. I felt like a thief carting it out of the auction.
I recently needed a monitor for a used xServer I got from a surplus place for my office. I asked around, and I found a friend who was getting rid of monitors because he "needed" a flat panel monitor. I got it for the price of hauling instead of paying $80.00 for a new one.
I recently was driving down the street to the grocery store on trash day, and I saw a fisher-price parking garage toy like I had in the 70's. It worked great when I stopped to examine it. A little cleaning, and BINGO, a toy for my 3.5 year old was had for nothing. He loves it, BTW.
I have oodles of used baby stuff for my 7 mo. old. She's a girl, but she wears girl/boy stuff from friends, because at 7 mo. old, I don't think she really cares, as long as she's warm/clean. It was had for nothing, unlike other folks I know who must get everything new and unblemished at Gap for kids. She's just going to spit up on the stuff anyway.
I refuse to waste my money on new and shiny. I don't need it.
If this is going to work, scientists will need copies of both the DNA in the nucleus AND mitochondria (and ways to synthesize the nucleus and mitochondria of the target organism).
RTFA:
"It has been very difficult thus far to get anything other than mitochondrial DNA from ancient material," he said.
Recovering the mitochondrial DNA is not as big an issue.
Pennsylvania has almost the exact sort of law online right now. Essentially, if someone complains about child pr0n, the AG verifies is (got me as to how -- "She look 18 to you?" "No." "Add the site to the list." Great job, btw -- reviewing pr0n sites to see if they comply with the law).
To make a long story short, it had little to no practical effect in PA and (I believe) it was recently overturned by the 3rd Circuit on appeal.
I find that if I feel like I am becoming bored on a project I try to break it up into smaller challanges, each of which is individually intersting.
I think that is excellent advice. In a manner of speaking, it is a way of "tricking" yourself -- viewed as a whole, many projects (after a burst of initial enthusiasm and excitement) become boring and work. Your method of dealing with it seems to me to be sensible. One of the frustrations in getting details on a project done is that some are fun to deal with and others seem to be intractable or involve doing things that aren't enjoyable or seem overwhelming, therefore, effort in those areas can peter out and those areas of the project wither on the vine.
People with good systems in place to deal with common problems -- such as doing things that may not be enjoyable or, alternatively, figuring ways to maintain interest in projects to make sure that everything gets done or figuring a way out of this run-on sentence -- those are the people who tend to be successful. From my observations, it is less innate intelligence than good personal work systems that differentiate high performers from underachievers.
In my line of work (I am an attorney) everyone has a college degree plus at least three years of graduate work, was smart enough to plan for and pass the bar, etc. Simply to get to be an attorney involves clearing a bunch of hurdles that weed people out who are ineffective on some fundamental level (insert lawyer jokes here if you want to be cynical). Starting with that base group of folks, I regularly observe some people who are chronic deadline-missers, who put out shoddy work, or who are otherwise not operating at as high a level as I think they should. Others seem to be able to get everything done and kick ass and take names while doing it. I wouldn't say that, as a general principle, the lower performers are "not as smart" or "not hard workers" -- the difference seems to me to be how effective their work systems are. And work systems are, essentially, ways to trick your brain into doing things that it really isn't meant to do.
A book I recently read mentioned an example where, when you wish to remember to take something in to the office in the morning, you put it in front of the door. This is essentially a trick to overcome your morning sluggishness. Things like this, in other contexts, make up your systems for getting things done (I think that was the name of the book, FWIW -- "Getting things done"), and the better systems you have in place, the more effective you are.
None of this speaks directly to the study described ever-so-briefly in the FA, but it does speak to the parent posts -- people that think of themselves as "inventors" to leave the details to others to finish up may simply have holes in their net of systems for methodically completing work. If their value as a sheer visionary is powerful enough, they may be valuable enough to an employer (or themselves) that the holes don't cause them career problems, but I'd bet that the same person with the same visionary ability with better work systems would be more successful, which is essentially a "me too" to the parent post.
Women's advocacy groups pick and choose sex differences to be outraged over:
Women:
1. live longer 2. are less likely to be victimized by violent crime 3. are less likely to be killed in war 4. are less likely to suffer birth defects 5. are less likely to go to jail 6. are less likely to be substance abusers (alcohol, smoking, illegal drugs) 7. are more likely to go to, and complete, college 8. are less likely to be high-school drop-outs
Raise the possibility that some things that women are not as good at, such as abstract reasoning, however, and you'll be slaughtered in public.
What your vote does count for is telling the electoral college their chances of getting re-appointed to their position. If the votes represent a statistical winner then they better vote that way or they may not be voting much longer themselves.
Your vote doesn't even count for that much. In an election where millions vote, you are more unlikely to affect the outcome than you are likely to win the daily number drawing in any given state. And, again, even if your vote is the one that tips the balance, it probably won't count anyway since the ballot challenging process will start immediately following the election. Voting, other than in very low-turnout local elections, is the equivalent of pissing in the wind.
You're better off spending the time on an alternative activity such as reading a book or picking lint from your navel. On the other hand, if you derive some sort of alternative benefit (such as a psychological benefit) from the act of voting, it may have a significant enough economic payoff to be worthwhile. Thinking that your vote will affect the outcome, however, is simply delusional.
It is inefficient (from a micro standpoint) to vote. Your vote is not likely to be the "difference maker" in an election, and even if it is, a tight election will result in lawsuits in which the consequences of your vote may be overturned anyway. In short, don't vote -- you're wasting your time.
Ahhh...heck. I just think people whouldn't vote because, from a microeconomic standpoint, it is inefficient. As we all learned from the last election, the likelihood that your vote would be the deciding vote is next to infinitesimal. In addition, even if it is the deciding vote, the lawyers will muck everything up anyway. Why waste the time voting?
That being said, I did vote (to keep my grandmother happy). I also note that I am very interested in the outcome of the election. A ton of handy election-night tools can be found here, including electoral college vote trackers, poll-closing time charts, pre-election polls, etc. Should be a fun night for all.
I am a sole practitioner in Pennsylvania. For time tracking and billing, I use Quickbooks Pro. I use free or OSS apps wherever I can if a viable tool is available, such as OpenOffice (which my office uses exclusively), Mozilla, Pegasus Mail (non-OSS, but free and more importantly, not Outlook), and the Palm Desktop for scheduling.
I looked far and wide for an OSS "lawyer" app, but eventually, I gave up and spent a few hundred USD on Quickbooks. For my office, it does everything I need for time tracking, billing, trust accounting, check-writing, etc. I just could not rationalize trying to kludge something together when I simply needed something that worked.
The time I would have spent trying to put something together would have been far outweighed by the cost of not doing billable client work, and I couldn't afford to have a critical system based on an immature product. I decided that my business was that of a law office, and not a software development house, so I decided against trying to build something from scratch.
In any case, with the proliferation of relatively inexpensive products that do exactly what I needed, I thought it would be penny wise and pound foolish to try to do it with products that aren't ready. I need to feed my family and my student loan company, and evangelism for the sake of evangelism didn't strike me as being something I wanted to do under these circumstances.
My advice is to go to Staples, plunk down a few hundred for Quickbooks and be done with it. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.
For what it's worth, QB is not immediately intuitive on how to do certain things (like client trust accouts, for instance) but it does handle them reasonably well in my circumstances. Also, client credits and contingent fee cases are less than intuitive, but I've made it work pretty well for me. I also do not like the fact that I cannot figure out how to make the thing print a batch of invoices (not just a "statement") for all accounts with balances that are outstanding. In addition, I wish there was (or that I knew of) some way to apply time from time sheets to clients' accounts automatically, rather than having to do it manually. That is a big annoyance. Fortunately, I have a small base of clients for whom I do a lot of work, so that issue is not critical for me -- I just have to create invoices for a few clients each month. If it were dozens (or more), it would be a royal pain in the ass.
QB could be much better if it were tweaked somewhat to make a special "Lawyer Edition" but the Pro edition will be workable under most small firm scenarios I can imagine. Unfortunately, you'll need a Windows box. I note that QB Pro would occasionally barf on me under Win 98, but under XP is has been very reliable.
My old office used PC Law, and I hated it vigorously. I have not used Time Matters or Time Slips, so I cannot intelligently opine about those products. I even know some folks who just use Quicken. From speaking to others, however, I think that there is no "perfect" solution, which is why the commercial software market for attorneys is so fractured -- each product has strengths and weaknesses, and there is no clear "winner" yet.
Because the commercial market is still (IMHO) without a clear winner, a good OSS project could conceivably come in and win the day. I would be receptive to something along those lines, but it would need to come a long way from any of the examples I either looked at or saw referred in this article and the subsequent posts.
I mean come on, if the observable universe is TINY, and we've only examined a TINY portion of that, isn't it a bit too early to say "That's it, we're all alone" ?
Maybe. What about the Von Neumann waves and the Fermi paradox?
Pennsylvania has a "giving false information" statute. I have a client right now who is facing a misdemeanor charge for (allegedly) giving a policeman a false name when she was caught with a bag of weed.
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Insurance companies not only insure yuo against monetary losses, they also must provide a reasonable defense. So, yes, they will "defend" you. More importantly, if they try to defend you too aggressively (i.e. by not settling a valid claim within the policy limits, which results in a judgment against you in excess of the policy limits), you can then sue the insurance company for handling the claim against you in bad faith.
Essentially, the "bad faith" claim is there to protect the insured from the insurance company from betting with someone else's money. For instance:
Joe Negligent has an auto policy with a $100,000 limit for liability. Joe hits Wally Whiplash. Wally's suffers facial scarring and he is young and unmarried. Wally goes to Larry Lawyer who sues Joe Negligent.
Idiot Insurance is notified by Joe Negligent of the claim. Idiot Insurance analyzes the claim and figures the case might be worth about 90,000. Larry Lawyer sends in a demand letter for the policy limits. Idiot Insurance refuses to pay.
Larry Lawyer tries the case, and a jury comes back with a $125,000 verdict for Wally Whiplash, which exceeds Joe Negligent's policy limits. Joe is on the hook because Idiot Insurance gambled (and lost) on the value a jury would assign to the claim, and Joe Negligent suffered as a result, since Wally Whiplash was willing to settle for the policy limits but Idiot Insurance refused to do it.
Joe Negligent can then sue Idiot Insurance for "bad faith." Alternatively (and this is what usually happens) He assigns his claim to Wally Whiplash to settle his case with Wally (Joe Negligent is frequently judgment-proof), and Wally Whiplash sues Idiot Insurance, who must then pay the excess in virtually all cases.
In any case, that's an overview of a "get sued and have insurance company defend it"-gone-bad scenario.
GF.
The idea is so preposterous that it is unimaginable (just like the laptop story earlier today). All the posts explaining *precisely* why the idea is idiotic probably took something like a few thousand man hours to write/read.
What a waste of space. Nobody is going to make money going to Mars in the next 20 years. Bank on it. Nobody is going to Mars in the next 20 years. Bank on it.
The only money to be made on this boondoggle is by fleecing money from dreamers.
Space exploration with meat in the exploration vehicles is a total waste of time and money. Send a robot. The current Mars successes are wonderful reasons why we shouldn't send meat to Mars.
By 2025, we'll all be so jacked into our VR worlds banging Jenna Haze that we won't give a shit if we go to Mars anyway.
As a reference, I cite Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, which I refer to by shorthand as "the porn fantasy book." We're all going to be circuits and software someday anyway, so the idea of saving humanity by exploring space is ridiculous anyway. We'll be able to send ourselves anywhere in the universe without the meat, given enough time, starting in about a hundred years, if we haven't solved Fermi's Paradox ourselves the hard way.
I felt a tinge of regret for a nano second after seeing the iPod phone release. What's the big deal? My Treo 650 plays video, it displays pictures, it plays mp3 files (I have a 512mb card stuffed into it and could get bigger ones pretty easily), it takes pictures (not great, just VGA, but nice for a phone), and it takes movies w/ sound, which have been a nice addition to my personal blog or my family (mostly pictures of the chilluns). Oh yeah, it also works as a PDA and a phone.
I don't see why the iPod phone is that big a deal. The Treos have been able to play mp3s for a while now. Too bad palm didn't name them r0x0rz or whatever. Apple is so about image.
Give me a Treo any day of the week.
I seriously considered getting a Google Mini for my law office. The desktop search stuff wasn't really doing it for us, and we have boatloads of work that we reuse on a regular basis -- pleadings/contracts/settlement agreements, etc. are sort of like code in that respect -- we always want to reuse our knowledge rather than reinventing the wheel. My concern was that the regular Google appliance was too expensive. The mini seemed reasonable, but I still was resisting the idea of paying that much for search.
In any case, I had searched high and low for a decent search function when I happened upon swish-e. I am exceptionally pleased with it. It can be found at swish-e.org.
I am not an uber geek, but I was capable of spending an afternoon monkeying with it to install it, set up regular indexing as a cron job, get it to properly read and index OpenOffice documents, and to launch them from the browser. This involved some frightening security settings, but I have a small enough office (three people) that I'm not too torqued about this. The wide open settings I used were not swish-e's fault, as near as I could tell. Rather, they resulted from my laziness -- "It works well enough now, and the likelihood of malicious use is pretty low, so fuck it".
Obviously, it could be set up a bit more cleanly on my end, but I am really, really happy with it apart from that. Currently, it runs on a used SCSI-RAIDed IBM Netfinity box that I picked up for a little under $500.
The time and money I spent on the hardware plus getting it running has paid immense dividends. I have benefitted in two primary ways:
First: my office minions use the network for storage and do not store anything locally. This means that everything is indexed (and can be found!) and because they like the search so much, they also (unwittingly, perhaps) give me the peace of mind knowing that our data also gets the other benefits of being on the network (everything is backed up automatically/regularly, etc.).
They like being able to find stuff, so the search has really encouraged saving stuff on the network. I could mandate this in other ways, but I'd rather have them drinking my Kool Aid than simply imposing the idea.
Second: My minions and I have saved tons of time using the search feature. Any good search does that. The additional bonus is that I no longer have to worry about the next version of Google Desktop or Copernic or installing it on various machines, blah, blah, blah. It's all centrally saved and configured. Administration is essentially zero since I am getting good search results on all the document types that I need - some old MS Office leftovers, Open Office, and PDF.
I don't see needing to change this in any significant way for at least as long as I keep the hardware. I think that the next time I'll need to touch it will be when the index outgrows the box serving the searches.
The box I'm running has dual 1.something gig pentiums with a gig of RAM. The drives are the weak link, with only 9.1 GB of space available for storage of OS, index, etc. The box also has redundant power supplies, redundant power supplies , redundant ethernet connections (100MB), and redundant ethernet connections (100MB).
The front end to the search is just a standard, "came with it" CGI script (swish.cgi). It works just fine. It gets called up as a webpage locally, and it spits our results.
On a final note, we are pretty aggressive in enforcing standardized file naming conventions. The naming conventions typically include te client name, the matter, a date, the type of document, and the subject of the document. Swish-e has document path, title, title and body searches off the interface we use, and you'll usually find exactly what you're looking for if you're reasonably specific.
On a final note, swish-e has been unsuccessful when I have used the following search terms "nubile blonde woman" and "willing to get with me". In that respect, swish-e has been an outright failure, though it is conceivable that the fault lies with operator error.
GF.
From: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1083195&page =4
"Emergency medical teams from across the country were sent into the region and President Bush cut short his Texas vacation Tuesday to return to Washington to focus on the storm damage."
While it's not obvious from the timing of your post, many of the "anti-Bush" follow-up posts were made well after Bush had already cut his vacation short.
Mindless anti-Bushism is just as bad as mindless pro-Bushism. And no, I'm not suggesting that your comment, though inflammatory, was motivated by the former. Clearly some "me-too" posts were, however.
GF.
Transitioning from one platform to another can be incredibly expensive. It doesn't matter what kind of license the software has.
Bingo. I had the option of starting my business from scratch. Nothing was in place, and I picked and chose from OSS and traditional software. I run a law office, and I ended up with the following:
1. Windows XP (needed it for my accounting package, plus training my minions on LInux was not an appealing idea)
2. Server OS: GNU/Linux
3. Website/Content management: PHP-Nuke
4. File server: Samba
5. Search tool for office network: Swish-e
6. Mail: Thunderbird
7. Office suite: Open Office
8. Browser: Firefox
9. Accounting: Quickbooks
10. AV: AVG
That's really all I need. I have a few pieces here and there: Paperport (which came OEM with my MFC machine) and Palm Desktop (came OEM with my Treo) for instance. I tried to mix and match based on my needs, budget, and consideration of implementation costs (that killed the idea of Linux on the desktop, though that's not out the window (so to speak) just yet -- I may ultimately make that move).
My standard rule in-house is to look OSS first, commercial second. I am clearly the exception in my community right now, by I am spreading the word. I'm not taking a ideological standpoint, simply a cost/beneift approach when spreading the word. I know OSS wins on initial cost (which is important to me now) and my staff has transitioned to Open Office pretty easily since there isn't a huge installed base of MS Office forms in place. In other areas, if an OSS app scratches an itch, I go that route if the software works inthe manner I need it to. If there is no OSS option, or there is a bad one, I do not hesitate to go commercial, and I don't feel badly about it.
FWIW, I know people who still run their offices on DOS Wordperfect versions, and these folks are giving serious consideration to OOO right now as a way to upgrade to a GUI office suite. They don't want to shell out hundreds per seat for MS Office.
YMMV, but ultimately, I think OSS will win/lose on the merits of the software rather than any ideological notion about how software should be created/licensed/distributed, etc. Upfront costs are a significant issue for me as well, but if the OSS software was not good, I wouldn't use it, even if it were free.
Hillary is doing what Presidential candidate hopefuls always do. She's getting some media time.
Yes and no. Obviously, media time is a key element of any public move by a politician -- if a politician speaks in a forest and nobody hears it...yadda, yadda, yadda.
No, what she is after here is some street cred on values issues. Remember Bill Clinton's "Sister Souljah moment? He went out and whacked some rapper chick who was on the fringes of media/Hollywood to give himself some distance and breathing room from criticisms that he was just part of the New York/LA liberal axis. It made him seem more centrist to the people in the middle of the country.
It is astonishing how similar this play is to that one. It's right out of the same handbook.
GF
Where are my mod points when I need them. Fantastic post.
Here's a photo of the Illinois record blue cat (124 pounds), caught this June.
I hire people for my business. I want talented people. On the other hand, I want the clients in my conservative, right-wing community to feel comfortable when they come to my office. I want a professional atmosphere.
I was raised ever so slightly before tatoos and (to a lesser extent) piercings became a big deal. My opinion is that tattoos are for hookers and sailors.
On the other hand, I don't want to exclude people with tattoos and odd piercings from my labor force if it hurts my business.
All things being equal, I will take the non-tattooed, non-pierced person over his/her body modded competitor for a job at my office. Talent will rule, however, to some extent.
I view tattoos/mods (that my clients can see and may be offended/unnerved by) as being a "cost" of hiring the employee. If the cost exceeds the expected benefit, they won't get hired.
Another interesting issue comes up as well -- what to do with Plain Jane who comes into my office unmodded who hits 30 years old and wants to have a lifestyle change to shake things up? She goes out and gets a Mike Tyson tiger tattoo on part of her face. She is in a face-to-face customer relations position. What do I do? My answer is that she'd be canned.
Am I a right-wing fascist dickhead? Nope. I'm simply making an economic decision that results in putting more food on my table. I have no duty or obligation to carry the costs of an employee's body mod. To the extent that prejudice against body mods remains in my community which prejudice can cost me business, I am not allowing my employees to transfer the payment of that cost so that it comes out of my wallet. It's your decision to body mod, you should pay all the costs.
Until body modded people have protected status under nondiscrimination statutes, I have the right to fire (so long as I have a written policy, etc.), and I will. Not because I hate boddy modding, but because I don't want it to hurt my business.
If you smoke, you choose to pay the costs of smoking, and hyour employer shouldn't have to subsidize you. Likewise, if you body mod, your employer has no obligation to subsidize your lifestyle choice.
If you're gay, black, hispanic, disabled, etc., you cannot be discriminated against unreasonably because it is not a choice. I certainly won't discriminate on any of those grounds. On the other hand, body modders are not "forced" to do anything, and businesses are certainly free to discriminate. They get to make a choice as to whether forgoing that portion of the labor pool is good or bad for business. Based on my experiences, I think people will make similar business decisions as I would -- people with body-mods (obvious ones) will pay a penalty in the workforce as a result.
In today's employment market, I would be loathe (as an employee) to hurt my career prospects by body modding in a way that forces me into a competitive disadvantage. If your choices are based on non-monetary concerns, by all means mod away, but don't cry about it if it hurts your job prospects. If you do, you're being either whiny or naive, and neither of those characteristics are things I look for in my employees.
GF.
Everyone keeps going on about how OS X on intel will be "familiar" to Windows users, enticing them to switch. I don't see it. It'll still be OS X. Maybe porting software will be easier since the chip architecture is the same, but the interface will still be different, the mode/method of operation will still be different, and it will still look and feel different than Windows v.whatever.
.02.
Apple will likely have a more secure OS, which will likely continue to attract users (and corporate IT types) and I think it will ultimately be cheaper to buy Apple stuff than it is now. On the other hand, there is still a huge base of Windows users who will still (for the most part) get most apps developed for them (first).
In addition, the Linux crowd will stil chafe at using Apple, since Apple is not OSS, though it is more OSS than MSFT. Also, the cheapo people in the crowd (like me) will still look for commodity hardware on which to install OSS *nices because we won't fork over for an OSS where you can't see all the bits and fiddle with same. Plus, there it is virtually assured that Apple will not guarantee/support their OS on everything that *nix can be run on.
Is this a revolution? Sort of, but maybe not. It'll piss off that Mac fan-boys, it'll inconvenience some MacUsers and MacDevelopers while there is a changeover from to Intel chips. On the other hand, getting Windows software to work on Macs will be much, much easier, and that should be a "good thing" (tm).
The idea that Apple has been building for Intel for a while (in tests) is encouraging, but it is no guarantee that you'll be able to go to Part R Us and buy a beige box and install OS X on it. Far from it.
Just my
GF.
"Don't buy stuff."
One of the problems people run into is that buying stuff makes them feel better. I'm way past that. I buy things that I need, and I constantly try to evaluate the things I already have to see if I can make better use of them to fulfill a perceived need I may think I have.
When buying stuff, I also wait. To wit: I recently wanted to get a new mountain bike. I waited for a local police department's auction of bikes that were lost/confiscated over the course of the last year. I got a nearly mint (needed a rear tire tube) Trek bike for $30.00. I felt like a thief carting it out of the auction.
I recently needed a monitor for a used xServer I got from a surplus place for my office. I asked around, and I found a friend who was getting rid of monitors because he "needed" a flat panel monitor. I got it for the price of hauling instead of paying $80.00 for a new one.
I recently was driving down the street to the grocery store on trash day, and I saw a fisher-price parking garage toy like I had in the 70's. It worked great when I stopped to examine it. A little cleaning, and BINGO, a toy for my 3.5 year old was had for nothing. He loves it, BTW.
I have oodles of used baby stuff for my 7 mo. old. She's a girl, but she wears girl/boy stuff from friends, because at 7 mo. old, I don't think she really cares, as long as she's warm/clean. It was had for nothing, unlike other folks I know who must get everything new and unblemished at Gap for kids. She's just going to spit up on the stuff anyway.
I refuse to waste my money on new and shiny. I don't need it.
GF.
If this is going to work, scientists will need copies of both the DNA in the nucleus AND mitochondria (and ways to synthesize the nucleus and mitochondria of the target organism).
RTFA:
"It has been very difficult thus far to get anything other than mitochondrial DNA from ancient material," he said.
Recovering the mitochondrial DNA is not as big an issue.
My law office has two folks (me and a minion -- sounds like an 80's sit-com). We have used solely OO since start-up over a year ago.
GF.
Pennsylvania has almost the exact sort of law online right now. Essentially, if someone complains about child pr0n, the AG verifies is (got me as to how -- "She look 18 to you?" "No." "Add the site to the list." Great job, btw -- reviewing pr0n sites to see if they comply with the law).
To make a long story short, it had little to no practical effect in PA and (I believe) it was recently overturned by the 3rd Circuit on appeal.
GF
I find that if I feel like I am becoming bored on a project I try to break it up into smaller challanges, each of which is individually intersting.
I think that is excellent advice. In a manner of speaking, it is a way of "tricking" yourself -- viewed as a whole, many projects (after a burst of initial enthusiasm and excitement) become boring and work. Your method of dealing with it seems to me to be sensible. One of the frustrations in getting details on a project done is that some are fun to deal with and others seem to be intractable or involve doing things that aren't enjoyable or seem overwhelming, therefore, effort in those areas can peter out and those areas of the project wither on the vine.
People with good systems in place to deal with common problems -- such as doing things that may not be enjoyable or, alternatively, figuring ways to maintain interest in projects to make sure that everything gets done or figuring a way out of this run-on sentence -- those are the people who tend to be successful. From my observations, it is less innate intelligence than good personal work systems that differentiate high performers from underachievers.
In my line of work (I am an attorney) everyone has a college degree plus at least three years of graduate work, was smart enough to plan for and pass the bar, etc. Simply to get to be an attorney involves clearing a bunch of hurdles that weed people out who are ineffective on some fundamental level (insert lawyer jokes here if you want to be cynical). Starting with that base group of folks, I regularly observe some people who are chronic deadline-missers, who put out shoddy work, or who are otherwise not operating at as high a level as I think they should. Others seem to be able to get everything done and kick ass and take names while doing it. I wouldn't say that, as a general principle, the lower performers are "not as smart" or "not hard workers" -- the difference seems to me to be how effective their work systems are. And work systems are, essentially, ways to trick your brain into doing things that it really isn't meant to do.
A book I recently read mentioned an example where, when you wish to remember to take something in to the office in the morning, you put it in front of the door. This is essentially a trick to overcome your morning sluggishness. Things like this, in other contexts, make up your systems for getting things done (I think that was the name of the book, FWIW -- "Getting things done"), and the better systems you have in place, the more effective you are.
None of this speaks directly to the study described ever-so-briefly in the FA, but it does speak to the parent posts -- people that think of themselves as "inventors" to leave the details to others to finish up may simply have holes in their net of systems for methodically completing work. If their value as a sheer visionary is powerful enough, they may be valuable enough to an employer (or themselves) that the holes don't cause them career problems, but I'd bet that the same person with the same visionary ability with better work systems would be more successful, which is essentially a "me too" to the parent post.
Forgive the length -- I'm a lawyer.
GF.
1. Control Panel:Display:Appearance:Effects -- turn stuff off.
2. Control Panel:Mouse:Pointers -- turn shadow off
3. Leave the desktop blank
4. Run: services.msc -- turn stuff off (Themes, indexing, other items you do not need -- be careful -- here there be dragons)
No, that's not his schvantz, that's his bow son.
His bos'n?
Only...in the Navy!
Women's advocacy groups pick and choose sex differences to be outraged over:
Women:
1. live longer
2. are less likely to be victimized by violent crime
3. are less likely to be killed in war
4. are less likely to suffer birth defects
5. are less likely to go to jail
6. are less likely to be substance abusers (alcohol, smoking, illegal drugs)
7. are more likely to go to, and complete, college
8. are less likely to be high-school drop-outs
Raise the possibility that some things that women are not as good at, such as abstract reasoning, however, and you'll be slaughtered in public.
GF
What your vote does count for is telling the electoral college their chances of getting re-appointed to their position. If the votes represent a statistical winner then they better vote that way or they may not be voting much longer themselves.
Your vote doesn't even count for that much. In an election where millions vote, you are more unlikely to affect the outcome than you are likely to win the daily number drawing in any given state. And, again, even if your vote is the one that tips the balance, it probably won't count anyway since the ballot challenging process will start immediately following the election. Voting, other than in very low-turnout local elections, is the equivalent of pissing in the wind.
You're better off spending the time on an alternative activity such as reading a book or picking lint from your navel. On the other hand, if you derive some sort of alternative benefit (such as a psychological benefit) from the act of voting, it may have a significant enough economic payoff to be worthwhile. Thinking that your vote will affect the outcome, however, is simply delusional.
GF
Folks:
It is inefficient (from a micro standpoint) to vote. Your vote is not likely to be the "difference maker" in an election, and even if it is, a tight election will result in lawsuits in which the consequences of your vote may be overturned anyway. In short, don't vote -- you're wasting your time.
GF.
Another de-voted anarchist refusing to vote.
Ahhh...heck. I just think people whouldn't vote because, from a microeconomic standpoint, it is inefficient. As we all learned from the last election, the likelihood that your vote would be the deciding vote is next to infinitesimal. In addition, even if it is the deciding vote, the lawyers will muck everything up anyway. Why waste the time voting?
That being said, I did vote (to keep my grandmother happy). I also note that I am very interested in the outcome of the election. A ton of handy election-night tools can be found here, including electoral college vote trackers, poll-closing time charts, pre-election polls, etc. Should be a fun night for all.
GF
I am a sole practitioner in Pennsylvania. For time tracking and billing, I use Quickbooks Pro. I use free or OSS apps wherever I can if a viable tool is available, such as OpenOffice (which my office uses exclusively), Mozilla, Pegasus Mail (non-OSS, but free and more importantly, not Outlook), and the Palm Desktop for scheduling.
I looked far and wide for an OSS "lawyer" app, but eventually, I gave up and spent a few hundred USD on Quickbooks. For my office, it does everything I need for time tracking, billing, trust accounting, check-writing, etc. I just could not rationalize trying to kludge something together when I simply needed something that worked.
The time I would have spent trying to put something together would have been far outweighed by the cost of not doing billable client work, and I couldn't afford to have a critical system based on an immature product. I decided that my business was that of a law office, and not a software development house, so I decided against trying to build something from scratch.
In any case, with the proliferation of relatively inexpensive products that do exactly what I needed, I thought it would be penny wise and pound foolish to try to do it with products that aren't ready. I need to feed my family and my student loan company, and evangelism for the sake of evangelism didn't strike me as being something I wanted to do under these circumstances.
My advice is to go to Staples, plunk down a few hundred for Quickbooks and be done with it. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.
For what it's worth, QB is not immediately intuitive on how to do certain things (like client trust accouts, for instance) but it does handle them reasonably well in my circumstances. Also, client credits and contingent fee cases are less than intuitive, but I've made it work pretty well for me. I also do not like the fact that I cannot figure out how to make the thing print a batch of invoices (not just a "statement") for all accounts with balances that are outstanding. In addition, I wish there was (or that I knew of) some way to apply time from time sheets to clients' accounts automatically, rather than having to do it manually. That is a big annoyance. Fortunately, I have a small base of clients for whom I do a lot of work, so that issue is not critical for me -- I just have to create invoices for a few clients each month. If it were dozens (or more), it would be a royal pain in the ass.
QB could be much better if it were tweaked somewhat to make a special "Lawyer Edition" but the Pro edition will be workable under most small firm scenarios I can imagine. Unfortunately, you'll need a Windows box. I note that QB Pro would occasionally barf on me under Win 98, but under XP is has been very reliable.
My old office used PC Law, and I hated it vigorously. I have not used Time Matters or Time Slips, so I cannot intelligently opine about those products. I even know some folks who just use Quicken. From speaking to others, however, I think that there is no "perfect" solution, which is why the commercial software market for attorneys is so fractured -- each product has strengths and weaknesses, and there is no clear "winner" yet.
Because the commercial market is still (IMHO) without a clear winner, a good OSS project could conceivably come in and win the day. I would be receptive to something along those lines, but it would need to come a long way from any of the examples I either looked at or saw referred in this article and the subsequent posts.
GF
I mean come on, if the observable universe is TINY, and we've only examined a TINY portion of that, isn't it a bit too early to say "That's it, we're all alone" ?
Maybe. What about the Von Neumann waves and the Fermi paradox?
GF.
Pennsylvania has a "giving false information" statute. I have a client right now who is facing a misdemeanor charge for (allegedly) giving a policeman a false name when she was caught with a bag of weed.
GF.