Maybe someone else actually answered your question, but I scanned the top-rate responses and didn't see it. So here goes.
No. Given your concerns - disorganization and mismanagement, merit-rewards and bureaucracy - non-military employers are, in my experience, always worse in every category.
This is simply the nature of the beast. The military loves to plan, and is allowed to. Its budgets are set ahead of time, its goals and standards are relatively well-defined and stable, its policies and merit system relatively clear cut.
The closer you get to a purely commercial venture, the farther away you get from all of those things. An aggressively company in a competitive market is much more reactive than pre-planned. Budget and goals can change instantly as management's perception of the market changes. One twitchy exec can wipe out a whole division in a heartbeat. Even when the business is stable, standards and policies tend to be ad hoc. Such standards and policies that do exist, exist only to make your life harder. If you try to do something new, you have to convince the bureaucracy first; but if something non-standard and anti-policy does get done, you will have to accomodate it: nobody is going to pay the replace a working dohicky with a compliant dohicky that does the same thing.
As for merits and rewards: while your supervisor may try to be fair (or may not), the bigger issue is that he can only split the pot he is given. If you do brilliant, excellent work for a company, (or division of a company, or product line within the division) which is not profitable "enough", you get nada. Conversely, if you are a lucky screw-off who works for a group that fell into and owns a particularly profitable niche, you can do pretty well even though you and everybody else are almost worthless. Whether that is good or bad, it's hard to argue that it's fair.
In my opinion, having worked for a range of employers, you will find the easiest transition at defense contractors or well-heeled acedemic institutions. They tend to plan and have stable budgets, and don't worry to much about competively pressures. If you are spectacularly brilliant, you might find that one of the big, successful high-tech companies you. They can be horrible places, but if they are big enough, rich enough, and you are good enough, you can be insulated against much of that horribleness. But, most important of all, stay away from startups - especially privately-held startups - double especially family-owned startups. The unfairness and disorder found there would leave you absolutely breathless.
Note to/.'ers: before you burn me, consider the class of issues that this guy raised. If you want to gamble on getting rich, join a startup. If you want to move into management someday, join a big technical company. But if you want organization, stable management, and merit-based rewards... good luck finding that anywhere. Sadly, IMHO, the best that this world offers, as a whole, are defense contractors and well-funded colleges.
What a strange question to ask. Isn't/. the home of open source advocacy? Isn't the motto that "information wants to be free?"
Let me ask you something. When you look something up on google, and you find a set of reasonable, internally consistent answers, do you keep looking? When you check snopes.com for background on some piece of email that someone forward to you, do you read it and say "naw, that's not right"? Or do you accept those sources as authoritative, and use them as the basis for your future actions and beliefs?
My buddy HorrorIsland posted two links in an earlier discussion about this topic. Nobody else seems to have noticed the post, but I thought they were pretty revealing. So here they are again: a Google image search for "tiananmen" on Chinese Google versus the same search on American Google. Notice any difference?
One way (maybe the only) way to keep information from being free is to flood the minds of inquirers with false information. If google kept itself out of China, people there might not know the truth, but at least they'd know that they did not know. With google there, but only providing half-truths, at least some people will be deceived.
Google has made a bad decision. When and if China every does become free, they'll have to answer for it.
Besides, even if Mao were actually harmless, why all the fuss? Did the agents confiscate the book? Did the threaten the reader? If not, then what's the big deal with them stopping by to see who was reading the book, and why?
What's so amusing about all this hysteria is watching all these posters freely expressing the most outrageous nonsense about how their free speech rights have disappeared.
I'm not defending E.U.'s actions - I'm not a lawyer, and I haven't read an analysis from anyone I trust - but that doesn't matter. I'm mainly reacting to U.S. posters, many of whom would be barely effected by this EU action, no matter how awful it might be.
In the U.S. (and many other places), free speech is much more imperiled from the left than the right. To take just one example: why on earth is "hate speech" against the law? Isnt it still speech? It certainly is more so than other "protected speech" like exotic dancing and obscene photography. "When I was a boy, I learned that "sticks and stones won't break my bones, and names will never harm me." If I ever came home crying because of someelses *words*, I wouldn't have gotten much sympathy from *my* parents. What's changed since then?
The truth is, this whole notion that "privacy is a Right" is solely a beard for abortion. Remove it from the equation, and all the rest vanishs. Unless, that is, you believe that technology creates Rights. To see what I mean, think back to 19th century America. Small towns, in-person shopping, face-to-face conversations, - all of which lend themselves to other people knowing everything you buy, everyone you meet, and everything you said... unless you were very, very careful about where and with whom you interacted. Did the people back then like that? Probably not. But neither did they think they had any right to expect anything else. Did they any privacy rights? Certainly - but only those explicitly in our Constitution: things like protects from unreasonable search and the like.
Nor should they have such privacy rights. The very idea undermines, for example, criminal prosecution on all types of cases. Say you bought an ax, snuck out of the basement one night, and hacked your mother to bits (because, see, all slashdotters live in their mother's basements...). If you bought the ax from me in person, am I not permitted to know that? Am I forbidden to testify to that? How then is that different than if you bought the ax online from Al's Little Shop of Axes? The website can't testify, and the UPS guy won't know what you bought. So how else is that testimony going to be given, if not through a trace of your on-line activity?
I think a big part of the reason for all the misunderstands is the whirl of "privacy memes" floating around these days. If you stop for a moment and think about them, you can see what nonsense they all are. For example, take this one: "keep government out of our bedrooms." People say that to protect their own sexual behavior, or behavior which they personally tolerate, but do they really mean that incest should be ignored? How about child molesting? Rape? Bestiality? Those are all sexual behaviors that often happen inside bedrooms too. Doesn't the government have a right - even a responsibility - to regulate those behaviors? If you think that you've been over-regulated, then take up the matter with your lawmakers. If they won't listen, try talking to the voters. If even that doesn't work, then live with the restrictions, or move to someplace more to your liking. But don't try to distort the entire structure of society!
I could go on and on, but the point is, hopefully, made. Take off your tinfoil hats, children - it's time to face reality! If you're really overwhelmed with concerns about your privacy, here's a thought - quit doing and saying things of which you have reason to be ashamed!
Re:The children will ask themselves
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My brother teaches at a vocational school, where all the issues are a bit starker, and he puts it this way: "Some kids will fail no matter how much I help. Some will succeed no matter how little I help. That's why I focus on the ones in-between - because that's where I can make a difference."
Lem is great... but he didn't write in English. That alone disqualifies him, but even if he didn't, I doubt he's well enough known to win a popularity contest like this one. Too bad, of course - he is unquestionably the greatest sci-fi writer that I've ever read.
Incidently, I found your comparision to Dick both apt and ironic, given that their interestinghistory.
I'm glad that you enjoy the conversation. I appreciate your reply as well. It's rare not to have people demonizing each other.
This is the real root of the pro-choice argument for me -- that her right to control her body trumps the right of the potential human growing inside her to control her body.
You're entirely correct - that is the heart of the debate.
It saddens me that we even have to have such a discussion, but I accept that it is human nature. Our whole history has been filled with attempts to define some people as slightly less human than others. It makes life so much more convenient. The result has been slavery, genocide, sexual discrimination, and religious warfare. There will be a day when it allows euthanasia, if we aren't already gotten at that point. The same impulse drives much of the public fascination with androids - an almost human creature that can be ordered to do whatever you want. Personally, I believe we will sooner see creatures, genetically-engineered to be legally subhuman, which fill this role.
There is no aspect of this de-humanizing impulse that I find noble or praise-worthy. That is why I reject it in all of its forms, regardless of the inconveniences that may result.
BTW, I don't mean to demonize you by this analysis. I'm sure that you do disapprove of slavery, etc. If not, there'd be no point writing that list - you'd simply nod your head approvingly as you read it. I'm sure you think that the distinction between a fetus and a delivered baby is important. But I hope you will recognize that those who did support slavery or justified violence and oppression on the basis of gender, religion, tribe, or whatever all believed with their whole hearts that whatever distinction they were concerned about was also essential to the definition of true humanity. In their cases, we now look back and think they were all wrong. Personally, I hope and believe that, if mankind survives long enough, someday people will look back on the abortion era the same way we look back on the slavery era, and wonder "how on earth did they justify treating other human beings that way?"
As to your specific questions: if I were to teleport you into space, by your logic I would not be killing you - I would merely be removing you from the environment which supports your life. I disagree - I think I would be killing you. It doesn't matter how much of a burden you would be to me if you were not teleported into space:-). If the sci-fi aspect of this example bothers you, replace it with me kicking you out of a submarine airlock at the bottom of the ocean, or abandoning you in the desert, or... you get the idea.
Another, slightly off-topic point: you refer to the "courts" forcing a woman not to have an abortion. It is in fact the courts which are currently forcing all of us to allow abortion. In the absence of Roe v. Wade, it would be state law, written by elected officials, who produced whatever regulation governed abortion. To the extent that one believes in democracy, that seems better than using the courts, which are fundamentally non-democratic. Note that, of the three possible positions one could take - use the courts to forbid all abortion everywhere; use the courts to allow abortion everywhere; and leave it to legislators to pass the appropriate laws which reflect the will of the people - until Roe v. Wade, the US took the third position. There was never a significant effort to impose the non-democratic first option. Of course, speaking personally, I now think we should impose the first option, in order to clearly support the sanctity of human life. Otherwise, I see Huxley-esque nightmare scenarios in the very near future, as I indicated earlier.
You make three important points. The first is that the question is not "when does life begin". The question is really, "when does humanity begin". Each sperm cell is alive, as is each egg; but neither alone is human. As a simple rule of thumb, I'd say a human being is an organism with two human parents. Mental development is irrelevant - work with the severely retarded for a month, and tell me that they aren't human - and so are minor genetic defects. Incidently, this definition eliminates all the confusion that some people seem to have between killing a fetus and killing, say, a skin cell. The issue is, does the destruction of that cell or cluster of cells destroy the organism? The number of cells involved doesn't matter in the least. We all seem to understand that when we're talking about adults - we don't confuse the harm of putting a tiny, tiny bullet hole in someone's head with the benefit of a surgeon removing a 10 pound tumor - so I don't know why people get confused when the person involved is a fetus.
Your second point, about the right to personal freedom vs. another person's right to life, is also good. However, you choose the wrong analogy. I tend to use this example: you are driving somewhere in a hurry, so you take a shortcut through an alleyway, too narrow for you to open your doors. Halfway along you see a drunken bum wander halfway across the alley, lie down, and pass out. You honk, you flash your lights, but the bum is oblivious. You try to back up, but your reverse gear decides just then to break. So you're stuck in the alley behind this bum. What situations would give you the right to drive over the bum, killing him? If you were bleeding to death? If you were hungry? If you had a million-dollar commission on the line? If you were late to work? If you were simply tired of waiting? Legally, you could only justify killing the bum if your own life (or the life of someone else) was in imminent danger. How much more reluctant should one be when the life to be taken is not that of a drunken sot, but the innocent life of one's own child?
Your third point, about the twins, shows two misunderstandings. First, once the zygote splits into two independent organisms, they are just that - independent. As such, neither has any special obligation to the other. Second, you seem to assume that there are only two options: help, or harm. There are in fact three options: help, harm, or do nothing. For example, if you and I were in a steakhouse, and you began to choke, I could 1) give you a Heimlich, 2) keep eating, or 3) stab you in the heart with my steak knife. A prohibition against 3) does not take away my option to do either 1) or 2). In the abortion context, that means that prohibiting abortion except when the mother's life is unusually threatened does not impose a requirement to use extreme measures to save every pregnancy. Society can choose to continue eating its meal, if it wants. So can the twin in your example.
Incidentally, I should clarify when I mean by "unusually threatened". One of my cousin's was pregnant when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She was told that she needed to have an immediate hysterectomy just to save her own life; that saving her child was impossible in either case. In a case like that, I and all of my family would have supported that option, if she was willing to do it. As it happens, she was not. As it happens, her second son was born healthy, started college this year, and she survived both the childbirth and the hysterectomy that followed and is still alive today to enjoy it.
Here's what I find odd: If it really was "certain" that Japan would have surrendered in a few months, why the hell not surrender right then? What, you think they enjoyed strapping kids into flying bombs and dropping them on U.S. ships for nothing?
Apparently you believe that this imminent surrender should have been obvious to the U.S. government thousands of miles away. Surely it should have been even clearer to the Japanese government and military!
I don't think either side expected Japan to surrender any time soon. It just doesn't make sense. In addition to what I've already mentioned, we know that many Japanese who heard the emperor surrender were so convinced they were winning that they didn't even understand what he was saying. They certainly didn't expect a surrender. Also, the spirit of that nation was completely broken. What does that tell you? It tells me that their loss was a complete shock to them.
And if they did expect to surrender, that's even worse. The delay could only be so they could inflict more casualties on the other side. If they expected to surrender anyway, those casualties would have been pointless, except perhaps to the emperor's ego. In other words, it's his fault. He should have surrendered sooner!
Anyway, it hardly matters. America never used a nuke again, although we could have( and probably should have. Hello, Mr. Stalin! I'm thinking of you!!!) If nuking Japan was a war crime of any sort, it was a first offense, and we've certainly been model citizens since.
Besides, consider the benefits that Japan received by being broken and remade. Pre-war Japan was a brutal, backward, hostile and dangerous place - not somewhere you want to be unless you were a highly placed male, and certainly no one you'd want for a neighbor. Post-war Japan is one of the greatest success stories of all time - wealthy, stable, free, and quite peaceful. Or to put it in slashdot terms: atom bomb == anime; no atom bomb == watercolors paintings of Mount Fuji. You tell me which is better!
"Emotionally the game is great"? You've got to be kidding! First, they don't really respond to anything you say. It seems to me that they are just looking for certain keywords. Hit the keyword, and Grace says "Thanks, that helps me." Oooh, that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy... yeah, like a poodle jumping through a hoop.
The big "secrets" are nothing that any stranger wouldn't learn about both of them in about 10 minutes of casual conversation. So how is it that these married blockheads don't know them already?
And even if such emotional retards could actually live outside a group home, I still wouldn't want to be their friend, because they are both mean and controlling. Specifics would give away the big "secrets", but really, nobody should have to live with either of them.
Fortunately, because the characters, situation, and story were all too ridiculous to believe, I'm happy to leave them to it.
What a waste of bandwidth! This stinker gets 'F's from me right across the board. If this is the future, Lord, take me now!
Everybody who is interested in space and *thinks* they understand the space shuttle costs and risks should read the linked article by Derbyshire. Agree or disagree, but do so based on all the facts...
I think you forgot hate speech laws. I believe various U.S. states have such laws, and occasionally do press criminal charges. Certainly a number of other countries do. The so-called defenders of free speech seem unconcerned about these infringments on the first amendment. Apparently, we've almost reached the point where actual emotions, starting with hate, are criminal in-and-of themselves. Can the thought police be far behind?
Obviously, these laws get justified by analogy to the law against calling out "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. Like so many slippery slopes, this seems to be a reasonable abridgement of freedom. After that, the slippery slope takes over.
Ah! if only the whole world were like slashdot, where any statement can be freely made, no matter how unpopular! Okay, kiddies, time to mod me down to oblivion...
You cringe? Why? Why is this any worse than the redefinition of the word to mean homosexual? I'd say that effort was worse, because it was a deliberate, coordinated "re-branding", cynically co-opting a positive, happy word. I, for one, refuse to refer to homosexuality or homosexuals as "gay". Why should I allow myself to be manipulated? Instead, I don't use "gay" at all. As far as I'm concerned, all that the homosexual advocates have accomplished is the pointless destruction of a word. While I don't approve of this new usage that you describe either, don't expect many tears from me if you are upset by it. If the word's meaning hadn't be twisted in the first place, it wouldn't be happening now.
I didn't miss the "point" - I simply ignored it. The comparison is ridiculous. What, do you think that there is some Dr. Evil type character out there, trying to figure out how to do the greatest damage possible without blowing his budget? Do you think Disney is going to transition ABC into a nuclear plant operator just so they can get cheaper fines?
Fines aren't set according to somebody's idea about their relative importance. They are set to the level that encourages compliance. For nuclear industries and such, that level does not need to be enormous. After all, the whole point of regulations in those industries is prevent harm. If they really accomplish that, most members of the industry will already try to comply with most regulations most of the time even without fines. After all, if real harm should occur, the costs to the organization through civil lawsuits and perhaps even criminal prosecution would be enormous - much larger than any regulator fine would be.
For those industries, the benefits of regulatory fines are two-fold: first, they ensure that every organization in the industry lives to the same standards, thereby leveling the playing field and reducing the competitive pressure to cut corners on safety; and second, they provide a financial incentive to fund compliance activities. After all, if it costs $100,000 to comply, and $200,000 in fines if you don't, what industry wouldn't comply?
On the other hand, in the broadcast industry, the only incentive that the industry has to comply with regulations is the FCC and it's fines. What, do you think it would be possible to win a lawsuit alleging harm against a broadcaster? No matter what they broadcast, any suit like that would lose. Don't believe me? Look at how long and difficult it was to win against the tobacco industry, one which provably harms the public health! Do you think that the anti-fast-food lawsuits and anti-handgun lawsuits are going to succeed? The harm done by both of those industries are more direct and provable than the harm done by ads, porn, and violence TV content.
Because the FCC fines have to enforce compliance all by themselves, those fines have to be pretty high. If not, then they are little more than slaps on the wrist - worse, actually: they become little more than advertisements.
A personal story: my father was raised in a dry county back in the woods of Tennessee. Like a lot of boys back then (this was during the Great Depression), he collected bottles and jars, and sold them to the local moonshiner. One day he asked the man what he thought about the sheriff, who periodically busted up his still. According to my dad, the old man just laughed, and said that, since the newspaper published his name and address every time he got busted, that in his opinion the product that he lost, the damage he had to repair, and the fine he had to pay were all cheaper and more effective than any ad that he could run.
So comparing fines in on industry against fines in another is like comparing apples and haircuts. If the fines in the nuclear industry work at one level, and the fines in the broadcast industry have to be much higher to make them work, so be it. They have no relationship to one another.
All these complaints about the FCC and "freedom of expression" on/. are completely bogus. Ask yourself: who's freedom of expression is the FCC curtailing? Yours? No, you are just the boob sitting in front of the tube. You aren't expressing anything. Janet Jackson's? Justin Timberlake's? Howard Stern's? No, they aren't the ones that the FCC is fining.
The FCC is fining corporations, not individuals. Do corporations have a right to freedom of expression? Of course not. They don't even have a right to broadcast. What (a few) corporations do have is a license to broadcast. Licensing of broadcasters is absolutely necessary, because the broadcast spectrum is limited. Licensing broadcasters in a controlled way is what allows broadcast to work in the first place.
You may argue (you corporation-lover you) that, even though licensing is necessary, the FCC should not include regulate content in any way. But the broadcast spectrrum is a public trust, no different that any other public trust. As such, it must be controlled so that the public - the entire public - retains safe and effective use of it. You can not dynamite Mount Rushmore, you cannot erect a sculture in the middle of a highway, and you cannot broadcast just anything you want. "Won't somebody think of the children?" Do you think that it'd be okay to broadcast a cartoon about a team of White Supremicist superheros making the world safe for whitey? Maybe it'd be funny to create a show telling children about the tasty flavors of the cleaners stored under the kitchen sink! Or, since you are a corporate shill and all, maybe you think that all cartoons should be 30 minute ads for toys or cereal with no educational content whatsoever?
Or perhaps you're really shedding all your tears over poor Howard Stern (or Janet Jackson and Justin Timerblake, who will never get another shot at a superbowl half-time show). Well, dry your eyes, bucko - the FCC didn't fine or censor those folks, the corporation did. And that is really the point, isn't it. Because in the end, nobody has ever had the right to say whatever they want on the broadcast channels - the content of the broadcast channel is completely under the control of the corporate licensee! If you don't believe me, try to get a few minutes on the CBS evening news some time based on your "freedom of expression". Good luck! Howard Stern does not and should not have any more rights than you have, so neither of you has a right to be broadcast.
Now what's left over for you to complain about? I suppose there's always the specifics of the FCC regulations themselves. Perhaps you think there should be more ads, or maybe more violence, or more profanity. Good for you! I happen to disagree, but I believe in democracy - let's vote on it.
Oops, too bad. Sorry that didn't work out for you - maybe next time! In the meantime, I feel just awful that there is nowhere you can go to get all the ads and porn that your heart desires. Maybe If we just sit here and think a while, maybe just maybe we can think of somewhere....
Do you know what I would like? A portable Tivo. Something you could carry in your luggage (smaller and lighter is best), and connect to your motel TV. It wouldn't even have to store a lot of video or anything - just provide recent guide data and let me pause and rewind video.
I've been traveling a lot lately, and screw my house and neighborhood, the only thing I really miss is my Tivo.
If it could take advantage of WiFi when it's available, that'd be great - I'd expect full functionality. But if not (or in case the motel doesn't offer WiFi) it ought to turn it on at home and at least download an up-to-date database of the cable systems across the country . That way, whenever and whereever I hook it up on the road, I just tell it identify my location, and it can correctly identify the channels. Not having the channel data on the screen when I travel really bothers me.
If I could also pre-download an up-to-date program guide that, at least for the cable channels, works everywhere in the country, that'd be great. If it contains national broadcast schedules, even better. If it contained local schedules for the whole country, though... wow.
I'm not saying that such a unit would save Tivo. On the other hand, look at iPod sales....
The submitter wrote, "It's basically a blimp that thinks it's a geostationary satellite floating at 65K feet!"
Ummm, hate to break it to you, but blimps do float - that's not noteworthy. What I think you meant to say is, "It's basically a blimp that thinks it's a geostationary satellite orbiting at 65k feet!". Now that is noteworthy!
In the article on Psychopathic C.E.O.'s, the author, Michael Steinberger, talks about the possibility of corporations using the B-Scan 360 to screen CEO candidates, and weed out the pyschos. Clearly, he had little contact with real world companies or CEOs. Obviously, at least some corporations would use the test to improve their odds of hiring one.
ps: If you want to validate the test, corporations, see if you can get HP CEO Carly Fiorina to take it...
Re:Cockroach bomb shelters and buttered kitten pow
on
The Year In Ideas
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· Score: 3, Funny
Cheap, clean power is just around the corner.
Clean? Obviously you have never replaced a litterbox. Buttered cats also have a tendency to toxic spills of hairballs, a tendency likely to be increased by buttering. And then there is the still unsolved problem of herding.
In my opinion, the butter-cat core reactor will never be more than a footnote of science. Of course, while it will never achieve large scale production, it will certainly continue to be a very popular lab demonstration.
Thanks! I'm not really much of a C.S. historian, but I recognize most of the names, and they sound right.
As for the printer and network moments: certainly you are correct, but I meant something else.
Adding the printer to the computer made it easy to generate reports, plots, tables, and other, more sophisticated outputs that were uncommon without it.
Certainly one could do much the same with a TTY - I know, I used to use one, and was glad to have it! But however well the TTY worked as an input device (not great), it was worse as an output device - slow and noisy, printing on continuous roll toilet paper. In my work back then, we used a system which had a remote high-speed printer, and we nearly always chose to print to that even though it meant waiting a day for the morning courier to get a printout.
Oh dear, I think I got off subject. The point I'm trying to make is that a computer without a good high-speed printer was still just a calculator - something that produced results that you wrote down. But once you have a high-speed printer, even one that just prints fixed-font characters, you have a machine that generates reports, analyses, and presentations. Conceptially a big shift, or so it seemed to me at the time.
In the same way, a networked computer, whatever the form of the network, becomes something quite different that one without. In the early days, I'd be willing to wager that nearly all computer time was used just to run calculations. Today I'd guess that nearly all of the time is used to access information on a different computer. Sure, calculations are still being done along the way, but they are not the purpose, merely the means to another end. I think that the first guy to think about using his overpriced adding machine to instead retrieve information from (or share information with) other systems had a major "aha" moment, no matter what might have gone before.
Either way, thanks a lot for a interesting response.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe someone else actually answered your question, but I scanned the top-rate responses and didn't see it. So here goes.
/.'ers: before you burn me, consider the class of issues that this guy raised. If you want to gamble on getting rich, join a startup. If you want to move into management someday, join a big technical company. But if you want organization, stable management, and merit-based rewards... good luck finding that anywhere. Sadly, IMHO, the best that this world offers, as a whole, are defense contractors and well-funded colleges.
No. Given your concerns - disorganization and mismanagement, merit-rewards and bureaucracy - non-military employers are, in my experience, always worse in every category.
This is simply the nature of the beast. The military loves to plan, and is allowed to. Its budgets are set ahead of time, its goals and standards are relatively well-defined and stable, its policies and merit system relatively clear cut.
The closer you get to a purely commercial venture, the farther away you get from all of those things. An aggressively company in a competitive market is much more reactive than pre-planned. Budget and goals can change instantly as management's perception of the market changes. One twitchy exec can wipe out a whole division in a heartbeat. Even when the business is stable, standards and policies tend to be ad hoc. Such standards and policies that do exist, exist only to make your life harder. If you try to do something new, you have to convince the bureaucracy first; but if something non-standard and anti-policy does get done, you will have to accomodate it: nobody is going to pay the replace a working dohicky with a compliant dohicky that does the same thing.
As for merits and rewards: while your supervisor may try to be fair (or may not), the bigger issue is that he can only split the pot he is given. If you do brilliant, excellent work for a company, (or division of a company, or product line within the division) which is not profitable "enough", you get nada. Conversely, if you are a lucky screw-off who works for a group that fell into and owns a particularly profitable niche, you can do pretty well even though you and everybody else are almost worthless. Whether that is good or bad, it's hard to argue that it's fair.
In my opinion, having worked for a range of employers, you will find the easiest transition at defense contractors or well-heeled acedemic institutions. They tend to plan and have stable budgets, and don't worry to much about competively pressures. If you are spectacularly brilliant, you might find that one of the big, successful high-tech companies you. They can be horrible places, but if they are big enough, rich enough, and you are good enough, you can be insulated against much of that horribleness. But, most important of all, stay away from startups - especially privately-held startups - double especially family-owned startups. The unfairness and disorder found there would leave you absolutely breathless.
Note to
Let me ask you something. When you look something up on google, and you find a set of reasonable, internally consistent answers, do you keep looking? When you check snopes.com for background on some piece of email that someone forward to you, do you read it and say "naw, that's not right"? Or do you accept those sources as authoritative, and use them as the basis for your future actions and beliefs?
My buddy HorrorIsland posted two links in an earlier discussion about this topic. Nobody else seems to have noticed the post, but I thought they were pretty revealing. So here they are again: a Google image search for "tiananmen" on Chinese Google versus the same search on American Google. Notice any difference?
One way (maybe the only) way to keep information from being free is to flood the minds of inquirers with false information. If google kept itself out of China, people there might not know the truth, but at least they'd know that they did not know. With google there, but only providing half-truths, at least some people will be deceived.
Google has made a bad decision. When and if China every does become free, they'll have to answer for it.
You should have quoted the title of the post: "HAPPY SMILES VERSUS TANKS". Truly, a remarkable contrast. Thanks!
Others disagree.
Kill tally: 14 to 20 million deaths from starvation
"responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime"
You can find more for themselves.
Besides, even if Mao were actually harmless, why all the fuss? Did the agents confiscate the book? Did the threaten the reader? If not, then what's the big deal with them stopping by to see who was reading the book, and why?
What's so amusing about all this hysteria is watching all these posters freely expressing the most outrageous nonsense about how their free speech rights have disappeared.
I'm not defending E.U.'s actions - I'm not a lawyer, and I haven't read an analysis from anyone I trust - but that doesn't matter. I'm mainly reacting to U.S. posters, many of whom would be barely effected by this EU action, no matter how awful it might be.
In the U.S. (and many other places), free speech is much more imperiled from the left than the right. To take just one example: why on earth is "hate speech" against the law? Isnt it still speech? It certainly is more so than other "protected speech" like exotic dancing and obscene photography. "When I was a boy, I learned that "sticks and stones won't break my bones, and names will never harm me." If I ever came home crying because of someelses *words*, I wouldn't have gotten much sympathy from *my* parents. What's changed since then?
The truth is, this whole notion that "privacy is a Right" is solely a beard for abortion. Remove it from the equation, and all the rest vanishs. Unless, that is, you believe that technology creates Rights. To see what I mean, think back to 19th century America. Small towns, in-person shopping, face-to-face conversations, - all of which lend themselves to other people knowing everything you buy, everyone you meet, and everything you said... unless you were very, very careful about where and with whom you interacted. Did the people back then like that? Probably not. But neither did they think they had any right to expect anything else. Did they any privacy rights? Certainly - but only those explicitly in our Constitution: things like protects from unreasonable search and the like.
Nor should they have such privacy rights. The very idea undermines, for example, criminal prosecution on all types of cases. Say you bought an ax, snuck out of the basement one night, and hacked your mother to bits (because, see, all slashdotters live in their mother's basements...). If you bought the ax from me in person, am I not permitted to know that? Am I forbidden to testify to that? How then is that different than if you bought the ax online from Al's Little Shop of Axes? The website can't testify, and the UPS guy won't know what you bought. So how else is that testimony going to be given, if not through a trace of your on-line activity?
I think a big part of the reason for all the misunderstands is the whirl of "privacy memes" floating around these days. If you stop for a moment and think about them, you can see what nonsense they all are. For example, take this one: "keep government out of our bedrooms." People say that to protect their own sexual behavior, or behavior which they personally tolerate, but do they really mean that incest should be ignored? How about child molesting? Rape? Bestiality? Those are all sexual behaviors that often happen inside bedrooms too. Doesn't the government have a right - even a responsibility - to regulate those behaviors? If you think that you've been over-regulated, then take up the matter with your lawmakers. If they won't listen, try talking to the voters. If even that doesn't work, then live with the restrictions, or move to someplace more to your liking. But don't try to distort the entire structure of society!
I could go on and on, but the point is, hopefully, made. Take off your tinfoil hats, children - it's time to face reality! If you're really overwhelmed with concerns about your privacy, here's a thought - quit doing and saying things of which you have reason to be ashamed!
My brother teaches at a vocational school, where all the issues are a bit starker, and he puts it this way: "Some kids will fail no matter how much I help. Some will succeed no matter how little I help. That's why I focus on the ones in-between - because that's where I can make a difference."
Incidently, I found your comparision to Dick both apt and ironic, given that their interesting history.
"Office Space"!
So sorry for the lack of response. The truth is, I simply have no time. I suppose we will have to agree to disagree for now. All the best.
It saddens me that we even have to have such a discussion, but I accept that it is human nature. Our whole history has been filled with attempts to define some people as slightly less human than others. It makes life so much more convenient. The result has been slavery, genocide, sexual discrimination, and religious warfare. There will be a day when it allows euthanasia, if we aren't already gotten at that point. The same impulse drives much of the public fascination with androids - an almost human creature that can be ordered to do whatever you want. Personally, I believe we will sooner see creatures, genetically-engineered to be legally subhuman, which fill this role.
There is no aspect of this de-humanizing impulse that I find noble or praise-worthy. That is why I reject it in all of its forms, regardless of the inconveniences that may result.
BTW, I don't mean to demonize you by this analysis. I'm sure that you do disapprove of slavery, etc. If not, there'd be no point writing that list - you'd simply nod your head approvingly as you read it. I'm sure you think that the distinction between a fetus and a delivered baby is important. But I hope you will recognize that those who did support slavery or justified violence and oppression on the basis of gender, religion, tribe, or whatever all believed with their whole hearts that whatever distinction they were concerned about was also essential to the definition of true humanity. In their cases, we now look back and think they were all wrong. Personally, I hope and believe that, if mankind survives long enough, someday people will look back on the abortion era the same way we look back on the slavery era, and wonder "how on earth did they justify treating other human beings that way?"
As to your specific questions: if I were to teleport you into space, by your logic I would not be killing you - I would merely be removing you from the environment which supports your life. I disagree - I think I would be killing you. It doesn't matter how much of a burden you would be to me if you were not teleported into space :-). If the sci-fi aspect of this example bothers you, replace it with me kicking you out of a submarine airlock at the bottom of the ocean, or abandoning you in the desert, or... you get the idea.
Another, slightly off-topic point: you refer to the "courts" forcing a woman not to have an abortion. It is in fact the courts which are currently forcing all of us to allow abortion. In the absence of Roe v. Wade, it would be state law, written by elected officials, who produced whatever regulation governed abortion. To the extent that one believes in democracy, that seems better than using the courts, which are fundamentally non-democratic. Note that, of the three possible positions one could take - use the courts to forbid all abortion everywhere; use the courts to allow abortion everywhere; and leave it to legislators to pass the appropriate laws which reflect the will of the people - until Roe v. Wade, the US took the third position. There was never a significant effort to impose the non-democratic first option. Of course, speaking personally, I now think we should impose the first option, in order to clearly support the sanctity of human life. Otherwise, I see Huxley-esque nightmare scenarios in the very near future, as I indicated earlier.
Your second point, about the right to personal freedom vs. another person's right to life, is also good. However, you choose the wrong analogy. I tend to use this example: you are driving somewhere in a hurry, so you take a shortcut through an alleyway, too narrow for you to open your doors. Halfway along you see a drunken bum wander halfway across the alley, lie down, and pass out. You honk, you flash your lights, but the bum is oblivious. You try to back up, but your reverse gear decides just then to break. So you're stuck in the alley behind this bum. What situations would give you the right to drive over the bum, killing him? If you were bleeding to death? If you were hungry? If you had a million-dollar commission on the line? If you were late to work? If you were simply tired of waiting? Legally, you could only justify killing the bum if your own life (or the life of someone else) was in imminent danger. How much more reluctant should one be when the life to be taken is not that of a drunken sot, but the innocent life of one's own child?
Your third point, about the twins, shows two misunderstandings. First, once the zygote splits into two independent organisms, they are just that - independent. As such, neither has any special obligation to the other. Second, you seem to assume that there are only two options: help, or harm. There are in fact three options: help, harm, or do nothing. For example, if you and I were in a steakhouse, and you began to choke, I could 1) give you a Heimlich, 2) keep eating, or 3) stab you in the heart with my steak knife. A prohibition against 3) does not take away my option to do either 1) or 2). In the abortion context, that means that prohibiting abortion except when the mother's life is unusually threatened does not impose a requirement to use extreme measures to save every pregnancy. Society can choose to continue eating its meal, if it wants. So can the twin in your example.
Incidentally, I should clarify when I mean by "unusually threatened". One of my cousin's was pregnant when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She was told that she needed to have an immediate hysterectomy just to save her own life; that saving her child was impossible in either case. In a case like that, I and all of my family would have supported that option, if she was willing to do it. As it happens, she was not. As it happens, her second son was born healthy, started college this year, and she survived both the childbirth and the hysterectomy that followed and is still alive today to enjoy it.
Sounds more like slashdot to me. Maybe they need a karma system... Wait, what am I thinking?
Here's what I find odd: If it really was "certain" that Japan would have surrendered in a few months, why the hell not surrender right then? What, you think they enjoyed strapping kids into flying bombs and dropping them on U.S. ships for nothing?
Apparently you believe that this imminent surrender should have been obvious to the U.S. government thousands of miles away. Surely it should have been even clearer to the Japanese government and military!
I don't think either side expected Japan to surrender any time soon. It just doesn't make sense. In addition to what I've already mentioned, we know that many Japanese who heard the emperor surrender were so convinced they were winning that they didn't even understand what he was saying. They certainly didn't expect a surrender. Also, the spirit of that nation was completely broken. What does that tell you? It tells me that their loss was a complete shock to them.
And if they did expect to surrender, that's even worse. The delay could only be so they could inflict more casualties on the other side. If they expected to surrender anyway, those casualties would have been pointless, except perhaps to the emperor's ego. In other words, it's his fault. He should have surrendered sooner!
Anyway, it hardly matters. America never used a nuke again, although we could have( and probably should have. Hello, Mr. Stalin! I'm thinking of you!!!) If nuking Japan was a war crime of any sort, it was a first offense, and we've certainly been model citizens since.
Besides, consider the benefits that Japan received by being broken and remade. Pre-war Japan was a brutal, backward, hostile and dangerous place - not somewhere you want to be unless you were a highly placed male, and certainly no one you'd want for a neighbor. Post-war Japan is one of the greatest success stories of all time - wealthy, stable, free, and quite peaceful. Or to put it in slashdot terms: atom bomb == anime; no atom bomb == watercolors paintings of Mount Fuji. You tell me which is better!
"Emotionally the game is great"? You've got to be kidding! First, they don't really respond to anything you say. It seems to me that they are just looking for certain keywords. Hit the keyword, and Grace says "Thanks, that helps me." Oooh, that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy... yeah, like a poodle jumping through a hoop.
The big "secrets" are nothing that any stranger wouldn't learn about both of them in about 10 minutes of casual conversation. So how is it that these married blockheads don't know them already?
And even if such emotional retards could actually live outside a group home, I still wouldn't want to be their friend, because they are both mean and controlling. Specifics would give away the big "secrets", but really, nobody should have to live with either of them.
Fortunately, because the characters, situation, and story were all too ridiculous to believe, I'm happy to leave them to it.
What a waste of bandwidth! This stinker gets 'F's from me right across the board. If this is the future, Lord, take me now!
Everybody who is interested in space and *thinks* they understand the space shuttle costs and risks should read the linked article by Derbyshire. Agree or disagree, but do so based on all the facts...
I think you forgot hate speech laws. I believe various U.S. states have such laws, and occasionally do press criminal charges. Certainly a number of other countries do. The so-called defenders of free speech seem unconcerned about these infringments on the first amendment. Apparently, we've almost reached the point where actual emotions, starting with hate, are criminal in-and-of themselves. Can the thought police be far behind?
Obviously, these laws get justified by analogy to the law against calling out "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. Like so many slippery slopes, this seems to be a reasonable abridgement of freedom. After that, the slippery slope takes over.
Ah! if only the whole world were like slashdot, where any statement can be freely made, no matter how unpopular! Okay, kiddies, time to mod me down to oblivion...
You cringe? Why? Why is this any worse than the redefinition of the word to mean homosexual? I'd say that effort was worse, because it was a deliberate, coordinated "re-branding", cynically co-opting a positive, happy word. I, for one, refuse to refer to homosexuality or homosexuals as "gay". Why should I allow myself to be manipulated? Instead, I don't use "gay" at all. As far as I'm concerned, all that the homosexual advocates have accomplished is the pointless destruction of a word. While I don't approve of this new usage that you describe either, don't expect many tears from me if you are upset by it. If the word's meaning hadn't be twisted in the first place, it wouldn't be happening now.
Your tax dollars at work.
Fines aren't set according to somebody's idea about their relative importance. They are set to the level that encourages compliance. For nuclear industries and such, that level does not need to be enormous. After all, the whole point of regulations in those industries is prevent harm. If they really accomplish that, most members of the industry will already try to comply with most regulations most of the time even without fines. After all, if real harm should occur, the costs to the organization through civil lawsuits and perhaps even criminal prosecution would be enormous - much larger than any regulator fine would be.
For those industries, the benefits of regulatory fines are two-fold: first, they ensure that every organization in the industry lives to the same standards, thereby leveling the playing field and reducing the competitive pressure to cut corners on safety; and second, they provide a financial incentive to fund compliance activities. After all, if it costs $100,000 to comply, and $200,000 in fines if you don't, what industry wouldn't comply?
On the other hand, in the broadcast industry, the only incentive that the industry has to comply with regulations is the FCC and it's fines. What, do you think it would be possible to win a lawsuit alleging harm against a broadcaster? No matter what they broadcast, any suit like that would lose. Don't believe me? Look at how long and difficult it was to win against the tobacco industry, one which provably harms the public health! Do you think that the anti-fast-food lawsuits and anti-handgun lawsuits are going to succeed? The harm done by both of those industries are more direct and provable than the harm done by ads, porn, and violence TV content.
Because the FCC fines have to enforce compliance all by themselves, those fines have to be pretty high. If not, then they are little more than slaps on the wrist - worse, actually: they become little more than advertisements.
A personal story: my father was raised in a dry county back in the woods of Tennessee. Like a lot of boys back then (this was during the Great Depression), he collected bottles and jars, and sold them to the local moonshiner. One day he asked the man what he thought about the sheriff, who periodically busted up his still. According to my dad, the old man just laughed, and said that, since the newspaper published his name and address every time he got busted, that in his opinion the product that he lost, the damage he had to repair, and the fine he had to pay were all cheaper and more effective than any ad that he could run.
So comparing fines in on industry against fines in another is like comparing apples and haircuts. If the fines in the nuclear industry work at one level, and the fines in the broadcast industry have to be much higher to make them work, so be it. They have no relationship to one another.
All these complaints about the FCC and "freedom of expression" on /. are completely bogus. Ask yourself: who's freedom of expression is the FCC curtailing? Yours? No, you are just the boob sitting in front of the tube. You aren't expressing anything. Janet Jackson's? Justin Timberlake's? Howard Stern's? No, they aren't the ones that the FCC is fining.
The FCC is fining corporations, not individuals. Do corporations have a right to freedom of expression? Of course not. They don't even have a right to broadcast. What (a few) corporations do have is a license to broadcast. Licensing of broadcasters is absolutely necessary, because the broadcast spectrum is limited. Licensing broadcasters in a controlled way is what allows broadcast to work in the first place.
You may argue (you corporation-lover you) that, even though licensing is necessary, the FCC should not include regulate content in any way. But the broadcast spectrrum is a public trust, no different that any other public trust. As such, it must be controlled so that the public - the entire public - retains safe and effective use of it. You can not dynamite Mount Rushmore, you cannot erect a sculture in the middle of a highway, and you cannot broadcast just anything you want. "Won't somebody think of the children?" Do you think that it'd be okay to broadcast a cartoon about a team of White Supremicist superheros making the world safe for whitey? Maybe it'd be funny to create a show telling children about the tasty flavors of the cleaners stored under the kitchen sink! Or, since you are a corporate shill and all, maybe you think that all cartoons should be 30 minute ads for toys or cereal with no educational content whatsoever?
Or perhaps you're really shedding all your tears over poor Howard Stern (or Janet Jackson and Justin Timerblake, who will never get another shot at a superbowl half-time show). Well, dry your eyes, bucko - the FCC didn't fine or censor those folks, the corporation did. And that is really the point, isn't it. Because in the end, nobody has ever had the right to say whatever they want on the broadcast channels - the content of the broadcast channel is completely under the control of the corporate licensee! If you don't believe me, try to get a few minutes on the CBS evening news some time based on your "freedom of expression". Good luck! Howard Stern does not and should not have any more rights than you have, so neither of you has a right to be broadcast.
Now what's left over for you to complain about? I suppose there's always the specifics of the FCC regulations themselves. Perhaps you think there should be more ads, or maybe more violence, or more profanity. Good for you! I happen to disagree, but I believe in democracy - let's vote on it.
Oops, too bad. Sorry that didn't work out for you - maybe next time! In the meantime, I feel just awful that there is nowhere you can go to get all the ads and porn that your heart desires. Maybe If we just sit here and think a while, maybe just maybe we can think of somewhere....
Do you know what I would like? A portable Tivo. Something you could carry in your luggage (smaller and lighter is best), and connect to your motel TV. It wouldn't even have to store a lot of video or anything - just provide recent guide data and let me pause and rewind video. I've been traveling a lot lately, and screw my house and neighborhood, the only thing I really miss is my Tivo. If it could take advantage of WiFi when it's available, that'd be great - I'd expect full functionality. But if not (or in case the motel doesn't offer WiFi) it ought to turn it on at home and at least download an up-to-date database of the cable systems across the country . That way, whenever and whereever I hook it up on the road, I just tell it identify my location, and it can correctly identify the channels. Not having the channel data on the screen when I travel really bothers me. If I could also pre-download an up-to-date program guide that, at least for the cable channels, works everywhere in the country, that'd be great. If it contains national broadcast schedules, even better. If it contained local schedules for the whole country, though... wow. I'm not saying that such a unit would save Tivo. On the other hand, look at iPod sales....
Ummm, hate to break it to you, but blimps do float - that's not noteworthy. What I think you meant to say is, "It's basically a blimp that thinks it's a geostationary satellite orbiting at 65k feet!". Now that is noteworthy!
ps: blimps don't think.
ps: If you want to validate the test, corporations, see if you can get HP CEO Carly Fiorina to take it...
Clean? Obviously you have never replaced a litterbox. Buttered cats also have a tendency to toxic spills of hairballs, a tendency likely to be increased by buttering. And then there is the still unsolved problem of herding.
In my opinion, the butter-cat core reactor will never be more than a footnote of science. Of course, while it will never achieve large scale production, it will certainly continue to be a very popular lab demonstration.
Thanks! I'm not really much of a C.S. historian, but I recognize most of the names, and they sound right.
As for the printer and network moments: certainly you are correct, but I meant something else.
Adding the printer to the computer made it easy to generate reports, plots, tables, and other, more sophisticated outputs that were uncommon without it.
Certainly one could do much the same with a TTY - I know, I used to use one, and was glad to have it! But however well the TTY worked as an input device (not great), it was worse as an output device - slow and noisy, printing on continuous roll toilet paper. In my work back then, we used a system which had a remote high-speed printer, and we nearly always chose to print to that even though it meant waiting a day for the morning courier to get a printout.
Oh dear, I think I got off subject. The point I'm trying to make is that a computer without a good high-speed printer was still just a calculator - something that produced results that you wrote down. But once you have a high-speed printer, even one that just prints fixed-font characters, you have a machine that generates reports, analyses, and presentations. Conceptially a big shift, or so it seemed to me at the time.
In the same way, a networked computer, whatever the form of the network, becomes something quite different that one without. In the early days, I'd be willing to wager that nearly all computer time was used just to run calculations. Today I'd guess that nearly all of the time is used to access information on a different computer. Sure, calculations are still being done along the way, but they are not the purpose, merely the means to another end. I think that the first guy to think about using his overpriced adding machine to instead retrieve information from (or share information with) other systems had a major "aha" moment, no matter what might have gone before.
Either way, thanks a lot for a interesting response.