Every time I hear how IT is a cost center and does not make money for the company I love to point out that accounting is also a cost center and does not make money for the company.
Seriously, if companies were to get fined for every bad piece of code or stupid bobby tables vulnerability (obligatory xkcd reference), they would all go out of existence.
Good. Then there would be a space in the market for a competent company to take over.
As far as I'm aware, Sanitarium is an independant company (legally speaking) that donates 100% of its profit to the Adventists. The Adventists are a registered charity, and the exact same tax status would be applicable to any other company that donated 100% of its income to a non-religious charity. It's their charity status, not their religious one, that generates the tax exemption.
I know the Anglican church in Australia pays tax on the income it derives from real estate that it rents out to third parties.
I can't imagine trying to work with email of any length or complexity on an iPhone (or my Android). Firing off a quick - "Delayed - be there in 40" is fine. Anything much longer, or anything with character other than basic alphanum, or formatting and the restrictions on such a small form-factor coupled with a touchscreen are just too limiting for me.
This is one reason why there absolutely should not be tax exemption for religions. None of them.
I don't know the American Tax Code. But here in Australia, churches are tax exempt (at least, the donations of their congregation are, if they also participate in commercial activity that's not), but only the way any other group of individuals pooling money for non-commercial activity are tax exempt. Church tax exemption is provided by exactly the same mechanism that exempts sporting clubs (kids sports clubs, or local amateur groups, not big commercial enterprises), knitting groups, hell, if your D&D group pools money for snacks and modules, they are exempt for the exact same reason - it's double-dipping to tax people once when they earn the money, and again when they combine it with other people to do something together with them.
This hasn't stopped some political parties from agitating about churches "tax free status" though.
And how many of those million-dollar products have delivered product yet? Answer: none. The Order of the Stick one has shipped the magnets for the very lowest of bidders, and the comic reprints have apparently been done, but are awaiting shipping. It was always a fairly safe bet, as it was just funding for reprinting - no new creative work actually needed to be done. The iPhone Elevation Dock should be shipping this month, but it hasn't. The other million USD+ projects are still months away from actually demonstrating whether they worked or not.
If they succeed and satisfy people, then all's well. But all it will take is a string of high-profile failures (like the Zion-Eyes one) for people to start to perceive Kickstarter as essentially a haven for scam artists. In the end, I believe that sort of rep is going to be inevitable, just because of the failure rates you see in any sort of entrepreneurial activity. Yeah, if people lose money on the odd project here or there it won't matter, but if they do on a string of them, and they see Kickstarter as just a money-pit, they're not going to use it any more.
In order to counter that rep, Kickstarter's going to have to start providing some form of guarantee, or see the backers depart. Honestly, for the money they receive from the high-value projects, it's not like it's going to be an extreme cost, and if they only have those requirements on million dollar plus projects, it's not going to swamp them unless they're raking in enough cash to scale their services.
However, since Australians already pay per-gigabyte (either through a cap or pre-paid) perhaps the easiest and best solution for all concerned is to whack on a modest per-GB tariff, similar to the Canadian levy on blank media, to be paid back to content producers.
Yay, free money for the content producers, and jack squat for the consumer. Because those Canadian blank media levies have stopped any persecution of consumers copying the media they've now paid for, am I right?
How is that contrasting? Brin never mentioned privacy as one of his concerns. Also, it was by an entirely different person, who's now an ex-employee of the company.
I also never liked Schmidt. He seemed to much the manager, forced on to the actual productive people by the venture capitalist. He sounds like a bit of a sleaze, both personally and professionally.
No, it is not scientific (not experimental) and it's not fact. Give me any one situation in which you say "religion" killed people, and I can point you to three other contributing factors. Crusades? Unlanded nobles wanting real estate. Northern Ireland? English conquest and occupation. Middle East? Political interventionism - British in creating Israel, and American pretty much ever since. Assigning blame to one factor over another is an exercise in speculation, not fact.
If the RIAA demands my ISP monitor my web usage, I can't opt out of it.
Sure you can. Just like nobody's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy an iPad, nobody's doing the same to force you to use the internet. It's opt-in as well.
And while going through life without internet access is a pain in the butt, it's becoming more and more annoying to go through life without a social network account, or a smart-phone. And the only reason iPhone isn't synonymous with smart-phone any more is because of Google's Android. Just think, if Android had never happened, and Blackberry had remained the #2 to Apple's #1, you would have no choice but either have no smart phone, or have a walled-garden smart phone.
The summary is a summary of a ZDnet summation of a Guardian article.
If you actually read the Guardian article, the three things Brin lists as threats are:
Government control
Piracy crackdown
Walled-garden platforms
He gives Apple and Facebook as examples of the third. Which the sensationalist media (including slashdot) twist around to try and incite a frenzy of condemnation.
The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.
Shush, you're applying logic to slashdot's knee-jerk reaction. Don't you know it's a scientific fact that religion is a pox on society and it's every slashdotter's duty to attack it any time an article on stem cells, birth control or evolution is submitted, regardless of applicability?
Yeah, keyword: college. You had a bunch of immature males sitting around acting immaturely. Maybe if the tech industry didn't try to fire/force into management everyone over 40, so they could hire young grads at cheap rates, and work them harder than they could people who were old enough to have developed a backbone, you wouldn't have an immature dev culture.
In the company I work, the average age in the tech team is a little over 30. We have no women on the team, but all of us are married. We're generally a bunch of mature, professional people. Sure there are nerdy in-jokes, and computer game references, and reflections back on the day we got our first modem - but that's just nerd culture, and is not inherently misogynistic.
If you think that tech is a meritocracy, you're not paying attention.
Well, no. Nobody who's every worked in a company with an HR department would claim that.
If you think everyone has the same opportunities, and the same encouragement you do, you're not paying attention.
What encouragement? I, like a decent chunk of people here on slashdot did, learnt programming before it was cool, by ourselves, with little outside support apart from books, and before the internet made language tutorials so accessible.
If you think that there isn't discrimination against women, you're not paying attention.
In the 10 years I've been in the industry, I've only seen one woman apply for a programming job. She got it, and worked fine in and with the rest of the team, until her husband got sick and she had to stop working to look after him and her kids.
I know that's only anecdotal data, but then, so's yours. I have no doubt there are unprofessional, misogynistic people out there in tech - as in pretty much any jobs. That sucks, and sucks more for women than anyone else, but those aren't the sort of people I'd like working with either.
As for a higher percentage of women encouraging more respect, I'd argue that environments that already respect women are more likely to gain a higher percentage of women in them, and that's why you see that bias. Misogynistic groups likely drive women away before they can accumulate to a high percentage.
In which case, the root cause is not that they're not getting paid enough (which is what this sort of funding seems to address) but that our education system is not functioning correctly. That is what needs to be addressed - the root cause. Not pottering around throwing money at the end product. Also, the notion of some activities not being "feminine" or "masculine" needs to die, hard.
Who knows? Who cares? Same reason as female teachers vastly outnumber males. As long as there's no discrimination going on, and the numerical discrepancy is the result of the choice of individuals, why are we bothering?
The OP wasn't arguing about "fair"; he was arguing about "effective". Why is a female programmer more desirable than a male programmer (given both are equally skilled)?
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I hear how IT is a cost center and does not make money for the company I love to point out that accounting is also a cost center and does not make money for the company.
Unless you're a Hollywood studio.
Seriously, if companies were to get fined for every bad piece of code or stupid bobby tables vulnerability (obligatory xkcd reference), they would all go out of existence.
Good. Then there would be a space in the market for a competent company to take over.
Also on the DVDs.
As far as I'm aware, Sanitarium is an independant company (legally speaking) that donates 100% of its profit to the Adventists. The Adventists are a registered charity, and the exact same tax status would be applicable to any other company that donated 100% of its income to a non-religious charity. It's their charity status, not their religious one, that generates the tax exemption.
I know the Anglican church in Australia pays tax on the income it derives from real estate that it rents out to third parties.
I can't imagine trying to work with email of any length or complexity on an iPhone (or my Android). Firing off a quick - "Delayed - be there in 40" is fine. Anything much longer, or anything with character other than basic alphanum, or formatting and the restrictions on such a small form-factor coupled with a touchscreen are just too limiting for me.
This is one reason why there absolutely should not be tax exemption for religions. None of them.
I don't know the American Tax Code. But here in Australia, churches are tax exempt (at least, the donations of their congregation are, if they also participate in commercial activity that's not), but only the way any other group of individuals pooling money for non-commercial activity are tax exempt. Church tax exemption is provided by exactly the same mechanism that exempts sporting clubs (kids sports clubs, or local amateur groups, not big commercial enterprises), knitting groups, hell, if your D&D group pools money for snacks and modules, they are exempt for the exact same reason - it's double-dipping to tax people once when they earn the money, and again when they combine it with other people to do something together with them.
This hasn't stopped some political parties from agitating about churches "tax free status" though.
Yes, because the only thing that differentiates a handset is the OS. The hardware has nothing at all to do with it.
And how many of those million-dollar products have delivered product yet? Answer: none. The Order of the Stick one has shipped the magnets for the very lowest of bidders, and the comic reprints have apparently been done, but are awaiting shipping. It was always a fairly safe bet, as it was just funding for reprinting - no new creative work actually needed to be done. The iPhone Elevation Dock should be shipping this month, but it hasn't. The other million USD+ projects are still months away from actually demonstrating whether they worked or not.
If they succeed and satisfy people, then all's well. But all it will take is a string of high-profile failures (like the Zion-Eyes one) for people to start to perceive Kickstarter as essentially a haven for scam artists. In the end, I believe that sort of rep is going to be inevitable, just because of the failure rates you see in any sort of entrepreneurial activity. Yeah, if people lose money on the odd project here or there it won't matter, but if they do on a string of them, and they see Kickstarter as just a money-pit, they're not going to use it any more.
In order to counter that rep, Kickstarter's going to have to start providing some form of guarantee, or see the backers depart. Honestly, for the money they receive from the high-value projects, it's not like it's going to be an extreme cost, and if they only have those requirements on million dollar plus projects, it's not going to swamp them unless they're raking in enough cash to scale their services.
However, since Australians already pay per-gigabyte (either through a cap or pre-paid) perhaps the easiest and best solution for all concerned is to whack on a modest per-GB tariff, similar to the Canadian levy on blank media, to be paid back to content producers.
Yay, free money for the content producers, and jack squat for the consumer. Because those Canadian blank media levies have stopped any persecution of consumers copying the media they've now paid for, am I right?
So, theoretically, that'd make Satan a Christian then? Interesting theology ;p
No, but if a smoker dies in an asbestos mine, saying smoking killed him is disingenuous. Moron.
I didn't think board members were employees. But maybe that's just me being wrong - not familiar with operations at those levels :P
How is that contrasting? Brin never mentioned privacy as one of his concerns. Also, it was by an entirely different person, who's now an ex-employee of the company.
I also never liked Schmidt. He seemed to much the manager, forced on to the actual productive people by the venture capitalist. He sounds like a bit of a sleaze, both personally and professionally.
No, it is not scientific (not experimental) and it's not fact. Give me any one situation in which you say "religion" killed people, and I can point you to three other contributing factors. Crusades? Unlanded nobles wanting real estate. Northern Ireland? English conquest and occupation. Middle East? Political interventionism - British in creating Israel, and American pretty much ever since. Assigning blame to one factor over another is an exercise in speculation, not fact.
You mean Google got in trouble for taking stuff from inside my house because they had to pick my deliberately locked front door?
Listen ahole ... I turned off SSID broadcasting in addition to using WPA
Then no, they didn't take anything inside your house, because you used WPA. They only collected unencrypted traffic.
for exactly the same reason I lock both the non-deadbolt lock and the deadbolt lock on my front door.
Poor analogy. Turning off SSID broadcasting is analogous to prying the little numbers off your letterbox. It's not a security measure.
If the RIAA demands my ISP monitor my web usage, I can't opt out of it.
Sure you can. Just like nobody's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy an iPad, nobody's doing the same to force you to use the internet. It's opt-in as well.
And while going through life without internet access is a pain in the butt, it's becoming more and more annoying to go through life without a social network account, or a smart-phone. And the only reason iPhone isn't synonymous with smart-phone any more is because of Google's Android. Just think, if Android had never happened, and Blackberry had remained the #2 to Apple's #1, you would have no choice but either have no smart phone, or have a walled-garden smart phone.
The summary is a summary of a ZDnet summation of a Guardian article.
If you actually read the Guardian article, the three things Brin lists as threats are:
He gives Apple and Facebook as examples of the third. Which the sensationalist media (including slashdot) twist around to try and incite a frenzy of condemnation.
The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.
Shush, you're applying logic to slashdot's knee-jerk reaction. Don't you know it's a scientific fact that religion is a pox on society and it's every slashdotter's duty to attack it any time an article on stem cells, birth control or evolution is submitted, regardless of applicability?
but I remember in college
Yeah, keyword: college. You had a bunch of immature males sitting around acting immaturely. Maybe if the tech industry didn't try to fire/force into management everyone over 40, so they could hire young grads at cheap rates, and work them harder than they could people who were old enough to have developed a backbone, you wouldn't have an immature dev culture.
In the company I work, the average age in the tech team is a little over 30. We have no women on the team, but all of us are married. We're generally a bunch of mature, professional people. Sure there are nerdy in-jokes, and computer game references, and reflections back on the day we got our first modem - but that's just nerd culture, and is not inherently misogynistic.
What, it's illegal to hum Ocarina of Time now?
If you think that tech is a meritocracy, you're not paying attention.
Well, no. Nobody who's every worked in a company with an HR department would claim that.
If you think everyone has the same opportunities, and the same encouragement you do, you're not paying attention.
What encouragement? I, like a decent chunk of people here on slashdot did, learnt programming before it was cool, by ourselves, with little outside support apart from books, and before the internet made language tutorials so accessible.
If you think that there isn't discrimination against women, you're not paying attention.
In the 10 years I've been in the industry, I've only seen one woman apply for a programming job. She got it, and worked fine in and with the rest of the team, until her husband got sick and she had to stop working to look after him and her kids.
I know that's only anecdotal data, but then, so's yours. I have no doubt there are unprofessional, misogynistic people out there in tech - as in pretty much any jobs. That sucks, and sucks more for women than anyone else, but those aren't the sort of people I'd like working with either.
As for a higher percentage of women encouraging more respect, I'd argue that environments that already respect women are more likely to gain a higher percentage of women in them, and that's why you see that bias. Misogynistic groups likely drive women away before they can accumulate to a high percentage.
In which case, the root cause is not that they're not getting paid enough (which is what this sort of funding seems to address) but that our education system is not functioning correctly. That is what needs to be addressed - the root cause. Not pottering around throwing money at the end product. Also, the notion of some activities not being "feminine" or "masculine" needs to die, hard.
And just because a job is rational and optimal for the market as a whole, doesn't mean it's enjoyable or desirable for the individual.
Who knows? Who cares? Same reason as female teachers vastly outnumber males. As long as there's no discrimination going on, and the numerical discrepancy is the result of the choice of individuals, why are we bothering?
The OP wasn't arguing about "fair"; he was arguing about "effective". Why is a female programmer more desirable than a male programmer (given both are equally skilled)?