Is the number of traffic violations really a good metric for morality? A lot of people just drive fast when there is no reasonable chance that they are going to endanger others. I am not making excuses, as I tend to be one of the slow drivers on the road. I just think it is better to think of morality in terms of actions that involve real and significant consequences for others but are of no personal consequence to the parties involved.
Andrew Wiles may be an exception. For every semi-celebrity prof like him that managed to do something notable, there are 100 highly paid tenured faculty that have more or less checked out. They make $150K, don't do research, and teach a handful of classes. They cause tuition prices to rise and require Universities to "tax" grant and external money at higher rates.
Important quote from the article "a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position". So Australian universities are cutting back on research position and focusing more on teaching.
Unless research positions are earning income for the income they are being abandoned.
So it seems they are focusing on education with research being tied students and providing education opportunities for them.
So it seems to be a split between teaching universities versus research universities. Universities in Australia come under a lot of pressure from TAFE, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafe, education facilities which have a tighter alignment with employment opportunities. With out research that doesn't generate income, thy are far more cost effective.
I think you are on the right track, but I do not agree that they are focusing more on teaching. Based on very close ties that I have with several universities and in depth knowledge of how salaries are usally funded, I can tell you this. Most faculty do not want to teach. Furthermore, teaching does not bring in enough money. Consider this example. An engineering prof may teach 6 classes per year. Those classes will have on average 20 students and the classes will be worth 4 credit hours. At my local public university it will cost $200 per credit hour. The teaching services he provides brings in roughly 6*20*4*200= $96000. Overhead for facilities, administration, etc will take at least 40% of that leaving $57600. That is not enough to pay a faculty member that probably makes over $100K. The departments need to make up for that deficit by either bringing in external money and "taxing" it, or by employing cheaper individuals (usually with the title of "lecturer") to teach classes. What this university is basically doing is identifying faculty who will not likely be bringing in much money and demoting them to lecturer positions that will pay less.
There is no reward for cranking out excessive numbers of papers, and it is a one time reshaping of the workforce. And your are wrong about the others being scared for their jobs. They are jumping for joy that Bill is no longer leaching money off of their projects because Bill has a $150K salary but doesn't bring in shit because student tuition doesn't even come close to funding his position. In order to pay his salary, they have to "tax" all of the researchers that are out their working their butts off to bring in external funding. Hell, Universities are run by faculty and this particular University is reshaping its work force most likely because the majority of faculty want this to happen.
I do not mean to be rude, but that is a naive point of view. In order to pursue those goals of educating students and performing cutting edge research, some amount of money and revenue is necessary. More to the point, research generally brings in more money than teaching classes (student tuition), especially in science and engineering. So Universities want their highest earning faculty to be supporting their salaries through external money.
It is not a quota! They are not instituting a policy saying "publish papers at a rate of X in the future". They need to reduce faculty costs right now. In this particular university and many others, the biggest losses are coming from high paid research faculty who are not bringing in external money to justify their existence. They chose to use papers already published as a metric for determining who stays, who goes, and who becomes instructors. That is no guarantee that they will use this same metric for any future workforce reductions and it is therefore not a quota. You can criticize the use of this metric, but keep in mind that in most other similar situations, the alternative would be to protect the faculty members who have been employed the longest and most likely toward the higher end in pay.
It is not a quota. Quota's are given in advance and you work to meet them. In this case the University needed to reduce research salaries. They just happened to choose this existing metric to make a decision on how to meet their salary reduction goals. There is no indication that this metric will be used in the future. It is very easy to criticize the use of this metric, but beeing currently part of a work force that requires similar efficiency improvements, I can tell you that their is no metric or means that will not be criticized for being unfair to some individuals. In my own personal opinion, this approach is a hell of a lot better than the typical practice of protecting the highest paid and longest retained individuals.
drop the last decimal place. get rid of pennies, nickels and quarters. Go to just dimes and 50c pieces and dollar coins. Make the 50c pieces smaller and cheaper to make. Problems solved.
These radio systems were never put in place to facilitate oversight of the police. They were put in place to enable faster distribution and response in emergency situations. Real-time communication monitoring is not a very good method of oversight in any circumstance. Besides, it is only one form of communication that is used and it is recorded for future record in case it is needed for prosecution of review of police actions.
You are dead on. This is a solution looking for a problem and low hanging fruit for reducing DARPA spending as far as I am concerned. Granted, researching how to learn better is a worthwhile goal and probably a much more useful goal than teaching people to shoot other people.
"Under Article 8(2)(a)(xxvi) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), adopted in July 1998 and entered into force 1 July 2002; "Conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities" is a war crime."
According to the website, they are not necessarily designing military items. It specifically identifies items like go-carts and mobile robots in the program description. However, I will agree to the extent that having the military involved in education is a slippery slope as it has the potential for abuse and really is no value added. The reason that the military is involved in this is that Congress has budgeted a specific amount of money for STEM. Congress could just as easily provide this money to other organizations for STEM or to schools directly with the stipulation that it is used to build extracurricular STEM programs. Perhaps an effort should be made to advocate for this money being given to programs through differenet means or as an alternative, put safegaurds in place to protect children from the loss of innocence that comes from building war machines.
All things considered, the Gov offer is extremely generous and pretty much standard for any government science and technology effort. The government is paying for the effort and all "unlimited rights" means is that they want to have access to the work so that they can use the technology in their efforts and eventually have a product manufactured. They do not force you to give your information away to anyone else. You can still patent/copyright whatever you create and make money off of it in the commercial world. That is not such a bad deal because a lot of people would argue that if the project is using tax payer money, then the resulting information should be put into the public domain.
You mean quietly focusing on and concentrating on work leads to more production than joking around with the office buddies and talking to the receptionist down the hall? Brilliant!!
I agree, MS actions are just par for the course. Every other manufacturer is doing the exact same things, usually without any clear objective. Even the cheap chinese android tablets like the epad and flytouch come locked downs to a certain degree. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how this benefits them or what they plan to gain through this other than customers who are slightly more annoyed at having to do extra work in order to install their custom roms. I am not sure who this is benefiting at this point, but it is certainly very popular.
To be fair to the grandparent, they did say that ATV is the only "box" that delivers a good interface. XBMC is awesome, but lets be honest, only a techie is going to install and maintain that software on dedicated hardware. To make money on these TV gadgets, the products are going to need to appeal to the very large market segment that is willing to spend money on a smartphone but does not have the desire to root or mod the software.
Anyone looking to contact the religious organizations might want to point out that intellectual property did not exist when "thou shalt not steal" was written in stone. Furthermore, a lot has been lost in translation, but it is widely recognized that individual property rights were not the same as they are today and that "stealing" refers to the monopolization of resources that were needed by the group of people as a whole and perceived to be common property. Ie. "thou shalt not claim ownership of the only source of drinkable water in the area and deny it to others'. Viewed from this more accurate interpretation of "thou shalt not steal", intellectual property is "stealing". It is taking something previously thought to be common property and claiming it as your own and using that to exploit other members of the tribe or other tribes.
I think torrent/usenet is probably the big thing. I think there was one hack that allowed you to send remote control commands to the device via the network, which would be cool if you wanted to control the device through a smart phone or tablet device.
I think can explain why an ebook might cost more, though I cannot say for this particular book, but it is feasible that the side of a business has different salary costs, marketing costs, etc. In time, electronic publishing will be cheaper. There is no argument, but in the short term the costs might be higher as the market adjusts to a new way of doing things and has not completely worked out all of the inefficiencies.
The intent is irrelevant when the wording involves an inalienable right to something. Just look at the laws involving rights passed in the last 50 years. How many have been rights from something, like those making up the Bill of Rights, and how many have been rights to something, like the ADA?
I cannot disagree with you. As I said, the proposal is vague, but the last sentence of the proposal states "By signing this petition, you are demanding the Obama Administration to add an amendment to the Constitution that limits the power of the Government from being able to censor the Internet". This indicates that the intent is to limit the power of the government. Many here are focusing on the word "inalienable", which would probably not be used in any eventual amendment, and arguing that this means that the government is required to actively facilitate providing internet access, but the definition of the word "inalienable" do not support this argument. I understand your concern and would agree with you concern if I agreed upon your interpretation of the "inalienable right" part of the petition.
Then, there is the small fact that no one could be sentenced to not having internet access, regardless of the crime. Spammers, crackers, sexual predators, child molesters, child pornographers, and even generic criminals.
Personally I think preventing these kinds of sentences would be a good thing, but a Constitutional amendment to make Internet an "inalienable right" would do no such thing. It's already well-established law that the government can infringe on people's rights when convicted of crimes: Prisoners already have most if not all of their rights restricted if not outright taken away. Additionally, when someone is let out of prison on probation or parole, they're effectively agreeing to the terms of such release (in return for being let out), so the government prohibiting the use of the Internet in that context wouldn't even be seen as an infringement of someone's rights at all.
That said, I agree this amendment is a terrible idea. It sounds more like an attempt to get "net neutrality" (otherwise known as "geeks who are perfectly fine with regulating the Internet to death if it's regulation favorable to them") embedded in the constitution than anything else.
Your take on net neutrality is interesting to me because I think that this amendment would undermine net neutrality, which is all about protecting the traffic at the end-nodes from being interfered with by the intermediary-nodes. I struggle to see how an amendment could be written in some way that did not allow the intermediary nodes to operate as they liked. The ISPs are part of the internet and it seems to me that a law that prohibited the government from regulating the internet usage by typical users would also prohibit the gov from regulating the ISPs.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the number of traffic violations really a good metric for morality? A lot of people just drive fast when there is no reasonable chance that they are going to endanger others. I am not making excuses, as I tend to be one of the slow drivers on the road. I just think it is better to think of morality in terms of actions that involve real and significant consequences for others but are of no personal consequence to the parties involved.
They should have just watched the movie "Trading Places"
Andrew Wiles may be an exception. For every semi-celebrity prof like him that managed to do something notable, there are 100 highly paid tenured faculty that have more or less checked out. They make $150K, don't do research, and teach a handful of classes. They cause tuition prices to rise and require Universities to "tax" grant and external money at higher rates.
Important quote from the article "a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position". So Australian universities are cutting back on research position and focusing more on teaching.
Unless research positions are earning income for the income they are being abandoned.
So it seems they are focusing on education with research being tied students and providing education opportunities for them.
So it seems to be a split between teaching universities versus research universities. Universities in Australia come under a lot of pressure from TAFE, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafe, education facilities which have a tighter alignment with employment opportunities. With out research that doesn't generate income, thy are far more cost effective.
I think you are on the right track, but I do not agree that they are focusing more on teaching. Based on very close ties that I have with several universities and in depth knowledge of how salaries are usally funded, I can tell you this. Most faculty do not want to teach. Furthermore, teaching does not bring in enough money. Consider this example. An engineering prof may teach 6 classes per year. Those classes will have on average 20 students and the classes will be worth 4 credit hours. At my local public university it will cost $200 per credit hour. The teaching services he provides brings in roughly 6*20*4*200= $96000. Overhead for facilities, administration, etc will take at least 40% of that leaving $57600. That is not enough to pay a faculty member that probably makes over $100K. The departments need to make up for that deficit by either bringing in external money and "taxing" it, or by employing cheaper individuals (usually with the title of "lecturer") to teach classes. What this university is basically doing is identifying faculty who will not likely be bringing in much money and demoting them to lecturer positions that will pay less.
There is no reward for cranking out excessive numbers of papers, and it is a one time reshaping of the workforce. And your are wrong about the others being scared for their jobs. They are jumping for joy that Bill is no longer leaching money off of their projects because Bill has a $150K salary but doesn't bring in shit because student tuition doesn't even come close to funding his position. In order to pay his salary, they have to "tax" all of the researchers that are out their working their butts off to bring in external funding. Hell, Universities are run by faculty and this particular University is reshaping its work force most likely because the majority of faculty want this to happen.
I do not mean to be rude, but that is a naive point of view. In order to pursue those goals of educating students and performing cutting edge research, some amount of money and revenue is necessary. More to the point, research generally brings in more money than teaching classes (student tuition), especially in science and engineering. So Universities want their highest earning faculty to be supporting their salaries through external money.
It is not a quota! They are not instituting a policy saying "publish papers at a rate of X in the future". They need to reduce faculty costs right now. In this particular university and many others, the biggest losses are coming from high paid research faculty who are not bringing in external money to justify their existence. They chose to use papers already published as a metric for determining who stays, who goes, and who becomes instructors. That is no guarantee that they will use this same metric for any future workforce reductions and it is therefore not a quota. You can criticize the use of this metric, but keep in mind that in most other similar situations, the alternative would be to protect the faculty members who have been employed the longest and most likely toward the higher end in pay.
It is not a quota. Quota's are given in advance and you work to meet them. In this case the University needed to reduce research salaries. They just happened to choose this existing metric to make a decision on how to meet their salary reduction goals. There is no indication that this metric will be used in the future. It is very easy to criticize the use of this metric, but beeing currently part of a work force that requires similar efficiency improvements, I can tell you that their is no metric or means that will not be criticized for being unfair to some individuals. In my own personal opinion, this approach is a hell of a lot better than the typical practice of protecting the highest paid and longest retained individuals.
drop the last decimal place. get rid of pennies, nickels and quarters. Go to just dimes and 50c pieces and dollar coins. Make the 50c pieces smaller and cheaper to make. Problems solved.
Those are some big families. They must be Catholic or Amish
s/hat/helmet
These radio systems were never put in place to facilitate oversight of the police. They were put in place to enable faster distribution and response in emergency situations. Real-time communication monitoring is not a very good method of oversight in any circumstance. Besides, it is only one form of communication that is used and it is recorded for future record in case it is needed for prosecution of review of police actions.
You are dead on. This is a solution looking for a problem and low hanging fruit for reducing DARPA spending as far as I am concerned. Granted, researching how to learn better is a worthwhile goal and probably a much more useful goal than teaching people to shoot other people.
I would say that every use of children for military purposes of any kind is a violation of international human rights: Military_use_of_children#International_human_rights_law
and especially interseting part is:
"Under Article 8(2)(a)(xxvi) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), adopted in July 1998 and entered into force 1 July 2002; "Conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities" is a war crime."
According to the website, they are not necessarily designing military items. It specifically identifies items like go-carts and mobile robots in the program description. However, I will agree to the extent that having the military involved in education is a slippery slope as it has the potential for abuse and really is no value added. The reason that the military is involved in this is that Congress has budgeted a specific amount of money for STEM. Congress could just as easily provide this money to other organizations for STEM or to schools directly with the stipulation that it is used to build extracurricular STEM programs. Perhaps an effort should be made to advocate for this money being given to programs through differenet means or as an alternative, put safegaurds in place to protect children from the loss of innocence that comes from building war machines.
All things considered, the Gov offer is extremely generous and pretty much standard for any government science and technology effort. The government is paying for the effort and all "unlimited rights" means is that they want to have access to the work so that they can use the technology in their efforts and eventually have a product manufactured. They do not force you to give your information away to anyone else. You can still patent/copyright whatever you create and make money off of it in the commercial world. That is not such a bad deal because a lot of people would argue that if the project is using tax payer money, then the resulting information should be put into the public domain.
You mean quietly focusing on and concentrating on work leads to more production than joking around with the office buddies and talking to the receptionist down the hall? Brilliant!!
I agree, MS actions are just par for the course. Every other manufacturer is doing the exact same things, usually without any clear objective. Even the cheap chinese android tablets like the epad and flytouch come locked downs to a certain degree. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how this benefits them or what they plan to gain through this other than customers who are slightly more annoyed at having to do extra work in order to install their custom roms. I am not sure who this is benefiting at this point, but it is certainly very popular.
To be fair to the grandparent, they did say that ATV is the only "box" that delivers a good interface. XBMC is awesome, but lets be honest, only a techie is going to install and maintain that software on dedicated hardware. To make money on these TV gadgets, the products are going to need to appeal to the very large market segment that is willing to spend money on a smartphone but does not have the desire to root or mod the software.
Anyone looking to contact the religious organizations might want to point out that intellectual property did not exist when "thou shalt not steal" was written in stone. Furthermore, a lot has been lost in translation, but it is widely recognized that individual property rights were not the same as they are today and that "stealing" refers to the monopolization of resources that were needed by the group of people as a whole and perceived to be common property. Ie. "thou shalt not claim ownership of the only source of drinkable water in the area and deny it to others'. Viewed from this more accurate interpretation of "thou shalt not steal", intellectual property is "stealing". It is taking something previously thought to be common property and claiming it as your own and using that to exploit other members of the tribe or other tribes.
There are MVNOs that use AT&T and Verizon's networks (StraightTalk available at Walmart for example).
Extremely difficult? For nerds on slashdot? I think not.
I think torrent/usenet is probably the big thing. I think there was one hack that allowed you to send remote control commands to the device via the network, which would be cool if you wanted to control the device through a smart phone or tablet device.
I think can explain why an ebook might cost more, though I cannot say for this particular book, but it is feasible that the side of a business has different salary costs, marketing costs, etc. In time, electronic publishing will be cheaper. There is no argument, but in the short term the costs might be higher as the market adjusts to a new way of doing things and has not completely worked out all of the inefficiencies.
The intent is irrelevant when the wording involves an inalienable right to something. Just look at the laws involving rights passed in the last 50 years. How many have been rights from something, like those making up the Bill of Rights, and how many have been rights to something, like the ADA?
I cannot disagree with you. As I said, the proposal is vague, but the last sentence of the proposal states "By signing this petition, you are demanding the Obama Administration to add an amendment to the Constitution that limits the power of the Government from being able to censor the Internet". This indicates that the intent is to limit the power of the government. Many here are focusing on the word "inalienable", which would probably not be used in any eventual amendment, and arguing that this means that the government is required to actively facilitate providing internet access, but the definition of the word "inalienable" do not support this argument. I understand your concern and would agree with you concern if I agreed upon your interpretation of the "inalienable right" part of the petition.
Personally I think preventing these kinds of sentences would be a good thing, but a Constitutional amendment to make Internet an "inalienable right" would do no such thing. It's already well-established law that the government can infringe on people's rights when convicted of crimes: Prisoners already have most if not all of their rights restricted if not outright taken away. Additionally, when someone is let out of prison on probation or parole, they're effectively agreeing to the terms of such release (in return for being let out), so the government prohibiting the use of the Internet in that context wouldn't even be seen as an infringement of someone's rights at all.
That said, I agree this amendment is a terrible idea. It sounds more like an attempt to get "net neutrality" (otherwise known as "geeks who are perfectly fine with regulating the Internet to death if it's regulation favorable to them") embedded in the constitution than anything else.
Your take on net neutrality is interesting to me because I think that this amendment would undermine net neutrality, which is all about protecting the traffic at the end-nodes from being interfered with by the intermediary-nodes. I struggle to see how an amendment could be written in some way that did not allow the intermediary nodes to operate as they liked. The ISPs are part of the internet and it seems to me that a law that prohibited the government from regulating the internet usage by typical users would also prohibit the gov from regulating the ISPs.