Maybe I'm a weird stats geek, but I wouldn't rather know that unless it actually statistically raises my odds of survival (perhaps weighted by quality of life during the survival). Knowing something that doesn't do me any good, and which will lead to pressure to take action that isn't beneficial? No thanks.
For some people that's true, but empirically a lot of people do make such choices, when given the option to do so legally. For example, quite a few people have do-not-resuscitate and/or "no life support" orders on file.
That's not really feasible at a large scale--- $100 billion of physical cash takes a lot of space, is expensive to store and secure, and is difficult to move around. That's why large businesses park their cash in treasuries, instead.
In particular, he does mostly consulting, and from his descriptions, it sounds like mostly for clueless people who aren't going to evaluate the technical quality of the deliverable (or even know what technical quality looks like). That's a real market niche, and a fairly large one, but it's hardly generalizable to all tech jobs. If you're interviewing for embedded systems development, and your attitude is "I can learn C in 6 weeks" and you want to talk more about providing return on value than about your technical skills, you probably aren't going to get the job.
I thought most of the big copyright players had more or less agreed with the de facto settlement of a mixture of takedowns (for cases they particularly object to) and slapping ads on YouTube videos so they can profit via Google's revenue-sharing thing (for cases where they'll just take some cash compensation).
It makes quite a bit of sense to me if you're really into free markets and individualism, which is why it's weird to think of it as anti-free-market. As Hayek points out, fear and desperation aren't conducive to rational exchange of value in a free market, or to individualism. With an economy driven by fear and desperation, people actually act in a more collectivist way: they cling to ethnic groups, churches, and various other such tribalist groupings that can provide them a safety net. And, people who would be great entrepreneurs, if they come from poorer background (i.e. without a good family-backed safety net) tend to stick to dead-end corporate jobs instead, because they have a family and can't take the risk of losing the steady paycheck. Etc.
People who actually want to do scientific research are not in a good position at the moment either, unless you count insecure, mediocre-pay employment in endless strings of post-docs as a good position.
It's true that you can make money with a science degree if you don't care about actually advancing fundamental science, though.
As the article notes, they already use "throwable" robots, and have for a while. This is just an R&D effort to come up with a lighter-weight one.
They've been around at least a decade I'd guess. When I read the "Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots" in 2003 (alas, I didn't build any robots, guide or not), it already included a section where it mentioned in passing that the military had something called a "throwbot" that soldiers could throw into confined areas for reconnaissance, so it must've been common knowledge by then.
Alibaba's been interested in buying back the Yahoo-owned portion of the company for a while, and with Yahoo's current stock price and the success of Alibaba, just buying Yahoo might be a reasonably cost-effective way to buy itself back.
What if my purpose in requesting the data about me isn't to help DDoS Facebook with a deluge of requests, but because I actually want to know what data Facebook's compiled on me. That is, after all, why the law exists in the first place, and it's not at all strange that someone might want to know that information.
If Facebook finds it expensive and inconvenient to mail out physical CDs, they could agree to allow at least optional delivery by other means, such as over the internet.
I'd be okay with requiring the protestors to clear a path and not obstruct traffic, if they do in fact obstruct traffic, and arresting people if they refuse to do so. It's ahead of time saying that they aren't allowed to protest here without the government's permission that bugs me more, and seems hard to square with a free state. If me and 10 of my friends get together to protest in an orderly fashion and don't in fact block the sidewalk or road, then the cops shouldn't be able to arrest me based solely on some technicality like lacking a permit.
The level of violence of U.S. cops "on the scene" is pretty surprising by most civilized standards. I will agree it's not a "police state" because the biggest marker of those is what happens more generally if you're arrested (e.g. do thousands of people get disappeared?). In the U.S. a typical arrested protestor will just be released, sometimes cited, though occasionally prosecutors do go overboard with charges intended to intimidate. There are a handful of more worrying terrorism detention-without-trial cases, but I haven't heard of that being used in relation to street protests.
It does seem strange that the level of violence on-the-scene is needed, though. Sure, it's not mowing people down, Tiananmen style, but it seems pretty excessive. I don't know if it's an attempt to scare off "normal" people from showing up (which leads to a vicious cycle of only more-extreme people being willing to show up), or if it's just the individual work of not-very-disciplined cops.
Under current case law the permit system is largely allowed, though it may violate the Constitution depending on how it's applied. The government may place "reasonable" "time, place and manner" restrictions on protests in order to maintain public order and safety, but is not supposed to prohibit protests entirely, or treat them differently based on the content of the protest (this is easiest to show if they treat protestors for and against some position differently).
I don't, for the record, think that interpretation of the Constitution is correct. Were it up to me, I would treat public protest similarly to publication: the government may prosecute actually illegal activity (libel for publication, or violence in the case of protests) if it ever takes place, but there should be an extremely high bar for prior restraint through anything like a permitting or imprimatur system before the speech even takes place.
If people bought into an IPO that was advertised with one set of revenues, and they were massively revised downwards after it happened, it'd be in the courts for years.
I believe it was justified by a problematic analogy to some physical trespassing type questions. It can sometimes be the case that, if you're granted access somewhere pursuant to an agreement or policy, then it's a criminal offense (trespass) if you access it in a way that doesn't comply with the policy, because the default is no-authorized-access. The attempted analogy is that if you access a computer resource in a way that violates its ToS, your access is unauthorized, so you're guilty of unauthorized access to a computer system.
WIPO Copyright Treaty. You remember that one, don't you?
I've probably been around here too long, but I think the #1 reason I know about the WIPO treaty (and the organization itself) is because of the famous Slashdot troll of that name.
It's not even particularly new for companies to be super paranoid about "leaks", and to interpret what constitutes a leak very broadly. Apple is probably more paranoid, for example, and Apple employees tend to just avoid Tweeting anything Apple-related for that reason.
I do agree that this was stupid, unless there's something more to the story; it doesn't appear that he actually leaked anything that could plausibly be considered secret, and certainly not any interesting secrets.
I also like the now-self-referential part of the policy that recommends employees think, before they take an action online:
How would it look on Slashdot or on the front page of the New York Times?
You clearly didn't pay attention in junior high school, if you think that taxes on profits are a cost to a company. Profits are what you make after costs are netted out. Corporations are only taxed if they turn profits.
They would function in a roughly cost-like manner if the rate of profit were completely fixed, so e.g. a company that suffered a 2% reduction in profit had to and was able to raise its prices by 2% to compensate, but rates of profit fluctuate according to a number of factors. Where the 2% reduction in profit will come from: price increases, wage decreases, dividend decreases, pressure on suppliers for price decreases, etc. depends on a lot of factors.
Perhaps DR RON PAUL could achieve more success if he reinvents himself in the guise of a Pirate Party. He could still stick to the gold stuff pretty easily, with a nice gold-doubloons theme.
What's more interesting to me than Israel joining specifically, is the "first non-European member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research". Is Israel simply an exception, or will CERN be moving to less of a European focus in the future? For example, Turkey has applied for membership; will they eventually join? Could other in-the-region-of-Europe states like Egypt join?
They don't run companies effectively because they aren't really in charge of the company. Most board members do completely different things as day jobs. Some are on five or six boards. You cannot effectively run six multinational companies and also have a day job at a seventh, though you can surely succeed at pulling in seven salaries.
For example, when there were some shady stores about Cisco coming out earlier this year, I looked up their board to see who I could contact. Oh, one of them is the President of Stanford University. How much time do you think the President of Stanford spends keeping tabs on Cisco's corporate affairs, making sure that the company is run properly? Another one is, uh, Carol Bartz, until recently the CEO of Yahoo being discussed here. How much time do you think Carol Bartz took out of her Yahoo day job to make sure Cisco was being responsibly governed? Yet another Cisco board member; Michele Burns, CEO of Mercer, the world's largest H.R. consulting firm. Do you think she spent lots of her free time, when not running Mercer, to make sure Cisco is doing things right?
No, in practice, the boards don't have any idea what's going on, the CEOs all sit on each others' boards anyway, and the boards therefore leave things to the CEO, ignorance-is-bliss style, until someone forces them to care, either because the stock price is tanking, there is bad media attention, or unwelcome attention from prosecutors.
I don't think Wall Street really believes in efficient markets. A large part of what investment banks do (on the "prop trading" side) is attempting to exploit market inefficiencies via various kinds of arbitrage plays.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm a weird stats geek, but I wouldn't rather know that unless it actually statistically raises my odds of survival (perhaps weighted by quality of life during the survival). Knowing something that doesn't do me any good, and which will lead to pressure to take action that isn't beneficial? No thanks.
For some people that's true, but empirically a lot of people do make such choices, when given the option to do so legally. For example, quite a few people have do-not-resuscitate and/or "no life support" orders on file.
That's not really feasible at a large scale--- $100 billion of physical cash takes a lot of space, is expensive to store and secure, and is difficult to move around. That's why large businesses park their cash in treasuries, instead.
In particular, he does mostly consulting, and from his descriptions, it sounds like mostly for clueless people who aren't going to evaluate the technical quality of the deliverable (or even know what technical quality looks like). That's a real market niche, and a fairly large one, but it's hardly generalizable to all tech jobs. If you're interviewing for embedded systems development, and your attitude is "I can learn C in 6 weeks" and you want to talk more about providing return on value than about your technical skills, you probably aren't going to get the job.
I thought most of the big copyright players had more or less agreed with the de facto settlement of a mixture of takedowns (for cases they particularly object to) and slapping ads on YouTube videos so they can profit via Google's revenue-sharing thing (for cases where they'll just take some cash compensation).
Indeed, that has been proposed as the future...
It makes quite a bit of sense to me if you're really into free markets and individualism, which is why it's weird to think of it as anti-free-market. As Hayek points out, fear and desperation aren't conducive to rational exchange of value in a free market, or to individualism. With an economy driven by fear and desperation, people actually act in a more collectivist way: they cling to ethnic groups, churches, and various other such tribalist groupings that can provide them a safety net. And, people who would be great entrepreneurs, if they come from poorer background (i.e. without a good family-backed safety net) tend to stick to dead-end corporate jobs instead, because they have a family and can't take the risk of losing the steady paycheck. Etc.
your proposal, which amounts to forcibly taking money from the productive to support the lazy and indolent, is the very essence of socialism
It's interesting to learn on Slashdot that Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek were socialists...
People who actually want to do scientific research are not in a good position at the moment either, unless you count insecure, mediocre-pay employment in endless strings of post-docs as a good position.
It's true that you can make money with a science degree if you don't care about actually advancing fundamental science, though.
As the article notes, they already use "throwable" robots, and have for a while. This is just an R&D effort to come up with a lighter-weight one.
They've been around at least a decade I'd guess. When I read the "Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots" in 2003 (alas, I didn't build any robots, guide or not), it already included a section where it mentioned in passing that the military had something called a "throwbot" that soldiers could throw into confined areas for reconnaissance, so it must've been common knowledge by then.
Alibaba's been interested in buying back the Yahoo-owned portion of the company for a while, and with Yahoo's current stock price and the success of Alibaba, just buying Yahoo might be a reasonably cost-effective way to buy itself back.
What if my purpose in requesting the data about me isn't to help DDoS Facebook with a deluge of requests, but because I actually want to know what data Facebook's compiled on me. That is, after all, why the law exists in the first place, and it's not at all strange that someone might want to know that information.
If Facebook finds it expensive and inconvenient to mail out physical CDs, they could agree to allow at least optional delivery by other means, such as over the internet.
I'd be okay with requiring the protestors to clear a path and not obstruct traffic, if they do in fact obstruct traffic, and arresting people if they refuse to do so. It's ahead of time saying that they aren't allowed to protest here without the government's permission that bugs me more, and seems hard to square with a free state. If me and 10 of my friends get together to protest in an orderly fashion and don't in fact block the sidewalk or road, then the cops shouldn't be able to arrest me based solely on some technicality like lacking a permit.
The level of violence of U.S. cops "on the scene" is pretty surprising by most civilized standards. I will agree it's not a "police state" because the biggest marker of those is what happens more generally if you're arrested (e.g. do thousands of people get disappeared?). In the U.S. a typical arrested protestor will just be released, sometimes cited, though occasionally prosecutors do go overboard with charges intended to intimidate. There are a handful of more worrying terrorism detention-without-trial cases, but I haven't heard of that being used in relation to street protests.
It does seem strange that the level of violence on-the-scene is needed, though. Sure, it's not mowing people down, Tiananmen style, but it seems pretty excessive. I don't know if it's an attempt to scare off "normal" people from showing up (which leads to a vicious cycle of only more-extreme people being willing to show up), or if it's just the individual work of not-very-disciplined cops.
Under current case law the permit system is largely allowed, though it may violate the Constitution depending on how it's applied. The government may place "reasonable" "time, place and manner" restrictions on protests in order to maintain public order and safety, but is not supposed to prohibit protests entirely, or treat them differently based on the content of the protest (this is easiest to show if they treat protestors for and against some position differently).
I don't, for the record, think that interpretation of the Constitution is correct. Were it up to me, I would treat public protest similarly to publication: the government may prosecute actually illegal activity (libel for publication, or violence in the case of protests) if it ever takes place, but there should be an extremely high bar for prior restraint through anything like a permitting or imprimatur system before the speech even takes place.
If people bought into an IPO that was advertised with one set of revenues, and they were massively revised downwards after it happened, it'd be in the courts for years.
I believe it was justified by a problematic analogy to some physical trespassing type questions. It can sometimes be the case that, if you're granted access somewhere pursuant to an agreement or policy, then it's a criminal offense (trespass) if you access it in a way that doesn't comply with the policy, because the default is no-authorized-access. The attempted analogy is that if you access a computer resource in a way that violates its ToS, your access is unauthorized, so you're guilty of unauthorized access to a computer system.
I've probably been around here too long, but I think the #1 reason I know about the WIPO treaty (and the organization itself) is because of the famous Slashdot troll of that name.
It's not even particularly new for companies to be super paranoid about "leaks", and to interpret what constitutes a leak very broadly. Apple is probably more paranoid, for example, and Apple employees tend to just avoid Tweeting anything Apple-related for that reason.
I do agree that this was stupid, unless there's something more to the story; it doesn't appear that he actually leaked anything that could plausibly be considered secret, and certainly not any interesting secrets.
I also like the now-self-referential part of the policy that recommends employees think, before they take an action online:
You clearly didn't pay attention in junior high school, if you think that taxes on profits are a cost to a company. Profits are what you make after costs are netted out. Corporations are only taxed if they turn profits.
They would function in a roughly cost-like manner if the rate of profit were completely fixed, so e.g. a company that suffered a 2% reduction in profit had to and was able to raise its prices by 2% to compensate, but rates of profit fluctuate according to a number of factors. Where the 2% reduction in profit will come from: price increases, wage decreases, dividend decreases, pressure on suppliers for price decreases, etc. depends on a lot of factors.
Also, the names are sort of similar, so it's easy to get confused between the "Star something thing" if you don't pay much attention to these things.
Perhaps DR RON PAUL could achieve more success if he reinvents himself in the guise of a Pirate Party. He could still stick to the gold stuff pretty easily, with a nice gold-doubloons theme.
What's more interesting to me than Israel joining specifically, is the "first non-European member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research". Is Israel simply an exception, or will CERN be moving to less of a European focus in the future? For example, Turkey has applied for membership; will they eventually join? Could other in-the-region-of-Europe states like Egypt join?
They don't run companies effectively because they aren't really in charge of the company. Most board members do completely different things as day jobs. Some are on five or six boards. You cannot effectively run six multinational companies and also have a day job at a seventh, though you can surely succeed at pulling in seven salaries.
For example, when there were some shady stores about Cisco coming out earlier this year, I looked up their board to see who I could contact. Oh, one of them is the President of Stanford University. How much time do you think the President of Stanford spends keeping tabs on Cisco's corporate affairs, making sure that the company is run properly? Another one is, uh, Carol Bartz, until recently the CEO of Yahoo being discussed here. How much time do you think Carol Bartz took out of her Yahoo day job to make sure Cisco was being responsibly governed? Yet another Cisco board member; Michele Burns, CEO of Mercer, the world's largest H.R. consulting firm. Do you think she spent lots of her free time, when not running Mercer, to make sure Cisco is doing things right?
No, in practice, the boards don't have any idea what's going on, the CEOs all sit on each others' boards anyway, and the boards therefore leave things to the CEO, ignorance-is-bliss style, until someone forces them to care, either because the stock price is tanking, there is bad media attention, or unwelcome attention from prosecutors.
I don't think Wall Street really believes in efficient markets. A large part of what investment banks do (on the "prop trading" side) is attempting to exploit market inefficiencies via various kinds of arbitrage plays.