Unless the team was deeply dysfunctional to start with - I have yet to see an environment where getting people together in one room to interact wasn't vastly more productive than trying to do so virtually.
I've actually never seen an environment where the opposite wasn't true. Coordination over our IRC channel works great. People idle in it, and are reasonably responsive without it being too distracting when they're doing something that requires concentration. Much, much more productive than people walking over to each others' cubicles, emailing, using the phone, or having in-person meetings. It's so vastly more productive that the remote people who are good IRC citizens feel closer than people who work within 50 meters of me who don't check it enough. Sure, I can have scheduled meetings with those people, or occasionally walk over to their desk if something's important, but they're out of the flow of collaboration and hour-to-hour problem solving.
It'd also help if the boards were comprised of more independent people. The current status-quo is that executives are all on each other's boards, which gives an obvious disincentive to play hardball on things like compensation. Does the Board think that executives should be paid a lot, because they provide immense value? Why of course, this board made up of other executives thinks the proposition to be beyond question!
For example, here are the members of the board of directors of JPMorgan Chase:
The retired Executive VP of Boeing
The Chairman of Springs Industries
The CEO of NBCUniversal
The Chairman and CEO of Honeywell
The President of Henry Crown and Company
The CEO of Chase itself
The former CEO of KPMG
The President of the American Museum of Natural History
It provides a mechanism by which shareholders can set a pay limit for executives, and veto large pay packages which they don't think are in their interests. Since shareholders nominally "own" the company, I'm not sure why that would be particularly controversial, except that companies have been to some extent captured by their management.
There is nothing here that prevents high corporate pay if the owners of the company feel it's justified.
The Web Standards Project is the organization that put together the ACID, ACID2, and ACID3 browser-compatibility tests. There has been talk for some time of an ACID4 in development. Will that be done via some other group, or is it canned?
Sure, and people are free to complain about them. One way information is exchanged in marketplaces, which helps guide consumer decisions and price signals, is via discussion.
It's a bit more than that: it also got rid of the idea of "stable versions" with their own updates, and just pushes new versions as updates. So for example, rather than Microsoft maintaining IE7, IE8, IE9 branches, the last update to IE7 would've just been the IE8 upgrade, and applied automatically.
Are 3d printers actually less traceable than existing tools like CNC mills? My understanding is that tracing for CNC'd parts is done based on small differences in alignment, operational speeds, etc, much like tracing typewritten text to a typewriter, or bullets to the gun that fired them. Wouldn't that also work with 3d printers unless they were exactly interchangeable, with no minor differences in operation that could be noticed as a signature?
Considering how slow it is (~100x slower than zlib), I doubt anyone will be using it for on-the-fly compression of web content. It'd only really make sense for one-time compression, e.g. Google might use this to slim Android APKs down a little bit.
I agree that you can make a good long films, but in practice those are usually sold as "TV series", not as "films", because that suits the viewing public's preferences much better. For example, I think the first season and first half of the 2nd season of Twin Peaks could've been put together into a quite good ~10-hour film. But nobody would try to do that, because a 10-hour film just isn't marketable as a film, at least outside of a niche art circuit.
Never mind the ratio of the hours of joy you get from a game per dollar compared to film.
Game devs always make this argument, but it seems like a dumb analogy to me. Film is deliberately a concise medium. People pay money for films wanting a high-quality but reasonably short experience. That's one of its virtues! Directors are often forced by studios to make cuts before final release, because the majority of movie-goers don't want to see a 4-hour film, even though they would get more "minutes per dollar". People aren't walking out thinking, ugh, a 2-hour film, what a fuckin' ripoff compared to Ben Hur.
If, on the other hand, you do want a much longer experience in the moving pictures category, there is a different product for you: you probably don't want a film, and instead you want a TV series. For $25 you can buy a complete season of The Wire (13 hours), say. That seems like a more relevant comparison.
I disagree. I think if some people have the misfortune to be born with worse genes, they shouldn't have the double misfortune of also having a significant financial burden piled on top of other burdens such as needing to get surgery. I wasn't born with a congenital heart defect, for example, but that was pure luck, not something I "deserve", and I'm perfectly happy to pay my fair share towards treating those who were less fortunate in their birth.
I think the opposite is actually the problem: salaries generally do vary based on prestige which just gives one more reason that scientists feel they need to chase it. Prestige is much more important to salary than seniority and formal credentials: a hot-shot young scientist who is getting papers in Nature on a regular basis will have universities competing to offer him or her more money than they pay many of their tenured faculty.
I generally agree, but it would be easier if federal funding for research were a bit more generous so it actually paid for it, rather than paying for only parts, sometimes not even very large parts.
For-profit journal companies are one side of the problem, but there are even a lot of non-profit professional organizations which don't publish open access, because they need the revenue provided by library subscriptions to keep the organization going: organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and the American Mathematical Society. If these organizations were funded by taxpayers instead of having to rely on raising their own funds, they would not have that problem, and would have no problem going open-access.
This is also why I'm skeptical of suggestions, like this one from the founder of academia.edu, that decentralized metrics will remove the prestige of the top journals. In a formal sense, they will make it possible to have a prestigious paper outside of a prestigious journal: you could have high citation counts and a high h-index publishing exclusively technical reports or self-hosted whitepapers. Therefore, the argument goes, there will no longer be any need to chase the prestigious journals, because on your CV people will look at citation metrics and not care where those papers are published.
But in practice, the metrics actually work to strengthen the prestigious journals even more. If your paper appears in Nature or Science, many people will see it who would not have otherwise seen it: even people outside your usual field, and science journalists who may write stories further disseminating it. This greatly raises the odds that your paper will get a lot of citations. Therefore, if citation metrics are important to you, that's just one more reason, not one less reason, to prefer the prestigious journals.
From an actuarial point of view, it's a reasonable comparison. The difference is that people are born in one body with a lot of things that they can't really do anything about. Sort of like being born in a burnt-down house without any possibility to move to a new one.
A conclusion could be that insurance for healthcare makes no sense. How do I insure against the possibility of being born with a genetically caused condition? I'd have to buy insurance before I was born.
1. Using this data for insurance purposes will be banned, which turns "preexisting condition" into a criterion that can only be applied with eyes closed;
or 2. Huge numbers of people will be uninsurable, because the likelihood of their future illnesses will be known before they try to buy insurance.
To make coding look cool, though, don't you have to somehow convince kids that these cool people code? Having some cool people who don't code as role models isn't gonna do much to convince kids that coding is cool.
(Let's leave aside for the moment whether the likes of Marco Rubio and Al Gore qualify as "cool".)
It's true that countries with armies have not generally renounced killing people in war, on an active battlefield. However, many of them have renounced executions, even military executions. Most European countries no longer countenance execution of either: 1) enemies caught in a non-battlefield situation, such as captured spies; or 2) their own soldiers found guilty of treason. In either case, in such countries, the maximum punishment is lifetime imprisonment.
The UK does retain the option to execute traitors or spies, but limited only to periods in which the country is in an officially declared war. Therefore the UK could not execute a British soldier who acted similarly to Manning, since the "War on Terror" is not a declared war.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless the team was deeply dysfunctional to start with - I have yet to see an environment where getting people together in one room to interact wasn't vastly more productive than trying to do so virtually.
I've actually never seen an environment where the opposite wasn't true. Coordination over our IRC channel works great. People idle in it, and are reasonably responsive without it being too distracting when they're doing something that requires concentration. Much, much more productive than people walking over to each others' cubicles, emailing, using the phone, or having in-person meetings. It's so vastly more productive that the remote people who are good IRC citizens feel closer than people who work within 50 meters of me who don't check it enough. Sure, I can have scheduled meetings with those people, or occasionally walk over to their desk if something's important, but they're out of the flow of collaboration and hour-to-hour problem solving.
It'd also help if the boards were comprised of more independent people. The current status-quo is that executives are all on each other's boards, which gives an obvious disincentive to play hardball on things like compensation. Does the Board think that executives should be paid a lot, because they provide immense value? Why of course, this board made up of other executives thinks the proposition to be beyond question!
For example, here are the members of the board of directors of JPMorgan Chase:
It provides a mechanism by which shareholders can set a pay limit for executives, and veto large pay packages which they don't think are in their interests. Since shareholders nominally "own" the company, I'm not sure why that would be particularly controversial, except that companies have been to some extent captured by their management.
There is nothing here that prevents high corporate pay if the owners of the company feel it's justified.
The Israeli kibbutzim are some of the longer-lasting ones.
The Web Standards Project is the organization that put together the ACID, ACID2, and ACID3 browser-compatibility tests. There has been talk for some time of an ACID4 in development. Will that be done via some other group, or is it canned?
Sure, and people are free to complain about them. One way information is exchanged in marketplaces, which helps guide consumer decisions and price signals, is via discussion.
It's a bit more than that: it also got rid of the idea of "stable versions" with their own updates, and just pushes new versions as updates. So for example, rather than Microsoft maintaining IE7, IE8, IE9 branches, the last update to IE7 would've just been the IE8 upgrade, and applied automatically.
Now if only I could upload it...
Are 3d printers actually less traceable than existing tools like CNC mills? My understanding is that tracing for CNC'd parts is done based on small differences in alignment, operational speeds, etc, much like tracing typewritten text to a typewriter, or bullets to the gun that fired them. Wouldn't that also work with 3d printers unless they were exactly interchangeable, with no minor differences in operation that could be noticed as a signature?
Not to mention that, even in Florida itself, hurricanes are a much larger risk than sinkholes.
There's a lot of empty space in Montana I hear.
The state's Department of Environmental Protection has a nice collection of sinkhole resources, including a database of incidents, and a poster with a map.
One example that comes to mind: Android APKs use the zip format.
Considering how slow it is (~100x slower than zlib), I doubt anyone will be using it for on-the-fly compression of web content. It'd only really make sense for one-time compression, e.g. Google might use this to slim Android APKs down a little bit.
I agree that you can make a good long films, but in practice those are usually sold as "TV series", not as "films", because that suits the viewing public's preferences much better. For example, I think the first season and first half of the 2nd season of Twin Peaks could've been put together into a quite good ~10-hour film. But nobody would try to do that, because a 10-hour film just isn't marketable as a film, at least outside of a niche art circuit.
Game devs always make this argument, but it seems like a dumb analogy to me. Film is deliberately a concise medium. People pay money for films wanting a high-quality but reasonably short experience. That's one of its virtues! Directors are often forced by studios to make cuts before final release, because the majority of movie-goers don't want to see a 4-hour film, even though they would get more "minutes per dollar". People aren't walking out thinking, ugh, a 2-hour film, what a fuckin' ripoff compared to Ben Hur.
If, on the other hand, you do want a much longer experience in the moving pictures category, there is a different product for you: you probably don't want a film, and instead you want a TV series. For $25 you can buy a complete season of The Wire (13 hours), say. That seems like a more relevant comparison.
I disagree. I think if some people have the misfortune to be born with worse genes, they shouldn't have the double misfortune of also having a significant financial burden piled on top of other burdens such as needing to get surgery. I wasn't born with a congenital heart defect, for example, but that was pure luck, not something I "deserve", and I'm perfectly happy to pay my fair share towards treating those who were less fortunate in their birth.
I think the opposite is actually the problem: salaries generally do vary based on prestige which just gives one more reason that scientists feel they need to chase it. Prestige is much more important to salary than seniority and formal credentials: a hot-shot young scientist who is getting papers in Nature on a regular basis will have universities competing to offer him or her more money than they pay many of their tenured faculty.
I generally agree, but it would be easier if federal funding for research were a bit more generous so it actually paid for it, rather than paying for only parts, sometimes not even very large parts.
For-profit journal companies are one side of the problem, but there are even a lot of non-profit professional organizations which don't publish open access, because they need the revenue provided by library subscriptions to keep the organization going: organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and the American Mathematical Society. If these organizations were funded by taxpayers instead of having to rely on raising their own funds, they would not have that problem, and would have no problem going open-access.
This is also why I'm skeptical of suggestions, like this one from the founder of academia.edu, that decentralized metrics will remove the prestige of the top journals. In a formal sense, they will make it possible to have a prestigious paper outside of a prestigious journal: you could have high citation counts and a high h-index publishing exclusively technical reports or self-hosted whitepapers. Therefore, the argument goes, there will no longer be any need to chase the prestigious journals, because on your CV people will look at citation metrics and not care where those papers are published.
But in practice, the metrics actually work to strengthen the prestigious journals even more. If your paper appears in Nature or Science, many people will see it who would not have otherwise seen it: even people outside your usual field, and science journalists who may write stories further disseminating it. This greatly raises the odds that your paper will get a lot of citations. Therefore, if citation metrics are important to you, that's just one more reason, not one less reason, to prefer the prestigious journals.
From an actuarial point of view, it's a reasonable comparison. The difference is that people are born in one body with a lot of things that they can't really do anything about. Sort of like being born in a burnt-down house without any possibility to move to a new one.
A conclusion could be that insurance for healthcare makes no sense. How do I insure against the possibility of being born with a genetically caused condition? I'd have to buy insurance before I was born.
Either:
1. Using this data for insurance purposes will be banned, which turns "preexisting condition" into a criterion that can only be applied with eyes closed;
or 2. Huge numbers of people will be uninsurable, because the likelihood of their future illnesses will be known before they try to buy insurance.
I believe states can only regulate photography that takes place in the state, not photography of the state. Good luck enforcing Texas law in space!
To make coding look cool, though, don't you have to somehow convince kids that these cool people code? Having some cool people who don't code as role models isn't gonna do much to convince kids that coding is cool.
(Let's leave aside for the moment whether the likes of Marco Rubio and Al Gore qualify as "cool".)
It's true that countries with armies have not generally renounced killing people in war, on an active battlefield. However, many of them have renounced executions, even military executions. Most European countries no longer countenance execution of either: 1) enemies caught in a non-battlefield situation, such as captured spies; or 2) their own soldiers found guilty of treason. In either case, in such countries, the maximum punishment is lifetime imprisonment.
The UK does retain the option to execute traitors or spies, but limited only to periods in which the country is in an officially declared war. Therefore the UK could not execute a British soldier who acted similarly to Manning, since the "War on Terror" is not a declared war.