At an ivy-league, I did not enter in CS but two years through changed my major to CS. It was highly theory-driven on the CS side and didn't really teach languages except for the opening "write a functional lisp interpreter in C" class. Then another class in the line would assume you knew C++ so you just had to learn it. Those were the bad old days of C++ with no STL in sight. But everyone got good at writing the String class....
I already knew I would never pursue a direct CS job - what I used to call "writing the spell checker for Word 6.0." But the in-major friends of mine who did want positions at the major software firms of the time (Microsoft, Oracle) had no problems getting them and for that matter succeeding at them.
In my job I've had to pick up a few language and learn them in order to accomplish some higher business purpose. The basic-ingredients focus on data structures, design patterns, discrete automata, and efficiency have always been there and given me a good framework to map any language I was working in to my knowledge base or any task onto my ability base.
Obviously you would get all that and more at MIT / Caltech as well. My point is that the cs/engineering program at a decent "liberal arts" school can give you what you need in many cases. Especially for "true" computer science, the required resources are quite easy for any top-ranked school/program to provide, even if it only brings forth 12 grads. If you asked the same question with respect to advanced materials or electrical engineering, then the required resources for a full program with grad-level options while in undergrad are an order of magnitude greater and might lead to a more careful consideration of the specific program.
The l.a. schools I am thinking of pull way ahead in terms of facilities, breadth of non-technical programs, girls (if you like that kind of thing), and recruiting/career path into non-technical jobs. The stereotyping of grads of tech schools that works for them in many cases in getting technical first-of-career jobs works against them in many cases in non-technical fields. And one of the best thing to do with college is keep your options open to you can change your mind.
I'm pleased that I was able to help you feel good about your giant superior intellect. You might want to tune it down just a touch when communicating with people so they don't wrongly interpret it as reflexive obnoxiousness.
What I was trying to say was that the contents of your house (personal property) you don't pay tax on, but you have already been "taxed" once on the income you used to purchase them.
I don't think I would like living in a country where personal property was regularly taxed -- effectively a wealth tax over liquid and illiquid investments. It's a value judgment.
Other responders have done a decent job of pointing out that things that require continued services seem to be appropriate targets of property tax, whereas goods that do not require additional societal interaction (personal property) does not. When road usage can be measured better without a giant toll network, then maybe auto property/title taxes will actually go away, too.
No arguments however that the tax system is a blunt and somewhat arbitrary instrument. In my view that's all the more reason not to introduce additional tax types.
If you believe that everything is owned by everyone else, then that makes sense. It sounds a lot like communism to me.
What's wrong with allowing someone to exclude people from making free copies of their book, if they want to do so? Have you ever written a book?
So if the book doesn't sell to a publishing house right away- tough luck - it should be free to everyone? How is that fair to the author?
Trying to legislate and tax everything is a recipe for disappointment. Set the copyright rules, let the market set value, then tax it at the end as income. Otherwise you get lots of distortions and rent-seeking behavior that adds nothing to the world. Oh, and a lot fewer books.
An IP property tax might be awful. Suppose you copyright something and then it doesn't sell. Should you have to dig into your pocket just to keep the book you wrote from slipping into the public domain (like what would happen if you fail to pay to maintain the patent)? That would really stick it to the little guy. And of course the tax might be wildly disproportionate (high or low) to the value created.
If the copyright helps some produce income, the income tax will get its fair share. It is appropriate to question the transfer prices for sale/transfer of IP to foreign jurisdictions and no doubt the treasury is getting the bad end of some tax cheating, but that is a largely separate issue.
How much were they quoting you for exactly what, and including other services or not? Inquiring minds want to know what expensive means. Might help frame the discussion.
USB charging is great for leaving your blackberry in a cradle. But for on the go, it's not a good solution. For one thing - too slow. Plus it doesn't completely solve your carry one charger problem.
When you charge on the road, you want to get fully charged as fast as possible. Being able to charge two things at once is even better. Basically if you travel a lot, the iGo is the best solution. A gift you give yourself. There is a competing product from Kensington but afaik it's only at Circuit City and just as expensive.
Expect more like 4000-5000. (That's still a lot of people, and it will still be painful)
It seems standard practice is to leak a big number to get everyone emotionally prepared, and then only do half. They may also count in the number the employees who left with the division they sold.
To speak more directly to your comment, in many cases when companies are growing well (as Intel was), a lot of people end up staying that aren't that great.
The following site refers to the European BGAN network, but has some pricing info ($6.95 - 9.95 per MByte), which is a good indication of possible Western hemisphere pricing.
Somehow they are doing VOIP at low quality, using 4Kbps. Why is VOIP [ TCP/IP] -> geosync -> land any noticeably longer lag that sat phone [circuit switch ] -> geosync -> land?
According to some promo info, with the new service you only pay for the bits you actually send/receive, not for just having the thing on, so you aren't tying up bandwidth for dead air.
The wi-fi is so that you can share the connection with a couple other laptops / computer equipment sitting next to you in the middle of nowhere (i.e., the equipment has an access point built in), not for alternate network connectivity.
How is it mandated that a ship must use Inmarsat/BGAN? Also, how is it that the pirates get your info from it? (No, I'm not a wannabe pirate.) I'm not giving you a hard time; I'm genuinely curious.
Good point. But some additional research shows it actually works differently. The inventory is actually held at Amazon!
Toysrus.com sells merchandise to the public via the Internet at www.toysrus.com, www.babiesrus.com, www.imaginarium.com, www.sportsrus.com, and www.personalizedbyrus.com. We opened our on-line doors to the public in 1998. In order to provide better customer service and order fulfillment, we entered into a strategic alliance with Amazon.com, Inc. and launched a co-branded toy store in 2000. Under the strategic alliance, this co-branded store offers toys and video games (Toysrus.com), baby products (Babiesrus.com), and learning and educational products (Imaginarium.com). The strategic alliance agreement, which expires in 2010, combines Toysrus.com's merchandising expertise and trusted brand name with Amazon.com, Inc.'s strengths in website operations, on-line customer service and reliable fulfillment. Toysrus.com is responsible for merchandising and content for the co-branded stores and identifies, purchases, owns, and manages the inventory. Amazon.com, Inc. handles site development, order fulfillment for most items, customer service, and the housing of Toysrus.com's inventory in Amazon.com, Inc.'s fulfillment centers in the United States. (from recent 10-K)
So TRU buys what it thinks it will sell, and then it's actually held at Amazon warehouses. Obviously Amazon would prefer that TRU buys gazillions of every unit, since TRU has to take all the inventory/pricing risk on unsold items, and Amazon only has to find a place to store it all. TRU is going to optimize margin vs. out-of-stock opportunity losses, just like a normal retail store. You could argue they have a slight incentive to have worse in-stock online so as to steer people to stores, but 1) it's pretty slight, and 2) that can be addressed (or not) by the contract.
However, it's also true that Toys'R'Us probably would rather sell more toys than fewer. They probably tried their "best." And selling more toys is not necessarily good business if you have to take too much inventory risk to do it, anyway.
It doesn't have to be the best qualified person's best efforts. Just theirs, even if they are not the most qualified. It's kind of like the right to counsel in that respect.
Toys'R'Us (bricks) maintained one of the highest in-stock percentages through the season. In contrast, Walmart was out of up to 25% of key items, iirc.
Sometimes you can't even choose to maintain higher inventories--suppliers have none to give.
I'd like to see the contract (if some has a link to it, pls post it). But I'm skeptical when someone countersues after breaking a contract and their basis is most simply "bad business judgment." Bad business judgment should not be adjudicated.
The informative "PDA" commercial informing me that my local phone co wants to bring me the future faster is just the ED ads where they don't actually mention the product because they might run afoul of the truth in advertising laws.
I think that's just for some basic services (the line) and a basic package (like crappy message rate service for those that have ever had the privilege. Other packages, and additional features like caller ID, voice mail, and the mystical "wire line maintenance gold" are iirc not regulated.
Obviously the MS programmer(s/oids) is(are/are) ANDing the evil bit flags instead of ORing them. They did check the for evil bit, didn't they?!
Why do I get the feeling that if you manually overrode the "maxlength=150" and set them a nice custom GET with "bork" 17000 times on the MSN search line, somewhere in Redmond a server will go down?
Ditto that. I had exactly the same experiences on SuSE 7.2 and 7.3 before I sucked it up and moved to Debian, which I had seen originally, but which sounded like a cult in the posts I had read before I started using Linux. And I ended up solving them in the same fashion (compile) which was obviously screwing up my dependency system. But it wasn't until I wanted a more up-to-date kernel and pcmcia packages, and couldn't easily get them under the SuSE framework, that I finally sucked it up and moved to Debian, by which time enough people had already said I should be using Debian's package system.
Double ditto about SuSE Yast not knowing where to look for updates, especially if you tried to be "nice" and point it to a local mirror but screwed something up and couldn't get it back.
The best thing about SuSE, and my only reason for keeping the discs around, is the partition resizer to smoosh your existing op system down to size to make room for Linux, and the fact that because it's from SuSE, it wasn't going to bork your existing installation in the process. I know there are other tools, but you can't put a high-enough value on trust when you are putting all your bits on the line.
I wish the debian installer had:
1. the non-destructive FAT partition resizer
2. would read your existing home dirs and ask you which user data you wanted to recreate, so you don't end up with orphan home dirs if you wipe and reinstall everything but/home
APT has been wonderful until recently when I discovered the KDE 3.1+/testing problems, which one can obviously work around, but not as easily as one should be able to....
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At an ivy-league, I did not enter in CS but two years through changed my major to CS. It was highly theory-driven on the CS side and didn't really teach languages except for the opening "write a functional lisp interpreter in C" class. Then another class in the line would assume you knew C++ so you just had to learn it. Those were the bad old days of C++ with no STL in sight. But everyone got good at writing the String class....
I already knew I would never pursue a direct CS job - what I used to call "writing the spell checker for Word 6.0." But the in-major friends of mine who did want positions at the major software firms of the time (Microsoft, Oracle) had no problems getting them and for that matter succeeding at them.
In my job I've had to pick up a few language and learn them in order to accomplish some higher business purpose. The basic-ingredients focus on data structures, design patterns, discrete automata, and efficiency have always been there and given me a good framework to map any language I was working in to my knowledge base or any task onto my ability base.
Obviously you would get all that and more at MIT / Caltech as well. My point is that the cs/engineering program at a decent "liberal arts" school can give you what you need in many cases. Especially for "true" computer science, the required resources are quite easy for any top-ranked school/program to provide, even if it only brings forth 12 grads. If you asked the same question with respect to advanced materials or electrical engineering, then the required resources for a full program with grad-level options while in undergrad are an order of magnitude greater and might lead to a more careful consideration of the specific program.
The l.a. schools I am thinking of pull way ahead in terms of facilities, breadth of non-technical programs, girls (if you like that kind of thing), and recruiting/career path into non-technical jobs. The stereotyping of grads of tech schools that works for them in many cases in getting technical first-of-career jobs works against them in many cases in non-technical fields. And one of the best thing to do with college is keep your options open to you can change your mind.
I'm pleased that I was able to help you feel good about your giant superior intellect. You might want to tune it down just a touch when communicating with people so they don't wrongly interpret it as reflexive obnoxiousness.
What I was trying to say was that the contents of your house (personal property) you don't pay tax on, but you have already been "taxed" once on the income you used to purchase them.
I don't think I would like living in a country where personal property was regularly taxed -- effectively a wealth tax over liquid and illiquid investments. It's a value judgment.
Other responders have done a decent job of pointing out that things that require continued services seem to be appropriate targets of property tax, whereas goods that do not require additional societal interaction (personal property) does not. When road usage can be measured better without a giant toll network, then maybe auto property/title taxes will actually go away, too.
No arguments however that the tax system is a blunt and somewhat arbitrary instrument. In my view that's all the more reason not to introduce additional tax types.
If you believe that everything is owned by everyone else, then that makes sense. It sounds a lot like communism to me.
What's wrong with allowing someone to exclude people from making free copies of their book, if they want to do so? Have you ever written a book?
So if the book doesn't sell to a publishing house right away- tough luck - it should be free to everyone? How is that fair to the author?
Trying to legislate and tax everything is a recipe for disappointment. Set the copyright rules, let the market set value, then tax it at the end as income. Otherwise you get lots of distortions and rent-seeking behavior that adds nothing to the world. Oh, and a lot fewer books.
You already paid tax on the money you used to purchase the personal property.
If your personal property starts to produce income (money tree, anyone?), then that income when declared will be taxed.
An IP property tax might be awful. Suppose you copyright something and then it doesn't sell. Should you have to dig into your pocket just to keep the book you wrote from slipping into the public domain (like what would happen if you fail to pay to maintain the patent)? That would really stick it to the little guy. And of course the tax might be wildly disproportionate (high or low) to the value created.
If the copyright helps some produce income, the income tax will get its fair share. It is appropriate to question the transfer prices for sale/transfer of IP to foreign jurisdictions and no doubt the treasury is getting the bad end of some tax cheating, but that is a largely separate issue.
How much were they quoting you for exactly what, and including other services or not? Inquiring minds want to know what expensive means. Might help frame the discussion.
USB charging is great for leaving your blackberry in a cradle. But for on the go, it's not a good solution. For one thing - too slow. Plus it doesn't completely solve your carry one charger problem.
When you charge on the road, you want to get fully charged as fast as possible. Being able to charge two things at once is even better. Basically if you travel a lot, the iGo is the best solution. A gift you give yourself. There is a competing product from Kensington but afaik it's only at Circuit City and just as expensive.
Expect more like 4000-5000. (That's still a lot of people, and it will still be painful)
It seems standard practice is to leak a big number to get everyone emotionally prepared, and then only do half. They may also count in the number the employees who left with the division they sold.
To speak more directly to your comment, in many cases when companies are growing well (as Intel was), a lot of people end up staying that aren't that great.
The following site refers to the European BGAN network, but has some pricing info ($6.95 - 9.95 per MByte), which is a good indication of possible Western hemisphere pricing.
http://www.outfittersatellite.com/rbgan.htm
(can't get the HTML to work in preview, sorry)
Somehow they are doing VOIP at low quality, using 4Kbps. Why is VOIP [ TCP/IP] -> geosync -> land any noticeably longer lag that sat phone [circuit switch ] -> geosync -> land?
According to some promo info, with the new service you only pay for the bits you actually send/receive, not for just having the thing on, so you aren't tying up bandwidth for dead air.
The wi-fi is so that you can share the connection with a couple other laptops / computer equipment sitting next to you in the middle of nowhere (i.e., the equipment has an access point built in), not for alternate network connectivity.
How is it mandated that a ship must use Inmarsat/BGAN? Also, how is it that the pirates get your info from it? (No, I'm not a wannabe pirate.) I'm not giving you a hard time; I'm genuinely curious.
A story that refers people primarily to a uninformative abstract on a $249 for-purchase paper simply isn't worthy of being an article on Slashdot.
If I could mod down the story choice, I would.
Sorry to be a downer, but this needed to be said.
are you in Cambridge?
Good point. But some additional research shows it actually works differently. The inventory is actually held at Amazon!
Toysrus.com sells merchandise to the public via the Internet at www.toysrus.com, www.babiesrus.com, www.imaginarium.com, www.sportsrus.com, and www.personalizedbyrus.com. We opened our on-line doors to the public in 1998. In order to provide better customer service and order fulfillment, we entered into a strategic alliance with Amazon.com, Inc. and launched a co-branded toy store in 2000. Under the strategic alliance, this co-branded store offers toys and video games (Toysrus.com), baby products (Babiesrus.com), and learning and educational products (Imaginarium.com). The strategic alliance agreement, which expires in 2010, combines Toysrus.com's merchandising expertise and trusted brand name with Amazon.com, Inc.'s strengths in website operations, on-line customer service and reliable fulfillment. Toysrus.com is responsible for merchandising and content for the co-branded stores and identifies, purchases, owns, and manages the inventory. Amazon.com, Inc. handles site development, order fulfillment for most items, customer service, and the housing of Toysrus.com's inventory in Amazon.com, Inc.'s fulfillment centers in the United States. (from recent 10-K)
So TRU buys what it thinks it will sell, and then it's actually held at Amazon warehouses. Obviously Amazon would prefer that TRU buys gazillions of every unit, since TRU has to take all the inventory/pricing risk on unsold items, and Amazon only has to find a place to store it all. TRU is going to optimize margin vs. out-of-stock opportunity losses, just like a normal retail store. You could argue they have a slight incentive to have worse in-stock online so as to steer people to stores, but 1) it's pretty slight, and 2) that can be addressed (or not) by the contract.
Agreed. We're all guessing until (if ever) the contract is revealed.
That said, I doubt that a X% in stock is in the contract, since that can be out of Toys'R'Us's control.
Reasonable start.
However, it's also true that Toys'R'Us probably would rather sell more toys than fewer. They probably tried their "best." And selling more toys is not necessarily good business if you have to take too much inventory risk to do it, anyway.
It doesn't have to be the best qualified person's best efforts. Just theirs, even if they are not the most qualified. It's kind of like the right to counsel in that respect.
That was during "peak periods" i.e., Christmas.
It's no secret that hot toys sell out at Xmas.
Toys'R'Us (bricks) maintained one of the highest in-stock percentages through the season. In contrast, Walmart was out of up to 25% of key items, iirc.
Sometimes you can't even choose to maintain higher inventories--suppliers have none to give.
I'd like to see the contract (if some has a link to it, pls post it). But I'm skeptical when someone countersues after breaking a contract and their basis is most simply "bad business judgment." Bad business judgment should not be adjudicated.
Right you are.
The informative "PDA" commercial informing me that my local phone co wants to bring me the future faster is just the ED ads where they don't actually mention the product because they might run afoul of the truth in advertising laws.
ED - read "male trouble"
I think that's just for some basic services (the line) and a basic package (like crappy message rate service for those that have ever had the privilege. Other packages, and additional features like caller ID, voice mail, and the mystical "wire line maintenance gold" are iirc not regulated.
Cable is the same way.
Obviously the MS programmer(s/oids) is(are/are) ANDing the evil bit flags instead of ORing them. They did check the for evil bit, didn't they?!
Why do I get the feeling that if you manually overrode the "maxlength=150" and set them a nice custom GET with "bork" 17000 times on the MSN search line, somewhere in Redmond a server will go down?
Ditto that. I had exactly the same experiences on SuSE 7.2 and 7.3 before I sucked it up and moved to Debian, which I had seen originally, but which sounded like a cult in the posts I had read before I started using Linux. And I ended up solving them in the same fashion (compile) which was obviously screwing up my dependency system. But it wasn't until I wanted a more up-to-date kernel and pcmcia packages, and couldn't easily get them under the SuSE framework, that I finally sucked it up and moved to Debian, by which time enough people had already said I should be using Debian's package system.
/home
Double ditto about SuSE Yast not knowing where to look for updates, especially if you tried to be "nice" and point it to a local mirror but screwed something up and couldn't get it back.
The best thing about SuSE, and my only reason for keeping the discs around, is the partition resizer to smoosh your existing op system down to size to make room for Linux, and the fact that because it's from SuSE, it wasn't going to bork your existing installation in the process. I know there are other tools, but you can't put a high-enough value on trust when you are putting all your bits on the line.
I wish the debian installer had:
1. the non-destructive FAT partition resizer
2. would read your existing home dirs and ask you which user data you wanted to recreate, so you don't end up with orphan home dirs if you wipe and reinstall everything but
APT has been wonderful until recently when I discovered the KDE 3.1+/testing problems, which one can obviously work around, but not as easily as one should be able to....