A number of religions prohibit body modification---Orthodox Judaism is one. The idea is twofold, and as with everyting else in this religion I am oversimplifying:
Your body is a gift to you from G-d and mutilating it betrays him
When the Messiah comes you will be resurrected bodily and live forever. Whatever you have done to your body in this life is forever.
Forcing employees to imbed this device in their bodies is body modification. A few extremely important points:
Once you have died no invasive procedure may be done on your body, even to the extent that a breathing tube is not removed: it is clipped off at the lips. Digging this chip out with a needle after I have died constituted an invasive procedure so if I die while employed by these assholes, I die with a body defiled by this device.
A defiled body may not be buried in a Jewish cemetary.
It may be worth mentioning another group who forced Jews to mutilate their bodies with identifying information--tattooed serial numbers, in this case. I suspect that a Labor Review Board would look unfavorably on such similarities.
This isn't just a Jewish thing: Christians also believe in bodily resurrection on the return of the Christ. The Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, recited frequently in Christian churches, make specific references to "the resurrection of the body" and "the resurrection of the dead." I am less familiar with other religions, but I believe sects of Islam has similar restrictions on body modification, as does the Hindu faith.
Build yourself a list of the types of task you must accomplish. For each task, pick one or at most two languages. That is what to standardize on.
There's the right tool for the job and the wrong tool for the job. Then there's the generic tool, which is almost the right tool for almost every job: Think about all the things one can do with a Leatherman. I've sawed up 4 inch branches, cleaned fish, loosened bolts, stripped wires, punched holes in leather. The Leatherman did a fair job at each. But I found myself sawing a lot of branches, for example, I'd invest in an honest-to-Ghod saw. Likewise a scaling knife, ratchet set, wire stripper, and a rotary-tip leather punch. I love my Leatherman, but like every other multipurpose tool out there it sacrifices efficiency for versatility.
Ponder the various goals you're trying to reach and find a (hopefully short) set of tools to reach those goals. For example: Serve your web pages in PHP. Exchange data in XML. Retrieve data in SQL. Hack and script in Python. Write everything else in C++. But: Don't hesitate to use Java servlets for computationally expensive web pages, exchange medical data in HL7, retrieve textual data with AWK, hack and script in Perl, and still write everything else in C++.
If you want to standardize your entire company on a single great big perfect do-everything language, just ask the U.S. Department of Defense it's doing with Ada.
It sounds like you're not just trading dull work for interesting work. You're trading a stable, low-risk, long-term environment for an unstable, high-risk, short-term environment. From your description, the work sounds far more exciting. But please think twice before walking away from high pay and good benefits. Those jobs are scarce, particularly when your resume says you walked away from one for a "fun" job.
I speak from experience: I walked away from a nice, stable job back in 2000 to join a friend at a startup. My old job was building databases for my state's public health department. It was slightly dull, paid fairly well, and had benefits out the wazoo. When we took on an incompetent manager and I quit in frustration, moved across the country and started working 70-hour weeks building waycool wireless application frameworks. Five months later they laid off half their developers and I was just another unemployed dotbomber. My friend lasted another year before the VCs ransacked the company and seized all its IP.
Back at my old job, the manager that made me want to quit had been "relieved of all responsibility," which is government speak for "we can't fire you, but we can make you tidy your desk for eight hours a day until you resign." And since she'd squandered her entire budget on hardware they didn't need, there was no money to hire me back. Yes, I asked.
The moral of the story, for me anyway, is that there are worse things than being slightly bored with a good-paying job. It could be different for you: You could have a lust for adventure and risk that you just gotta get out of your system. But you should realize that you're not just walking a way from a dull job: You might be walking away from a career company. In a few years, with a wife, kids and an oppressive mortgage in tow, you might feel differently about waking up and knowing you're going to draw a fat paycheck and that your employer, not you, is going to pay for little Billy's braces.
If you're bored, maybe what you need is a hobby. I recommend motorcycling. I got to work this morning glad to be alive, because three commuters tried to kill me on my way in.
Thank you for your very informative reply. I think I misstated my case: Insurance companies aren't guarantors per se. They simply act as intermediaries. The guaranteed payer is actually the employers.
Even ignoring employers, there is still a payer somewhere. The medical industry has a nearly unique advantage: If you refuse their services, you die. At the very least you suffer. This gives them substantial leverage on prices.
Medica{re,id} had fairly effective price controls for a while---good enough that providers who accept Medicare or Medicaid are becoming a minority.
The flaw in their scheme is that half of the price-fixing board you describe represents people who profit from increased fees. They have allowed prices to go up by ten to twenty percent over inflation every year, and have for decades.
I'm still comfortable asserting that the free market has been subverted here in a dangerous way. Your well-informed post bears this out: Instead of a true market, a very small group of very big players decide how things are going to be. Practicioners either play by those rules or get forced out of the market.
When an economy is planned only by those who profit, with no input from those who pay, it collapses. America's $2 trillion medical economy follows this model, planned by medical providers and insurance companies, facilitated by a government in the thrall of medical, pharmaceutical and insurance lobbyists. In a genuine free market, the payers participate, and payees compete with one another. Combination is limited and costs stay down.
The other route to sanity is genuine socialized medicine. Compared to what we have now, I'm actually okay with that. The current system reeks of the trusts that ruled this country from the 1880s through the 1910s. This time around instead of combining, the big players simply collude.
It actually goes all the way back to WWII. Manufacturing wages were largely frozen, and factory workers, critical to the war effort, were getting frustrated. So companies like Ford, prevented from giving raises, decided to throw a few perks at their employees. One of them was health insurance.
When the war was over, there was no way unions were going to let health insurance go away, so it became a universal demand in unionized industries.
Thirty years later, Ford was spending more on employee health insurance than it was on steel.
It's a death-spiral. Hell, it's the death spiral: Guaranteed-payment arrangements have a lethal effect on the free market: If the provider will be paid no matter what they charge, they will charge whatever they please. With costs so high, the only way to get service is through an insurance company, which guarantees payment.
To me this says that you are demanding to approve the story itself if it contains any quotes you have supplied, and if you don't like it, you will somehow withdraw the quotes or magically deny them the ability to run the story.
He's saying you either run accurate quotes or you can't say you're quoting.
I suspect your concern is that if you, as a reporter, ask a company spokesperson "So, been poisoning the wells around here?" and he says "No, we poison the groundwater itself," he can simply refuse to allow you to quote him and the story goes away. If you're worried about this happening, bring a tape recorder of your own.
What the AC is talking about is situations where he says, "Our tests show our 20 ppm printer is actually faster than our competitor's 20 ppm printer," but the reporter prints "'FuBarCo has been fudging their benchmarks for years,' said Mr. Coward. 'They're obviously trying to deceive their customers.'" And the reporter's editor will damned well make sure it's straight before it gets printed.
Let me get this straight---you get parts for your potato guns via FedEx? What ever happened to foraging behind the tool shed? Two questions come to mind:
(1) How in the hell do you have that kind of time and money on hand? (2) Are they still hiring?
Using encryption on the Internet is equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench.
In other words, it makes no difference how well she encrypted her last e-mail to you when I've already installed a keystroke logger on her machine---and yours.
That's why we think that the f-word is so common in everyday usage of American English
It's true. It's really fucking true.
We tend to learn American English primary from American popular culture - movies, song lyrics, comics, video games etc.
One of the worst stereotypes to deal with is that American women are sexually promiscuous. This is probably because most of the world's pornography comes from the U.S.
My wife is an accomplished traveler with an amazing knack for language and dialect. When abroad, people assume she's far too sophisticated to be an American. Very often, though, as soon as men learn where she's from, they stop treating her with respect and start hitting on her. Once a man let out a whoop and grabbed at her breasts. She slapped him, he called her a puta and ran out the door. To be fair, the man was a tourist, and horrified locals went to great ends to make her feel safe and welcome again.
Back to the f-word: its use varies between cultural groups and social classes---and America has lots of those. Men swear more than women. The poor swear more than the rich. The agnostic swear more than the religious. Dock workers swear more than funeral directors. The young swear more than the old---but when the old do swear, they do it very, very well. I can remember when some teenager mouthed off to my grandfather, a World War II combat veteran. Called him a Nazi. Grandpa spent five minutes swearing at this boy without pausing or repeating himself. Little fucker was crying when it was over.
The organization whose funding depends on the success of CAN-Spam has declared that CAN-Spam is a success? Why, that would be as absurd as a President who needs to win in Iraq to get re-elected giving a speech under a great big banner that says "Mission Accomplished."
You're thinking of "Shylock", which is indeed a slur against Jews. "Shyster" gets confused with shylock, but its etymology is fairly well understood to be from the German "Scheisser", lit. "shitter" but more figuratively "bullshitter" or "son-of-a-bitch."
In all likelihood it got dragged into the U.S. via Yiddish, hence the Semitic connection. Calling a Jewish lawyer a shyster is probably rather tasteless.
I see he hasn't returned his (right between his Postscript reference and his Oracle 8 DBA handbook) LISP book to the library just yet. And I gotta love arranging all his ORA in chromatological order.
Carbonation has a way of making the stomach absorb things faster. This is why champaigne gives a buzz faster than wine, and why a Coke will amp you up more rapidly than orange juice, which has about the same amount of sugar. So carbonation and high caffeination should be a winning combination, buzz-wise. You can imagine, though, how hard users will crash.
Bluntly speaking, the US's legal limitations are whatever it decides they are.
AFAICT there are no international treaties about cybercrime and information warfare---except those involving copyrights. The U.S. seems happy to prosecute or cause to be prosecuted anybody who is electonically inconvenient to U.S. companies.
Okay, there are a lot of people and companies who have invested heavily in the credibility of various myths and bogosities. Some of them are scammers, and some are true believers.
What Busting has had the most dramatic fallout for companies and people who've relied on the Myth being true?
And while we're out it, how many times have you been sued or threatened with lawsuits?
This is a classic example of "If it sounds too good to be true, it's probably not true." If you think $400 chips can be found for $78, I'd be happy to go into business with you---I'll handle all the freight and tariffs if you just pay for the chips themselves. Just send me a cashier's check made out to "CASH" ('cause that's my name, like "CHER" or "MADONNA"), and remember, they're only available in lots of 100...
The "lots of 100" is the worrier---it means they'll most likely go to dishonest resellers and system builders only too happy to hide the missing $322 in markup.
Slashdot Mirror
Forcing employees to imbed this device in their bodies is body modification. A few extremely important points:
It may be worth mentioning another group who forced Jews to mutilate their bodies with identifying information--tattooed serial numbers, in this case. I suspect that a Labor Review Board would look unfavorably on such similarities.
This isn't just a Jewish thing: Christians also believe in bodily resurrection on the return of the Christ. The Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, recited frequently in Christian churches, make specific references to "the resurrection of the body" and "the resurrection of the dead." I am less familiar with other religions, but I believe sects of Islam has similar restrictions on body modification, as does the Hindu faith.
There's the right tool for the job and the wrong tool for the job. Then there's the generic tool, which is almost the right tool for almost every job: Think about all the things one can do with a Leatherman. I've sawed up 4 inch branches, cleaned fish, loosened bolts, stripped wires, punched holes in leather. The Leatherman did a fair job at each. But I found myself sawing a lot of branches, for example, I'd invest in an honest-to-Ghod saw. Likewise a scaling knife, ratchet set, wire stripper, and a rotary-tip leather punch. I love my Leatherman, but like every other multipurpose tool out there it sacrifices efficiency for versatility.
Ponder the various goals you're trying to reach and find a (hopefully short) set of tools to reach those goals. For example: Serve your web pages in PHP. Exchange data in XML. Retrieve data in SQL. Hack and script in Python. Write everything else in C++. But: Don't hesitate to use Java servlets for computationally expensive web pages, exchange medical data in HL7, retrieve textual data with AWK, hack and script in Perl, and still write everything else in C++.
If you want to standardize your entire company on a single great big perfect do-everything language, just ask the U.S. Department of Defense it's doing with Ada.
I speak from experience: I walked away from a nice, stable job back in 2000 to join a friend at a startup. My old job was building databases for my state's public health department. It was slightly dull, paid fairly well, and had benefits out the wazoo. When we took on an incompetent manager and I quit in frustration, moved across the country and started working 70-hour weeks building waycool wireless application frameworks. Five months later they laid off half their developers and I was just another unemployed dotbomber. My friend lasted another year before the VCs ransacked the company and seized all its IP.
Back at my old job, the manager that made me want to quit had been "relieved of all responsibility," which is government speak for "we can't fire you, but we can make you tidy your desk for eight hours a day until you resign." And since she'd squandered her entire budget on hardware they didn't need, there was no money to hire me back. Yes, I asked.
The moral of the story, for me anyway, is that there are worse things than being slightly bored with a good-paying job. It could be different for you: You could have a lust for adventure and risk that you just gotta get out of your system. But you should realize that you're not just walking a way from a dull job: You might be walking away from a career company. In a few years, with a wife, kids and an oppressive mortgage in tow, you might feel differently about waking up and knowing you're going to draw a fat paycheck and that your employer, not you, is going to pay for little Billy's braces.
If you're bored, maybe what you need is a hobby. I recommend motorcycling. I got to work this morning glad to be alive, because three commuters tried to kill me on my way in.
Forget the gadgets---how does he react when doctors walk in and are female? Or black?
Thank you for your very informative reply. I think I misstated my case: Insurance companies aren't guarantors per se. They simply act as intermediaries. The guaranteed payer is actually the employers.
Even ignoring employers, there is still a payer somewhere. The medical industry has a nearly unique advantage: If you refuse their services, you die. At the very least you suffer. This gives them substantial leverage on prices.
Medica{re,id} had fairly effective price controls for a while---good enough that providers who accept Medicare or Medicaid are becoming a minority.
The flaw in their scheme is that half of the price-fixing board you describe represents people who profit from increased fees. They have allowed prices to go up by ten to twenty percent over inflation every year, and have for decades.
I'm still comfortable asserting that the free market has been subverted here in a dangerous way. Your well-informed post bears this out: Instead of a true market, a very small group of very big players decide how things are going to be. Practicioners either play by those rules or get forced out of the market.
When an economy is planned only by those who profit, with no input from those who pay, it collapses. America's $2 trillion medical economy follows this model, planned by medical providers and insurance companies, facilitated by a government in the thrall of medical, pharmaceutical and insurance lobbyists. In a genuine free market, the payers participate, and payees compete with one another. Combination is limited and costs stay down.
The other route to sanity is genuine socialized medicine. Compared to what we have now, I'm actually okay with that. The current system reeks of the trusts that ruled this country from the 1880s through the 1910s. This time around instead of combining, the big players simply collude.
It actually goes all the way back to WWII. Manufacturing wages were largely frozen, and factory workers, critical to the war effort, were getting frustrated. So companies like Ford, prevented from giving raises, decided to throw a few perks at their employees. One of them was health insurance.
When the war was over, there was no way unions were going to let health insurance go away, so it became a universal demand in unionized industries.
Thirty years later, Ford was spending more on employee health insurance than it was on steel.
It's a death-spiral. Hell, it's the death spiral: Guaranteed-payment arrangements have a lethal effect on the free market: If the provider will be paid no matter what they charge, they will charge whatever they please. With costs so high, the only way to get service is through an insurance company, which guarantees payment.
He's saying you either run accurate quotes or you can't say you're quoting.
I suspect your concern is that if you, as a reporter, ask a company spokesperson "So, been poisoning the wells around here?" and he says "No, we poison the groundwater itself," he can simply refuse to allow you to quote him and the story goes away. If you're worried about this happening, bring a tape recorder of your own.
What the AC is talking about is situations where he says, "Our tests show our 20 ppm printer is actually faster than our competitor's 20 ppm printer," but the reporter prints "'FuBarCo has been fudging their benchmarks for years,' said Mr. Coward. 'They're obviously trying to deceive their customers.'" And the reporter's editor will damned well make sure it's straight before it gets printed.
Being drunk is fun.
...and when they got back to the hive all the other bees made fun of their really high voices.
It's true. It's really fucking true.
We tend to learn American English primary from American popular culture - movies, song lyrics, comics, video games etc.
One of the worst stereotypes to deal with is that American women are sexually promiscuous. This is probably because most of the world's pornography comes from the U.S.
My wife is an accomplished traveler with an amazing knack for language and dialect. When abroad, people assume she's far too sophisticated to be an American. Very often, though, as soon as men learn where she's from, they stop treating her with respect and start hitting on her. Once a man let out a whoop and grabbed at her breasts. She slapped him, he called her a puta and ran out the door. To be fair, the man was a tourist, and horrified locals went to great ends to make her feel safe and welcome again.
Back to the f-word: its use varies between cultural groups and social classes---and America has lots of those. Men swear more than women. The poor swear more than the rich. The agnostic swear more than the religious. Dock workers swear more than funeral directors. The young swear more than the old---but when the old do swear, they do it very, very well. I can remember when some teenager mouthed off to my grandfather, a World War II combat veteran. Called him a Nazi. Grandpa spent five minutes swearing at this boy without pausing or repeating himself. Little fucker was crying when it was over.
The organization whose funding depends on the success of CAN-Spam has declared that CAN-Spam is a success? Why, that would be as absurd as a President who needs to win in Iraq to get re-elected giving a speech under a great big banner that says "Mission Accomplished."
In all likelihood it got dragged into the U.S. via Yiddish, hence the Semitic connection. Calling a Jewish lawyer a shyster is probably rather tasteless.
A shyster is an unscrupulous lawyer. How did shyster get to mean shady digital camera salesman?
I see he hasn't returned his (right between his Postscript reference and his Oracle 8 DBA handbook) LISP book to the library just yet. And I gotta love arranging all his ORA in chromatological order.
If it involves caffeine, then yes. No single chemical has had more impact on software development than caffeine.
Carbonation has a way of making the stomach absorb things faster. This is why champaigne gives a buzz faster than wine, and why a Coke will amp you up more rapidly than orange juice, which has about the same amount of sugar. So carbonation and high caffeination should be a winning combination, buzz-wise. You can imagine, though, how hard users will crash.
Bluntly speaking, the US's legal limitations are whatever it decides they are.
AFAICT there are no international treaties about cybercrime and information warfare---except those involving copyrights. The U.S. seems happy to prosecute or cause to be prosecuted anybody who is electonically inconvenient to U.S. companies.
Anybody know how to covert feet to seconds when doing four-space? Do you just use c?
Google Calculator gave more precise numbers. A one cent fluctuation in the price of gold changes his net worth by $176 million.
Went to lunch with him last week. Fucker wanted to split the check.
I won't be able to read...
I'll have to read...
All the rest of the comments.
Hmmm.
What Busting has had the most dramatic fallout for companies and people who've relied on the Myth being true?
And while we're out it, how many times have you been sued or threatened with lawsuits?
That's odd---I do the same thing when I'm coding Perl. Usually with my forehead, though...
The "lots of 100" is the worrier---it means they'll most likely go to dishonest resellers and system builders only too happy to hide the missing $322 in markup.