Mind you, the drug is called "booze" and you don't do the selecting, it does. It tends to erase things like why it was a good idea to leave the bar with that hyena-creature, or why you were dancing with it in the first place.
A few years ago the Wall Street Journal estimated that every year we lose billions in productivity worldwide this week, due to simple grogginess. Hundreds of millions wake up an hour earlier than usual then spend a week trying to adjust. It sucks complete ass.
I have a toddler. Toddlers don't spring forward very well. Put them to bed an hour early and they'll spend two hours fighting it. Then get them up an hour early and see how happy they are to see you.
Please, please, either ditch it completely or use it all year long. I really like having an extra hour of daylight to spend outside with the boy, the dog, and the missus.
All IBM ever has to do to hurt SCO's profits is to read SCO's own press releases out loud. It's not hard to say "if you're thinking of becoming a SCO customer, please Google them." SCO's being hurt the same way any con artist is hurt -- by being outed.
But this is more petty bitching by a company that's going to end its life with thud and a brief squeak. Is it too late to market themselves as as a scrappy, loveable underdog instead of something about to be scraped off the bottom of a shoe?
I disagree. I am an introvert, and a developer, and I spent two modestly successful years in sales.
Sales isn't a single task, and it can be handled with a variety of styles. Cold calling, glad-handing, and schmoozing are all extremely tiring and stressful for introverts. And you hardly need any of it. I think introversion is a special case of a person's overall tendency to focus narrowly and intensely. Floodlight people have broad interests and as such do well with broad interactions with lots of people. Laser people -- which developers tend to be -- have narrower interests and prefer narrower interactions with fewer people.
I believe that most introverts can do quite well in sales by spending more time with fewer costomers, getting to know them and their needs well. Extroverts do better with the shotgun approach, replacing depth with volume. It's kind of like the Laffer curve, where success can be achieved at two price points.
One of the best things about the small-base approach is that it rewards depth of understanding and the quiet, introverted research this entails. Learn as much as you can about your products, their strengths and weakensses. Then learn as much as you can about your customers and their business needs. Match the business need with the best product and present your case to your customer. That's sales, in a style that involves planning, diligence and honesty, and very little bullshit.
I worked with another sales rep, a very floodlight sort of guy. He was very experienced, and naturally pulled in higher figures than I in the first year. In the second year I pulled a bit closer to him and he told me that it was for two reasons: First, I was simply getting better at dealing with people. Second, and more importantly, the prospects I paid close attention to in the first year remembered me, and when they were ready to buy, they knew I was someone they could rely on to set them up right. He was a very good saleman, who met and talked with many more people than I, and made our employer a ton of money. He was making sales, but he told me that what I was making customers, which in the long run are actually more valuable.
A final advantage of moving from development to sales is that you have the technical savvy to communicate with the customers' technical people, because you speak their language. You can answer their questions, can face their hard challenges with hard facts, and best of all you can understand the questions behind their questions.
At any rate, the Asker says he's already gained some experience in management, which is significantly more people-oriented than development, and has spent time in customer-facing roles, which is not only people-oriented, but oriented towards people's satisfaction. It sounds like the Asker is not a hard-core, head-down introvert at all. Sales would not a dramatic transition.
Meetings are bad, m'kay? E-mail exchanges headed "I need the specifications for the app" are even worse.
What you need to do is interact, one-on-one, with (a) the people putting information in, and (b) the people taking information out. If it's the same people, so much the better. But don't go into a stuffy room with a whiteboard -- not yet. Find key users (not managers!) and start by asking them two simple questions: (1) What do you do all day? (2) Can you show me? Every time you see something, discuss it with them until you understand it well, then write it down, right then right there. Ask them what's tedious. Ask them what's important and why. Ask them what happens if a particular step is omitted.
Take all this back to your own desk and start doing mockups. Take these back to the users for round two, complete with observations like "I noticed that you spend a lot of time matching the numbers on this sheet of paper to the numbers on this other one. It looks like we could merge them together right here." Be prepared to have your design ripped to shreds, but have
Failing that, call your grandma on the phone and tell her that the users are writing "terrorist accounting software." The CIA, who is tapping your phone, will abduct them and fly them to one of those countries Amnesty International is always talking about, where a Haliburton sub-contractor will gather requirements for you. Six weeks later a New York Times reporter will discover the users wandering a dusty third-world street. The reporter will piece together the whole story into a five-part series that eventually wins the Pulitzer Prize. Part three of the series will be all the sordid details of the software, obtained from an anonymous whistle-blower at the Justice Department. The following spring a book called The Best Reporting of 2007 will be available in paperback, peaking at #237 on Amazon. Buy the book along with Karl Weigers's excellent Software Requirements, Second Edition so that you'll qualify for Super Savers Free Shipping. Using the two together you'll be on your way to award-winning software, but after the awards ceremony, don't accept offers of free rides in unmarked vans, even if they say they have a Wii console in there.
How can a presentation on a patented technology possibly infringe on the patent? A patent is already published information. Theirs are published here and here. If you don't want information about your system known to the public, you don't get a patent.
This is some of the most contemptible saber-rattling -- and caving -- I've seen this year.
One day a legitimate user, one with a license and a receipt in his hand, is going to be rebuilding his hard drive. When he can't put his hands on his registered Display Eater license key, he's gonna say to himself, "I'm a legitimate, licensed user in a hurry. Let me just snag a key off a warez site so I can get working again. A key's a key, right?" A few minutes later all his Display Eater files are gone.
This developer is engaged in vigilante activity that, inevitably, will harm an innocent bystander. Hopefully it will be somebody who writes for Ziff Davis. If said writer lives or works in my home state, after the developer is successfully sued, he'll be thrown in jail for computer tampering.
Fake tears have been around since well before film: A few drops of glycerine will brim beautifully, and it has refractive qualities that real tears simply lack.
Fake everything is used in movies all the time, and always has been. Have you seen Psycho? In the shower scene, that's not blood -- it's not even red. It's chocolate syrup. And in the original, unadulterated Star Wars, Luke's landspeeder is actually mounted on the arm of a centrifuge, with the camera at the pivot, so the desert in back really just goes around and around. Also, it was shot on Earth rather than a desert planet called Tatooine.
These tricks have been around for decades. The only thing even vaguely interesting this article says is that the faking that used to be done during a scene is now done afterwards. We don't need the old tricks anymore: They can be hacked in afterwards. All you need to do is make sure your actor has a tennis ball on a green stick to stare at, and you can chroma-key in whatever alien doohickey you care to. Think your alien needs fur instead of scales? No worries, no retakes -- you just drag and drop the right texture and you're done.
From the audiences point of view, it matters not one bit whether Ms. Connelly actually cried, or used glycerine, or had the tears added later. What matters is that we look at the screen and see sadness.
I didn't say it was pointless. But most programers, myself included, rarely need to implement a textbook algorithm beyond the most basic. So much of the heavy lifting has already been done in libraries. Still, they do crop up from time to time: Right now I'm trying to cull data from a 450-table database with a rapidly changing schema by building a tree out of the referential integrity metadata, which gets fun when there's self-referencing tables. I've had to dust off my algorithms book(s) more than once.
Just like every five or ten years a pipefitter will find himself dealing with something the engineers never dreamed necessary, and he'll have to dust off That One Book and do some serious ciphering. As a working programmer, rather than a researcher, I feel more affinity for the pipefitter than anyone else.
Forget documentation. Nobody reads it. They think of the computer -- and the router -- as an appliance that's simply switched on and that's the end of it.
What home networking routers should do is, right out of the box, (a) have wireless off by default, and (b) when they plug their Ethernet cable in, all outgoing port 80 requests get redirected to an internal web server:
Welcome to the RouteCo Pornblaster 2000 wireless router! Next >> then (c) gets them to set a password and finally (d) asks them if they want to activate the wireless. Oh, and throw in some legal disclaimers and some actual configuration parameters somewhere for good measure.
Alternatively they should all have a different password that's printed on a sticker on the bottom. That'll at least reduce the vulnerability level by a smidge. Shouldn't be too terribly hard to do.
I'll agree to you, but only to the extent that real, hard-core computer science has almost nothing to do with computers. To misquote Kelly-Bootle, computer science is to computers what hydrodynamics is to plumbing: You can discuss Rayleigh-Taylor instability all day but sooner or later you've got to get all that shit from the bathroom to the sewer.
I say we move Computer Science from the Mathematics Building over to the Divinity School and be done with it.
John Tukey at Bell Labs came up with "bit" in the 1940s, during a lunchtime debate between "binit" and "bigit" for "binary digit." "Bite" came into use for "a group of bits," but was respelled "byte" to keep typos from causing tragic confusion.
It's kind of like how my brother's dog got his name: He was born "Bodean", but my brother and his girlfriend were deciding between calling him "Bo" or "Dean" when "Bean" was said, and he's been "Bean" ever since.
I am not in the habit of posting anonymously, but I am afraid of them. ...aaaaaaand I don't know the difference between the "No Karma Bonus" checkbox and the "Post Anonymously". Hail Xenu!
This bunch of sad loonies has been known to hire (or pose as) private investigators sowing lies and misinformation to their neighbors:
"We're conducting an investigation of your neighbor Mr. Alex Schoenfeldt (show picture of Schoenfeldt). Do you have any children? What ages? Has Mr. Schoenfeldt ever made any effort to befriend them? Has he ever offered to watch them or asked to be left unattended with them? Has he ever invited them to his home? Has he ever asked to photograph them? Have you ever seen him carrying photographic equipment to or from his home? Does he have an Internet connection? Has he fully informed you about his criminal history?"
To experience it yourself, simply picket a Scientology org. Wait for them to knock on your mother's door asking if she's aware that her son has been participating in "anti-religious hate marches." Wait for the phone to ring at 3:00 AM with somebody at the other end describing exactly how your children were dressed yesterday. Wait for the police to raid your studio on an anonymous tip about kiddie porn -- and your picture to be on the 6:00 news, because the TV stations eat that shit up.
By some estimates, the Church of Scientology has spent over two million dollars litigating against Henson. They've bankrupted him. They call him a bigot. A stalker. A terrorist. On their Keith Henson web page they say "Keith Henson is an explosives expert and a convicted hate criminal." He's an "explosives expert" because he used to put on fireworks shows in the desert. He's a "convicted hate criminal" because Scientology set him up. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he hasn't received a few anonymous e-mails and phone calls, inviting him to speculate on how old men fare in prison.
Please refer to Xenu.net to learn more about what happens to people who speak out against Scientology. Scientologists may be a bunch of sad loonies, but their leadership is very quick to call someone an enemy, and very eager to bring their enemies to ruin.
I am not in the habit of posting anonymously, but I am afraid of them.
Pretty soon the RIAA will be claiming jus primae noctis as part of their fee, right after they've forced piano manufacturers to insert a chip that detects when a copyrighted song is being played and slams the lid shut until you swipe your credit card...
Dude, we don't even know what state or provence or prefecture or administrative sector you live in, nor do very many of us have law degrees, and those of us who do probably aren't going to waste much time and expertise on such a vague question.
I'm in the not-a-lawyer crowd, and won't be the first to say you should consult a lawyer, but I will add that you shouldn't bother with a lawyer unless you're actually served papers. And don't mention a damned thing to your new employer. No point in getting them skittish about bringing you on.
As for escorting you out a week early, etc.: Call your former employer's HR department and find out when your official termination date is. If it matches your submitted resignation date, then the VP dude was talking smack and you should quit worrying.
But if HR gives you a date short of the one you submitted, then you got fired for quitting and that's something almost every state's labor board would be delighted to hear about. A competent HR department will fix this very quickly. If you were fired without cause (or wrongfully, in this case), it puts them in a very different situation vis-a-vis unemployment benefits and other little things.
BTW, just for fun you should send a letter to VP dude's boss asking for contact information in the legal department, since VP dude told you the company was suing you and your next employer.
Drug companies spend more on advertising than they do on R&D. And advertising forces them into a business model of producing drugs based on their marketability rather than their medical necessity. And advertising prescription drugs compromises the trust of patients and objectivity of doctors -- who get lots of free samples and personal visits from DrugCo reps all the time, by the way. Oh, and if a drug is marketable, the DrugCo will spend decades patenting gratuitous modifications thereof.
But back to the subject of this comment: If they're spending more money advertising a pill than developing it, we're paying for them to advertise drugs to us that either we need because a doctor knows we do, or that we want because a commercial told us we do. I mean, what the hell is restless leg syndrome? OH MY GOD! I HAVE A SYNDROME!
Pharmaceutical companies, and medicine in general, have a rather special ability to jack up their prices almost at will. The industry is a complex controlled by a small handful of players who dan defy market economics and hand us a single proposition: "If you don't buy our services, you'll die." This isn't like the food industry, although ADM, "the supermarket to the world," is trying to make it happen. If caviar is through the roof, I'll do without. If the price of asparagus doubles, I'll buy string beans instead. But if my heart medicine is too expensive, I buy it or I fucking die.
And they're engaged in unnecessary activities, that dramatically increase costs, by marketing drugs to unqualified decision makers.
The cost of a security breach is measured as the probability of an incident multiplied by the cost of the incident. Both numbers can be calculated surprisingly well, or at least made to sound plausible. Security software will reduce the probability of an incident. Calculate the difference. If it exceeds the cost implementing security, it's a good thing.
This is a basic formula used for all types of data security, including backup and disaster planning.
I'll bet something like one hundred twenty million PCs and laptops get built every year. These custom designs have volumes in, optimistically, the tens of thousands. I spoke too soon. According to Google Answers there were about 230 million PCs, laptops and servers shipped in 2006 and we'll exceed quarter-billion units this year.
I suspect that low volume is a major factor in the pricing. I'll bet something like one hundred twenty million PCs and laptops get built every year. These custom designs have volumes in, optimistically, the tens of thousands. The economies of scale are definitely on the McTowerCase manufacturer's side.
What if you're old, about to retire, and you are reporting on Social Security? I'm thinking more along the lines of "we'll make billions if this law passes." It's fairly easy to establish floors/ceilings for exemptions. But I could see this going the way of campaign finance reform, with all the nickle-and-diming, lengthy disclosure forms, and other abominations. Better yet, I can see them simply skipping that coverage entirely in favor of a squirrel who knows how to water ski.
If DeLay had tried to pull this you'd be apoplectic with hysteria ...because it would be obvious that he'd been replaced by one of the pod people.
Please reset your irony detectors and come back later. Maybe calibrate them against some known irony, like an episode of Blackadder.
I suspect that the point of the GP is that "liberal media" is a myth, and has been for some time. But what replaced it isn't "right-wing media." It's corporate media.
CNN is owned by one of the six corporations that own about eighty-five percent of all media in the U.S. Eighty five-percent of the information controlled by six entities. And they collude. And they have a common agenda that is decidedly anti-consumerist. Didn't know that? They don't have to tell you. They don't have to mention the laws they pay to get passed.
The only reason I like the Fairness Doctrine is that it might get some people thinking. It may scare the shit out of a few people who didn't know that corporatism really and truly is destroying their rights. But I'm a pragmatist. I know full-well that any corporation worth its share price also knows how to make the views they present, and the opposing views they present, somehow both line up with their actual agenda. Lovely questions like "Are consumer rights a big mistake, or a stupid idea? Our panel explores both sides of this controversial issue, fairly."
A resurrected Fairness Doctrine will only bring an unenforceable morass of shrill jackassery and lawsuits. Plus it violates the free speech rights all those affected.
How about a compromise? You know that quaint little disclosure they do at the end of movie reviews that the film they're praising was made by CNN's "sister company"? The one that doesn't appear at the bottom of articles about legislature being lobbied for by their parent corporation? How about a Fairness Doctrine that says that if you're reporting on a story you have a financial stake in, you have to disclose the fact. Is that fair enough?
First, most of us can travel a thousand miles in any (land) direction and not have to switch languages. In other words, there's no point in bothering. Beyond that, there are so few opportunities to exercise a second language that even for those of us who bothered (French and German in my case), it atrophies from disuse unless one finds special settings.
Second, World War I. Up until the 1910s, there were many multilingual communities in the United States, and still quite a few where English speakers were the exception, not the rule. This was particularly the case with German and Norwegian. When the U.S. entered the war, it did so with an anti-German fervor that was downright rabid. The Espionage Act and Sedition Act created an environment so hostile that the post office refused to deliver German-language mail and speaking German in public could land you in jail. Congress even refused to seat an elected member, in part because of his German heritage. In this environment, multilingualism was severely discouraged and America was well on its way into what has been nearly a century of monolinguistic, monocultural pressure.
After WWI, mass communications such as radio and television, nearly all in one language, sealed the deal.
Office-2007 is a contender for the least useful upgrade in the history of computing. It's expensive, has a steep learning curve, and it's default format is even less compatible with anything else. But does its grammar checker know the difference between it's and its?
All I really want to know is how unobtrusive it can be. Word 2003 seems congenitally incapable of letting me write an entire sentence without doing something to distract me from the thought I'm trying to express. And you have to go all over the place to turn all that crap off. "Ooh! That looks like an e-mail address! Let's have a deep conversation with Outlook then make a hyperlink!" "Ooh! That file server called monday has a name just like a day of the week! Let's capitalize that word!" "Ooh! Someone you never met who worked here a few years ago wrote something with those three words in the title. Let's put some tiny dots underneath!" STFU and let me type.
Slashdot Mirror
Mind you, the drug is called "booze" and you don't do the selecting, it does. It tends to erase things like why it was a good idea to leave the bar with that hyena-creature, or why you were dancing with it in the first place.
I have a toddler. Toddlers don't spring forward very well. Put them to bed an hour early and they'll spend two hours fighting it. Then get them up an hour early and see how happy they are to see you.
Please, please, either ditch it completely or use it all year long. I really like having an extra hour of daylight to spend outside with the boy, the dog, and the missus.
But this is more petty bitching by a company that's going to end its life with thud and a brief squeak. Is it too late to market themselves as as a scrappy, loveable underdog instead of something about to be scraped off the bottom of a shoe?
Sales isn't a single task, and it can be handled with a variety of styles. Cold calling, glad-handing, and schmoozing are all extremely tiring and stressful for introverts. And you hardly need any of it. I think introversion is a special case of a person's overall tendency to focus narrowly and intensely. Floodlight people have broad interests and as such do well with broad interactions with lots of people. Laser people -- which developers tend to be -- have narrower interests and prefer narrower interactions with fewer people.
I believe that most introverts can do quite well in sales by spending more time with fewer costomers, getting to know them and their needs well. Extroverts do better with the shotgun approach, replacing depth with volume. It's kind of like the Laffer curve, where success can be achieved at two price points.
One of the best things about the small-base approach is that it rewards depth of understanding and the quiet, introverted research this entails. Learn as much as you can about your products, their strengths and weakensses. Then learn as much as you can about your customers and their business needs. Match the business need with the best product and present your case to your customer. That's sales, in a style that involves planning, diligence and honesty, and very little bullshit.
I worked with another sales rep, a very floodlight sort of guy. He was very experienced, and naturally pulled in higher figures than I in the first year. In the second year I pulled a bit closer to him and he told me that it was for two reasons: First, I was simply getting better at dealing with people. Second, and more importantly, the prospects I paid close attention to in the first year remembered me, and when they were ready to buy, they knew I was someone they could rely on to set them up right. He was a very good saleman, who met and talked with many more people than I, and made our employer a ton of money. He was making sales, but he told me that what I was making customers, which in the long run are actually more valuable.
A final advantage of moving from development to sales is that you have the technical savvy to communicate with the customers' technical people, because you speak their language. You can answer their questions, can face their hard challenges with hard facts, and best of all you can understand the questions behind their questions.
At any rate, the Asker says he's already gained some experience in management, which is significantly more people-oriented than development, and has spent time in customer-facing roles, which is not only people-oriented, but oriented towards people's satisfaction. It sounds like the Asker is not a hard-core, head-down introvert at all. Sales would not a dramatic transition.
What you need to do is interact, one-on-one, with (a) the people putting information in, and (b) the people taking information out. If it's the same people, so much the better. But don't go into a stuffy room with a whiteboard -- not yet. Find key users (not managers!) and start by asking them two simple questions: (1) What do you do all day? (2) Can you show me? Every time you see something, discuss it with them until you understand it well, then write it down, right then right there. Ask them what's tedious. Ask them what's important and why. Ask them what happens if a particular step is omitted.
Take all this back to your own desk and start doing mockups. Take these back to the users for round two, complete with observations like "I noticed that you spend a lot of time matching the numbers on this sheet of paper to the numbers on this other one. It looks like we could merge them together right here." Be prepared to have your design ripped to shreds, but have
Failing that, call your grandma on the phone and tell her that the users are writing "terrorist accounting software." The CIA, who is tapping your phone, will abduct them and fly them to one of those countries Amnesty International is always talking about, where a Haliburton sub-contractor will gather requirements for you. Six weeks later a New York Times reporter will discover the users wandering a dusty third-world street. The reporter will piece together the whole story into a five-part series that eventually wins the Pulitzer Prize. Part three of the series will be all the sordid details of the software, obtained from an anonymous whistle-blower at the Justice Department. The following spring a book called The Best Reporting of 2007 will be available in paperback, peaking at #237 on Amazon. Buy the book along with Karl Weigers's excellent Software Requirements, Second Edition so that you'll qualify for Super Savers Free Shipping. Using the two together you'll be on your way to award-winning software, but after the awards ceremony, don't accept offers of free rides in unmarked vans, even if they say they have a Wii console in there.
This is some of the most contemptible saber-rattling -- and caving -- I've seen this year.
One day a legitimate user, one with a license and a receipt in his hand, is going to be rebuilding his hard drive. When he can't put his hands on his registered Display Eater license key, he's gonna say to himself, "I'm a legitimate, licensed user in a hurry. Let me just snag a key off a warez site so I can get working again. A key's a key, right?" A few minutes later all his Display Eater files are gone. This developer is engaged in vigilante activity that, inevitably, will harm an innocent bystander. Hopefully it will be somebody who writes for Ziff Davis. If said writer lives or works in my home state, after the developer is successfully sued, he'll be thrown in jail for computer tampering.
Fake everything is used in movies all the time, and always has been. Have you seen Psycho? In the shower scene, that's not blood -- it's not even red. It's chocolate syrup. And in the original, unadulterated Star Wars, Luke's landspeeder is actually mounted on the arm of a centrifuge, with the camera at the pivot, so the desert in back really just goes around and around. Also, it was shot on Earth rather than a desert planet called Tatooine.
These tricks have been around for decades. The only thing even vaguely interesting this article says is that the faking that used to be done during a scene is now done afterwards. We don't need the old tricks anymore: They can be hacked in afterwards. All you need to do is make sure your actor has a tennis ball on a green stick to stare at, and you can chroma-key in whatever alien doohickey you care to. Think your alien needs fur instead of scales? No worries, no retakes -- you just drag and drop the right texture and you're done.
From the audiences point of view, it matters not one bit whether Ms. Connelly actually cried, or used glycerine, or had the tears added later. What matters is that we look at the screen and see sadness.
Just like every five or ten years a pipefitter will find himself dealing with something the engineers never dreamed necessary, and he'll have to dust off That One Book and do some serious ciphering. As a working programmer, rather than a researcher, I feel more affinity for the pipefitter than anyone else.
What home networking routers should do is, right out of the box, (a) have wireless off by default, and (b) when they plug their Ethernet cable in, all outgoing port 80 requests get redirected to an internal web server:
Welcome to the RouteCo Pornblaster 2000 wireless router!Next >> then (c) gets them to set a password and finally (d) asks them if they want to activate the wireless. Oh, and throw in some legal disclaimers and some actual configuration parameters somewhere for good measure.
Alternatively they should all have a different password that's printed on a sticker on the bottom. That'll at least reduce the vulnerability level by a smidge. Shouldn't be too terribly hard to do.
I say we move Computer Science from the Mathematics Building over to the Divinity School and be done with it.
It's kind of like how my brother's dog got his name: He was born "Bodean", but my brother and his girlfriend were deciding between calling him "Bo" or "Dean" when "Bean" was said, and he's been "Bean" ever since.
By some estimates, the Church of Scientology has spent over two million dollars litigating against Henson. They've bankrupted him. They call him a bigot. A stalker. A terrorist. On their Keith Henson web page they say "Keith Henson is an explosives expert and a convicted hate criminal." He's an "explosives expert" because he used to put on fireworks shows in the desert. He's a "convicted hate criminal" because Scientology set him up. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he hasn't received a few anonymous e-mails and phone calls, inviting him to speculate on how old men fare in prison.
Please refer to Xenu.net to learn more about what happens to people who speak out against Scientology. Scientologists may be a bunch of sad loonies, but their leadership is very quick to call someone an enemy, and very eager to bring their enemies to ruin.
I am not in the habit of posting anonymously, but I am afraid of them.
Pretty soon the RIAA will be claiming jus primae noctis as part of their fee, right after they've forced piano manufacturers to insert a chip that detects when a copyrighted song is being played and slams the lid shut until you swipe your credit card...
I'm in the not-a-lawyer crowd, and won't be the first to say you should consult a lawyer, but I will add that you shouldn't bother with a lawyer unless you're actually served papers. And don't mention a damned thing to your new employer. No point in getting them skittish about bringing you on.
As for escorting you out a week early, etc.: Call your former employer's HR department and find out when your official termination date is. If it matches your submitted resignation date, then the VP dude was talking smack and you should quit worrying.
But if HR gives you a date short of the one you submitted, then you got fired for quitting and that's something almost every state's labor board would be delighted to hear about. A competent HR department will fix this very quickly. If you were fired without cause (or wrongfully, in this case), it puts them in a very different situation vis-a-vis unemployment benefits and other little things. BTW, just for fun you should send a letter to VP dude's boss asking for contact information in the legal department, since VP dude told you the company was suing you and your next employer.
But back to the subject of this comment: If they're spending more money advertising a pill than developing it, we're paying for them to advertise drugs to us that either we need because a doctor knows we do, or that we want because a commercial told us we do. I mean, what the hell is restless leg syndrome? OH MY GOD! I HAVE A SYNDROME!
Pharmaceutical companies, and medicine in general, have a rather special ability to jack up their prices almost at will. The industry is a complex controlled by a small handful of players who dan defy market economics and hand us a single proposition: "If you don't buy our services, you'll die." This isn't like the food industry, although ADM, "the supermarket to the world," is trying to make it happen. If caviar is through the roof, I'll do without. If the price of asparagus doubles, I'll buy string beans instead. But if my heart medicine is too expensive, I buy it or I fucking die.
And they're engaged in unnecessary activities, that dramatically increase costs, by marketing drugs to unqualified decision makers.
The cost of a security breach is measured as the probability of an incident multiplied by the cost of the incident. Both numbers can be calculated surprisingly well, or at least made to sound plausible. Security software will reduce the probability of an incident. Calculate the difference. If it exceeds the cost implementing security, it's a good thing.
This is a basic formula used for all types of data security, including backup and disaster planning.
Did I miss something? I was watching American Idol.
I suspect that low volume is a major factor in the pricing. I'll bet something like one hundred twenty million PCs and laptops get built every year. These custom designs have volumes in, optimistically, the tens of thousands. The economies of scale are definitely on the McTowerCase manufacturer's side.
Please reset your irony detectors and come back later. Maybe calibrate them against some known irony, like an episode of Blackadder.
I suspect that the point of the GP is that "liberal media" is a myth, and has been for some time. But what replaced it isn't "right-wing media." It's corporate media.
CNN is owned by one of the six corporations that own about eighty-five percent of all media in the U.S. Eighty five-percent of the information controlled by six entities. And they collude. And they have a common agenda that is decidedly anti-consumerist. Didn't know that? They don't have to tell you. They don't have to mention the laws they pay to get passed.
The only reason I like the Fairness Doctrine is that it might get some people thinking. It may scare the shit out of a few people who didn't know that corporatism really and truly is destroying their rights. But I'm a pragmatist. I know full-well that any corporation worth its share price also knows how to make the views they present, and the opposing views they present, somehow both line up with their actual agenda. Lovely questions like "Are consumer rights a big mistake, or a stupid idea? Our panel explores both sides of this controversial issue, fairly."
A resurrected Fairness Doctrine will only bring an unenforceable morass of shrill jackassery and lawsuits. Plus it violates the free speech rights all those affected.
How about a compromise? You know that quaint little disclosure they do at the end of movie reviews that the film they're praising was made by CNN's "sister company"? The one that doesn't appear at the bottom of articles about legislature being lobbied for by their parent corporation? How about a Fairness Doctrine that says that if you're reporting on a story you have a financial stake in, you have to disclose the fact. Is that fair enough?
First, most of us can travel a thousand miles in any (land) direction and not have to switch languages. In other words, there's no point in bothering. Beyond that, there are so few opportunities to exercise a second language that even for those of us who bothered (French and German in my case), it atrophies from disuse unless one finds special settings.
Second, World War I. Up until the 1910s, there were many multilingual communities in the United States, and still quite a few where English speakers were the exception, not the rule. This was particularly the case with German and Norwegian. When the U.S. entered the war, it did so with an anti-German fervor that was downright rabid. The Espionage Act and Sedition Act created an environment so hostile that the post office refused to deliver German-language mail and speaking German in public could land you in jail. Congress even refused to seat an elected member, in part because of his German heritage. In this environment, multilingualism was severely discouraged and America was well on its way into what has been nearly a century of monolinguistic, monocultural pressure.
After WWI, mass communications such as radio and television, nearly all in one language, sealed the deal.
All I really want to know is how unobtrusive it can be. Word 2003 seems congenitally incapable of letting me write an entire sentence without doing something to distract me from the thought I'm trying to express. And you have to go all over the place to turn all that crap off. "Ooh! That looks like an e-mail address! Let's have a deep conversation with Outlook then make a hyperlink!" "Ooh! That file server called monday has a name just like a day of the week! Let's capitalize that word!" "Ooh! Someone you never met who worked here a few years ago wrote something with those three words in the title. Let's put some tiny dots underneath!" STFU and let me type.