This article makes it sound like kids as young as 8 are choosing their own meals.
As young as 5. The elementary school in my area allows kids 3 choices of a main entree; 3 choices for a side entry (fruit/veggie/etc.) and their choice of drink. We do full day kindergarten two days a week and then one half day (rather than 5 half days), that means that 5 year olds could pick their food for those two days a week. Kids as young as 6 pick their food 5 days a week.
Most parents we know approach it as a training experience. Our approach is to allow our daughter to pick one meal a week where she can buy (she usually goes for chicken fingers; but pizza slips in on occasion); the rest of the time we pack lunch (she helps me pack). Same system - we pay into an account, and they debit the account. We do not pay a percentage - what we deposit is the same amount credited.
Most parents in our neighborhood feed the kids a meal when they get home. Our daughter gets a real meal (at least fruit, usually leftovers, etc.) when she gets home - lunch is only 30 minutes long, and more of a "snack". What do I mean by "snack"? Lunch is 30 minutes. In that time they have to (i) get their lunch (ii) find a seat (iii) play funny faces (iv) talk about how Meanie Jim was pulled aside by the teacher... (infinity) oh, yeah, and eat their food. We usually see half of the food come back home in the lunchbox because "she didn't have enough time to eat". I usually eat lunch with her every month or so - and its almost a crime to see how much food the kids throw away, especially the kids who bought the school lunch. (And, yes, the school encourages us to go in and eat lunch with the kids. My daughter asks me to go pretty much every day - kids think its cool that her parents can come in - but we try to limit it to once every month or two. The workers enjoy it because it means they have another parent there to open milks, puncture Capri-Suns, pry the tops of puddings, referee the funny face matches, etc. The one rule? Thou Shalt Not Bring In Fast Food when you eat lunch with your kids. They discourage fast food...)
Most likely they're blocking money transfers as part of their compliance with OFAC
The rules are supposed to be you check relevant information (including but not limited to name) against the watch list, and then hold any monies which are associated with a positive hit on the watch list until it is resolved whether the recipient is a false positive or truly on the watch list. Most financial companies which I have worked with try to resolve within 24 hours, but my experience is limited to a small small number of companies.
It does sound that Western Union is having an issue properly identifying and resolving OFAC positives.
OFAC is a legal compliance requirement. Much like another of our favorites, SOX.
You use a drill with a drill bit designed to go through metal and it's platters. Were you using safety glassess/goggles? How far was the customer in relation do you doing this work? Did you mount the drive in a vice? What did you place the drive on in case the drill bit goes through the cast aluminum?
Depending on your age and the job classification (based on employment contract), this activity screams of an OSHA violation.
OHSA! Oh my god! Not OHSA!
And the hundreds and thousands of us who worked and slaved at minimum wage jobs routinely violating rules laugh at you.
Hell, I spent most of my high school years working until 3 AM (a huge violation), cleaning grills and other areas with some of the most caustic acid cleaner you've ever seen (someone got pissed off at a coworker and poured the pink shit on their car. No pain left), lugging vats of 300+ degree oil across the parking lot by myself to dump in the disposal bin (someone dropped the oil on their foot after I left), etc. etc. I'm sure most slashdotters can chime in with similar stories.
Maybe they're trying to phase out pilots all together?
I always think of Heinlein and the book Friday when this comes up.
The discussion there was in regards of replacing a normal human pilot with a bioengineered human (quicker reflexes, more arms, etc.), not a computer
But the pilot's reply as to why he was against a bioengineered human? Paraphrasing it was 'I recognize that they may be better than I am in terms of raw ability, but I and any other human will try my damndest to make sure the plane lands with a minimum of human casualties. A test tube created critter may not care as much.'
Until they make a machine care, I prefer a human. Yeah, humans make mistakes, but if the tail rotor comes apart and something comes up that the machine can't handle, I prefer human for the ability to land the damn thing in a cornfield.
Iger (the new Disney CEO) stated that one of the reasons he wanted to buy Pixar is that he watched the parade at the newest Disney and realized all of the characters were older than 10 years. Disney had created no new characters in 10 years. Pixar had.
Interview was in Fortune for those who want to RTFA.
The Roman Empire was done in not by an equal country, but by small bands of invading hordes. And perhaps the rules of political empires apply to technology empires, too
It was Just The Barbarians? Geez, and there go all of the historians debating endlessly. There they go listing a combination of factors, of which the barbarians were one. Christianity, decadence, blah blah - there's plenty of blame to go around. Some of those pesky historians even say that Roman civilization never fell as much as it evolved into European civilization, and that the 4th and 5th centuries were just a real low point.
Are you really that "interested" in finding another job when they start bouncing paycheques on their way to bankruptcy?
The above is the more important question. I would say "if you're young, single, and want good experience, take the dot-com job for the experience." It may work out - and you make oodles - but more you get the experience. But - realize you've got possibility of crazy hours; your job could evaporate; you need to realize that while Task A may be due tomorrow, that could be quickly trumped by Emergency B where you quickly have to learn skill Q (not saying that can't happen anywhere; but large multinationals tend to have schedules that stick because there are more people to spread tasks around, and the skillset tends to be in house...somewhere); etc.
If you're risk averse - and coming out of college I knew several people that were - than stay put. You'll be happier overall, even though you know the work isn't as challenging as it could be.
Now if you have a family and large bills the question changes. But you didn't give me that impression.
If my employer intends to monitor and regulate what I do when off work, I expect to be paid my full amount, including overtime, on a basis of working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
Hypothetical case: if you are a salesman for Oracle, but in your off time you advocate everyone use MySQL, is Oracle justified to fire you?
Side discussion: lawyers are held to a higher ethical standard; lawyers can be sanctioned for ethical violations. A law firm employee stated that she has no issues with violating a law she feels is unconstitutional. This law firm is not the ACLU (the firm does not have a reputation for fighting rules the firm feels are unconsitutional) Will the employee be fired?
Side discussion 2: a few Ford plant managers have reimplemented the policy where Ford employees driving non-Ford cars park in a different parking lot, further from the plant. Is this justifiable? You bought the car in your off time after performing a cost/benefits analysis.
I'm going to begin this with a tangent, but I'll come back to the point.
I've been accused of racism and sexism - twice - when dealing with those who worked for me.
In the first case, guy knew his stuff when it came to coding. Guy also sat in my boss' office for 30 minutes telling him that the rest of the team were idiots; he wasn't going to comply with our standards as he disagreed with them; he wanted to rebuild our architecture to the Newest! Greatest! technology (at the time, Struts had just come out. We weren't using it yet. We agreed that we should keep an eye on it, but we were damned if we were going to rebuild an existing - and working - application that took 1 million hits a day and had been for a year)
The director gave the guy enough rope, and then walked him to the door with the comment that I was right, the guy wasn't working out as far as team chemistry.
He ranted that I was racist against Hispanics.
The second time I had someone working for me who the rest of the team had nicknamed 101, as that person was stuck at the 101 level no matter how much the team worked with her. There were various issues (lack of ability to pick up concepts; inability to design or architect; a strange ability to blow away other people's changes in version control no matter how many times the version control admin sat down with her to work with her; etc.) - so I explained to my boss that 101 just wasn't working out. I was encouraged to keep 101 because "there aren't any other females on the team" and "we need to work with her; she wants to be in the technical field and there aren't enough women in technical fields."
On one day I discovered that not only had 101 blown away some changes in a remote corner of the app, but then full testing on that piece hadn't been examined and the removal of those changes had made it to production. The language I used was...colorful. I did not use the C-word (I'm married - I know better. The C-word is a week on the couch) or the female dog word. I used the words "stupid wench." (Everyone please forgive me. It was Friday afternoon at 3 PM and it had been a long week, but now I'm making excuses) 101 went to the boss and complained about my sexist attitude. Despite evidence to the contrary, she said she had not done it. I was called on the carpet. It was explained to me that I was supposed to be mentoring 101 so that she could improve as we were encouraging females to be in the field and it would be difficult for her to improve if she felt I had a hostile attitude. I decided it was time for me to move to another job and I did so. (and this is petty of me, but I just want to mention that a week after I left, she blew away some changes again, and again tried to deny it. Except that this time there was more of an audit trail.)
My point?
It might not be others, although I suspect some of it could be (just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not coming to get you. Seriously, using the examples above, 101 was right - the rest of the team couldn't stand her - she was just wrong as to the root cause. It wasn't her sex. She was just a pain in the ass to work with) But some of it might be you and how you do things. Others here have said the same thing to you. Give it some thought.
The gift tax only applies to cash? So wouldn't it be a lot easier to just gift gold or property or something else that's unlikely to change much in value before it can be liquidated?
According to my accountant, gift tax applies to any gift, and it is the value of the "asset" as of the day of the gift. This includes gold, stock/mutual funds, real estate, etc. I'm speaking somewhat from experience - when grandmother's health went we were doing everything we could to legally reduce her estate.
Keep in mind there are two limits - the limit for the receiver (income) and the limit for the giver. Individually, you can be gifted with anything less that $11,000 (now $12,000) before you have to pay income taxes on it. The giver has different rules - giver can give anything under $11,000 to someone before they have to file a form; but anything over $11,000 they have to file a form. BUT, even though the giver filed a form, they do not owe a gift tax until they exceed the $1,000,000 cumulative lifetime gift rule for all gifts ever given to anyone.
I've been told the IRS does look at family member transactions to verify that income was not missed. If you sell a building to a family member, be damn sure you get fair market value and you have an appraisal or two to back it up, or else the IRS will look at the difference and declare the excess was a gift - and charge taxes with penalties.
Couldn't this be used as a way to escape the gift tax? If I give you $10 million, then you have to pay taxes on it. If I loan you $10 million, then as a gift to you, cancel your debt to me, then you've paid no taxes on the $10 million.
What you're describing is not gift tax.
First of all, if I give you 10 million then forgive the debt, you have to declare the 10 million as income and pay taxes on it. You would have to do the same thing if I "gifted" you the 10 million. Any amount over $12,000 (as of 2006) has to be declared as income unless it was a wedding gift, for tuition or medical bills, blah blah blah all sorts of exceptions.
Gift tax is that you, the giver, have to pay a tax on cash gifts if the total of the gift is over a certain amount and you have given over Y amount total as gifts (I believe Y is $1.5 million). This means the money is taxed twice - the giver and the receiver are paying taxes on it (gift tax and income tax). And, yes, in theory you have just gotten around the gift tax. But if the IRS audits you, you'd better have a good explanation for forgiving $10,000,000 in debt without other compensation after handing someone $10,000,000, or else the IRS will declare it a gift. They aren't stupid.
In the case of this spammer, if the company forgave the debt, the IRS will probably look at the forgiving of the debt and go "okay, that makes sense as to why you don't want to deal with collecting it" and so not want the gift tax.
crime was down BECAUSE the jails were full. Cause and affect.
Prove it.
Someone else did a study - and found a decline in crime corresponds with the reduction of single mothers giving birth and the rise in abortions. Conclusion was that we're seeing lower crime rates now because of what happened in the 70's and 80's.
Reduce the number of teens and young adults in certain segments of the population and crime goes down. Hmm. That would cause a lot of liberals to have a cow.
All I'm saying is the issue is a lot more complex than you think it is.
IBM has DB2. I don't see IBM deciding not to sell DB2.
Unless you mean MicroSoft is going to leave the market.
And please don't say "DB2! No one uses DB2!" Those of us who deal with large businesses will just shake our heads.
Because I was curious, I did a search for CRM with DB2 as the back end. There are business cases out there for using DB2 with PeopleSoft. I suspect the current owners of PeopleSoft don't encourage that.
The GPL's viral nature ensures that nobody else can incorporate the software into a product of theirs, without GPL'ing that product, too.
Would people please quit repeating this? It's not true. The GPL does not work that way.
"New code" you create which includes GPLd code is your code and does not have to be GPL'd due to some viral nature clause.
Repeating the "viral nature of GPL'd" canard actually hurts the GPL - because people then shy away from using GPL'd code thinking that they will then lose control of their code.
Here's an analogy (and I'll use copyright): if Tom Smith publishes a article which lays out the basics of a concept I am allowed to quote from that article so long as I attribute the passages to Tom Smith. But if I copy the passages and attribute them correctly that does not mean that Tom Smith can force me to publish the article where he wants. Now, if I copy the entire article and try to pass it off as my own, that would be wrong. If I copy the entire article and only change 10 lines I'm still in violation of the copyright. But if I create a new work which delves deeper into the concepts which Tom Smith only covered in basic - so which extends Tom Smith's work - the work is mine.
The GPL works in a similar way - you are allowed to incorporate GPLd code provided (a) you attribute it correctly (b) you include the source as specified by the GPL. The only pieces GPL'd are the original code which was GPL'd; you are not forced to GPL your entire code base.
Most of the things you cite you didn't need persistent cookies for; they could be handled at the session level
For example, two of your examples were: knowing that the last page 20% of people visited was our contact page, yet only 10% of those people actually submitted the form would make me reevaluate that page a lot of people clicking through from a banner ad we had on Site A tended to buy Widget B
both of which are able to be tracked at the session level.
your non session level variables were "how often do we get repeat business" (or how often does anonymous person X browse our site and not buy anything. What pages are they browsing. What are they searching for. Hmm. Maybe they wanted it in magenta. How many other people are looking for the item in magenta. Ah ha - we need to offer magenta!) Now *that* could be a reason to justify a cookie, but then we start down the slippery slope of tracking what people are doing and the potential evil.
I would say that for you anonymous users are just that - anonymous. Track what a user does in a session, but do not store any information about that user. Do not let there be a way that the user can be associated with their usage during the session. The downside to that approach is you do not know how often you get an anonymous repeat browser who is looking for something and not finding it (either you have the wrong product, or the product is out of stock, or...) Or another approach is to try to cookie so that you can track repeat visits, but to ackowledge that some do not allow cookies and that your data is skewed. But - and I can't emphasize this enough - but do not associate users to usage.
My current site is different in that it is a business to business site, and so we have a business relationship with our users. I want to track what the user did and track when they did it (timestamps can matter contractually) Users must login, authenticate, and in doing so accept the fact that their usage will be tracked.
And note that I don't need cookies. In fact, I can't think of a reason I've needed cookies for the past 4 or 5 years.
All the money is being spent on "tech in schools". At the end of the day, a bad teacher will be bad given a set of textbooks or laptops. Imo, this money should go towards more teacher training/more teachers.
The high school which I'm an alumni of - a private Catholic high school in Cincinnati - did this years ago because it saved them money in the long run, allowing them to funnel more money into other things (such as upgrading the chemistry and physics labs which were 20 years old, expanding the physics summer camp, bumping up salaries, etc.).
Here were some of the reasons they cited:
Textbooks cost money. A lot of money.
All of those textbooks need to be stored. That takes up room each summer.
All of those textbooks need to be inventoried, tracked, handed out, etc. Now they image someone's laptop and hand it to them. Handing out text material is as simple as either (a) pushing the install to the user (b) handing out a CD or (c) telling the student to click a link on a teachers page to download the material
The school also leased laptops from Dell, with the student getting the laptop when they leave the school. (Who really cares - a 4 year old laptop - but still a nice touch)
Keep in mind that this is a private Catholic school, so rules about modding your laptop have serious teeth (they have no problem booting you out on your ass for violations - you can go to public school, thank you very much) But like most Catholic schools, they're trying extremely hard to keep costs as low as possible so that Joe Sixpack can afford to send their kid to Catholic school.
Well, frankly if I paid someone to develop an application and I felt it was good enough, I'd sell it, not just give it away for free. Why should I spend my hard-earned money paying someone to write a piece of software only to let them give it away to anyone else, including my competitors!?
Do you understand that the vast majority of software developers are not working for software development companies? I work for an insurance company; my buddy writes statistical analysis programs on Wall Street; another buddy specializes in databases for call center apps; etc. For my company, it makes sense to use and contribute to Open Source for the projects that make sense for us to use. My company's competitive advantage in terms of IT is our raters and our analysis engines - and we ain't selling those - but the stuff we use to build 'em (Ant, eClipse, Tomcat, etc.) we want reliable, cheap, and industry standard.
The majority of companies out there don't give a rat's ass about marketing a software. They're in another business. They might spin off software to another company; but they're not even looking for that. They want systems/software that are cheap, widely available, stable, industry standard, able to be supported by either in house staff or outside staff, blah blah blah - not to develop and sell software.
Case in point: I know a project that was using a vanilla MySQL instantiation and connecting to it via MySQL's Java drivers. They were unable to use a GPL license, but thought they didn't have to as they were just using the JDBC drivers. They were quickly and I am told emphatically informed that their entire project was GPL if they distributed it.
I want to first emphatically state (for those who are clueless) that whoever told this company that they had to GPL their entire project was a fuckwit.
You are allowed to use a GPL'd Java driver in your proprietary software as long as:
if you make any changes to the driver, you release those changes back, per GPL requirements
you do not sell the driver to the end user (including a blurb that you are using this GPLd driver blah blah would be recommended)
And now I wander into the tangent of "what the hell were the programmers doing?". The idea I try to live by is that I don't give a flying fucking shit what the database and drivers are. I create a table structure and an automated way to create those tables in a SQL database; I create code that goes against a JNDI data source; and I test against SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL. Maybe DB2. Unless it is required that you do a lot of things SQL side (such as triggers on the database side), the idea is you abstract out the database dependencies and let the customer choose what database they want to support (and so what drivers they need to use). But that's just another consultant's perspective.
It's different than a corporation. The skills are the same, but its...different.
Deadlines do not matter. At all. In a corporation, there is accountability. At most universities I've dealt with, there is little to no fear of consequences. It takes a MAJOR screw up to get canned. Job security is through the roof.
As a result of the high feeling of job security, there is a lot more "input" from peons as well as faculty. Some of this is also the nature of universities - things are discussed to death.
Politics are different. While there can be times when you need to "convince a big wig" - be it a dean or a college president - more often you are trying to get a "coalition" to agree on the way to do things. But keep in mind that with the lack of accountability, even though the coalition may say 'this is the way it is', if the networking (or operating systems or...) decide they don't like it, they will ignore any requests. (Versus a corporation where once the decision is made by the coalition, you WILL support the decision or else feel the wrath of upper management)
Professors think they are gods because of the PhD. Think "treat like middle to upper management". Professors like to provide 'input' which is often contradictory - if not flat out wrong. But do not cause them to lose face - because they will scuttle you.
Despite what others have said, money is usually very very tight in most universities. If you are on a Big Budget project, they'll pour money down your throat - but this doesn't sound like a Big Important Project. (Big Important Projects = student registration; finance; etc.)
Expect the wierd. Some professor is going to have a Mac Plus because that's what he loves; another will be running some variant of Linux you've never heard of; a third will expect support on OS2. Some department which exists in the hinterlands of the campus will be running Windows 3.1 for Workstation because they never had the budget to upgrade.
Just as with any corporation, have you figured out what the architecture the IT department (or other bigs wigs) are sold on? Is it Java on Sun Servers, or Linux and PHP or Perl? Windows and.NET? Your project had better conform. I've gotten in trouble doing projects for universities where I was asked for an Open Source PHP solution (what the budget could support), and found out later that the IT department actively sabotaged the results because they preferred to support.NET. (In a coporation the size of most universities, the "acceptable platforms/languages" are usually well defined. A university is often less...regulated)
H1B workers have their hands tied, since the second they are no longer employed in the US, they get kicked out. That is a huge stick for a company to be able to use against an employee.
And for a very similar reason, my large corporation CIO has stated he flatly refuses to hire any more H1Bs. And that has become corporate policy. Quote, "if they suck, and we want to get rid of them, it means that we have to send them home. That is a huge stress for the firing manager. It causes the manager to not want to fire someone. We don't want that."
Yes, there are some decent C-folk out there.
Under law of unintended consequences: it means the existing H1Bs (such as the one who I work with) have major hurdles to go through to get visa paperwork through HR.
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As young as 5. The elementary school in my area allows kids 3 choices of a main entree; 3 choices for a side entry (fruit/veggie/etc.) and their choice of drink. We do full day kindergarten two days a week and then one half day (rather than 5 half days), that means that 5 year olds could pick their food for those two days a week. Kids as young as 6 pick their food 5 days a week.
Most parents we know approach it as a training experience. Our approach is to allow our daughter to pick one meal a week where she can buy (she usually goes for chicken fingers; but pizza slips in on occasion); the rest of the time we pack lunch (she helps me pack). Same system - we pay into an account, and they debit the account. We do not pay a percentage - what we deposit is the same amount credited.
Most parents in our neighborhood feed the kids a meal when they get home. Our daughter gets a real meal (at least fruit, usually leftovers, etc.) when she gets home - lunch is only 30 minutes long, and more of a "snack". What do I mean by "snack"? Lunch is 30 minutes. In that time they have to (i) get their lunch (ii) find a seat (iii) play funny faces (iv) talk about how Meanie Jim was pulled aside by the teacher ... (infinity) oh, yeah, and eat their food. We usually see half of the food come back home in the lunchbox because "she didn't have enough time to eat". I usually eat lunch with her every month or so - and its almost a crime to see how much food the kids throw away, especially the kids who bought the school lunch. (And, yes, the school encourages us to go in and eat lunch with the kids. My daughter asks me to go pretty much every day - kids think its cool that her parents can come in - but we try to limit it to once every month or two. The workers enjoy it because it means they have another parent there to open milks, puncture Capri-Suns, pry the tops of puddings, referee the funny face matches, etc. The one rule? Thou Shalt Not Bring In Fast Food when you eat lunch with your kids. They discourage fast food...)
Most likely they're blocking money transfers as part of their compliance with OFAC
The rules are supposed to be you check relevant information (including but not limited to name) against the watch list, and then hold any monies which are associated with a positive hit on the watch list until it is resolved whether the recipient is a false positive or truly on the watch list. Most financial companies which I have worked with try to resolve within 24 hours, but my experience is limited to a small small number of companies.
It does sound that Western Union is having an issue properly identifying and resolving OFAC positives.
OFAC is a legal compliance requirement. Much like another of our favorites, SOX.
Depending on your age and the job classification (based on employment contract), this activity screams of an OSHA violation.
OHSA! Oh my god! Not OHSA!
And the hundreds and thousands of us who worked and slaved at minimum wage jobs routinely violating rules laugh at you.
Hell, I spent most of my high school years working until 3 AM (a huge violation), cleaning grills and other areas with some of the most caustic acid cleaner you've ever seen (someone got pissed off at a coworker and poured the pink shit on their car. No pain left), lugging vats of 300+ degree oil across the parking lot by myself to dump in the disposal bin (someone dropped the oil on their foot after I left), etc. etc. I'm sure most slashdotters can chime in with similar stories.
I always think of Heinlein and the book Friday when this comes up.
The discussion there was in regards of replacing a normal human pilot with a bioengineered human (quicker reflexes, more arms, etc.), not a computer
But the pilot's reply as to why he was against a bioengineered human? Paraphrasing it was 'I recognize that they may be better than I am in terms of raw ability, but I and any other human will try my damndest to make sure the plane lands with a minimum of human casualties. A test tube created critter may not care as much.'
Until they make a machine care, I prefer a human. Yeah, humans make mistakes, but if the tail rotor comes apart and something comes up that the machine can't handle, I prefer human for the ability to land the damn thing in a cornfield.
Iger (the new Disney CEO) stated that one of the reasons he wanted to buy Pixar is that he watched the parade at the newest Disney and realized all of the characters were older than 10 years. Disney had created no new characters in 10 years. Pixar had.
Interview was in Fortune for those who want to RTFA.
It was Just The Barbarians? Geez, and there go all of the historians debating endlessly. There they go listing a combination of factors, of which the barbarians were one. Christianity, decadence, blah blah - there's plenty of blame to go around. Some of those pesky historians even say that Roman civilization never fell as much as it evolved into European civilization, and that the 4th and 5th centuries were just a real low point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Roman_Emp ire
What about used games? If I read this right, the used games market would be gone.
For someone such as myself who pretty much only buys used games (Sony must hate my family), this would be huge.
But what happens when the robots go out of control roaming the countryside?
- John Connor
The above is the more important question. I would say "if you're young, single, and want good experience, take the dot-com job for the experience." It may work out - and you make oodles - but more you get the experience. But - realize you've got possibility of crazy hours; your job could evaporate; you need to realize that while Task A may be due tomorrow, that could be quickly trumped by Emergency B where you quickly have to learn skill Q (not saying that can't happen anywhere; but large multinationals tend to have schedules that stick because there are more people to spread tasks around, and the skillset tends to be in house...somewhere); etc.
If you're risk averse - and coming out of college I knew several people that were - than stay put. You'll be happier overall, even though you know the work isn't as challenging as it could be.
Now if you have a family and large bills the question changes. But you didn't give me that impression.
Hypothetical case: if you are a salesman for Oracle, but in your off time you advocate everyone use MySQL, is Oracle justified to fire you?
Side discussion: lawyers are held to a higher ethical standard; lawyers can be sanctioned for ethical violations. A law firm employee stated that she has no issues with violating a law she feels is unconstitutional. This law firm is not the ACLU (the firm does not have a reputation for fighting rules the firm feels are unconsitutional) Will the employee be fired?
Side discussion 2: a few Ford plant managers have reimplemented the policy where Ford employees driving non-Ford cars park in a different parking lot, further from the plant. Is this justifiable? You bought the car in your off time after performing a cost/benefits analysis.
I'm going to begin this with a tangent, but I'll come back to the point.
I've been accused of racism and sexism - twice - when dealing with those who worked for me.
In the first case, guy knew his stuff when it came to coding. Guy also sat in my boss' office for 30 minutes telling him that the rest of the team were idiots; he wasn't going to comply with our standards as he disagreed with them; he wanted to rebuild our architecture to the Newest! Greatest! technology (at the time, Struts had just come out. We weren't using it yet. We agreed that we should keep an eye on it, but we were damned if we were going to rebuild an existing - and working - application that took 1 million hits a day and had been for a year)
The director gave the guy enough rope, and then walked him to the door with the comment that I was right, the guy wasn't working out as far as team chemistry.
He ranted that I was racist against Hispanics.
The second time I had someone working for me who the rest of the team had nicknamed 101, as that person was stuck at the 101 level no matter how much the team worked with her. There were various issues (lack of ability to pick up concepts; inability to design or architect; a strange ability to blow away other people's changes in version control no matter how many times the version control admin sat down with her to work with her; etc.) - so I explained to my boss that 101 just wasn't working out. I was encouraged to keep 101 because "there aren't any other females on the team" and "we need to work with her; she wants to be in the technical field and there aren't enough women in technical fields."
On one day I discovered that not only had 101 blown away some changes in a remote corner of the app, but then full testing on that piece hadn't been examined and the removal of those changes had made it to production. The language I used was...colorful. I did not use the C-word (I'm married - I know better. The C-word is a week on the couch) or the female dog word. I used the words "stupid wench." (Everyone please forgive me. It was Friday afternoon at 3 PM and it had been a long week, but now I'm making excuses) 101 went to the boss and complained about my sexist attitude. Despite evidence to the contrary, she said she had not done it. I was called on the carpet. It was explained to me that I was supposed to be mentoring 101 so that she could improve as we were encouraging females to be in the field and it would be difficult for her to improve if she felt I had a hostile attitude. I decided it was time for me to move to another job and I did so. (and this is petty of me, but I just want to mention that a week after I left, she blew away some changes again, and again tried to deny it. Except that this time there was more of an audit trail.)
My point?
It might not be others, although I suspect some of it could be (just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not coming to get you. Seriously, using the examples above, 101 was right - the rest of the team couldn't stand her - she was just wrong as to the root cause. It wasn't her sex. She was just a pain in the ass to work with) But some of it might be you and how you do things. Others here have said the same thing to you. Give it some thought.
According to my accountant, gift tax applies to any gift, and it is the value of the "asset" as of the day of the gift. This includes gold, stock/mutual funds, real estate, etc. I'm speaking somewhat from experience - when grandmother's health went we were doing everything we could to legally reduce her estate.
Keep in mind there are two limits - the limit for the receiver (income) and the limit for the giver. Individually, you can be gifted with anything less that $11,000 (now $12,000) before you have to pay income taxes on it. The giver has different rules - giver can give anything under $11,000 to someone before they have to file a form; but anything over $11,000 they have to file a form. BUT, even though the giver filed a form, they do not owe a gift tax until they exceed the $1,000,000 cumulative lifetime gift rule for all gifts ever given to anyone.
I've been told the IRS does look at family member transactions to verify that income was not missed. If you sell a building to a family member, be damn sure you get fair market value and you have an appraisal or two to back it up, or else the IRS will look at the difference and declare the excess was a gift - and charge taxes with penalties.
Comcast and TiVo has a deal that starts mid-2006 to market TiVo DVRs to Comcast customers.
http://news.com.com/TiVo,+Comcast+reach+DVR+deal/2 100-1041_3-5616961.html
Couldn't this be used as a way to escape the gift tax? If I give you $10 million, then you have to pay taxes on it. If I loan you $10 million, then as a gift to you, cancel your debt to me, then you've paid no taxes on the $10 million.
What you're describing is not gift tax.
First of all, if I give you 10 million then forgive the debt, you have to declare the 10 million as income and pay taxes on it. You would have to do the same thing if I "gifted" you the 10 million. Any amount over $12,000 (as of 2006) has to be declared as income unless it was a wedding gift, for tuition or medical bills, blah blah blah all sorts of exceptions.
Gift tax is that you, the giver, have to pay a tax on cash gifts if the total of the gift is over a certain amount and you have given over Y amount total as gifts (I believe Y is $1.5 million). This means the money is taxed twice - the giver and the receiver are paying taxes on it (gift tax and income tax). And, yes, in theory you have just gotten around the gift tax. But if the IRS audits you, you'd better have a good explanation for forgiving $10,000,000 in debt without other compensation after handing someone $10,000,000, or else the IRS will declare it a gift. They aren't stupid.
In the case of this spammer, if the company forgave the debt, the IRS will probably look at the forgiving of the debt and go "okay, that makes sense as to why you don't want to deal with collecting it" and so not want the gift tax.
Last time I checked, the sun:
Where'd you get your facts? Weekly World News?
Prove it.
Someone else did a study - and found a decline in crime corresponds with the reduction of single mothers giving birth and the rise in abortions. Conclusion was that we're seeing lower crime rates now because of what happened in the 70's and 80's.
Reduce the number of teens and young adults in certain segments of the population and crime goes down. Hmm. That would cause a lot of liberals to have a cow.
All I'm saying is the issue is a lot more complex than you think it is.
Will it come down to a two player game?
Three.
IBM has DB2. I don't see IBM deciding not to sell DB2.
Unless you mean MicroSoft is going to leave the market.
And please don't say "DB2! No one uses DB2!" Those of us who deal with large businesses will just shake our heads.
Because I was curious, I did a search for CRM with DB2 as the back end. There are business cases out there for using DB2 with PeopleSoft. I suspect the current owners of PeopleSoft don't encourage that.
Would people please quit repeating this? It's not true. The GPL does not work that way.
"New code" you create which includes GPLd code is your code and does not have to be GPL'd due to some viral nature clause.
Repeating the "viral nature of GPL'd" canard actually hurts the GPL - because people then shy away from using GPL'd code thinking that they will then lose control of their code.
Here's an analogy (and I'll use copyright): if Tom Smith publishes a article which lays out the basics of a concept I am allowed to quote from that article so long as I attribute the passages to Tom Smith. But if I copy the passages and attribute them correctly that does not mean that Tom Smith can force me to publish the article where he wants. Now, if I copy the entire article and try to pass it off as my own, that would be wrong. If I copy the entire article and only change 10 lines I'm still in violation of the copyright. But if I create a new work which delves deeper into the concepts which Tom Smith only covered in basic - so which extends Tom Smith's work - the work is mine.
The GPL works in a similar way - you are allowed to incorporate GPLd code provided (a) you attribute it correctly (b) you include the source as specified by the GPL. The only pieces GPL'd are the original code which was GPL'd; you are not forced to GPL your entire code base.
Smurfs
ObTasteless: What's blue and creamy?
Hints: Smurfette can't make it. Although as the only female, she must have seen lots of it.
For example, two of your examples were:
knowing that the last page 20% of people visited was our contact page, yet only 10% of those people actually submitted the form would make me reevaluate that page
a lot of people clicking through from a banner ad we had on Site A tended to buy Widget B
both of which are able to be tracked at the session level.
your non session level variables were "how often do we get repeat business" (or how often does anonymous person X browse our site and not buy anything. What pages are they browsing. What are they searching for. Hmm. Maybe they wanted it in magenta. How many other people are looking for the item in magenta. Ah ha - we need to offer magenta!) Now *that* could be a reason to justify a cookie, but then we start down the slippery slope of tracking what people are doing and the potential evil.
I would say that for you anonymous users are just that - anonymous. Track what a user does in a session, but do not store any information about that user. Do not let there be a way that the user can be associated with their usage during the session. The downside to that approach is you do not know how often you get an anonymous repeat browser who is looking for something and not finding it (either you have the wrong product, or the product is out of stock, or...) Or another approach is to try to cookie so that you can track repeat visits, but to ackowledge that some do not allow cookies and that your data is skewed. But - and I can't emphasize this enough - but do not associate users to usage.
My current site is different in that it is a business to business site, and so we have a business relationship with our users. I want to track what the user did and track when they did it (timestamps can matter contractually) Users must login, authenticate, and in doing so accept the fact that their usage will be tracked.
And note that I don't need cookies. In fact, I can't think of a reason I've needed cookies for the past 4 or 5 years.
The high school which I'm an alumni of - a private Catholic high school in Cincinnati - did this years ago because it saved them money in the long run, allowing them to funnel more money into other things (such as upgrading the chemistry and physics labs which were 20 years old, expanding the physics summer camp, bumping up salaries, etc.).
Here were some of the reasons they cited:
The school also leased laptops from Dell, with the student getting the laptop when they leave the school. (Who really cares - a 4 year old laptop - but still a nice touch)
Keep in mind that this is a private Catholic school, so rules about modding your laptop have serious teeth (they have no problem booting you out on your ass for violations - you can go to public school, thank you very much) But like most Catholic schools, they're trying extremely hard to keep costs as low as possible so that Joe Sixpack can afford to send their kid to Catholic school.
Do you understand that the vast majority of software developers are not working for software development companies? I work for an insurance company; my buddy writes statistical analysis programs on Wall Street; another buddy specializes in databases for call center apps; etc. For my company, it makes sense to use and contribute to Open Source for the projects that make sense for us to use. My company's competitive advantage in terms of IT is our raters and our analysis engines - and we ain't selling those - but the stuff we use to build 'em (Ant, eClipse, Tomcat, etc.) we want reliable, cheap, and industry standard.
The majority of companies out there don't give a rat's ass about marketing a software. They're in another business. They might spin off software to another company; but they're not even looking for that. They want systems/software that are cheap, widely available, stable, industry standard, able to be supported by either in house staff or outside staff, blah blah blah - not to develop and sell software.
I want to first emphatically state (for those who are clueless) that whoever told this company that they had to GPL their entire project was a fuckwit.
You are allowed to use a GPL'd Java driver in your proprietary software as long as:
And now I wander into the tangent of "what the hell were the programmers doing?". The idea I try to live by is that I don't give a flying fucking shit what the database and drivers are. I create a table structure and an automated way to create those tables in a SQL database; I create code that goes against a JNDI data source; and I test against SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL. Maybe DB2. Unless it is required that you do a lot of things SQL side (such as triggers on the database side), the idea is you abstract out the database dependencies and let the customer choose what database they want to support (and so what drivers they need to use). But that's just another consultant's perspective.
And for a very similar reason, my large corporation CIO has stated he flatly refuses to hire any more H1Bs. And that has become corporate policy. Quote, "if they suck, and we want to get rid of them, it means that we have to send them home. That is a huge stress for the firing manager. It causes the manager to not want to fire someone. We don't want that."
Yes, there are some decent C-folk out there.
Under law of unintended consequences: it means the existing H1Bs (such as the one who I work with) have major hurdles to go through to get visa paperwork through HR.