Teachers unions are often fine with paying teachers more for qualifications, for instance if you get a post-graduate degree many districts will put you on a higher pay scale. I suspect what they are against here is having higher pay scales for math and science than other subjects.
At the university level, this has long been the standard, each department has a different pay scale which is heavily influenced by the market for that profession. Science, engineering, and business professors make more than arts and humantities professors because that is what they have to pay to attact good people -- even so, qualified people in those fields usually have considerably higher paying options outside of the university.
I would like to pay all qualified teachers more, but I suspect that having separate pay scales is also likely to be part of a successful solution.
No, but we could see a return to plauges that kill 30% of the population, similar to the fraction of Hiroshima killed by the atomic bomb or its immediate aftermath, but affecting entire countries or continents. I think I would call that "the big one". Certianly it would catastrophically disrupt our society and economy, as transportation shut down and businesses providing key services disappeared. We are more reliant on each other than we ever have been in the past.
That said, it is still unlikely that a disease exactly like the black plauge would happen. Sanitation is one of the few defenses against infection that bacteria have not evolved resistance to. My guess is the next big disease will look more like AIDS than avian flu.
(ordinary) glass is transparent at 1 micron. It is also transparent at 1.5 microns -- telecom laser communication travels down glass fibers at the wavelength.
apt-get does more complicated depenency resolution than yum. I do not know whether this is intrinsic to the tool, or pratices of package maintainers.
The problem that has been annoying me recently is that yum will not remove packages to install a conflicting package. Admittedly, whether this is a good thing is up to debate, but I have frequently run into situations where one (or many!) packages depend on a file provided by two packages, which conflict with each other. If I want to switch from one to the other, I have to temporarily uninstall all packages that depend on the mutual file, or use --force to override dependency analysis and hope that the alternate actually provides all the necessary files.
If anyone knows of a way to get yum to solve this problem, I would love to hear it, but apt-get (usually) does it automatically.
So, if you have errors in those highly correlated categories your drives are probably going to fail, but if you do not have errors in these categories your drives can still fail.
It isn't even that good. Many of the failure flags indicate between 70% and 90% survavability to 8 months. This is much worse than the ~2%/year baseline failure rate, but not as strong of a predictor as you might like. It would be nice to see data on this out to 2 or 3 years, so you could calculate the integrated chance of failure over the service lifetime, but by eye it looks like the trends were leveling off by 8 months.
So, if you want to avoid replacing too many good drives, you probably have to move to a multiple error model, which probably reduces your detection liklihood well below the already low 44% reported.
Most non-Mormon Christians, as well (I believe) as most religious scholars consider Mormonism non-Christian in the same way that Christians are non-Jewish, or Muslims are not Christian.
Related, yes. Sharing history and principles, yes. However, the differences between Mormonism and the rest of Christianity in culture, history, and doctrine are rather large, even compared to the difference between most Protestant denominations and the Catholic churches.
It is not like it is a bad thing -- it is just a category to make useful notational distinctions. Any time you classify items you run into problems between people who want to lump anything with common elements together or split by the smallest difference. See Lumpers and Splitters. It doesn't affect what you believe or what your life means. A rose by any other name and all that.
Well, that is fine as long as you stop killing me with your environmentally hostile lightbulbs.
Seriously, people, the government may not know what is best for you, but they often know why what you are doing is not best for the rest of us. You can fix this by banning the harmful behavior, taxing it, giving tax credits for doing to right thing, or the government can just let me hit you with a pointy stick for polluting the environment I have to live in -- all forms of government intervention. Or we can go the ultimate property rights route and I will not let anyone emit any pollutant that will enter my property -- shutting down the entire economy. Anyone who thinks we can live in a modern society without a reasonable amount of government regulation subscribes to a world view as simplistic as the high school communist who really believes that everyone will work for the betterment of society without any incentive. Wild west libertarianism does not work in a technological society, or anywhere with a high population density, because peoples actions always affect others, and there is no simple formula for when that interaction should be allowed when one party does not consent.
Don't get me wrong, I suspect that banning incandecent bulbs is at best premature, but there is no sound principle of government where it not within the rights of the government to do so. The question is only if it is really in the interests of the governed.
I thought I was for an optional.xxx domain, but after reading the article, and especially reading ".sex considered harmful" I chanced my mind. While it is long and technical, the salient points (for me, and regarding host names for web services only) were:
First, due to the availability of redirects and other features, it is impossible to determine whether when I type something in the location bar or click on a link, whether I will end up at a.xxx labeled site. Thus, for an adult who wishes to police himself, the.xxx domain provides little extra protection to avoid seeing objectionable material before the more effective existing content labels show up in the form of huge tits.
Second, there is no security, nor any provision of security for the assignment of domain names to arbitrary IP addresses. In particular, this means that as owner of stuff.xxx I can create an entry for really.bad.stuff.xxx to point to your web server, possibly creating a denial of service attack against you. Likewise a user with a name in a non-adult namespace can reference my adult site, even if I as a responsible webmaster have delegated all adult content to a.xxx TLD.
The second concerns can be largely but not completely handled through HTTP/1.1 virtual hosts, but that requires correct administrative practices on the part of all webmasters, and restraint on the part of content filters to not block any IP address pointed to by a.xxx address. Neither of which seem likely without penalties, and then we are back to the government (or ICANN) deciding what content should be in.xxx.
Content based filtering is a little harder, but I can't imagine it is hard to correctly identify most adult webpages that are not trying to hide. Excluding that, even a HTML attribute would be superior to hijacking internet naming systems which are not really designed to handle that sort of labeling information, and allow people who don't have control over their web server's virtual host configuration to still label their content if they so choose.
Light has everything to do with it. Light is a wave in the elctromagnetic field, changes at which propogate at c in a vacuum. Signals travel down "wires" at somewhat less than c (typically 65-80% * c), dependant on the dielectric constant of the insulator around the wire as well as the geometry of the conductor. In general, the electrons move much slower than this, with instantaneous velocities of a small fraction of c and drift velocities on the order of a few cm/s.
The problem is, those cheap products shouldn't exist at all. It something is selling for less than it costs to make and test a reilable product, it isn't likely to be one. Consumers understandably look at two boxes and see that one costs half the price of the other for the "same" functionality, and buy the cheaper one. If manufacturers were penalized for shipping defective products, there wouldn't be any overly cheap products, and all would be well in the world. Except that the guy who is broke but wants are wireless router for 1 or 2 computers and doesn't mind reseting it won't be able to buy one. I can't really say whether that is a good or a bad thing.
Part of me dreams that in a world with a minimum standard of full functionality, the prices would not be much higher, but I begin to doubt that.
RICO can apply to any felony carried out as part of a commerical enterprise. Since this guy was most certainly a commercial enterprise, accused of making money by illegally selling copyrighted music, I would say RICO is applicable.
This case is probably a mistake for the RIAA, but it certainly sounds like legally they are on firm ground. It is unfortunately that given our current copyright status quo, it doesn't seem like there is a good, legal way for him to work, despite the implied positive effect on the artists (and probably record labels) he is accused of ripping off.
The RIAA will likely say that even if artists were not being harmed, they are entiteled to some royalties (possibly correct, though I doubt any legal licensing would lead to that) it is important to not allow a "culture of piracy" to exist.
Interestingly enough, they probably have to push for criminal charges, since civil charges might not stick since the RIAA would have to show actual harm, which there allegedly is not. For the criminal case, you only have to show that the law was broken, which it probably was.
I don't have a problem with the funding going to the University, although I do have a problem with it going to the individual researchers. If they want that money, they can go work for the drug companies. No reason they should get the benefits of both worlds.
Actually, researchers for drug companies are unlikely to make money off of their inventions. That is one advantage universities offer to compensate for the dramatically lower base salaries -- if you invent something that makes a ton of money you get usually between 1/3 and 1/2 of the royalties (split among the inventors) after the university recoups patenting costs.
Also, many academics instead leave the unviersity after inventing something and start a company that licenses the technology from the university.
It is a pretty good system. While it wouldn't be a bad idea to also include repayment of development grants in some cases, I think we get a reasonable benefit from the system as it stands. I would be more supportive of requiring (or enforcing existing requirements where they exist) the results of government funded research to be licensed "fairly", especially in cases when the developer isn't commercializing them.
MTBF is only defined within the drives expected life (something like 3 or 5 years). So, if you take 182 drives, you expect about 5 of them to die within 5 years, even if all of them die within 10 years.
He asked the question. The problem is that he also tried to answer it. And his answer("Women aren't as good at men at math and science,") was offensive and incorrect, and rightly struck a blow to his reputation among the faculty.
The question this women is asking is more like, "Given that there are no inherent disparities in aptitude between men and women, why aren't as many women appearing in engineering positions?"
First, have you read his speech? Here it is. Your characterization of it is at best overy simplistic and possibly just wrong.
Is it not even worth considering the possiblity that there is a difference? I have heard a lot of people talk, and a lot of theory, conjecture. and speculation as to why there is such a gender gap in science and engineering, but no answers. Over the past 50 years, the gender gap has dramatically decreased in many fields requiring intelligent, technical people, but much of science and engineering has resisted diversification. It seems that speculating on the range of validity of the initial assumption should not get you fired by a community that prides itself on allowing people to hold radical or controversial viewpoints.
I personally think it is unlikely there is a siginificant difference in inherent aptitude, largely based on anecdotal observation that the gap is smaller in many european countries. Furthermore, I think that at least in the case of science researche (only because this is what I am familiar with) even if there is a gender disparity in the number of exceptionally qualified people, it is worth putting some serious effort into getting more women into those jobs. First, this provides a role model for other women who aspire to those jobs, but perhaps more importantly, if there is a real difference that means it is likely women will be able to provide new ideas and directions that men might be less likely to come up with. Said another popular way, monocultures are dangerous, if not necessarily bad.
The clueless parent:
"It means that computers are not safe," said Jeannie Bandy. "I don't want to have one in my house. Under even under the strictest rules and the strictest security, your computer is vulnerable."
That doesn't actually sound clueless. It looks as if you own a computer with an interent connection, there is a chance you will be charged with possesion of child pornography without having willfully aquired it. That sounds dangerous to me. You can take steps to prevent it with security software and smart behavior, but it is difficult to do so perfectly, and regardless that doesn't mean it is the victim's fault.
If we start throwing people in jail for making and distributing malware and illegal spam, maybe this will stop. Not very practical due to the invasive survalence that would probably be required as well as the international jurisdiction issues, but it is an actual solution.
Yet if I murder the phone company for just increasing the price of my DSL when my contract ran out by a more than a factor of two above the current rate, I will get thrown in jail. I already switched to DSL because the cable company had such abysmal service. The market has failed, as far as I am concerned.
I will take the govt. over the phone (or cable) company any day. Show me a viable alternative, or resume forcing telecos to allow competative DSL at reasonable prices, and I might change my mind.
Also, plenty of state run or controlled agencies are quite efficient. Consider the post office, for example. It is technically illegal to compete with them, but who in their right mind would want to deliver letters for less than $.50 each, anywhere in the country?
It's legally pretty clear that code you write on work time and on work computers is owned by your employer.
This is not true in most states. Absent a formal agreement, this only applies to a work for hire (it is your job to write the software). If your job is to be a police officer and you write software that makes your job easier or allows you to do it better, you own it. If you use your employers resources (time, computers) to do do, they get shop rights to use your code.
Of course, the outcome will rest on the details as to whether this constitutes a work for hire or not, as well as the details of the contract from the Iowa DOT.
My guess based on the article would be that if the software really is potentially worth millions, and he was paid in line with other police officers and performed police duties while developing this software, it would be declared his property, though he would have to share the source code with the state. However, he is still probably barred from actually selling it by the agreement with Iowa.
Flying off the handle is different that telling them why they didn't get the job. Telling someone that you didn't hire them because they had too much experience isn't the problem, either: not hiring them because of that is the problem. If you have specific, concrete reasons for not hiring someone (too little expereience, asking for too much money, another candidate was more qualified) it is fine to tell them in a constructive fashion. Vauge answers (we liked Jon better, we think your technical skills suck) may be problematic if the person you hired differes from the candidate on a legally protected discrimination criteria, though saying nothing might also cause this. You should obviously not tell someone if they were rejected due to a poor recommendation.
I post anonymously when I say something that might be embarassing to someone other than myself. This is usually when I have an opinion that might be misconstrued by, say, the people who decide our funding. There is essentially no possibility that such a comment would be read, linked to me, or that anyone would care, and the issue is not fear of retribution, just acting responsibly. Essentially, I treat ever public, written statement as if it were going to be published in the newspaper.
Almost certainly this guy is in no real danger unless there is more to his story than he let on, but if someone is going to criticize someone who is known to detain and harrass dissidents and is implicated of their murder in some situations, it is absurd to critize them for being a little defensive.
Despite the reactions against ACs on/., sometimes anonymous speech is an important part of free speech. Of course, it can also be used irresponsibly, just like any other weapon.
I always use grep's command line filenames in preference to cat|. However, I substantially prefer cat | to < when necessary because it eliminates the distinction between a single / multiple file inputs.
My biggest problem with LIRC is that lircd doesn't support multiple kernel drivers. I have 3 different LIRC devices on my myth system, and I have to run 2 different lircd instances. Everytime I think I have things set so that the modules load in a predictable order an update changes something and everything will break. Also, one of my devices is the I2C port on my PVR-250 card, and there is some weird dependency with module loading order and the ivtv module that is not handled correctly automatically. Which leaves me trying to understand and override the hotplug scripts, which makes me want to kill small animals.
I am not sure who I should blame here, lirc, fedora, hotplug, or atrpms, but it is a major annoyance. Enough so that I would consider Myth unusable by most people. Presumably it works better if you only have a single IR device for send and receive, and it is USB or serial.
The article says "ringtones and other digital recordings" which might imply that it was refering to all digital recordings (both iTunes and ringtones). While it is true that digital music services may cost less than CDs, they should really pass the savings onto the publishers -- it costs the same to produce the music whether sold as a CD or mp3, but the distribution costs are lower for the mp3. Ringtones I could believe (since they are of less value than the full, high quality recording) should earn the musicians less money except they usually sell for $2-$3, compared with the $.99 on iTunes or about $1/track for CDs.
Of course, all of the digital music options are cheaper than most CD singles, so if nobody actually wants more than a track or two, everyone makes less money. I leave it as an excercise to the reader to determine if this is a bad thing.
Re:If you've ever seen how fast a fire moves...
on
Arson Science Rewritten
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The article made it clear that the "old" rules about fire progression were not based on scientific study. Simple observation is the beginning of scientific investigation, but it is not itself scientific investigation.
I don't believe the US is worried about Iran having deuterium exactly, but the US is worried about Iran building heavy water (D20) moderated reactors. D20 is used in reactor designs that need a low neutron capture cross section, including ones used to breed plutonium. Note that heavy water reactors may also be used simply for power generation with unenriched uranium.
Slashdot Mirror
Teachers unions are often fine with paying teachers more for qualifications, for instance if you get a post-graduate degree many districts will put you on a higher pay scale. I suspect what they are against here is having higher pay scales for math and science than other subjects.
At the university level, this has long been the standard, each department has a different pay scale which is heavily influenced by the market for that profession. Science, engineering, and business professors make more than arts and humantities professors because that is what they have to pay to attact good people -- even so, qualified people in those fields usually have considerably higher paying options outside of the university.
I would like to pay all qualified teachers more, but I suspect that having separate pay scales is also likely to be part of a successful solution.
No, but we could see a return to plauges that kill 30% of the population, similar to the fraction of Hiroshima killed by the atomic bomb or its immediate aftermath, but affecting entire countries or continents. I think I would call that "the big one". Certianly it would catastrophically disrupt our society and economy, as transportation shut down and businesses providing key services disappeared. We are more reliant on each other than we ever have been in the past.
That said, it is still unlikely that a disease exactly like the black plauge would happen. Sanitation is one of the few defenses against infection that bacteria have not evolved resistance to. My guess is the next big disease will look more like AIDS than avian flu.
(ordinary) glass is transparent at 1 micron. It is also transparent at 1.5 microns -- telecom laser communication travels down glass fibers at the wavelength.
This appears to be going to far in the same way that starting a war with Canada over their copyright laws appears to be too much.
This guy is an amoral jackass, If only there were some way we could delete his source code database to make sure he learns his lesson...
apt-get does more complicated depenency resolution than yum. I do not know whether this is intrinsic to the tool, or pratices of package maintainers.
The problem that has been annoying me recently is that yum will not remove packages to install a conflicting package. Admittedly, whether this is a good thing is up to debate, but I have frequently run into situations where one (or many!) packages depend on a file provided by two packages, which conflict with each other. If I want to switch from one to the other, I have to temporarily uninstall all packages that depend on the mutual file, or use --force to override dependency analysis and hope that the alternate actually provides all the necessary files.
If anyone knows of a way to get yum to solve this problem, I would love to hear it, but apt-get (usually) does it automatically.
It isn't even that good. Many of the failure flags indicate between 70% and 90% survavability to 8 months. This is much worse than the ~2%/year baseline failure rate, but not as strong of a predictor as you might like. It would be nice to see data on this out to 2 or 3 years, so you could calculate the integrated chance of failure over the service lifetime, but by eye it looks like the trends were leveling off by 8 months.
So, if you want to avoid replacing too many good drives, you probably have to move to a multiple error model, which probably reduces your detection liklihood well below the already low 44% reported.
Most non-Mormon Christians, as well (I believe) as most religious scholars consider Mormonism non-Christian in the same way that Christians are non-Jewish, or Muslims are not Christian.
Related, yes. Sharing history and principles, yes. However, the differences between Mormonism and the rest of Christianity in culture, history, and doctrine are rather large, even compared to the difference between most Protestant denominations and the Catholic churches.
It is not like it is a bad thing -- it is just a category to make useful notational distinctions. Any time you classify items you run into problems between people who want to lump anything with common elements together or split by the smallest difference. See Lumpers and Splitters. It doesn't affect what you believe or what your life means. A rose by any other name and all that.
Well, that is fine as long as you stop killing me with your environmentally hostile lightbulbs.
Seriously, people, the government may not know what is best for you, but they often know why what you are doing is not best for the rest of us. You can fix this by banning the harmful behavior, taxing it, giving tax credits for doing to right thing, or the government can just let me hit you with a pointy stick for polluting the environment I have to live in -- all forms of government intervention. Or we can go the ultimate property rights route and I will not let anyone emit any pollutant that will enter my property -- shutting down the entire economy. Anyone who thinks we can live in a modern society without a reasonable amount of government regulation subscribes to a world view as simplistic as the high school communist who really believes that everyone will work for the betterment of society without any incentive. Wild west libertarianism does not work in a technological society, or anywhere with a high population density, because peoples actions always affect others, and there is no simple formula for when that interaction should be allowed when one party does not consent.
Don't get me wrong, I suspect that banning incandecent bulbs is at best premature, but there is no sound principle of government where it not within the rights of the government to do so. The question is only if it is really in the interests of the governed.
I thought I was for an optional .xxx domain, but after reading the article, and especially reading ".sex considered harmful" I chanced my mind. While it is long and technical, the salient points (for me, and regarding host names for web services only) were:
.xxx labeled site. Thus, for an adult who wishes to police himself, the .xxx domain provides little extra protection to avoid seeing objectionable material before the more effective existing content labels show up in the form of huge tits.
.xxx TLD.
.xxx address. Neither of which seem likely without penalties, and then we are back to the government (or ICANN) deciding what content should be in .xxx.
First, due to the availability of redirects and other features, it is impossible to determine whether when I type something in the location bar or click on a link, whether I will end up at a
Second, there is no security, nor any provision of security for the assignment of domain names to arbitrary IP addresses. In particular, this means that as owner of stuff.xxx I can create an entry for really.bad.stuff.xxx to point to your web server, possibly creating a denial of service attack against you. Likewise a user with a name in a non-adult namespace can reference my adult site, even if I as a responsible webmaster have delegated all adult content to a
The second concerns can be largely but not completely handled through HTTP/1.1 virtual hosts, but that requires correct administrative practices on the part of all webmasters, and restraint on the part of content filters to not block any IP address pointed to by a
Content based filtering is a little harder, but I can't imagine it is hard to correctly identify most adult webpages that are not trying to hide. Excluding that, even a HTML attribute would be superior to hijacking internet naming systems which are not really designed to handle that sort of labeling information, and allow people who don't have control over their web server's virtual host configuration to still label their content if they so choose.
Light has everything to do with it. Light is a wave in the elctromagnetic field, changes at which propogate at c in a vacuum. Signals travel down "wires" at somewhat less than c (typically 65-80% * c), dependant on the dielectric constant of the insulator around the wire as well as the geometry of the conductor. In general, the electrons move much slower than this, with instantaneous velocities of a small fraction of c and drift velocities on the order of a few cm/s.
The problem is, those cheap products shouldn't exist at all. It something is selling for less than it costs to make and test a reilable product, it isn't likely to be one. Consumers understandably look at two boxes and see that one costs half the price of the other for the "same" functionality, and buy the cheaper one. If manufacturers were penalized for shipping defective products, there wouldn't be any overly cheap products, and all would be well in the world. Except that the guy who is broke but wants are wireless router for 1 or 2 computers and doesn't mind reseting it won't be able to buy one. I can't really say whether that is a good or a bad thing.
Part of me dreams that in a world with a minimum standard of full functionality, the prices would not be much higher, but I begin to doubt that.
RICO can apply to any felony carried out as part of a commerical enterprise. Since this guy was most certainly a commercial enterprise, accused of making money by illegally selling copyrighted music, I would say RICO is applicable.
This case is probably a mistake for the RIAA, but it certainly sounds like legally they are on firm ground. It is unfortunately that given our current copyright status quo, it doesn't seem like there is a good, legal way for him to work, despite the implied positive effect on the artists (and probably record labels) he is accused of ripping off.
The RIAA will likely say that even if artists were not being harmed, they are entiteled to some royalties (possibly correct, though I doubt any legal licensing would lead to that) it is important to not allow a "culture of piracy" to exist.
Interestingly enough, they probably have to push for criminal charges, since civil charges might not stick since the RIAA would have to show actual harm, which there allegedly is not. For the criminal case, you only have to show that the law was broken, which it probably was.
Actually, researchers for drug companies are unlikely to make money off of their inventions. That is one advantage universities offer to compensate for the dramatically lower base salaries -- if you invent something that makes a ton of money you get usually between 1/3 and 1/2 of the royalties (split among the inventors) after the university recoups patenting costs.
Also, many academics instead leave the unviersity after inventing something and start a company that licenses the technology from the university.
It is a pretty good system. While it wouldn't be a bad idea to also include repayment of development grants in some cases, I think we get a reasonable benefit from the system as it stands. I would be more supportive of requiring (or enforcing existing requirements where they exist) the results of government funded research to be licensed "fairly", especially in cases when the developer isn't commercializing them.
MTBF is only defined within the drives expected life (something like 3 or 5 years). So, if you take 182 drives, you expect about 5 of them to die within 5 years, even if all of them die within 10 years.
First, have you read his speech? Here it is. Your characterization of it is at best overy simplistic and possibly just wrong.
Is it not even worth considering the possiblity that there is a difference? I have heard a lot of people talk, and a lot of theory, conjecture. and speculation as to why there is such a gender gap in science and engineering, but no answers. Over the past 50 years, the gender gap has dramatically decreased in many fields requiring intelligent, technical people, but much of science and engineering has resisted diversification. It seems that speculating on the range of validity of the initial assumption should not get you fired by a community that prides itself on allowing people to hold radical or controversial viewpoints.
I personally think it is unlikely there is a siginificant difference in inherent aptitude, largely based on anecdotal observation that the gap is smaller in many european countries. Furthermore, I think that at least in the case of science researche (only because this is what I am familiar with) even if there is a gender disparity in the number of exceptionally qualified people, it is worth putting some serious effort into getting more women into those jobs. First, this provides a role model for other women who aspire to those jobs, but perhaps more importantly, if there is a real difference that means it is likely women will be able to provide new ideas and directions that men might be less likely to come up with. Said another popular way, monocultures are dangerous, if not necessarily bad.
That doesn't actually sound clueless. It looks as if you own a computer with an interent connection, there is a chance you will be charged with possesion of child pornography without having willfully aquired it. That sounds dangerous to me. You can take steps to prevent it with security software and smart behavior, but it is difficult to do so perfectly, and regardless that doesn't mean it is the victim's fault.
If we start throwing people in jail for making and distributing malware and illegal spam, maybe this will stop. Not very practical due to the invasive survalence that would probably be required as well as the international jurisdiction issues, but it is an actual solution.
Yet if I murder the phone company for just increasing the price of my DSL when my contract ran out by a more than a factor of two above the current rate, I will get thrown in jail. I already switched to DSL because the cable company had such abysmal service. The market has failed, as far as I am concerned.
I will take the govt. over the phone (or cable) company any day. Show me a viable alternative, or resume forcing telecos to allow competative DSL at reasonable prices, and I might change my mind.
Also, plenty of state run or controlled agencies are quite efficient. Consider the post office, for example. It is technically illegal to compete with them, but who in their right mind would want to deliver letters for less than $.50 each, anywhere in the country?
This is not true in most states. Absent a formal agreement, this only applies to a work for hire (it is your job to write the software). If your job is to be a police officer and you write software that makes your job easier or allows you to do it better, you own it. If you use your employers resources (time, computers) to do do, they get shop rights to use your code.
Of course, the outcome will rest on the details as to whether this constitutes a work for hire or not, as well as the details of the contract from the Iowa DOT.
My guess based on the article would be that if the software really is potentially worth millions, and he was paid in line with other police officers and performed police duties while developing this software, it would be declared his property, though he would have to share the source code with the state. However, he is still probably barred from actually selling it by the agreement with Iowa.
Flying off the handle is different that telling them why they didn't get the job. Telling someone that you didn't hire them because they had too much experience isn't the problem, either: not hiring them because of that is the problem. If you have specific, concrete reasons for not hiring someone (too little expereience, asking for too much money, another candidate was more qualified) it is fine to tell them in a constructive fashion. Vauge answers (we liked Jon better, we think your technical skills suck) may be problematic if the person you hired differes from the candidate on a legally protected discrimination criteria, though saying nothing might also cause this. You should obviously not tell someone if they were rejected due to a poor recommendation.
I post anonymously when I say something that might be embarassing to someone other than myself. This is usually when I have an opinion that might be misconstrued by, say, the people who decide our funding. There is essentially no possibility that such a comment would be read, linked to me, or that anyone would care, and the issue is not fear of retribution, just acting responsibly. Essentially, I treat ever public, written statement as if it were going to be published in the newspaper.
/., sometimes anonymous speech is an important part of free speech. Of course, it can also be used irresponsibly, just like any other weapon.
Almost certainly this guy is in no real danger unless there is more to his story than he let on, but if someone is going to criticize someone who is known to detain and harrass dissidents and is implicated of their murder in some situations, it is absurd to critize them for being a little defensive.
Despite the reactions against ACs on
I always use grep's command line filenames in preference to cat|. However, I substantially prefer cat | to < when necessary because it eliminates the distinction between a single / multiple file inputs.
My biggest problem with LIRC is that lircd doesn't support multiple kernel drivers. I have 3 different LIRC devices on my myth system, and I have to run 2 different lircd instances. Everytime I think I have things set so that the modules load in a predictable order an update changes something and everything will break. Also, one of my devices is the I2C port on my PVR-250 card, and there is some weird dependency with module loading order and the ivtv module that is not handled correctly automatically. Which leaves me trying to understand and override the hotplug scripts, which makes me want to kill small animals.
I am not sure who I should blame here, lirc, fedora, hotplug, or atrpms, but it is a major annoyance. Enough so that I would consider Myth unusable by most people. Presumably it works better if you only have a single IR device for send and receive, and it is USB or serial.
The article says "ringtones and other digital recordings" which might imply that it was refering to all digital recordings (both iTunes and ringtones). While it is true that digital music services may cost less than CDs, they should really pass the savings onto the publishers -- it costs the same to produce the music whether sold as a CD or mp3, but the distribution costs are lower for the mp3. Ringtones I could believe (since they are of less value than the full, high quality recording) should earn the musicians less money except they usually sell for $2-$3, compared with the $.99 on iTunes or about $1/track for CDs.
Of course, all of the digital music options are cheaper than most CD singles, so if nobody actually wants more than a track or two, everyone makes less money. I leave it as an excercise to the reader to determine if this is a bad thing.
The article made it clear that the "old" rules about fire progression were not based on scientific study. Simple observation is the beginning of scientific investigation, but it is not itself scientific investigation.
I don't believe the US is worried about Iran having deuterium exactly, but the US is worried about Iran building heavy water (D20) moderated reactors. D20 is used in reactor designs that need a low neutron capture cross section, including ones used to breed plutonium. Note that heavy water reactors may also be used simply for power generation with unenriched uranium.