How about you have data required to do your job on a device supplied by your employer that also happened to have you sign a NDA?
How would this play out with a cellphone or a laptop now that you have two distinct laws you have to abide by.
Should the govt be able to request your password for information stored on your (or a company) device that you have signed contracts to keep secret?
I think a warrant would overrule any NDA. And I think it's reasonable to expect that NDA'd information is always stored in encrypted form on vulnerable devices such as smartphones and laptops.
Or you could just secure your smartphone, of course, which is exactly what TFA is all about. Had you read TFA, you'd also have known that 60% of criminal offenses can be committed without even being aware of it, so you might be a criminal and not know it.
In any case, just like any other computer, a smartphone is bound to contain thousands of emails, browsing history, cookies, and other data that you'd expect to be protected by privacy laws. Make sure you protect it as good as you'd protect any other computer. Better even, because it's much more easily stolen, lost or confiscated.
TFA mentions that the issue of warrantless searches of smartphones hasn't been definitively settled yet, so with some luck, supreme judges might be smart enough to realize that law enforcement officers should need a warrant for it. But even then, it could also be criminals that are rummaging through your personal details.
Stop bolting technology onto a 19th century design. How about designing something from the ground up that solves the issues of our time ? We already have something that allows you to do other things while traveling, it's called a train.
That's also a 19th century design, and it has plenty of problems of its own. Trains tend to go from where I'm not to where I don't want to go at the wrong time.
Don't get me wrong: I love trains. I come from a train-loving family. I vastly prefer train travel over car travel exactly because you can read and relax. But it's not the ultimate solution. What we need is a system that I can enter at my front door, leave at work, and in the mean time I can just remain seated and read something. That would be perfect, but it's sounding an awful lot like a fully automated car.
My daily newspaper is aimed at people between 25 and 35 who get most of their news from the Net. And it's pretty successful.
But there's plenty of other stuff to do. Read a book, for example. I have trouble finding time to read books anymore. Reading during the commute would be perfect. Only I commute by bike, so it's still not going to be an option. But if I were commuting by traffic jam, like most of the western world, I'd love to hand over control and have a read.
I kinda assume that all the other cars will brake. The entire advantage of this system over relying on organic eyeballs is that the necessary information can be shared with the driver at the rear faster than any human could react.
Without anything like that, it'd be ridiculously unsafe.
Good point. I've been receiving quite a lot of such emails that manage to get around my spam filter. The text is always different, and there's always a different photo at the bottom (I think; I don't actually keep track of it). It could easily be explained by some unsolicited dating site.
When I read the summary, I thought they were going to create the most useless dating site ever. Where many commercial dating sites already have the problem that the vast majority of your matches will be unable to respond, here the vast majority of your matches wouldn't even be interested in dating, and would consider your attempts to contact them spam.
TFA sounds more like they want to provide a service for people and companies to collect information on people (prospective employees?), while the official cover story is that they want to check the accuracy of their dating profiles (but then why would they need millions of other profiles too?).
As much as you'd like to de-emphasize the difference between men and women (and I certainly do), at some point boys are going to discover that there are differences, and those differences will matter. Of course women can be great role models, but inevitably, some men will become role models too. And without normal adult men in his environment, he may have to resort to either boys in his class, or movie actors.
There are good reasons why people are trying to get more men into child care and primary education. A society entirely dominated by women isn't any better than a society entirely dominated by men. Diversity is a good thing.
The extreme length and glacial speed of our Earthdawn campaign might be what killed the spirit of our group. Although at the same time, the last few years some players were really getting into the spirit of it. We did some epic stuff. But in the end it was just way too slow.
Okay, in that case you might really have to change the group, sad as that is.
Considering the time we played, and the amount of stuff we did, it's clearly not all bad. It's just that it's nowhere near as good as I think it could be. Or even as good as it used to be, back when we were younger and had no jobs and more time and energy to invest in it.
(Oh, and I noticed that you distinguish between "Shadowrun" and "Shadowrun 4" instead of "Shadowrun 3 " and "Shadowrun 4". I don't know if that's intended but if it is I fully agree.)
We did SR2 and 3 before. I have mixed feelings about SR4. In a way it's a far better system, and fixes lots of problems that older versions had, but at the same time I wonder if they didn't also accidentally kill the spirit. I haven't played it enough to be sure.
I recognise some of what you're saying. Sometimes, I enter the zone at the end of the afternoon, and that's why I love to work late sometimes. But I can't do that every day, nor can I do it on command. There are days where I enter the zone early in the morning, even the moment I enter the building (or even earlier!). Sometimes I don't enter the zone at all. And there are many days where I'm completely exhausted around 5 PM.
Allowing long hours (rewarding them even) can be great. Demanding them is destructive. It's much more productive to figure out what gets your programmers in the zone, and do that. Or give them the freedom to figure it out for themselves.
Maybe data trumps anecdote, but I honestly haven't had the slightest problem finding interesting job offers during the past few years. Several of my friends switched jobs voluntarily and also didn't have any problems. The only people I know who can't find a job either don't (want to) work in software development, or they're unemployable geniuses.
It might be different for fresh graduates of course, but I've seen no signs of it. Yesterday I read in the paper that there's a serious shortage of programmers in Netherland, which is why they're importing people from Hungary and Romania to fill positions here. And with the baby boomers about to retire, it's only going to get worse (or better, from a job seeker's perspective).
Personally, though, I suspect the reason for the shortage of programmers here is that software development as a job is not respected enough. Managers make more money, so most students prefer to do business/economics-related studies instead of computer science. And instead of raising wages, they're going to import people from countries where they're used to lower wages. So it's not all great. But if you're any good, there's no need to take any crap from your employer. There are still plenty of other jobs out here.
It's a startup. The boss may not be terribly experienced. The fact that he's asking for advice is a good sign. Plenty of managers would draw their own wrong conclusions from some random article and run with that. Sure, it's a stupid suggestion, but the fact that he's asking could be a sign he's willing to learn. Give him some good advice and take a more active role in the organization of the company. If he starts being unreasonable, you can always run away later.
But a boss can't just declare motivation and efficiency, whereas a boss can just declare longer workdays.
Not after we signed a contract for a 32-hour work week (that's the maximum I'm officially willing to commit to; but I can be flexible if my employer is too).
Go up the Mississippi river and count the towns that flood every decade or so and then count the ones that have finally got the hint and relocated. When river traffic was a town's lifeblood it made sense to take the risk, but nowadays?
I'm not too familiar with the Mississippi or New Orleans, but a lot of trade still happens by river. There can still be very good reasons to live below sea level. The richest parts of Netherland lies below sea level. It has fertile soil, major rivers, important traffic routes, direct access to the sea. It's good living here.
The big difference with the Mississippi, Bangladesh, Queensland, etc, is that we have decided that we don't want more than one major flood every 10,000 years, and have built massive flood protections all over the place, and we continue investing in it. That makes this economically important area safe to live. It costs money of course, but it's easily worth it. It might not be worth it for small towns on the Mississippi that flood every couple of years, though.
The effects of methane is well-known and has been for ages. People have been looking for ways to cut methane emissions, but essentially it all boils down to: we need to eat a lot less meat, or we need to find a way to stop animals from farting in the open. The first one is by far preferable as it costs less and has other beneficial effects, but for some reason people keep buying lots of meat.
Even I started eating meat again after years of vegetarianism.
We've done that about a million times now. In the distant past, we started out with a lot of GURPS, followed by some Shadowrun, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu, CORPS, and Dream Park. Then we settled on some long campaigns in WFRP and Earthdawn (Earthdawn lasted 10 years or longer), doing some Fudge in between. And after the end of the massive campaigns, we're a bit lost. We've tried some D&D4 (which I hate), 3:16, Dogs in the Vineyard, Diaspora, Shadowrun4, Serenity, WFRP3, and now some homebrew d6 stuff. I still have Savage Worlds, Gumshoe/Esoterrorists, The Riddle of Steel, Spirit of the Century and The Shadow of Yesterday on my want-to-play list.
But really, I don't think the system is our problem. It's our group dynamic.
Slashdot Mirror
How about you have data required to do your job on a device supplied by your employer that also happened to have you sign a NDA?
How would this play out with a cellphone or a laptop now that you have two distinct laws you have to abide by.
Should the govt be able to request your password for information stored on your (or a company) device that you have signed contracts to keep secret?
I think a warrant would overrule any NDA. And I think it's reasonable to expect that NDA'd information is always stored in encrypted form on vulnerable devices such as smartphones and laptops.
Everybody has something to hide. Even if they're not aware of it.
Or you could just secure your smartphone, of course, which is exactly what TFA is all about. Had you read TFA, you'd also have known that 60% of criminal offenses can be committed without even being aware of it, so you might be a criminal and not know it.
In any case, just like any other computer, a smartphone is bound to contain thousands of emails, browsing history, cookies, and other data that you'd expect to be protected by privacy laws. Make sure you protect it as good as you'd protect any other computer. Better even, because it's much more easily stolen, lost or confiscated.
TFA mentions that the issue of warrantless searches of smartphones hasn't been definitively settled yet, so with some luck, supreme judges might be smart enough to realize that law enforcement officers should need a warrant for it. But even then, it could also be criminals that are rummaging through your personal details.
We're just back in the '90s again. You need to lose money in order to be worth anything.
Stop bolting technology onto a 19th century design. How about designing something from the ground up that solves the issues of our time ? We already have something that allows you to do other things while traveling, it's called a train.
That's also a 19th century design, and it has plenty of problems of its own. Trains tend to go from where I'm not to where I don't want to go at the wrong time.
Don't get me wrong: I love trains. I come from a train-loving family. I vastly prefer train travel over car travel exactly because you can read and relax. But it's not the ultimate solution. What we need is a system that I can enter at my front door, leave at work, and in the mean time I can just remain seated and read something. That would be perfect, but it's sounding an awful lot like a fully automated car.
Computers can react faster than humans. A lot faster.
My daily newspaper is aimed at people between 25 and 35 who get most of their news from the Net. And it's pretty successful.
But there's plenty of other stuff to do. Read a book, for example. I have trouble finding time to read books anymore. Reading during the commute would be perfect. Only I commute by bike, so it's still not going to be an option. But if I were commuting by traffic jam, like most of the western world, I'd love to hand over control and have a read.
Only when the train actually transports a mass. Empty trains aren't efficient at all. Though neither are empty cars, of course.
I kinda assume that all the other cars will brake. The entire advantage of this system over relying on organic eyeballs is that the necessary information can be shared with the driver at the rear faster than any human could react.
Without anything like that, it'd be ridiculously unsafe.
Good point. I've been receiving quite a lot of such emails that manage to get around my spam filter. The text is always different, and there's always a different photo at the bottom (I think; I don't actually keep track of it). It could easily be explained by some unsolicited dating site.
When I read the summary, I thought they were going to create the most useless dating site ever. Where many commercial dating sites already have the problem that the vast majority of your matches will be unable to respond, here the vast majority of your matches wouldn't even be interested in dating, and would consider your attempts to contact them spam.
TFA sounds more like they want to provide a service for people and companies to collect information on people (prospective employees?), while the official cover story is that they want to check the accuracy of their dating profiles (but then why would they need millions of other profiles too?).
By ignoring them.
As much as you'd like to de-emphasize the difference between men and women (and I certainly do), at some point boys are going to discover that there are differences, and those differences will matter. Of course women can be great role models, but inevitably, some men will become role models too. And without normal adult men in his environment, he may have to resort to either boys in his class, or movie actors.
There are good reasons why people are trying to get more men into child care and primary education. A society entirely dominated by women isn't any better than a society entirely dominated by men. Diversity is a good thing.
The extreme length and glacial speed of our Earthdawn campaign might be what killed the spirit of our group. Although at the same time, the last few years some players were really getting into the spirit of it. We did some epic stuff. But in the end it was just way too slow.
Okay, in that case you might really have to change the group, sad as that is.
Considering the time we played, and the amount of stuff we did, it's clearly not all bad. It's just that it's nowhere near as good as I think it could be. Or even as good as it used to be, back when we were younger and had no jobs and more time and energy to invest in it.
(Oh, and I noticed that you distinguish between "Shadowrun" and "Shadowrun 4" instead of "Shadowrun 3 " and "Shadowrun 4". I don't know if that's intended but if it is I fully agree.)
We did SR2 and 3 before. I have mixed feelings about SR4. In a way it's a far better system, and fixes lots of problems that older versions had, but at the same time I wonder if they didn't also accidentally kill the spirit. I haven't played it enough to be sure.
Those are the first things out the door when management starts cutting corners.
I recognise some of what you're saying. Sometimes, I enter the zone at the end of the afternoon, and that's why I love to work late sometimes. But I can't do that every day, nor can I do it on command. There are days where I enter the zone early in the morning, even the moment I enter the building (or even earlier!). Sometimes I don't enter the zone at all. And there are many days where I'm completely exhausted around 5 PM.
Allowing long hours (rewarding them even) can be great. Demanding them is destructive. It's much more productive to figure out what gets your programmers in the zone, and do that. Or give them the freedom to figure it out for themselves.
Maybe data trumps anecdote, but I honestly haven't had the slightest problem finding interesting job offers during the past few years. Several of my friends switched jobs voluntarily and also didn't have any problems. The only people I know who can't find a job either don't (want to) work in software development, or they're unemployable geniuses.
It might be different for fresh graduates of course, but I've seen no signs of it. Yesterday I read in the paper that there's a serious shortage of programmers in Netherland, which is why they're importing people from Hungary and Romania to fill positions here. And with the baby boomers about to retire, it's only going to get worse (or better, from a job seeker's perspective).
Personally, though, I suspect the reason for the shortage of programmers here is that software development as a job is not respected enough. Managers make more money, so most students prefer to do business/economics-related studies instead of computer science. And instead of raising wages, they're going to import people from countries where they're used to lower wages. So it's not all great. But if you're any good, there's no need to take any crap from your employer. There are still plenty of other jobs out here.
It's a startup. The boss may not be terribly experienced. The fact that he's asking for advice is a good sign. Plenty of managers would draw their own wrong conclusions from some random article and run with that. Sure, it's a stupid suggestion, but the fact that he's asking could be a sign he's willing to learn. Give him some good advice and take a more active role in the organization of the company. If he starts being unreasonable, you can always run away later.
But a boss can't just declare motivation and efficiency, whereas a boss can just declare longer workdays.
Not after we signed a contract for a 32-hour work week (that's the maximum I'm officially willing to commit to; but I can be flexible if my employer is too).
Unfortunately, Keynes isn't as popular as he used to be.
Go up the Mississippi river and count the towns that flood every decade or so and then count the ones that have finally got the hint and relocated. When river traffic was a town's lifeblood it made sense to take the risk, but nowadays?
I'm not too familiar with the Mississippi or New Orleans, but a lot of trade still happens by river. There can still be very good reasons to live below sea level. The richest parts of Netherland lies below sea level. It has fertile soil, major rivers, important traffic routes, direct access to the sea. It's good living here.
The big difference with the Mississippi, Bangladesh, Queensland, etc, is that we have decided that we don't want more than one major flood every 10,000 years, and have built massive flood protections all over the place, and we continue investing in it. That makes this economically important area safe to live. It costs money of course, but it's easily worth it. It might not be worth it for small towns on the Mississippi that flood every couple of years, though.
The effects of methane is well-known and has been for ages. People have been looking for ways to cut methane emissions, but essentially it all boils down to: we need to eat a lot less meat, or we need to find a way to stop animals from farting in the open. The first one is by far preferable as it costs less and has other beneficial effects, but for some reason people keep buying lots of meat.
Even I started eating meat again after years of vegetarianism.
Have you tried changing the system?
We've done that about a million times now. In the distant past, we started out with a lot of GURPS, followed by some Shadowrun, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu, CORPS, and Dream Park. Then we settled on some long campaigns in WFRP and Earthdawn (Earthdawn lasted 10 years or longer), doing some Fudge in between. And after the end of the massive campaigns, we're a bit lost. We've tried some D&D4 (which I hate), 3:16, Dogs in the Vineyard, Diaspora, Shadowrun4, Serenity, WFRP3, and now some homebrew d6 stuff. I still have Savage Worlds, Gumshoe/Esoterrorists, The Riddle of Steel, Spirit of the Century and The Shadow of Yesterday on my want-to-play list.
But really, I don't think the system is our problem. It's our group dynamic.
Man, that's exactly what I wanted to do in university. But nobody cared about games back then. Now I have to do it on my own.