Curious how you link patents with profit and research funding. You sound so sure of that.
The patent system is based on possessiveness, denial, and fear of loss. The default answer is always "no". We're so afraid someone will miss out on payment for a use of "their" invention that we'd rather strangle innovation than "cheat" any of these mythical starving inventors of their rewards. In our haste to protect the poor inventors, we trample upon all kinds of other legitimate concerns. We award patents far too freely on stuff that is much too obvious and broad, and we're not honest about why we do that. That's not for the inventor's sake, that's so the patent office can collect more fees, and patent lawyers can drum up more business. Now the inventor does not benefit from this, it's the legions of sophisticated lawyers who have learned to work the system.
What is a nice technologist to do? Don't just do it, make sure someone else didn't think of anything remotely related. You will miss some stuff. Get permission, if you can. Lots and lots of permissions. They don't have to give you permission. If just one denies you, then what? Now if you go ahead, you're on the hook for triple damages for knowingly violating a patent instead of unknowingly violating a patent. No one can operate this way. No one does. It's far too burdensome. Many refuse to even look at patents, to avoid the triple damages problem. The patent system works against the very thing it tries to promote! Everyone goes ahead and just does it, hoping not to be sued.
I've run into a little of this too. In one undergrad class, I did the assignments a little too well. I don't think there were any grounds for the professor to feel embarrassed, but seems he did. He took a dislike to me, and tried to find excuses to flunk me. I should have received an A, but I got a C and that only because I threatened to appeal the grade if it wasn't passing. The entire department was rotten thanks to the irresponsible way the school assembled it. When I attended, it was a new discipline, and the school was in a rush to dredge up some professors. They raided related departments, and those departments used it as an opportunity to jettison their worst. Instead of the usual 1 or 2 bad teachers, it was the other way around. 1 or 2 good teachers, and the rest were terrible. To make matters even worse, they were bitter over being rejected by their chosen discipline, clinging lovingly to it despite the rejection, and regarding their new discipline with contempt, and the students who chose it as idiots. The failure rate got so bad (5% graduation rate!) the dean finally told them that if they didn't shape up, he'd kill the whole department.
I didn't have difficulties of that sort in grad school. Found out who the plagiarizing, credit stealing backstabbers were and avoided them. And that was fairly easy to do because it was a normal department and there were only a few.
You have explained some of why your advisor behaved the way he did. Sadly, he has lots of company. What about the larger environment? What is it about the way we run schools that drive people to such desperation? Too competitive perhaps? Science is so highly regarded that some people will stoop to anything to obtain recognition. Or, not selective enough? Maybe the tenure system is a big part of the problem? I have this uncomfortable feeling that too often we hand out PhDs to cheaters, who go on to be the monsters who give academia and science a bad name as they continue the dishonesty that they used to obtain the degree. They won't settle for a lesser role, so they have no choice but to continue to cheat, because they aren't capable of honest science. One PhD I was stuck working with for a year was so bad he never even tried honest work. Never should have been given a PhD, as he himself admitted in one of his rare honest moments. He felt that what was wanted was impossibly hard. He pushed everyone very hard to come up with stuff he could use to snow the customer, and of course blamed everyone else when that didn't work. Even worse, despite the desperate need, if anyone looked like they were on to something good, he'd sabotage them out of fear it might show him up and cost him his job. In the end, we all lost.
To the young researcher: if you haven't yet faced an ethical dilemma, you will. What do you do when the choice is your ethics or your job? And all future chance at similar jobs? Everyone likes to think they will make the right choice, but until you've been there you won't see how hard that can be. You've got managers putting all the pressure they can on you to "just approve it" even though it's rubbish, hinting that not doing so is not showing team spirit. Which is of course actually a threat to fire you if you don't play ball. If you play along, then odds are your reputation will be ruined, and they'll dump you when they can't use your good name anymore, as it's spent. They will of course blame you for that. And it will stick. Haven't you got a PhD? Shouldn't you have known better, doc? Don't ever put yourself in a position where you can't afford to lose the job. Don't let anyone push you into such a position either. Keep some money saved up, and put off that new car purchase. Else the pressure to cheat or at least condone cheating will be intense.
Same reason why Bank of America still exists. They bought the politicians. They've suckered much of the press. And we, the public, haven't exercised our power to stop this corruption, this parasitic drain upon our economy. Many of us are woefully distracted, too busy trying to stay afloat to pay attention even to important matters, even those things that are making it so hard to stay afloat. Criminals love distraction. Some people even go so far as to agree with our oppressors' propaganda. If the politicians were more than being buried in angry letters, if they were facing recall elections, if some got the boot, the MAFIAA would be busted so fast your head would spin. We ought to see a bunch of CEOs being fired, with some dragged off to prison. And these Too Big To Fail companies ought to be failed, broken up, liquidated, and the proceeds given back to the taxpayers who bailed out their undeserving, ungrateful, lying, cheating asses. Why hasn't any of this happened!?
We could also make the MAFIAA behave or die if we'd simply quit doing business with them. Why does anyone still bank at Bank of America? And buy music from the labels and see movies? If we can't even bring ourselves to shut down the likes of Bank of America, I see little hope that the MAFIAA can be brought to heel.
How many of us have seen an OWS protest in person? Actually participated in one? Anyone? Anyone?
Rest of the declines, and there've been plenty, are local. Some of them were entirely due to natural disaster, some were started by a natural disaster that weakened a civilization so it could not withstand its enemies as is thought to have happened with the Minoans, and some were long drawn out declines, some of natural causes such as the extended drought that lead to the Mayan collapse, and some from human practices and customs that turned out to be bad ideas, such as soil tilling practices that caused very fast erosion. Takes a few centuries for farmland to recover after the civilization that wrecked it has collapsed.
These local collapses didn't affect people far away. But now, the scale of our civilization is global. If we screw up, we could cause a global collapse which could kill us all off. There are uncomfortably many ways that could happen. The geologic record has many extinctions caused by outside factors, but also plenty of examples of life doing itself in: the Oxygen Catastrophe, PETM, and possible mass suffocations from H2S.
Fukushima was not a technical failure. It was a human failure. They didn't build the tsunami wall high enough. Why didn't they build it high enough? To save money. They knew tsunamis could be higher, but they deliberately minimized and ignored the evidence. When they couldn't simply be silent, they turned to propaganda to assure everyone they'd done their homework and found everything was safe. And now we know the hard way that they lied. This was penny-wise pound-foolish in spades.
Risk analysis doesn't help much if the decision makers are too stupid to make sound decisions based on facts. They foolishly decided to bury the results and tell lies. And that's no one time thing, that's scarily routine. After the accident, safety will be taken more seriously-- for a while.
You have to factor in the risk of human stupidity and recklessness in your analysis. With that factored in, my feeling is that nuclear power is too dangerous. What's the chance of another major nuclear disaster in the next 30 years? It should be near 0%. But because people are still reckless, I'm guessing the chance of 1 bad nuclear disaster in that time frame is pretty high, better than 50%. Even now, they're skimping on maintenance of aging reactors that were meant to be decommissioned years ago.
When the old gas powered water tank sprang a leak after 27 years of service, I looked into switching to tankless, and decided it wasn't worth it. A cheap new tank heater was $350, warrantied for 6 years, and was so improved it was twice as efficient as the old one. In contrast, the cheapest tankless heater was about $800. Then it would be another $400 to convert the gas pipe, flue pipe, and water pipes, add electrical wiring so there was some place to plug it in, and contrive some kind of support for it as it was not freestanding. Checking the expected energy usage, I saw that the chance of making back the difference in the upfront cost was practically zero. The tankless water heater would have to last at least 30 years.
To top it all off, tankless is a really poor 2nd to solar water heating. I looked into that too, and found it's completely impractical at the present time. No local business has a solar water heater. Prices at the closest places started at about $5000. Ridiculous. So I hope the new tank buys us enough time for solar to come way down in price.
Perfect example of the style of bad arguing used by the deniers, who, sadly, are for the most part also conservatives. You just start ranting away about the consequences of something you think and fear is so obviously true that you don't have to bother stating let alone proving it. Your problem is, the assumption isn't true. So your whole rant is founded on nothing, and is just a bunch of hot air.
In this case, the assumption seems to be that anthropogenic global warming is false. You evidently find it more likely that the entire consensus about global warming is wrong, or is a big lie and plot to get more funding. You think that thousands of independent scientists running thousands of independent tests and checks have all gotten this wrong, and wrong in the same way? You think that every single scientist is too incompetent or biased to collect good, honest data and to come to some honest conclusions based on that data? And that there is no competition between scientists that would very quickly expose problems? That the entire community of very diverse individuals would or even could collude? And that organizations with an interest in the status quo, such as Big Oil, haven't tried to discredit the idea and even science itself for patently obvious reasons? Do you really believe any of that?
Big business tells whoppers like no one else does. Everyone thinks of politicians as the incurable, pathologic liars, but big business makes them look like pikers. Big business is so much more professional about lying, employing entire departments known as "marketing" to handle routine, accepted lying, and funding nominally independent think tanks and setting up fake research groups to engage in less accepted forms of lying. One of Big Tobacco's few honest moments was when they said "doubt is our product", admitting that their object is NOT to do good science, but just the opposite. They purposely hinder discovery and confuse the public. Exxon is notorious for applying the same dishonest techniques to arguments over global warming. The Creationists saw what they thought was a good thing, and adopted similar techniques to argue that evolution is controversial and in doubt when it is not, and to try to present their own wishful thinking as solid science when it too obviously is not. Funny how you give "doubt is our product" a pass when you are so quick to take and interpret every least little thing as more signs that scientists are just a pack of whining, conniving, greedy, politically motivated hacks.
And in 2002, when I was contracting for the government, I needed some data that was stored on a government server. They set up a user account for me and rather than email the password to me, called to tell it to me over the phone, because they felt that was more secure than email.
The joke was that I was to connect via telnet. They didn't have ssh on that server. They didn't even have some kind of secure telnet that would at least try to encrypt the password. Just plain old telnet, with the password transmitted in the clear.
Political correctness is just another mental shortcut.
The whole idea of sorting people into "good" and "bad" misses all the nuance.
What is undeniable is how terrible we are at tapping people for management. Everyone ought to have a shot at managing for long enough to understand what a high pressure PITA job it really can be. Many of us do understand, and avoid it! When they're actually trying to be objective about it, instead of handing these "plum" jobs to friends and relatives, the criteria used to pick out people with "management potential" (as if leadership is innate-- amazing how much we still labor under medieval thinking), are completely wrong. Technical proficiency is seriously underrated in favor of loudmouthed, aggressive pushiness. The latter is mistakenly seen as being proactive, and a go-getter. They want people with drive and ambition, and they look the other way very hard whenever the whippings start. Because you see, peons are naturally lazy slackers and must be constantly threatened with termination to get the most work out of them. What they should want are leaders, but what they get are mostly pushers because they can't tell the difference. I've been wondering for some time now what they are teaching in management classes that we get this so wrong.
Does Nouveau really have 3D acceleration now? Last time I tried Nouveau was a few years ago, and it didn't have good 3D acceleration then. Was fine otherwise. But Google Earth was so horribly slow I had to switch back to the proprietary driver.
Then it's an issue of semantics. I am also a scientist. I try to be careful with words, and because of its connection with religious faith, I try to avoid using that word "believe" in the context of scientific discovery. In a way, I'm glad the anti-intellectuals have forced us to be more careful with our language. We do get sloppy at times. We know common usage of "believe" can mean simply that someone thinks some evidence appears to support a particular idea. But it can also mean someone thinks some idea could be right despite the absence of any credible evidence whatsoever. Closely related is the messiness in the meanings of "law", "theory", and "hypothesis", and I feel we've been a little too sloppy about using "theory" when we really mean "hypothesis", and about going along with the common usage of "theory". That opened the door for the objection that evolution is "just a theory". Ideas such as how the moon formed are, currently, hypotheses, though they are often called theories. Can't expect everyone to just understand, shouldn't blow it off with "you know what I mean", should be more careful with language.
what about a complete, consistent (and non-trivial) system of logical reasoning?
See, this is the problem. No can do! Perhaps you've heard of Godel's incompleteness theorems? I think you have, the way you worded that demand. You expect the wrong thing and too much. You demand completeness and consistency, and upon hearing that can't be done, you rush to the incorrect conclusion that scientists therefore are taking things on faith.
No, you could not possibly prove that you're not imagining it all.
That's right, but so what? This is why science is restricted to natural phenomena. There is of course no way to prove that $DIETY or anything else supernatural does or does not exist, and is or is not messing with us and our perceptions. We could be living in a giant simulator. The universe could have been created anytime, be that 5000 years ago or 5 minutes ago, and it only seems to be about 14 billion years old. Or perhaps the universe never was created, it has always existed. Or maybe it's something even stranger and paradoxical, maybe it somehow created itself, traveling back in time to do that, sort of a wheel of time.
But for some reason, you are trying to argue that believing in our perceptions, in what we see and observe, is a matter of faith. It is not. The minute you start down the path of being unsure that what we all see is objective reality, you've shoved yourself right back into the horror of chaos. You can't ever know what's right, can't prove anything, can't agree on anything. Your whole world is on a foundation of quicksand, and you're hating life. You're tempted to throw up your hands, and turn over all responsibility for thinking to some guru. Some of those gurus like it that way, as this allows them to make up anything they like, anything whatever, and no one can argue against them because no one can "prove" anything. They've made the standards for proof too high. And so we occasionally have tragedies like Heaven's Gate.
Or you glom onto some pseudoscience such as Creationism. You very badly want to believe it, and now you can because you've denied the foundations of philosophy and rational thought. And why do you want so badly to believe it? Because, contradictorily enough, faith isn't good enough for you, you want proof! You want to see fiery letters burning themselves into stone tablets of their own accord, you want an even more profound miracle than the fact we exist. If Genesis is not literally correct, then suddenly you're doubting your whole religion! You're being too literal, too narrow, too unwilling to consider that reality is not black and white, that there are many other plausible explanations. God can coexist just fine with evolution, and the Bible can still be the word of God, despite Genesis not being literally correct. But instead, to get absolute "proof", you turn to the trappings of science despite having rejected science itself. Sad. Really sad to see these Intelligent Design fanatics banging out "theories" in support of their conclusions, going at science totally backwards and at the same time abandoning faith. They've already settled on their model, and busy themselves trying to force the facts to fit their model. And somehow they've convinced themselves that that's science. And it doesn't work, making them very unhappy and defensive. They would prefer to believe that the rest of humanity is engaged in a giant conspiracy to keep them down and silence them, which is no real surprise considering the huge difficulty they've demonstrated in accepting basic facts.
Be more careful with that word "believe". Science is most emphatically not about belief. Science is not a religion and takes nothing on faith. Science also does not claim to have all the answers. All of science is based on observable evidence, repeatable experiments, and logical deduction and modeling. I cringe a little every time I see that phrase "scientists believe" in reference to a hypothesis we think is likely true, or a theory, or some other bit of scientific thinking or uncertainty.
Your cynical view of humanity is not accurate. There is such a thing as altruism. Charities somehow manage to persuade people to donate. There are actually many people who do NOT like free shit, because we don't believe it really is free, we're suspicious there's some catch.
You also attribute piracy to the desire to "stick it to the man". Yes, but that's not the whole story either. I am offended that these psychopathic dinosaurs insist on wasting all kinds of resources and then insist on PASSING THE COST OF THAT WASTE ONTO THE CUSTOMERS. We should pay all this extra money to cover the costs of producing millions of plastic disks and delivering them to thousands of bricks and mortar retail locations, just so those miserable bastards can feel more comfortable that all this extra and needless friction makes piracy more difficult? When we can have the same music delivered via the Internet for a fraction of the cost and time? Why should anyone choose to pay for someone else's gross stupidity? Because if we refuse to do it their way, they try to force and browbeat us into it, that's why. They trash us all as evil pirates, threaten to sue us all, keep cooking up extremely offensively stupid legislation and laughably pathetic DRM schemes, lie through their teeth about the amount of piracy and damages allegedly suffered, cheat artists, manipulate the public with things like Payola, and seriously think they have the moral high ground and the justification to do all this and almost any other reprehensible act to preserve their very dead business model. They should have been ashamed that Sony tried to rootkit PCs, instead they defended it! They pay lawyers to go after the very most vulnerable and helpless citizens. If they had no power, we could just ignore them. But they're old and established, and still have enough power to hurt a lot of people. The revolution is ongoing, and they're throwing themselves against the wall. They're acting like Capt Bligh-- "it's mutiny I tell you, mutiny", only they say piracy in place of mutiny. Don't point the finger at us for rebelling, point the finger at them for causing the whole thing, for calling us all thieves and rebels whether or not we really are.
I'd switch to AMD permanently and buy a new AMD video card tomorrow if I was sure they're serious. I want decent 3D acceleration in the open source drivers for Linux. Neither Nvidia nor ATI ever delivered on this. The proprietary Catalyst driver is something like 5x the speed of the open source driver. Nvidia is even worse. That's totally unacceptable. Some years ago, ATI announced they were opening up, and I got ready to dump Nvidia. And then... it didn't happen.
Intel? What a joke! Their video performance is so horrid that they can't beat AMD on the dog slow open source driver no matter what driver they use. Until Intel improves dramatically, they're out of the picture.
So I'm not celebrating yet. Sounds like this may well be another empty gesture.
That was my argument. A GPS is a receiver, it would interfere with itself if it caused interference. I suppose it's possible it could generate interference at frequencies not used for GPS. Any device, even a light switch, can spew out radiation. Mechanical devices can be the worst offenders. All it takes is a loose connection or an unshielded trace. Early computers were not designed with that in mind. The Apple II was pretty bad about spewing out interference, and could junk up analog TV reception with a band of snow even 20 meters away. One of the worst cases I saw was a hard drive from the late 90's. When it was closer than 2 meters to an AM radio, the radio faithfully reproduced every click of the hard drive, drowning out the radio station.
Several times I have used a GPS device on flights and thought nothing of it. Pilots routinely use garden variety GPS in the cockpit. No specially shielded versions there, just plain old consumer grade GPS devices. Have to hold it up to the window to get a good signal, which is easy in the cockpit but makes it a bit conspicuous in the passenger compartment. On one flight, they told me to turn it off, citing interference, even though we were at cruising altitude and people all around were using laptops. I wonder if that was really paranoia about allowing passengers to know exactly what route the plane took, as if we can't get a good idea simply by looking out the window-- interstates are easy to pick out. Or maybe the stewardess thought that because it had an antenna and is about the size of a cell phone it could be a cell phone. Or she was feeling grumpy that day, who knows? When in doubt, petty authorities always say no. It was not an issue on any other flight.
Why? Because this is about digital downloads, not physical items that happened to be purchased online. The so-called goods really are different. They aren't material. They don't suffer from the scarcity of the physical. The state is conveniently making the same mistake the MAFIAA deliberately commits.
It does shine more light on the MAFIAA's quandary. This tax bolsters their arguments in favor of treating these products just like physical goods, so they should support it. But, they shouldn't support it because it eats into their profits. They will have to lower prices or see their business suffer.
Is the whole thing to be viewed as the purchase of a license, a right to access some bits? In those licenses, they try to claim non-transferability. The MAFIAA tries to have it both ways: it's a material good when that interpretation makes them more money, and it's a non-transferable license when that's the more favorable interpretation. And, seems the state wants in on that racket. I think neither way is correct.
A better way to view a transaction in which money is exchanged for bits is as a charitable contribution. The buyer cannot be forced to pay for something that isn't scarce, and bits are definitely not scarce. Therefore the buyer is not really a buyer, but a donor. People obtain copies of bits, perhaps through a "store", or perhaps through piracy. (And note, copying is not theft.) They donate money to the authors only if they wish to. What the store does is make it convenient to donate, easy for the donors to salve their consciences, very like the old Catholic practice of indulgences. (And the store makes it easy for 3rd parties to skim most of the take.) The only thing that keeps copyright somewhat functional is dogma, the assumption that the copyright system is the only way to compensate artists and that without copyright, they'd all starve. The whole system operates very much like a tired, old religion that cannot compel people to believe and participate, though they try with DRM, and the force of law, and by demonizing copying. They scream that copying is piracy, stealing, a threat to capitalism, evil, and a mortal sin. So a tax on such a transaction is a tax upon a donation, and an interference with our freedom of religion.
This was my first thought. And it's only that good if you win. If you don't win, you get nothing. How many entries might you be competing against? 100? 1000? More? Might as well play the lottery.
Maybe Atari is also looking for more people and is using this as a way to find those who are interested and talented? Odds of that aren't good either. If they are searching for people, they can't hire but a handful even if they wanted to hire more.
You think the content cartels have finally won, eh? You really think so?
Well, fear not. They haven't. It's an unwinnable war. They're stubborn old men who are incapable of understanding that piracy is unstoppable, and that sharing is good. Tell me how you think they can stop sneakernet? Several movies can be traded in an instant with the hand off of a flash drive. Or encryption, how will they stop that? The most tragic part of all this is that they've wasted millions on this "problem", on trying to turn back the clock. To use a car analogy, it's as if solar cells and batteries became so good that the public abandoned gasoline, thereby saving the planet from global warming, and the oil companies declared it was a problem and tried to reverse it.
Very hard to keep Disney junk away from her. Some friend or relative is sure to give it to her for a present. I set my nieces up with a PC with Linux. The Shockwave only children's websites strained things but it survived that. However, the first Disney PC game gift was too much, and sent them running back to MS's embrace. Wine had no hope of salvaging matters, the PC was of course an old castoff and needed native performance to make the game playable.
Microsoft should have paid for that audit. How many man hours did the high school spend on it? Why should we, the taxpayers, pay for this? Those workers are our workers, not MS's workers, and we expect their time to be devoted to the work we hired them for. What's next, are we to frisk all the students to make sure they didn't steal any gum from the neighboring convenience store? Maybe anytime so much as a dry erase marker goes missing, we should lock all the students in the building until the thieving criminal scum who stole it fesses up, returns it, and apologizes to the entire school?
I find it very weird you seem to think this audit was okay. You're even grateful at how nice and sweet it was of MS not to penalize you. Wow, just wow. Would you be okay with your employees popping over to a temp agency to do a little extra work on the side while they are on the clock with you? If a former employee turns you in for some petty violation, are you going to admit you screwed up, and "take your medicine" with a smile because you deserved to be punished? Especially if it's not clear you did anything wrong?
MS is hated for good reason: much patent trolling with Android being among the most recent victims, OOXML and file format lock in, Windows Genuine Advantage and Vista's DRM, and the Microsoft Tax to name just a few. And of course the BSA. Their entire attitude is about maintaining a monopoly and controlling and milking their users, not serving them. I really think the only thing keeping MS's empire alive these days is DirectX and PC gaming, and inertia and continuing prejudice against products that are not backed by traditional large corporations. MS has merely displaced IBM among conservative computer users.
Or are you going to try to claim there isn't good reason to hate MS?
You're too picky. What's wrong with indulging in... a little training? (gasp!) You're willing to pony up a 6 figure salary, but not do any training at all?
You talk as if developing for a MCU takes years of training and experience. It doesn't. Plenty of smart people could pick it up quickly. Of course you disagree. I could do it, and do it well, but you wouldn't even think of hiring a guy like me. I've only heard of 1-wire because I've seen a driver for that in the Linux kernel. Well, that's your problem. If MCUs really are that hard, then I'd say it's not inherently hard, it's a problem with poor documentation, bad environments, and bad designs.
There's a lot of dishonesty in the job market. Qualified job seekers are rejected all the time.
When an employer asks for 10 years of experience in 20 different languages, systems, applications, and platforms, that could say they don't want to hire anyone. They actually want to hire a cheap foreigner, or the boss's nephew, and are just going through the motions to satisfy the letter of EEOA requirements. They've already found their man, and just copied his resume to the job posting. If the position goes unfilled, then they can complain that there aren't enough qualified applicants no matter the real reason it wasn't filled. In a bigger company, there could be internal politicking going on, with one department using the hordes of hapless job applicants to send a message to other departments. It could also say they have to ask for that much so they aren't buried under resumes. Which of course happens because contrary to what they claim, there is in fact no shortage of qualified job seekers.
To add to the fun, there are the head hunters throwing out bait, to harvest resumes.
And job seekers are pressured to spin and exaggerate to the max without quite lying (wink, wink). Quite common for a good programmer to pick up a programming language quick, then apply for a job that asks for 10 years experience in it, and if hired, pull it off because as we all know, programming ability is not language specific.
Another factor that shows there is no shortage of qualified people is that employers can demand that new hires "hit the ground running". In other words, applicants are expected to bone up on whatever specific technologies are wanted on their own time and dime, rather than spend a month training. Employers don't train people anymore. They've externalized that cost, and gotten away with it, demanding that schools and applicants do that. They complain bitterly that schools don't educate people right, which too often means they were educated instead of trained for a specific position. And they're quick to moan about the waste in spending money to train someone who is just going to leave them. Whether or not it's fair or appropriate, the job applicant is expected to come in already knowing many of the arcane specifics of whatever oddball setup they use.
Slashdot Mirror
Curious how you link patents with profit and research funding. You sound so sure of that.
The patent system is based on possessiveness, denial, and fear of loss. The default answer is always "no". We're so afraid someone will miss out on payment for a use of "their" invention that we'd rather strangle innovation than "cheat" any of these mythical starving inventors of their rewards. In our haste to protect the poor inventors, we trample upon all kinds of other legitimate concerns. We award patents far too freely on stuff that is much too obvious and broad, and we're not honest about why we do that. That's not for the inventor's sake, that's so the patent office can collect more fees, and patent lawyers can drum up more business. Now the inventor does not benefit from this, it's the legions of sophisticated lawyers who have learned to work the system.
What is a nice technologist to do? Don't just do it, make sure someone else didn't think of anything remotely related. You will miss some stuff. Get permission, if you can. Lots and lots of permissions. They don't have to give you permission. If just one denies you, then what? Now if you go ahead, you're on the hook for triple damages for knowingly violating a patent instead of unknowingly violating a patent. No one can operate this way. No one does. It's far too burdensome. Many refuse to even look at patents, to avoid the triple damages problem. The patent system works against the very thing it tries to promote! Everyone goes ahead and just does it, hoping not to be sued.
I've run into a little of this too. In one undergrad class, I did the assignments a little too well. I don't think there were any grounds for the professor to feel embarrassed, but seems he did. He took a dislike to me, and tried to find excuses to flunk me. I should have received an A, but I got a C and that only because I threatened to appeal the grade if it wasn't passing. The entire department was rotten thanks to the irresponsible way the school assembled it. When I attended, it was a new discipline, and the school was in a rush to dredge up some professors. They raided related departments, and those departments used it as an opportunity to jettison their worst. Instead of the usual 1 or 2 bad teachers, it was the other way around. 1 or 2 good teachers, and the rest were terrible. To make matters even worse, they were bitter over being rejected by their chosen discipline, clinging lovingly to it despite the rejection, and regarding their new discipline with contempt, and the students who chose it as idiots. The failure rate got so bad (5% graduation rate!) the dean finally told them that if they didn't shape up, he'd kill the whole department.
I didn't have difficulties of that sort in grad school. Found out who the plagiarizing, credit stealing backstabbers were and avoided them. And that was fairly easy to do because it was a normal department and there were only a few.
You have explained some of why your advisor behaved the way he did. Sadly, he has lots of company. What about the larger environment? What is it about the way we run schools that drive people to such desperation? Too competitive perhaps? Science is so highly regarded that some people will stoop to anything to obtain recognition. Or, not selective enough? Maybe the tenure system is a big part of the problem? I have this uncomfortable feeling that too often we hand out PhDs to cheaters, who go on to be the monsters who give academia and science a bad name as they continue the dishonesty that they used to obtain the degree. They won't settle for a lesser role, so they have no choice but to continue to cheat, because they aren't capable of honest science. One PhD I was stuck working with for a year was so bad he never even tried honest work. Never should have been given a PhD, as he himself admitted in one of his rare honest moments. He felt that what was wanted was impossibly hard. He pushed everyone very hard to come up with stuff he could use to snow the customer, and of course blamed everyone else when that didn't work. Even worse, despite the desperate need, if anyone looked like they were on to something good, he'd sabotage them out of fear it might show him up and cost him his job. In the end, we all lost.
To the young researcher: if you haven't yet faced an ethical dilemma, you will. What do you do when the choice is your ethics or your job? And all future chance at similar jobs? Everyone likes to think they will make the right choice, but until you've been there you won't see how hard that can be. You've got managers putting all the pressure they can on you to "just approve it" even though it's rubbish, hinting that not doing so is not showing team spirit. Which is of course actually a threat to fire you if you don't play ball. If you play along, then odds are your reputation will be ruined, and they'll dump you when they can't use your good name anymore, as it's spent. They will of course blame you for that. And it will stick. Haven't you got a PhD? Shouldn't you have known better, doc? Don't ever put yourself in a position where you can't afford to lose the job. Don't let anyone push you into such a position either. Keep some money saved up, and put off that new car purchase. Else the pressure to cheat or at least condone cheating will be intense.
Same reason why Bank of America still exists. They bought the politicians. They've suckered much of the press. And we, the public, haven't exercised our power to stop this corruption, this parasitic drain upon our economy. Many of us are woefully distracted, too busy trying to stay afloat to pay attention even to important matters, even those things that are making it so hard to stay afloat. Criminals love distraction. Some people even go so far as to agree with our oppressors' propaganda. If the politicians were more than being buried in angry letters, if they were facing recall elections, if some got the boot, the MAFIAA would be busted so fast your head would spin. We ought to see a bunch of CEOs being fired, with some dragged off to prison. And these Too Big To Fail companies ought to be failed, broken up, liquidated, and the proceeds given back to the taxpayers who bailed out their undeserving, ungrateful, lying, cheating asses. Why hasn't any of this happened!?
We could also make the MAFIAA behave or die if we'd simply quit doing business with them. Why does anyone still bank at Bank of America? And buy music from the labels and see movies? If we can't even bring ourselves to shut down the likes of Bank of America, I see little hope that the MAFIAA can be brought to heel.
How many of us have seen an OWS protest in person? Actually participated in one? Anyone? Anyone?
When? Toba supervolcano eruption about 73000 years ago.
Rest of the declines, and there've been plenty, are local. Some of them were entirely due to natural disaster, some were started by a natural disaster that weakened a civilization so it could not withstand its enemies as is thought to have happened with the Minoans, and some were long drawn out declines, some of natural causes such as the extended drought that lead to the Mayan collapse, and some from human practices and customs that turned out to be bad ideas, such as soil tilling practices that caused very fast erosion. Takes a few centuries for farmland to recover after the civilization that wrecked it has collapsed.
These local collapses didn't affect people far away. But now, the scale of our civilization is global. If we screw up, we could cause a global collapse which could kill us all off. There are uncomfortably many ways that could happen. The geologic record has many extinctions caused by outside factors, but also plenty of examples of life doing itself in: the Oxygen Catastrophe, PETM, and possible mass suffocations from H2S.
Fukushima was not a technical failure. It was a human failure. They didn't build the tsunami wall high enough. Why didn't they build it high enough? To save money. They knew tsunamis could be higher, but they deliberately minimized and ignored the evidence. When they couldn't simply be silent, they turned to propaganda to assure everyone they'd done their homework and found everything was safe. And now we know the hard way that they lied. This was penny-wise pound-foolish in spades.
Risk analysis doesn't help much if the decision makers are too stupid to make sound decisions based on facts. They foolishly decided to bury the results and tell lies. And that's no one time thing, that's scarily routine. After the accident, safety will be taken more seriously-- for a while.
You have to factor in the risk of human stupidity and recklessness in your analysis. With that factored in, my feeling is that nuclear power is too dangerous. What's the chance of another major nuclear disaster in the next 30 years? It should be near 0%. But because people are still reckless, I'm guessing the chance of 1 bad nuclear disaster in that time frame is pretty high, better than 50%. Even now, they're skimping on maintenance of aging reactors that were meant to be decommissioned years ago.
When the old gas powered water tank sprang a leak after 27 years of service, I looked into switching to tankless, and decided it wasn't worth it. A cheap new tank heater was $350, warrantied for 6 years, and was so improved it was twice as efficient as the old one. In contrast, the cheapest tankless heater was about $800. Then it would be another $400 to convert the gas pipe, flue pipe, and water pipes, add electrical wiring so there was some place to plug it in, and contrive some kind of support for it as it was not freestanding. Checking the expected energy usage, I saw that the chance of making back the difference in the upfront cost was practically zero. The tankless water heater would have to last at least 30 years.
To top it all off, tankless is a really poor 2nd to solar water heating. I looked into that too, and found it's completely impractical at the present time. No local business has a solar water heater. Prices at the closest places started at about $5000. Ridiculous. So I hope the new tank buys us enough time for solar to come way down in price.
Perfect example of the style of bad arguing used by the deniers, who, sadly, are for the most part also conservatives. You just start ranting away about the consequences of something you think and fear is so obviously true that you don't have to bother stating let alone proving it. Your problem is, the assumption isn't true. So your whole rant is founded on nothing, and is just a bunch of hot air.
In this case, the assumption seems to be that anthropogenic global warming is false. You evidently find it more likely that the entire consensus about global warming is wrong, or is a big lie and plot to get more funding. You think that thousands of independent scientists running thousands of independent tests and checks have all gotten this wrong, and wrong in the same way? You think that every single scientist is too incompetent or biased to collect good, honest data and to come to some honest conclusions based on that data? And that there is no competition between scientists that would very quickly expose problems? That the entire community of very diverse individuals would or even could collude? And that organizations with an interest in the status quo, such as Big Oil, haven't tried to discredit the idea and even science itself for patently obvious reasons? Do you really believe any of that?
Big business tells whoppers like no one else does. Everyone thinks of politicians as the incurable, pathologic liars, but big business makes them look like pikers. Big business is so much more professional about lying, employing entire departments known as "marketing" to handle routine, accepted lying, and funding nominally independent think tanks and setting up fake research groups to engage in less accepted forms of lying. One of Big Tobacco's few honest moments was when they said "doubt is our product", admitting that their object is NOT to do good science, but just the opposite. They purposely hinder discovery and confuse the public. Exxon is notorious for applying the same dishonest techniques to arguments over global warming. The Creationists saw what they thought was a good thing, and adopted similar techniques to argue that evolution is controversial and in doubt when it is not, and to try to present their own wishful thinking as solid science when it too obviously is not. Funny how you give "doubt is our product" a pass when you are so quick to take and interpret every least little thing as more signs that scientists are just a pack of whining, conniving, greedy, politically motivated hacks.
And in 2002, when I was contracting for the government, I needed some data that was stored on a government server. They set up a user account for me and rather than email the password to me, called to tell it to me over the phone, because they felt that was more secure than email.
The joke was that I was to connect via telnet. They didn't have ssh on that server. They didn't even have some kind of secure telnet that would at least try to encrypt the password. Just plain old telnet, with the password transmitted in the clear.
Doesn't anyone else use a non symmetric two handed hold? I often use 2 and 9 or even 1 and 9. Lets me rest the left arm on the window sill.
Political correctness is just another mental shortcut.
The whole idea of sorting people into "good" and "bad" misses all the nuance.
What is undeniable is how terrible we are at tapping people for management. Everyone ought to have a shot at managing for long enough to understand what a high pressure PITA job it really can be. Many of us do understand, and avoid it! When they're actually trying to be objective about it, instead of handing these "plum" jobs to friends and relatives, the criteria used to pick out people with "management potential" (as if leadership is innate-- amazing how much we still labor under medieval thinking), are completely wrong. Technical proficiency is seriously underrated in favor of loudmouthed, aggressive pushiness. The latter is mistakenly seen as being proactive, and a go-getter. They want people with drive and ambition, and they look the other way very hard whenever the whippings start. Because you see, peons are naturally lazy slackers and must be constantly threatened with termination to get the most work out of them. What they should want are leaders, but what they get are mostly pushers because they can't tell the difference. I've been wondering for some time now what they are teaching in management classes that we get this so wrong.
Does Nouveau really have 3D acceleration now? Last time I tried Nouveau was a few years ago, and it didn't have good 3D acceleration then. Was fine otherwise. But Google Earth was so horribly slow I had to switch back to the proprietary driver.
Then it's an issue of semantics. I am also a scientist. I try to be careful with words, and because of its connection with religious faith, I try to avoid using that word "believe" in the context of scientific discovery. In a way, I'm glad the anti-intellectuals have forced us to be more careful with our language. We do get sloppy at times. We know common usage of "believe" can mean simply that someone thinks some evidence appears to support a particular idea. But it can also mean someone thinks some idea could be right despite the absence of any credible evidence whatsoever. Closely related is the messiness in the meanings of "law", "theory", and "hypothesis", and I feel we've been a little too sloppy about using "theory" when we really mean "hypothesis", and about going along with the common usage of "theory". That opened the door for the objection that evolution is "just a theory". Ideas such as how the moon formed are, currently, hypotheses, though they are often called theories. Can't expect everyone to just understand, shouldn't blow it off with "you know what I mean", should be more careful with language.
what about a complete, consistent (and non-trivial) system of logical reasoning?
See, this is the problem. No can do! Perhaps you've heard of Godel's incompleteness theorems? I think you have, the way you worded that demand. You expect the wrong thing and too much. You demand completeness and consistency, and upon hearing that can't be done, you rush to the incorrect conclusion that scientists therefore are taking things on faith.
No, you could not possibly prove that you're not imagining it all.
That's right, but so what? This is why science is restricted to natural phenomena. There is of course no way to prove that $DIETY or anything else supernatural does or does not exist, and is or is not messing with us and our perceptions. We could be living in a giant simulator. The universe could have been created anytime, be that 5000 years ago or 5 minutes ago, and it only seems to be about 14 billion years old. Or perhaps the universe never was created, it has always existed. Or maybe it's something even stranger and paradoxical, maybe it somehow created itself, traveling back in time to do that, sort of a wheel of time.
But for some reason, you are trying to argue that believing in our perceptions, in what we see and observe, is a matter of faith. It is not. The minute you start down the path of being unsure that what we all see is objective reality, you've shoved yourself right back into the horror of chaos. You can't ever know what's right, can't prove anything, can't agree on anything. Your whole world is on a foundation of quicksand, and you're hating life. You're tempted to throw up your hands, and turn over all responsibility for thinking to some guru. Some of those gurus like it that way, as this allows them to make up anything they like, anything whatever, and no one can argue against them because no one can "prove" anything. They've made the standards for proof too high. And so we occasionally have tragedies like Heaven's Gate.
Or you glom onto some pseudoscience such as Creationism. You very badly want to believe it, and now you can because you've denied the foundations of philosophy and rational thought. And why do you want so badly to believe it? Because, contradictorily enough, faith isn't good enough for you, you want proof! You want to see fiery letters burning themselves into stone tablets of their own accord, you want an even more profound miracle than the fact we exist. If Genesis is not literally correct, then suddenly you're doubting your whole religion! You're being too literal, too narrow, too unwilling to consider that reality is not black and white, that there are many other plausible explanations. God can coexist just fine with evolution, and the Bible can still be the word of God, despite Genesis not being literally correct. But instead, to get absolute "proof", you turn to the trappings of science despite having rejected science itself. Sad. Really sad to see these Intelligent Design fanatics banging out "theories" in support of their conclusions, going at science totally backwards and at the same time abandoning faith. They've already settled on their model, and busy themselves trying to force the facts to fit their model. And somehow they've convinced themselves that that's science. And it doesn't work, making them very unhappy and defensive. They would prefer to believe that the rest of humanity is engaged in a giant conspiracy to keep them down and silence them, which is no real surprise considering the huge difficulty they've demonstrated in accepting basic facts.
Be more careful with that word "believe". Science is most emphatically not about belief. Science is not a religion and takes nothing on faith. Science also does not claim to have all the answers. All of science is based on observable evidence, repeatable experiments, and logical deduction and modeling. I cringe a little every time I see that phrase "scientists believe" in reference to a hypothesis we think is likely true, or a theory, or some other bit of scientific thinking or uncertainty.
People like free shit
Your cynical view of humanity is not accurate. There is such a thing as altruism. Charities somehow manage to persuade people to donate. There are actually many people who do NOT like free shit, because we don't believe it really is free, we're suspicious there's some catch.
You also attribute piracy to the desire to "stick it to the man". Yes, but that's not the whole story either. I am offended that these psychopathic dinosaurs insist on wasting all kinds of resources and then insist on PASSING THE COST OF THAT WASTE ONTO THE CUSTOMERS. We should pay all this extra money to cover the costs of producing millions of plastic disks and delivering them to thousands of bricks and mortar retail locations, just so those miserable bastards can feel more comfortable that all this extra and needless friction makes piracy more difficult? When we can have the same music delivered via the Internet for a fraction of the cost and time? Why should anyone choose to pay for someone else's gross stupidity? Because if we refuse to do it their way, they try to force and browbeat us into it, that's why. They trash us all as evil pirates, threaten to sue us all, keep cooking up extremely offensively stupid legislation and laughably pathetic DRM schemes, lie through their teeth about the amount of piracy and damages allegedly suffered, cheat artists, manipulate the public with things like Payola, and seriously think they have the moral high ground and the justification to do all this and almost any other reprehensible act to preserve their very dead business model. They should have been ashamed that Sony tried to rootkit PCs, instead they defended it! They pay lawyers to go after the very most vulnerable and helpless citizens. If they had no power, we could just ignore them. But they're old and established, and still have enough power to hurt a lot of people. The revolution is ongoing, and they're throwing themselves against the wall. They're acting like Capt Bligh-- "it's mutiny I tell you, mutiny", only they say piracy in place of mutiny. Don't point the finger at us for rebelling, point the finger at them for causing the whole thing, for calling us all thieves and rebels whether or not we really are.
I'd switch to AMD permanently and buy a new AMD video card tomorrow if I was sure they're serious. I want decent 3D acceleration in the open source drivers for Linux. Neither Nvidia nor ATI ever delivered on this. The proprietary Catalyst driver is something like 5x the speed of the open source driver. Nvidia is even worse. That's totally unacceptable. Some years ago, ATI announced they were opening up, and I got ready to dump Nvidia. And then... it didn't happen.
Intel? What a joke! Their video performance is so horrid that they can't beat AMD on the dog slow open source driver no matter what driver they use. Until Intel improves dramatically, they're out of the picture.
So I'm not celebrating yet. Sounds like this may well be another empty gesture.
That was my argument. A GPS is a receiver, it would interfere with itself if it caused interference. I suppose it's possible it could generate interference at frequencies not used for GPS. Any device, even a light switch, can spew out radiation. Mechanical devices can be the worst offenders. All it takes is a loose connection or an unshielded trace. Early computers were not designed with that in mind. The Apple II was pretty bad about spewing out interference, and could junk up analog TV reception with a band of snow even 20 meters away. One of the worst cases I saw was a hard drive from the late 90's. When it was closer than 2 meters to an AM radio, the radio faithfully reproduced every click of the hard drive, drowning out the radio station.
Several times I have used a GPS device on flights and thought nothing of it. Pilots routinely use garden variety GPS in the cockpit. No specially shielded versions there, just plain old consumer grade GPS devices. Have to hold it up to the window to get a good signal, which is easy in the cockpit but makes it a bit conspicuous in the passenger compartment. On one flight, they told me to turn it off, citing interference, even though we were at cruising altitude and people all around were using laptops. I wonder if that was really paranoia about allowing passengers to know exactly what route the plane took, as if we can't get a good idea simply by looking out the window-- interstates are easy to pick out. Or maybe the stewardess thought that because it had an antenna and is about the size of a cell phone it could be a cell phone. Or she was feeling grumpy that day, who knows? When in doubt, petty authorities always say no. It was not an issue on any other flight.
Why? Because this is about digital downloads, not physical items that happened to be purchased online. The so-called goods really are different. They aren't material. They don't suffer from the scarcity of the physical. The state is conveniently making the same mistake the MAFIAA deliberately commits.
It does shine more light on the MAFIAA's quandary. This tax bolsters their arguments in favor of treating these products just like physical goods, so they should support it. But, they shouldn't support it because it eats into their profits. They will have to lower prices or see their business suffer.
Is the whole thing to be viewed as the purchase of a license, a right to access some bits? In those licenses, they try to claim non-transferability. The MAFIAA tries to have it both ways: it's a material good when that interpretation makes them more money, and it's a non-transferable license when that's the more favorable interpretation. And, seems the state wants in on that racket. I think neither way is correct.
A better way to view a transaction in which money is exchanged for bits is as a charitable contribution. The buyer cannot be forced to pay for something that isn't scarce, and bits are definitely not scarce. Therefore the buyer is not really a buyer, but a donor. People obtain copies of bits, perhaps through a "store", or perhaps through piracy. (And note, copying is not theft.) They donate money to the authors only if they wish to. What the store does is make it convenient to donate, easy for the donors to salve their consciences, very like the old Catholic practice of indulgences. (And the store makes it easy for 3rd parties to skim most of the take.) The only thing that keeps copyright somewhat functional is dogma, the assumption that the copyright system is the only way to compensate artists and that without copyright, they'd all starve. The whole system operates very much like a tired, old religion that cannot compel people to believe and participate, though they try with DRM, and the force of law, and by demonizing copying. They scream that copying is piracy, stealing, a threat to capitalism, evil, and a mortal sin. So a tax on such a transaction is a tax upon a donation, and an interference with our freedom of religion.
This was my first thought. And it's only that good if you win. If you don't win, you get nothing. How many entries might you be competing against? 100? 1000? More? Might as well play the lottery.
Maybe Atari is also looking for more people and is using this as a way to find those who are interested and talented? Odds of that aren't good either. If they are searching for people, they can't hire but a handful even if they wanted to hire more.
Contests leave me feeling cold.
You think the content cartels have finally won, eh? You really think so?
Well, fear not. They haven't. It's an unwinnable war. They're stubborn old men who are incapable of understanding that piracy is unstoppable, and that sharing is good. Tell me how you think they can stop sneakernet? Several movies can be traded in an instant with the hand off of a flash drive. Or encryption, how will they stop that? The most tragic part of all this is that they've wasted millions on this "problem", on trying to turn back the clock. To use a car analogy, it's as if solar cells and batteries became so good that the public abandoned gasoline, thereby saving the planet from global warming, and the oil companies declared it was a problem and tried to reverse it.
Very hard to keep Disney junk away from her. Some friend or relative is sure to give it to her for a present. I set my nieces up with a PC with Linux. The Shockwave only children's websites strained things but it survived that. However, the first Disney PC game gift was too much, and sent them running back to MS's embrace. Wine had no hope of salvaging matters, the PC was of course an old castoff and needed native performance to make the game playable.
Microsoft should have paid for that audit. How many man hours did the high school spend on it? Why should we, the taxpayers, pay for this? Those workers are our workers, not MS's workers, and we expect their time to be devoted to the work we hired them for. What's next, are we to frisk all the students to make sure they didn't steal any gum from the neighboring convenience store? Maybe anytime so much as a dry erase marker goes missing, we should lock all the students in the building until the thieving criminal scum who stole it fesses up, returns it, and apologizes to the entire school?
I find it very weird you seem to think this audit was okay. You're even grateful at how nice and sweet it was of MS not to penalize you. Wow, just wow. Would you be okay with your employees popping over to a temp agency to do a little extra work on the side while they are on the clock with you? If a former employee turns you in for some petty violation, are you going to admit you screwed up, and "take your medicine" with a smile because you deserved to be punished? Especially if it's not clear you did anything wrong?
MS is hated for good reason: much patent trolling with Android being among the most recent victims, OOXML and file format lock in, Windows Genuine Advantage and Vista's DRM, and the Microsoft Tax to name just a few. And of course the BSA. Their entire attitude is about maintaining a monopoly and controlling and milking their users, not serving them. I really think the only thing keeping MS's empire alive these days is DirectX and PC gaming, and inertia and continuing prejudice against products that are not backed by traditional large corporations. MS has merely displaced IBM among conservative computer users.
Or are you going to try to claim there isn't good reason to hate MS?
You're too picky. What's wrong with indulging in ... a little training? (gasp!) You're willing to pony up a 6 figure salary, but not do any training at all?
You talk as if developing for a MCU takes years of training and experience. It doesn't. Plenty of smart people could pick it up quickly. Of course you disagree. I could do it, and do it well, but you wouldn't even think of hiring a guy like me. I've only heard of 1-wire because I've seen a driver for that in the Linux kernel. Well, that's your problem. If MCUs really are that hard, then I'd say it's not inherently hard, it's a problem with poor documentation, bad environments, and bad designs.
There's a lot of dishonesty in the job market. Qualified job seekers are rejected all the time.
When an employer asks for 10 years of experience in 20 different languages, systems, applications, and platforms, that could say they don't want to hire anyone. They actually want to hire a cheap foreigner, or the boss's nephew, and are just going through the motions to satisfy the letter of EEOA requirements. They've already found their man, and just copied his resume to the job posting. If the position goes unfilled, then they can complain that there aren't enough qualified applicants no matter the real reason it wasn't filled. In a bigger company, there could be internal politicking going on, with one department using the hordes of hapless job applicants to send a message to other departments. It could also say they have to ask for that much so they aren't buried under resumes. Which of course happens because contrary to what they claim, there is in fact no shortage of qualified job seekers.
To add to the fun, there are the head hunters throwing out bait, to harvest resumes.
And job seekers are pressured to spin and exaggerate to the max without quite lying (wink, wink). Quite common for a good programmer to pick up a programming language quick, then apply for a job that asks for 10 years experience in it, and if hired, pull it off because as we all know, programming ability is not language specific.
Another factor that shows there is no shortage of qualified people is that employers can demand that new hires "hit the ground running". In other words, applicants are expected to bone up on whatever specific technologies are wanted on their own time and dime, rather than spend a month training. Employers don't train people anymore. They've externalized that cost, and gotten away with it, demanding that schools and applicants do that. They complain bitterly that schools don't educate people right, which too often means they were educated instead of trained for a specific position. And they're quick to moan about the waste in spending money to train someone who is just going to leave them. Whether or not it's fair or appropriate, the job applicant is expected to come in already knowing many of the arcane specifics of whatever oddball setup they use.