Nonsense. When you buy a book, you own the physical materials--the paper, the ink, the glue--but you don't own the words printed in it.
Likewise, everything on your hard drive isn't "yours," either. You own the disk, you own the platters, you own the magnets--but you don't own the data the bits represent.
This is the way it will remain, short of getting all copyright laws abolished.
The article you linked is highly speculative and written by someone with a vested interest in criticizing Jabari's assassination. Jabari's death basically cuts Baskin out of the loop, so I'm not convinced Baskin is free of any conflict of interest here. Baskin has no idea how Jabari would have responded to the draft of his deal, but it certainly serves a political purpose to imply Israel deliberately murdered the one man who could negotiate and enforce a cease-fire.
Or, you know, it was simply an attack on a military target (given that he was second-in-command of Hamas' military wing), as well as retribution for the kidnapping and detention of Gilad Shalit.
It strikes me as much more likely that the Israeli government simply didn't care whether Jabari was interested in a cease-fire. Once this conflict flared up, his fate was sealed.
I was going to say something similar. You're right. The advantage of a contractor is that they've made the investments in supplies, infrastructure, training, etc., so on a per-job basis, they can do it cheaper than you, since you would have to take on all those up-front, one-time costs in order to do it yourself.
Obviously, there are those who cut corners and use substandard tools, supplies, and labor, but then a contractor worth their salt can give you an itemized list of what you are paying for.
You do realize that outfits like UPS and FedEx actually use the USPS for last-mile delivery in a lot of places? It's them outsourcing to the USPS, not the other way around.
In other words, killing the USPS would actually jack up parcel delivery rates, too, because UPS and FedEx would have to foot the full costs of those, rather than pay the (relatively low) fees the USPS charges.
Well said. And I noticed there are quite a few people here saying that the employees shouldn't get pensions at all. It's as if they don't understand that a pension is deferred compensation--it's money you earned while working but your employer promised to pay it to you later. It's not a "freebie" that workers unfairly feel entitled to. It is part of their compensation package.
If an organization defaults on their pension obligations, they've essentially reneged on earnings the employees are fully entitled to.
Now, the requirement the new hires at USPS have their pensions 100% funded from day one may be (and probably is) excessive and unnecessary. But any organization that offers deferred compensation pensions absolutely needs to make sure they are funded so that the money is there to be paid out when employees retire.
Nope, CAPTCHA was an utter failure. I even had the strongest one activated, and they still got through. reCAPTCHA was also no good.
I hear that, the way some spam companies do this now is, they pass the CAPTCHA image along to an actual human--someone in India or China or something, working for a tiny amount of money, and they type it in. They get paid for how many they can do in an hour.
I use phpBB, and it comes with the option to add questions at registration time to prevent spammers from signing up. The answers must be typed in, so automated systems can't deal with it unless you are using really simple questions that it can google. For instance, if I had "2+2=" as one of the questions, some bots can figure this out. Instead, I use plain text questions that require human thought:
Is the sun bigger than the Earth? What does the Earth orbit? What is the name of our galaxy? Is the Moon bigger than the Earth? etc.
Any English-speaking human should know these, but bots can't figure them out, and my board is very small. Without any countermeasures, though, it gets positively jammed up with spam, so I have to trim that stuff down automatically as much as I can.
It doesn't seem like most of the replies actually address the submitter's question. Here are the things I look for:
* Does the company use any kind of source control management system? If they say "no" or don't know what that is, RUN AWAY. * What development methodology do they use? Agile, waterfall, RUP, something else? If they don't know, RUN AWAY. * How is requirement specification done? If they can't explain this in even a little detail, RUN AWAY. * How is release management done? Are there automated builds? Is there a defined process for deployment, upgrades, patches, etc.? If not, this is a red flag, at the least. * Are developers required to write unit tests? If not, this is another red flag. * What is the defect rate per 100 or 1000 hours of development time? Do they have any available metrics on whether their software quality is improving or not? If they aren't even tracking this, again, that is a red flag.
If their development department is disorganized, you will be able to tell from the above questions. If that is the case, odds are there is little or no discipline in terms of actual coding, as well. A common answer to some of the questions above is, "we'd like to do those things, but we just don't have time." Again, this means they do not understand the total cost of quality. You must invest in good quality practices up front or you will never get out of the "firefighting" mode. If you go into a company that's lacking the things described above, you can expect chaos, little attention to good development practices, poor software quality, unpredictable release schedules, and probably long hours to make up for all of it.
It's not that these problems can't be fixed--I've made a career out of doing that--but if you, as a developer, just want to work on interesting products and get them out the door, then shaping up a dysfunctional development organization is probably not what you are signing up for.
I despised Bush. Obama is smarter but carries on most of the same policies, especially when it comes to foreign policy and economic intervention. About the only place where he really differs is on social issues and the role of government aid programs.
All this has done is make his opposition even more insane. So, now I get to choose between a guy who is mostly like Bush and a guy who seems to have no beliefs of his own, but is beholden to a base made up of lunatics. Awesome choice there.
I voted for Obama, again, because I could not in good conscience vote to further empower the deranged hysterics of the Republican Party.
I get tasked with reviewing resumes, too. Sometimes I'm completely baffled as to what someone was thinking when they wrote it. I've never seen one that was obviously lifted from an online template, though. Most people are simply not trained on how to write a good resume, and they don't want to take the time to learn--they want someone else to have done the work for them.
As for cheating, it does seem like cheating is on the rise among students. Part of it is that it's easier now than it ever was in the past. This provides a great temptation. On top of that, there's the laziness factor I mentioned above. I really don't know where this came from. I was born in 1981 and I've never felt the urge to cheat my way through academics. What good is a degree if you didn't actually learn anything to get it, and you just cheated the whole way through? What kind of ethical standard does such a person have? I sure as hell wouldn't want them making any important decisions in a business environment.
It's well-known that whether you make a system opt-in or opt-out, the vast majority will stick with whatever is the default, because they don't want to be bothered with such details.
Advertisers want an opt-in DNT because they know most people won't bother to turn it on. An opt-out DNT means most people will leave it on, because they probably won't even know about it to turn it off (assuming they'd want to.)
I've made that particular healthcare argument more times than I can count, and because it is so sensible in terms of its cause, effect, and goals, you can only get responses that take issue with the very idea of government involvement in healthcare:
* "It's wrong for my neighbor to reach into my pocket to pay for what he can't afford." This is the libertarian argument, which is impossible to argue with because it comes from a fundamentally different view of government's purpose. * "Let's get the government out of the healthcare business and let the free market sort it out." This is the conservative argument, which is naive at best and malevolent at worst. The "free market" is concerned with rent-seeking, not ensuring a healthy, productive workforce. Such policies have been proven over and over not to work, but conservatives keep pushing them because, I guess, enough people are gullible enough to buy them. * Insert random argument about how socialized healthcare makes people lazy, dependent, etc. etc. etc.
Those who oppose a single-payer/socialized system in the US never seem to have an explanation for why healthcare is so much more expensive here, in our "free market" system, than in more socialized (e.g. European) systems. When confronted with this, their solution, puzzlingly enough, is to embrace even more "free market" policies to "bring costs down." It makes absolutely no sense.
Every reform proposal I've seen thus far comes with a caveat that it won't affect anyone already receiving benefits, and usually not anyone over 55, so if you are close to retirement (or already retired), you don't have anything to worry about as far as your benefits being slashed.
That said, the system will not be solvent for future beneficiaries, so we have to do something about that.
If you want to drive for pleasure, do it on your own property or a private track.
Public roads are not there for you to get your jollies on--indeed, doing so makes you a menace to everyone else using the roads for their intended purpose.
If self-driving cars are found to be safer than human drivers (and I think they will be), then your insurance company might actually give you a discount. You would still pay for insurance like normal, but it would be based on how well your autocar performs during accidents.
If there is found to be a flaw in the car itself (such a bug that makes it speed up uncontrollably, plowing into pedestrians or something) then obviously that is a recall/lawsuit situation. Manufacturers would be just as liable for that as they are for any other demonstrable defects in their vehicles.
That brings up another thing autocars will be better about than humans. Individual humans can learn from their mistakes, but that knowledge is not directly transferable to other humans. Any mistake a self-driving car makes, however, can have its solution incorporated into all self-driving cars (or at least all the ones of that model.) So, lots and lots of testing should ultimately give us very safe and effective cars.
All excellent points. We already have computer-assisted driving. Automatic traction control and stability systems have computers hooked up to your car, monitoring the vehicle's characteristics at all times. They adjust in real-time to keep the vehicle on the road, going in the direction you have it pointed. They can do this a lot more effectively than a human ever could.
It's time people realized there are just things machines are better at than we are. It's not something that denigrates humans, it's just accepting reality.
Yeah. I think the most utility of self-driving cars will come from daily commutes and long trips that consist primarily of interstate/highway driving. I would certainly like that.
Quite true. An autocar can't get distracted. It also has much more sensory data available than a human does, and it can gauge and react to that data inordinately faster than a human could.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. When you buy a book, you own the physical materials--the paper, the ink, the glue--but you don't own the words printed in it.
Likewise, everything on your hard drive isn't "yours," either. You own the disk, you own the platters, you own the magnets--but you don't own the data the bits represent.
This is the way it will remain, short of getting all copyright laws abolished.
The article you linked is highly speculative and written by someone with a vested interest in criticizing Jabari's assassination. Jabari's death basically cuts Baskin out of the loop, so I'm not convinced Baskin is free of any conflict of interest here. Baskin has no idea how Jabari would have responded to the draft of his deal, but it certainly serves a political purpose to imply Israel deliberately murdered the one man who could negotiate and enforce a cease-fire.
Or, you know, it was simply an attack on a military target (given that he was second-in-command of Hamas' military wing), as well as retribution for the kidnapping and detention of Gilad Shalit.
It strikes me as much more likely that the Israeli government simply didn't care whether Jabari was interested in a cease-fire. Once this conflict flared up, his fate was sealed.
Penguins are well-known anti-Semites.
I was going to say something similar. You're right. The advantage of a contractor is that they've made the investments in supplies, infrastructure, training, etc., so on a per-job basis, they can do it cheaper than you, since you would have to take on all those up-front, one-time costs in order to do it yourself.
Obviously, there are those who cut corners and use substandard tools, supplies, and labor, but then a contractor worth their salt can give you an itemized list of what you are paying for.
You do realize that outfits like UPS and FedEx actually use the USPS for last-mile delivery in a lot of places? It's them outsourcing to the USPS, not the other way around.
In other words, killing the USPS would actually jack up parcel delivery rates, too, because UPS and FedEx would have to foot the full costs of those, rather than pay the (relatively low) fees the USPS charges.
Well said. And I noticed there are quite a few people here saying that the employees shouldn't get pensions at all. It's as if they don't understand that a pension is deferred compensation--it's money you earned while working but your employer promised to pay it to you later. It's not a "freebie" that workers unfairly feel entitled to. It is part of their compensation package.
If an organization defaults on their pension obligations, they've essentially reneged on earnings the employees are fully entitled to.
Now, the requirement the new hires at USPS have their pensions 100% funded from day one may be (and probably is) excessive and unnecessary. But any organization that offers deferred compensation pensions absolutely needs to make sure they are funded so that the money is there to be paid out when employees retire.
Nope, CAPTCHA was an utter failure. I even had the strongest one activated, and they still got through. reCAPTCHA was also no good.
I hear that, the way some spam companies do this now is, they pass the CAPTCHA image along to an actual human--someone in India or China or something, working for a tiny amount of money, and they type it in. They get paid for how many they can do in an hour.
I use phpBB, and it comes with the option to add questions at registration time to prevent spammers from signing up. The answers must be typed in, so automated systems can't deal with it unless you are using really simple questions that it can google. For instance, if I had "2+2=" as one of the questions, some bots can figure this out. Instead, I use plain text questions that require human thought:
Is the sun bigger than the Earth?
What does the Earth orbit?
What is the name of our galaxy?
Is the Moon bigger than the Earth?
etc.
Any English-speaking human should know these, but bots can't figure them out, and my board is very small. Without any countermeasures, though, it gets positively jammed up with spam, so I have to trim that stuff down automatically as much as I can.
It doesn't seem like most of the replies actually address the submitter's question. Here are the things I look for:
* Does the company use any kind of source control management system? If they say "no" or don't know what that is, RUN AWAY.
* What development methodology do they use? Agile, waterfall, RUP, something else? If they don't know, RUN AWAY.
* How is requirement specification done? If they can't explain this in even a little detail, RUN AWAY.
* How is release management done? Are there automated builds? Is there a defined process for deployment, upgrades, patches, etc.? If not, this is a red flag, at the least.
* Are developers required to write unit tests? If not, this is another red flag.
* What is the defect rate per 100 or 1000 hours of development time? Do they have any available metrics on whether their software quality is improving or not? If they aren't even tracking this, again, that is a red flag.
If their development department is disorganized, you will be able to tell from the above questions. If that is the case, odds are there is little or no discipline in terms of actual coding, as well. A common answer to some of the questions above is, "we'd like to do those things, but we just don't have time." Again, this means they do not understand the total cost of quality. You must invest in good quality practices up front or you will never get out of the "firefighting" mode. If you go into a company that's lacking the things described above, you can expect chaos, little attention to good development practices, poor software quality, unpredictable release schedules, and probably long hours to make up for all of it.
It's not that these problems can't be fixed--I've made a career out of doing that--but if you, as a developer, just want to work on interesting products and get them out the door, then shaping up a dysfunctional development organization is probably not what you are signing up for.
I despised Bush. Obama is smarter but carries on most of the same policies, especially when it comes to foreign policy and economic intervention. About the only place where he really differs is on social issues and the role of government aid programs.
All this has done is make his opposition even more insane. So, now I get to choose between a guy who is mostly like Bush and a guy who seems to have no beliefs of his own, but is beholden to a base made up of lunatics. Awesome choice there.
I voted for Obama, again, because I could not in good conscience vote to further empower the deranged hysterics of the Republican Party.
Bullshit.
I get tasked with reviewing resumes, too. Sometimes I'm completely baffled as to what someone was thinking when they wrote it. I've never seen one that was obviously lifted from an online template, though. Most people are simply not trained on how to write a good resume, and they don't want to take the time to learn--they want someone else to have done the work for them.
As for cheating, it does seem like cheating is on the rise among students. Part of it is that it's easier now than it ever was in the past. This provides a great temptation. On top of that, there's the laziness factor I mentioned above. I really don't know where this came from. I was born in 1981 and I've never felt the urge to cheat my way through academics. What good is a degree if you didn't actually learn anything to get it, and you just cheated the whole way through? What kind of ethical standard does such a person have? I sure as hell wouldn't want them making any important decisions in a business environment.
It's well-known that whether you make a system opt-in or opt-out, the vast majority will stick with whatever is the default, because they don't want to be bothered with such details.
Advertisers want an opt-in DNT because they know most people won't bother to turn it on. An opt-out DNT means most people will leave it on, because they probably won't even know about it to turn it off (assuming they'd want to.)
That would require a Constitutional amendment, which makes it a political non-starter.
I've made that particular healthcare argument more times than I can count, and because it is so sensible in terms of its cause, effect, and goals, you can only get responses that take issue with the very idea of government involvement in healthcare:
* "It's wrong for my neighbor to reach into my pocket to pay for what he can't afford." This is the libertarian argument, which is impossible to argue with because it comes from a fundamentally different view of government's purpose.
* "Let's get the government out of the healthcare business and let the free market sort it out." This is the conservative argument, which is naive at best and malevolent at worst. The "free market" is concerned with rent-seeking, not ensuring a healthy, productive workforce. Such policies have been proven over and over not to work, but conservatives keep pushing them because, I guess, enough people are gullible enough to buy them.
* Insert random argument about how socialized healthcare makes people lazy, dependent, etc. etc. etc.
Those who oppose a single-payer/socialized system in the US never seem to have an explanation for why healthcare is so much more expensive here, in our "free market" system, than in more socialized (e.g. European) systems. When confronted with this, their solution, puzzlingly enough, is to embrace even more "free market" policies to "bring costs down." It makes absolutely no sense.
Every reform proposal I've seen thus far comes with a caveat that it won't affect anyone already receiving benefits, and usually not anyone over 55, so if you are close to retirement (or already retired), you don't have anything to worry about as far as your benefits being slashed.
That said, the system will not be solvent for future beneficiaries, so we have to do something about that.
Then virtually all software is AI and people can stop asking "when will we have AI?" :-p
It's not "AI" as most people would think of it. That's just rather typical programming: wait for inputs, analyze them, produce outputs (responses.)
What about that makes it more "AI" than any other interactive software?
If you want to drive for pleasure, do it on your own property or a private track.
Public roads are not there for you to get your jollies on--indeed, doing so makes you a menace to everyone else using the roads for their intended purpose.
If self-driving cars are found to be safer than human drivers (and I think they will be), then your insurance company might actually give you a discount. You would still pay for insurance like normal, but it would be based on how well your autocar performs during accidents.
If there is found to be a flaw in the car itself (such a bug that makes it speed up uncontrollably, plowing into pedestrians or something) then obviously that is a recall/lawsuit situation. Manufacturers would be just as liable for that as they are for any other demonstrable defects in their vehicles.
That brings up another thing autocars will be better about than humans. Individual humans can learn from their mistakes, but that knowledge is not directly transferable to other humans. Any mistake a self-driving car makes, however, can have its solution incorporated into all self-driving cars (or at least all the ones of that model.) So, lots and lots of testing should ultimately give us very safe and effective cars.
We don't need "AI" to do any of the things a car does, just a system that reads various sensors and reacts to them as it is programmed to do.
All excellent points. We already have computer-assisted driving. Automatic traction control and stability systems have computers hooked up to your car, monitoring the vehicle's characteristics at all times. They adjust in real-time to keep the vehicle on the road, going in the direction you have it pointed. They can do this a lot more effectively than a human ever could.
It's time people realized there are just things machines are better at than we are. It's not something that denigrates humans, it's just accepting reality.
Yeah. I think the most utility of self-driving cars will come from daily commutes and long trips that consist primarily of interstate/highway driving. I would certainly like that.
Quite true. An autocar can't get distracted. It also has much more sensory data available than a human does, and it can gauge and react to that data inordinately faster than a human could.