It's not enough that if the subscription expires then you can't create anymore docs. What they have to do is either destroy or encrypt the docs you've already completed. And also they should encrypt all of the docs anyway so they can't be read or used on any other machine than the one that had the subscription to begin with. In fact this whole subscription idea is so 20th century. They have to track every keystroke made on that machine and and force you to pay before the document you're working on at the time can be printed or saved. Then what they have to do is ensure that the subscription is only for versions that the doc was created on and continually change the version so that you have to pay an additional kick to use the old doc on a current version which holds its own upgrade maintainence subscription charge. And copying or backing up a doc requires a duplicate charge. Then they have to charge you for embedded objects - or at least force you to license every application that could use the doc. And make sure that the versions aren't upgraded at the same time so you have to maintain every version of every application. Also charge for each font seperately. And if you let a subscription lapse then you have to charge a subscription reinitiallization fee and force a complete reinstallation of all applications. In fact the only thing that makes sense is to give them direct access to your money so they can simply debit what they need. Oh in case your continuous version maintenance causes you to have to buy another PC, then you can either re-licence everything again for an additional fee, or you can simply lease a PC from MS directly.
I don't care what is good or bad anymore. "My stuff is great, your stuff sucks the tailpipe?!" Honestly does anyone feel like like those guys in The Deerhunter who are forced to play Russian Roulette? Yeah yeah its great it sucks you suck I'm tired of this sucking........... meanwhile your blockhead management is getting away with jamming something stupid down your throats. Why do they suddenly need to move your whole company's mail system en masse? Do they not have enough real work to do? Is weeks or months of transition worth it to do ANYTHING this disruptive to an organization just because some shithead says so? Tell those pukes to go back to selling widgets or smalltalking the CEO's admin assistant counting paperclips or whatever the fuck they're supposed to be doing.
Tell them that if its so vitally important to move to anything new then maybe they should look at outsourcing their mail. If mail is a strategic asset of your company and there is a real reason to do something like this then they should just force it as a necessary requirement to the business. IF its just something your CEO read about on an airline magazine then told 3 or 4 layers of flunkies about, just ignore it.
I'm too old to listen to "because I'm the daddy that's why" bullshit.
Well let's see - options are about 32% under water well into their 2nd vesting year so that gift is worthless. About 25% of my cap is in tech stocks which are about 75% from where I bought them. Everything else is steady or better, marginally so at least better than any other instrument like a CD or a mutual fund or index of any kind. My accountant says I need well timed losses which is where the tech stocks play today.
Wrap it all up and I'm still working, still employed, still have to be. If my expectation was to become a dotKommissar cash out and retire to Fiji well that isn't going to happen. I'm a dotCommoner instead. My employer is grinding through its annual "...Times are great! We have to cut 10%!" bullshit gyrations.
Those were mostly my expectations. OTOH I've been doing this for neigh on 2 decades so it's not as if I just graduated went to work for a startup and went belly-up in 8 months later. The economy and this sector is still growing rapidly, more rapidly than at any other time execept for the prior 3 years. And yeah it would have been nice to get in on the Yahoo IPO but that didn't happen either. Most of us are not going to retire @40 get on the board of a Ballet company, start a foundation, trek through the Andes and get a trophy wife. Conversely most of us at least now are not in the position that EE's were in in the late 70's/early 80's, or MIS types 87-92 where you got laid off the week before Xmas, had to reapply for your job and take a 25% cut.
'Every country is three meals away from its next revolution' (quoted on Red Dwarf, it's from Tallyrand, I think)
Maybe the Puritans need their OWN COUNTRY. Or maybe they should become Amish and stop using the infernal Satanic computer. Then we could take all that money all that effort and all that energy and solve some real social problems. If you don't know what your CHHHHIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDRRRREEENNNNNNNN are doing then what the FUCK gives you the right to demand that someone or something else do that for you and for everyone else as well.
Are these people complaining about the inappropriateness of hand counting the same people who took the administration to court over the necessity of counting the census in person by hand? Whut with them thar new fangled stuhtiztucks and stuff Yuh nevuh no whut yer gonna git ?!?!?!?!?!?!
Do the math people - what demographic would benefit most from online voting? Don't forget that 'Dewey won' when the networks interviewed upper class white Republicans.
Seriously - introduce some small quantum effect into the count so that the results change only if they are observed directly. The more they are observed the less discrete they become.
Just like you can't call your local GNC store a health facility and you can't claim that the products they sell can make you healthy then sites who don't want to be subject to the regulation wouldn't opt in to that domain. OTOH sites that do would have a defacto baseline certification like a seal of approval, for what it's worth. I think this whole topic has more to do with services than sites. So for example the eating disorder treatment specialist I saw on the news and who handles all his patients online only would have to certify into the.health domain in order qualify. By extension you would have all of your financial dealings through intermediaries in the.health domain such as HMO's <keeping with the myth that HMO's have anything to do with health, wink> and so on. Of course all of this implies some kind of audit and policing to insure compliance.
One needs to establish legal standing. If one cannot establish direct legal standing then one is free to file an amicus, a 'friend of the court' as it were'. There is no doubt that one could sue for some remedy retroactively because that is why we have affirmative statutes of limitation. OTOH if one can no longer be helped or harmed by either outcome and there is no direct legal remedy to be obtained either way then one would or should have a very hard time proving legal standing. One could sue as a test case but its clear that the motivation for that is political or social, not legal. That is specificallt the point. An interest can derive from a benefit or it can be independent of any benefit or remedy. Either way you still have to establish standing. For example I don't have children in that school district either and don't even live in that state. I would have to establish some standing before being allowed to sue. I may claim that I have standing based on the fact that in some tiny way I helped pay for it but that is a vague and slippery path that no court would willingly pursue.
Do you live and or plan to travel in a major metro area? Many calling plans are great until you get out of a large area then its mom-n-pop all the way. For example most cellular (or digital, for the purposes of this discussio we'll call everything cellular) build up are in major metro areas and along major interstate highways so if you live not near those you will have degraded service. The work around for that can be in some areas to prepurchase analog minutes instead of having to essentially roam at that time. One thing to remember though is that a dual band or even tri band phone will suck batteries as it attempts to switch in an out of digital and analog zones if you're in a marginal area that crosses both systems. Next, find out exactly what the up front charges are if you want any additional services. Have you noticed that you haven't heard much about mobile net from the carriers recently? That's because a) it doesn't work and b) they charge some obscene up front setup like $300 plus $5/minute. At least they do here in the Raleigh NC area. Next find out about bundled billing. If you want 2 phone numbers to share the minutes pool you will have 2 basic choices a) No and b) a large block of initial minutes with the corresponding large monthly nut. Sprint will do that for a 500 minute/month plan or higher. Next find out what kind of billing detail they can provide incase you have to provide that to your employer. Next what kind of phone rebate if any are they offering or is the really really great calling plan only available if you purchase a $400 phone. Is the phone replaceable per the contract or is it upgradeable? If the answer is yes probe deeper and find out what they mean by that. Some providers mean yes to mean that you can do whatever you want if you want to buy another phone and then pay some multi-hundred dollar switch over fee to move your phone number to another phone.And make sure that your phone is not Nextel because that is a closed system different from all others and you have to use a Nextel phone in a Nextel area which is why they appear to be offering such great deals. Next of course the usual carry over minutes, plan change options should be reviewed. Oh - yeah, check the online vs. calling a telemarketer rates and plan options, they are usually different and they almost never know about one another. Next check phone insurance and compare it to what you can get ANYWHERE else including your existing homeowners'. Carrier provided phone insurance is close to loan shark rates. Find out if battery replacement canbe included in the maintainance contract - a very few do this. Do you need prepurchased minutes. Some providers have flat rate prepurchased service that shuts off when you reach it. A good thing to have if you're using the phone only for business and the employer won't pay for overages. Can the service be combined with ANI, CallerID, Paging, voicemail and the like which actually are pretty good to have with a business phone. Do they support inbound and outbound faxing? Is that even important to you? Does the service have automatic firmware updates for the phones a-la Startac or do they expect you bring them the phone 6 times a year to upgrade the microcode. Will they give you a loaner if yours breaks. What is their fraud protection?
If the next POTUS is GWB then we'll be treated to moooovies about satanic communist child molesting foreigners from another dimension who are stupidly battling Christ's new army for the souls of all the CHIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLDREN !!!!!
Even NASA says now that anyone who has anything to learn about keeping shit up in space for VERY long periods of time have to learn from the Russians. Their program failed not because it was flawed but because it ran out of money. Damn if anyone else could keep a functioning Mir in orbit for 11 years. The great story I like is the $500K Fisher space pen that NASA commissioned so that astros could writ during an EVA. The Astros showed it to the Russians on Soyuz who whipped out a pencil!
They got a working lander on the moon first, they go a remote piloted lander on the moon first, they got the first 1 and 3 man crews in space and they built the largest launch vehicles. True the program never had the high tech gee-whiz bells-n-whistles of the American program but it did prove its point with comparitively little funding which is just what Americans are demanding of their space program now.
But contrary to the current fashion proclaiming that paying taxes entitles you to any and all instantaneous and unlimited access to any information, you are in fact, wrong. For if you were correct then you would also be entitled to, nay, guaranteed access to any and all school employees' or any governmental employees' HR records, the detailed accounting of any and all governmental agency or facility, the detailed logs, diaries notes or any other record on anything compiled by any government employee on any subject or matter whatsoever. Unlike some countries, like say Iran or the PRC there actually is an expectation of at least some privacy and the argument that because you personally pay taxes entitles you to having the final say in any and all details about running a government facility is specious. If that were true then you personally should be able to regulate dams, power plants, aircraft carriers and the like. The agument that you personally pay taxes so you personally have to gain a direct benefit is equally specious. Why you ask? Well there are many many things your taxes support that do not and would not expect to personally use. Take prisons for example - you pay for them but you do not expect to have to be incarcerated in one.
You see this is great myth of the Right. That you personally need to give your detailed and instant approval to anything no matter how small the detail in order for the government to be legitimate. The fact is, you're a citizen a part of community and there are going to be things that you personally don't agree with. For anything else to be the case is an excuse for tyranny. I mean logically your taxes dollars went in part to subsidize the last election campaign of someone you probably loathe, fear & detest. Do you want to use the excuse that your tax dollar logically entitles you to ensconce one political party over all others? You have to know that that is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they designed the Democratic process. Specifically the intent was not to use the majority to supress all other beliefs. You may argue with that and carp about majority this majority that, to the victor go the spoils and so on but that would be a misreading of the Constitution.
Now to go back to the original question. Yes, you are right when you were going to say that privacy is not guaranteed by the Constitution. Fair enough. I'll give you that when you open your life to any inquiry if you have ever received money that is not a refund of your own payment from any government agency, ever. After all my tax dollars went in part to that benefit you received. I want a complete accounting of what you did with it. That includes any good or service which in any way had any government subsidy or tax credit applied to it at any stage of the process. So for example if you receive a child care tax credit that should entitle me to examine exactly and in excruciating detail what you did with and how you rear your children.
The plaintiff has no direct interest other than a vague legal interest public policy, because, and this is important to understand, his own children are not in the public schools, are not the subject of this inquiry. The articles state that the plaintiffs own children are enrolled in PRIVATE school which specifically is immune from a legal challenge like this. So turnabout in this case is NOT fair play. We could not for example have the access records for his children made public because they are enrolled in private school and it is not a public policy issue.
So in the end this where law and public policy are mismatched to the Net? Why you ask? Well in this case it's not much different that protesting outside of a family planning clinic. the law states that protests have to be a certain distance from the front door so that people going are not only physically prohibited but also that they are not subject to undue emotional stress, verbal abuse, etc. In the case here there is no physical separation so what we have in effect is a protest or vigil that has a chilling effect on using a facility without the protection from figuratively blocking the door.
So the question you have to ask yourself is, is this challenge really about filtering software or is this challenge about using the facility at all. It would be interesting from a legal perspective to see whether this gentleman could be successfully prosecuted if he ever published and identifiable information on minors who access the Net. That is, let's say he is collecting this information in order to pressure the school or the students by publishing the names or addresses of sites they visit. If he refers to any identifaible attribute of a minors access, say, first initial last name could he be prosecuted under a law that bars divulging any information about minors without their guardians' consent?
First off you fucks - I'm lefthanded and even I see that covering up half of the choices obscures things. Next - even the fucking SAT has instructions on how to fill out the form. Is not even that important.
So what do you want next - literacy, English language or intelligence tests to qualify for voting. Almost all of you smug bastards are decendants of people who came here from someotherfuckingplace. I propose that we retroactively void the voting of everyone who was in a hurry, had poor language skills, did not attend Geek U, was baffled perhaps as a first time voter or for any other reason. Every other aspect of our relationship to the government has SOME level of standardization to it.Why the fuck not this? Uh lemme guess - the same blockheads who are screaming that PEOPLE OF THEIR CHOSING should not be allowed to vote fall into two categories:
Vote straight party line w/o really thinking about it or even knowing who all the candidates in their own party are or what the offices represent.
Wrap themselves in the flag and the Constitution and bleat about how everyone should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want as long as Boortz and Limbaugh tell them to.
Not being a fat middle aged Christian white guy I guess I'll be urged now to 'relocate to the East.' Shit, I was kinda hoping that didn't happen. Again.
This is better than any professional sport. You've got a game that never ends like the eternal struggle of good vs. evil. Plus it has the illusion of mattering a whole hell of a lot. We can only wish that this ends up in the courts with scenario that no one ever banked on; that there is no winner by Jan. 20 and there is provision to have a provisional President until the two parties can stop squabbling in court. Wouldn't it be great sport if each of the 50 State Supreme courts gets to decide the election. Not because of a tie that ostensibly gets broken in the Senate but because neither party even wants the vote to get there and send every state's election into the courts?
This would be great fun, even more entertaining that saying "Lewinsky" 1E9548 times in a row. Think of the great fun we'll have: either Bush wins and we tear up the Constitution, bring back slavey and outlaw not being fat white male middle class bible thumping gun nut, or, Bush loses and we have CW2 (Civil War 2- the Sequel) complete with threats of secession, state referendums to bring back criminal trials for Witchcraft.
OOOOps there's a firealarm going off here in the office. It looks like the fun is only beginning!
Had an episode where the bad guys captured a scientist who built a machine that manufactured $5,000 gold bars. They put him to work and the first thing he did was ask for some raw materials including a $10,000 bar of platinum to make each gold bar.
Said in a properly operatic tone. And here I thought all we needed was more Bibles, Bullets, Beans and Bandages. Computers are the tool of Satan after all.
Don't you think there would be an easier way to steal an election if you wanted, then to rig thousands of voting machines, to secretly coopt the hundreds or thousands of people who have to administer them. Wouldn't it be easier to simply call up the mothership and have it beam a 'special message, from the space overlords' to all of us who haven't aleady been abducted and anally probed while listening to the new world order speech from JFK and Elvis straight from their secret moonbase?
I mean c'mon, voting machines? How pedestrian when we all know that the Illuminati, TLC and the Bildeberg group can instantly power up their UN run mass delusion machines and cause us to think that such and such candidate has won when actually its someone else from the Vatican-ZOG-Masonic electorate?
Remember - the one great conspiracy was that there is one great conspiracy. The one great deception the devil succeeded with was convincing the world he did not exist.
Evaluation system, forced curve on a scale of 1,2,3. 3 being deadwood that floats and 1 being raise the freakin dead, smote the rock, etc. etc. But the VAST middle area which has a range of RIP (retirement in place) to just saved the company 25 million dollars which translates to a $250 million revenue stream.....
Ones, twos threes are relevant because they are the ONLY factor in determining the difference between what could be a 0% and a 20% bonus. Given that MegaTelCo-Blue doesn't reward its employees any other way and the options they hand out are about 35% under water.
1 I made zillions as a dotkomissar therefore I am right.
2 I agree with other statements generally agreed to be correct therefore my statements are chistled in granite.
3 Nagging is good because not nagging leads to similar results therefore either negative or positive reinforcement must be a good thing.
4 Stupid people yield stupid results.
5 You are probably stupid if you are not as great as I am.
6 If I say something is correct then it must be a priori since I provide no proof otherwise.
7 Generally agreed upon aphorisms are in fact correct even if you can't prove them to be.
8 Everyone wastes 30% of their time even the most productive and brilliant of us.
9 Hard work is good.
10 Working smarter is no substitute for thinning the herd.
11 If you could bottle it you would. Even though we call it engineering and we claim to agree to be able to manage it at all, it's a really an artform that can't be well understood, documented, replicated or taught. IF you're in the bottom half...tough luck for you.
Brooks may be right but if the variation in productivity is really 10:1 then it isn't engineering at all. That's no measure of the engineering-ositude of anything. If it were then civil engineering projects would have schedules and timelines that look like "whenever...." and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference in the creation process from software, steelmaking or wineries.
So let's agree to disagree. ArsDigita was successfull because of very smart talented people working in small focused groups that specifically WERE NOT ATTEMPTING TO ENGINEER ANYTHING. At least not the way you'd design and build an airliner. Because if you knew anything about actual engineering you'd understand that it doesn't depend on the brilliance of a few to be successful. Is is the application of well understood and documented knowledge processes and tools to create a reproduceable item or service or process.
In fact that is precisely why software is so hard to make. No one has adequately figured out how to engineer it at all. Projects still largely fail and the ones that don't generally have no repeatable success criteria or design or process commonalities. Even successful projects generally are late and an order of magnitude more expensive than projected, don't survive unaltered for as long as projected and cost much more to maintain. Good solid designs rarely survive the tenure of the people who built them and in the end it's cheaper to be ignorant of the whole of a system and attack fixes as temporary point solutions than it is to build maintainability into the system to begin with.
In fact if software was engineered then you would see larger groups successfully develop it and maintain it. But it's not. For an apocryphal story about this read "Strategic Planning, Systems Analysis, & Database Design, the continuous flow approach: Mark L. Gillenson & Robert Goldberg; Published by John Wiley and Sons, 1984; ISBN 0-471-89066-9. Where there is a story of two developers who apparently developed some customer system right the first time with no obvious bugs or requirement or design changes, on time and on budget. When asked how they ever did this, apparently the response was something like "It never occurred to us that bugs were acceptable..." or less poetically, the quality was engineered-in from the beginning.
Private practice 1st year associates in a white shoe Wall St. firm working 90 hrs week command $140K out of school w/ no experience.
The average income of doctors in the US including all of the MDs who now work for HMO's etc. is ~$250k according the personal disability insurance providers.
The average CEO of an American firm earns between 17x and 30x the income of the lowest paid worker. My own CEO earned something like $6-9 million in direct cash compensation, another $9 or so million in deferred compensation, another few hundred thousand $ or so in guaranteed deferred pension earninings and several hundred million dollars in options, grants, deferred stock purchases and other forms of equity. And this is not a startup this is a well established stable company which barring an asteriod will be around for a while.
So yeah - lots of people are willing to work huge hours. Mostly because there is a huge financial upside. Not a maybe, not a chance, not a possible IPO but a definite concrete realistic outcome you can bank on when making other life decisions like what house to buy now like how many children to have now and what kind of schools they can go to, whether you need to be a 2 income family or not.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not enough that if the subscription expires then you can't create anymore docs. What they have to do is either destroy or encrypt the docs you've already completed. And also they should encrypt all of the docs anyway so they can't be read or used on any other machine than the one that had the subscription to begin with. In fact this whole subscription idea is so 20th century. They have to track every keystroke made on that machine and and force you to pay before the document you're working on at the time can be printed or saved. Then what they have to do is ensure that the subscription is only for versions that the doc was created on and continually change the version so that you have to pay an additional kick to use the old doc on a current version which holds its own upgrade maintainence subscription charge. And copying or backing up a doc requires a duplicate charge. Then they have to charge you for embedded objects - or at least force you to license every application that could use the doc. And make sure that the versions aren't upgraded at the same time so you have to maintain every version of every application. Also charge for each font seperately. And if you let a subscription lapse then you have to charge a subscription reinitiallization fee and force a complete reinstallation of all applications. In fact the only thing that makes sense is to give them direct access to your money so they can simply debit what they need. Oh in case your continuous version maintenance causes you to have to buy another PC, then you can either re-licence everything again for an additional fee, or you can simply lease a PC from MS directly.
I don't care what is good or bad anymore. "My stuff is great, your stuff sucks the tailpipe?!" Honestly does anyone feel like like those guys in The Deerhunter who are forced to play Russian Roulette? Yeah yeah its great it sucks you suck I'm tired of this sucking........... meanwhile your blockhead management is getting away with jamming something stupid down your throats. Why do they suddenly need to move your whole company's mail system en masse? Do they not have enough real work to do? Is weeks or months of transition worth it to do ANYTHING this disruptive to an organization just because some shithead says so? Tell those pukes to go back to selling widgets or smalltalking the CEO's admin assistant counting paperclips or whatever the fuck they're supposed to be doing.
Tell them that if its so vitally important to move to anything new then maybe they should look at outsourcing their mail. If mail is a strategic asset of your company and there is a real reason to do something like this then they should just force it as a necessary requirement to the business. IF its just something your CEO read about on an airline magazine then told 3 or 4 layers of flunkies about, just ignore it.
I'm too old to listen to "because I'm the daddy that's why" bullshit.
How much of a waste of time is that? Set your filter to "only gaze lovingly at myself"
Well let's see - options are about 32% under water well into their 2nd vesting year so that gift is worthless. About 25% of my cap is in tech stocks which are about 75% from where I bought them. Everything else is steady or better, marginally so at least better than any other instrument like a CD or a mutual fund or index of any kind. My accountant says I need well timed losses which is where the tech stocks play today.
Wrap it all up and I'm still working, still employed, still have to be. If my expectation was to become a dotKommissar cash out and retire to Fiji well that isn't going to happen. I'm a dotCommoner instead. My employer is grinding through its annual "...Times are great! We have to cut 10%!" bullshit gyrations.
Those were mostly my expectations. OTOH I've been doing this for neigh on 2 decades so it's not as if I just graduated went to work for a startup and went belly-up in 8 months later. The economy and this sector is still growing rapidly, more rapidly than at any other time execept for the prior 3 years. And yeah it would have been nice to get in on the Yahoo IPO but that didn't happen either. Most of us are not going to retire @40 get on the board of a Ballet company, start a foundation, trek through the Andes and get a trophy wife. Conversely most of us at least now are not in the position that EE's were in in the late 70's/early 80's, or MIS types 87-92 where you got laid off the week before Xmas, had to reapply for your job and take a 25% cut.
'Every country is three meals away from its next revolution' (quoted on Red Dwarf, it's from Tallyrand, I think)
Maybe the Puritans need their OWN COUNTRY. Or maybe they should become Amish and stop using the infernal Satanic computer. Then we could take all that money all that effort and all that energy and solve some real social problems. If you don't know what your CHHHHIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDRRRREEENNNNNNNN are doing then what the FUCK gives you the right to demand that someone or something else do that for you and for everyone else as well.
Are these people complaining about the inappropriateness of hand counting the same people who took the administration to court over the necessity of counting the census in person by hand? Whut with them thar new fangled stuhtiztucks and stuff Yuh nevuh no whut yer gonna git ?!?!?!?!?!?!
Do the math people - what demographic would benefit most from online voting? Don't forget that 'Dewey won' when the networks interviewed upper class white Republicans.
Seriously - introduce some small quantum effect into the count so that the results change only if they are observed directly. The more they are observed the less discrete they become.
Just like you can't call your local GNC store a health facility and you can't claim that the products they sell can make you healthy then sites who don't want to be subject to the regulation wouldn't opt in to that domain. OTOH sites that do would have a defacto baseline certification like a seal of approval, for what it's worth. I think this whole topic has more to do with services than sites. So for example the eating disorder treatment specialist I saw on the news and who handles all his patients online only would have to certify into the .health domain in order qualify. By extension you would have all of your financial dealings through intermediaries in the .health domain such as HMO's <keeping with the myth that HMO's have anything to do with health, wink> and so on. Of course all of this implies some kind of audit and policing to insure compliance.
One needs to establish legal standing. If one cannot establish direct legal standing then one is free to file an amicus, a 'friend of the court' as it were'. There is no doubt that one could sue for some remedy retroactively because that is why we have affirmative statutes of limitation. OTOH if one can no longer be helped or harmed by either outcome and there is no direct legal remedy to be obtained either way then one would or should have a very hard time proving legal standing. One could sue as a test case but its clear that the motivation for that is political or social, not legal. That is specificallt the point. An interest can derive from a benefit or it can be independent of any benefit or remedy. Either way you still have to establish standing. For example I don't have children in that school district either and don't even live in that state. I would have to establish some standing before being allowed to sue. I may claim that I have standing based on the fact that in some tiny way I helped pay for it but that is a vague and slippery path that no court would willingly pursue.
There a few critical questions:
Do you live and or plan to travel in a major metro area? Many calling plans are great until you get out of a large area then its mom-n-pop all the way. For example most cellular (or digital, for the purposes of this discussio we'll call everything cellular) build up are in major metro areas and along major interstate highways so if you live not near those you will have degraded service. The work around for that can be in some areas to prepurchase analog minutes instead of having to essentially roam at that time. One thing to remember though is that a dual band or even tri band phone will suck batteries as it attempts to switch in an out of digital and analog zones if you're in a marginal area that crosses both systems. Next, find out exactly what the up front charges are if you want any additional services. Have you noticed that you haven't heard much about mobile net from the carriers recently? That's because a) it doesn't work and b) they charge some obscene up front setup like $300 plus $5/minute. At least they do here in the Raleigh NC area. Next find out about bundled billing. If you want 2 phone numbers to share the minutes pool you will have 2 basic choices a) No and b) a large block of initial minutes with the corresponding large monthly nut. Sprint will do that for a 500 minute/month plan or higher. Next find out what kind of billing detail they can provide incase you have to provide that to your employer. Next what kind of phone rebate if any are they offering or is the really really great calling plan only available if you purchase a $400 phone. Is the phone replaceable per the contract or is it upgradeable? If the answer is yes probe deeper and find out what they mean by that. Some providers mean yes to mean that you can do whatever you want if you want to buy another phone and then pay some multi-hundred dollar switch over fee to move your phone number to another phone.And make sure that your phone is not Nextel because that is a closed system different from all others and you have to use a Nextel phone in a Nextel area which is why they appear to be offering such great deals. Next of course the usual carry over minutes, plan change options should be reviewed. Oh - yeah, check the online vs. calling a telemarketer rates and plan options, they are usually different and they almost never know about one another. Next check phone insurance and compare it to what you can get ANYWHERE else including your existing homeowners'. Carrier provided phone insurance is close to loan shark rates. Find out if battery replacement canbe included in the maintainance contract - a very few do this. Do you need prepurchased minutes. Some providers have flat rate prepurchased service that shuts off when you reach it. A good thing to have if you're using the phone only for business and the employer won't pay for overages. Can the service be combined with ANI, CallerID, Paging, voicemail and the like which actually are pretty good to have with a business phone. Do they support inbound and outbound faxing? Is that even important to you? Does the service have automatic firmware updates for the phones a-la Startac or do they expect you bring them the phone 6 times a year to upgrade the microcode. Will they give you a loaner if yours breaks. What is their fraud protection?
If the next POTUS is GWB then we'll be treated to moooovies about satanic communist child molesting foreigners from another dimension who are stupidly battling Christ's new army for the souls of all the CHIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLDREN !!!!!
Even NASA says now that anyone who has anything to learn about keeping shit up in space for VERY long periods of time have to learn from the Russians. Their program failed not because it was flawed but because it ran out of money. Damn if anyone else could keep a functioning Mir in orbit for 11 years. The great story I like is the $500K Fisher space pen that NASA commissioned so that astros could writ during an EVA. The Astros showed it to the Russians on Soyuz who whipped out a pencil!
They got a working lander on the moon first, they go a remote piloted lander on the moon first, they got the first 1 and 3 man crews in space and they built the largest launch vehicles. True the program never had the high tech gee-whiz bells-n-whistles of the American program but it did prove its point with comparitively little funding which is just what Americans are demanding of their space program now.
But contrary to the current fashion proclaiming that paying taxes entitles you to any and all instantaneous and unlimited access to any information, you are in fact, wrong. For if you were correct then you would also be entitled to, nay, guaranteed access to any and all school employees' or any governmental employees' HR records, the detailed accounting of any and all governmental agency or facility, the detailed logs, diaries notes or any other record on anything compiled by any government employee on any subject or matter whatsoever. Unlike some countries, like say Iran or the PRC there actually is an expectation of at least some privacy and the argument that because you personally pay taxes entitles you to having the final say in any and all details about running a government facility is specious. If that were true then you personally should be able to regulate dams, power plants, aircraft carriers and the like. The agument that you personally pay taxes so you personally have to gain a direct benefit is equally specious. Why you ask? Well there are many many things your taxes support that do not and would not expect to personally use. Take prisons for example - you pay for them but you do not expect to have to be incarcerated in one.
You see this is great myth of the Right. That you personally need to give your detailed and instant approval to anything no matter how small the detail in order for the government to be legitimate. The fact is, you're a citizen a part of community and there are going to be things that you personally don't agree with. For anything else to be the case is an excuse for tyranny. I mean logically your taxes dollars went in part to subsidize the last election campaign of someone you probably loathe, fear & detest. Do you want to use the excuse that your tax dollar logically entitles you to ensconce one political party over all others? You have to know that that is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they designed the Democratic process. Specifically the intent was not to use the majority to supress all other beliefs. You may argue with that and carp about majority this majority that, to the victor go the spoils and so on but that would be a misreading of the Constitution.
Now to go back to the original question. Yes, you are right when you were going to say that privacy is not guaranteed by the Constitution. Fair enough. I'll give you that when you open your life to any inquiry if you have ever received money that is not a refund of your own payment from any government agency, ever. After all my tax dollars went in part to that benefit you received. I want a complete accounting of what you did with it. That includes any good or service which in any way had any government subsidy or tax credit applied to it at any stage of the process. So for example if you receive a child care tax credit that should entitle me to examine exactly and in excruciating detail what you did with and how you rear your children.
The plaintiff has no direct interest other than a vague legal interest public policy, because, and this is important to understand, his own children are not in the public schools, are not the subject of this inquiry. The articles state that the plaintiffs own children are enrolled in PRIVATE school which specifically is immune from a legal challenge like this. So turnabout in this case is NOT fair play. We could not for example have the access records for his children made public because they are enrolled in private school and it is not a public policy issue.
So in the end this where law and public policy are mismatched to the Net? Why you ask? Well in this case it's not much different that protesting outside of a family planning clinic. the law states that protests have to be a certain distance from the front door so that people going are not only physically prohibited but also that they are not subject to undue emotional stress, verbal abuse, etc. In the case here there is no physical separation so what we have in effect is a protest or vigil that has a chilling effect on using a facility without the protection from figuratively blocking the door.
So the question you have to ask yourself is, is this challenge really about filtering software or is this challenge about using the facility at all. It would be interesting from a legal perspective to see whether this gentleman could be successfully prosecuted if he ever published and identifiable information on minors who access the Net. That is, let's say he is collecting this information in order to pressure the school or the students by publishing the names or addresses of sites they visit. If he refers to any identifaible attribute of a minors access, say, first initial last name could he be prosecuted under a law that bars divulging any information about minors without their guardians' consent?
First off you fucks - I'm lefthanded and even I see that covering up half of the choices obscures things. Next - even the fucking SAT has instructions on how to fill out the form. Is not even that important.
So what do you want next - literacy, English language or intelligence tests to qualify for voting. Almost all of you smug bastards are decendants of people who came here from someotherfuckingplace. I propose that we retroactively void the voting of everyone who was in a hurry, had poor language skills, did not attend Geek U, was baffled perhaps as a first time voter or for any other reason. Every other aspect of our relationship to the government has SOME level of standardization to it.Why the fuck not this? Uh lemme guess - the same blockheads who are screaming that PEOPLE OF THEIR CHOSING should not be allowed to vote fall into two categories:
Vote straight party line w/o really thinking about it or even knowing who all the candidates in their own party are or what the offices represent.
Wrap themselves in the flag and the Constitution and bleat about how everyone should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want as long as Boortz and Limbaugh tell them to.
Just drive drunk to the next militia meeting.
Nobody moderated anything, Einstein.
Not being a fat middle aged Christian white guy I guess I'll be urged now to 'relocate to the East.' Shit, I was kinda hoping that didn't happen. Again.
This is better than any professional sport. You've got a game that never ends like the eternal struggle of good vs. evil. Plus it has the illusion of mattering a whole hell of a lot. We can only wish that this ends up in the courts with scenario that no one ever banked on; that there is no winner by Jan. 20 and there is provision to have a provisional President until the two parties can stop squabbling in court. Wouldn't it be great sport if each of the 50 State Supreme courts gets to decide the election. Not because of a tie that ostensibly gets broken in the Senate but because neither party even wants the vote to get there and send every state's election into the courts?
This would be great fun, even more entertaining that saying "Lewinsky" 1E9548 times in a row. Think of the great fun we'll have: either Bush wins and we tear up the Constitution, bring back slavey and outlaw not being fat white male middle class bible thumping gun nut, or, Bush loses and we have CW2 (Civil War 2- the Sequel) complete with threats of secession, state referendums to bring back criminal trials for Witchcraft.
OOOOps there's a firealarm going off here in the office. It looks like the fun is only beginning!
Had an episode where the bad guys captured a scientist who built a machine that manufactured $5,000 gold bars. They put him to work and the first thing he did was ask for some raw materials including a $10,000 bar of platinum to make each gold bar.
D'yah get it?
Said in a properly operatic tone. And here I thought all we needed was more Bibles, Bullets, Beans and Bandages. Computers are the tool of Satan after all.
Don't you think there would be an easier way to steal an election if you wanted, then to rig thousands of voting machines, to secretly coopt the hundreds or thousands of people who have to administer them. Wouldn't it be easier to simply call up the mothership and have it beam a 'special message, from the space overlords' to all of us who haven't aleady been abducted and anally probed while listening to the new world order speech from JFK and Elvis straight from their secret moonbase?
I mean c'mon, voting machines? How pedestrian when we all know that the Illuminati, TLC and the Bildeberg group can instantly power up their UN run mass delusion machines and cause us to think that such and such candidate has won when actually its someone else from the Vatican-ZOG-Masonic electorate?
Remember - the one great conspiracy was that there is one great conspiracy. The one great deception the devil succeeded with was convincing the world he did not exist.
Evaluation system, forced curve on a scale of 1,2,3. 3 being deadwood that floats and 1 being raise the freakin dead, smote the rock, etc. etc. But the VAST middle area which has a range of RIP (retirement in place) to just saved the company 25 million dollars which translates to a $250 million revenue stream.....
Ones, twos threes are relevant because they are the ONLY factor in determining the difference between what could be a 0% and a 20% bonus. Given that MegaTelCo-Blue doesn't reward its employees any other way and the options they hand out are about 35% under water.
Greenspun's argument goes thus:
1 I made zillions as a dotkomissar therefore I am right.
2 I agree with other statements generally agreed to be correct therefore my statements are chistled in granite.
3 Nagging is good because not nagging leads to similar results therefore either negative or positive reinforcement must be a good thing.
4 Stupid people yield stupid results.
5 You are probably stupid if you are not as great as I am.
6 If I say something is correct then it must be a priori since I provide no proof otherwise.
7 Generally agreed upon aphorisms are in fact correct even if you can't prove them to be.
8 Everyone wastes 30% of their time even the most productive and brilliant of us.
9 Hard work is good.
10 Working smarter is no substitute for thinning the herd.
11 If you could bottle it you would. Even though we call it engineering and we claim to agree to be able to manage it at all, it's a really an artform that can't be well understood, documented, replicated or taught. IF you're in the bottom half...tough luck for you.
Brooks may be right but if the variation in productivity is really 10:1 then it isn't engineering at all. That's no measure of the engineering-ositude of anything. If it were then civil engineering projects would have schedules and timelines that look like "whenever...." and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference in the creation process from software, steelmaking or wineries.
So let's agree to disagree. ArsDigita was successfull because of very smart talented people working in small focused groups that specifically WERE NOT ATTEMPTING TO ENGINEER ANYTHING. At least not the way you'd design and build an airliner. Because if you knew anything about actual engineering you'd understand that it doesn't depend on the brilliance of a few to be successful. Is is the application of well understood and documented knowledge processes and tools to create a reproduceable item or service or process.
In fact that is precisely why software is so hard to make. No one has adequately figured out how to engineer it at all. Projects still largely fail and the ones that don't generally have no repeatable success criteria or design or process commonalities. Even successful projects generally are late and an order of magnitude more expensive than projected, don't survive unaltered for as long as projected and cost much more to maintain. Good solid designs rarely survive the tenure of the people who built them and in the end it's cheaper to be ignorant of the whole of a system and attack fixes as temporary point solutions than it is to build maintainability into the system to begin with.
In fact if software was engineered then you would see larger groups successfully develop it and maintain it. But it's not. For an apocryphal story about this read "Strategic Planning, Systems Analysis, & Database Design, the continuous flow approach: Mark L. Gillenson & Robert Goldberg; Published by John Wiley and Sons, 1984; ISBN 0-471-89066-9. Where there is a story of two developers who apparently developed some customer system right the first time with no obvious bugs or requirement or design changes, on time and on budget. When asked how they ever did this, apparently the response was something like "It never occurred to us that bugs were acceptable..." or less poetically, the quality was engineered-in from the beginning.
Private practice 1st year associates in a white shoe Wall St. firm working 90 hrs week command $140K out of school w/ no experience.
The average income of doctors in the US including all of the MDs who now work for HMO's etc. is ~$250k according the personal disability insurance providers.
The average CEO of an American firm earns between 17x and 30x the income of the lowest paid worker. My own CEO earned something like $6-9 million in direct cash compensation, another $9 or so million in deferred compensation, another few hundred thousand $ or so in guaranteed deferred pension earninings and several hundred million dollars in options, grants, deferred stock purchases and other forms of equity. And this is not a startup this is a well established stable company which barring an asteriod will be around for a while.
So yeah - lots of people are willing to work huge hours. Mostly because there is a huge financial upside. Not a maybe, not a chance, not a possible IPO but a definite concrete realistic outcome you can bank on when making other life decisions like what house to buy now like how many children to have now and what kind of schools they can go to, whether you need to be a 2 income family or not.