As a one-time worker bee who is now a part of senior management (with an MPA and not an MBA, although they are pretty similar) I understand what he is saying but I disagree that people should have a better chance of being hired because they have the three letters next to their name.
I hire for open reqs based on the PERSON and their SKILLSET, not the degree they may or may not hold. You know, the way it should be. What Musk is promoting through another one of his ridiculous soundbites is that we should pay more attention to degrees (good or bad) than the skills someone brings along with them.
Musk can be absolutely brilliant and incredibly and insanely stupid all at the same time.
No, the problem is that the public sector does not operate anything at all like the private sector all the while trying to emulate it under the overhead and red tape that comes along with requiring the public's input.
In addition to the issues seen with how the public sector operates, we have the requirement of outsourcing to the private sector to do the bulk of work through private/public partnerships which the public sector cannot and will not effectively manage,
The competing interests of these partnerships leans heavily on the private sector to make loads of money while the public sector expects them to operate within the bounds of the red tape the private sector is not accustomed or willing to accept as part of their business model.
If the government took this upon themselves to do anything in its entirety, it would likely be done slowly but correctly. Unfortunately, we end up with the result we did: a quickly cobbled together, expensive, and poorly implemented product which would never have seen the light of day in the private sector.
This happens ALL THE TIME with public/private partnerships. Take a look at the website redesign for the City of Apple Valley, Minnesota which was originally budgeted at $76,000 but later reduced to a much more reasonable, although still incredibly expensive $30,000. The resulting site is basically unusable, slow, horrendous to update, and slightly more useless than its predecessor (lipstick on a pig).
I'd love to see the Tesla sales numbers from Austin vs the rest of the state. Austin residents have long been at odds w/the rest of the state and their politics and as such I have a feeling we'd see a pretty high correlation with Austin vs Tesla ownership when compared w/the rest of the state.
I once had a non-technical manager and she told me what I did was simply "magic" to her and others and while she knew the results provided weren't as simple as it seemed to them, others in the organization felt it was.
It's a very difficult concept for non-technical people to understand and part of the life of any developer to deal with. It's the same thing many developers feel about management and administration and we all need to share in the responsibility of not assuming it's easy and/or "magic".
I have repeatedly requested camera views from publicly owned but privately operated buses in the southern suburbs of the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area.
These cameras exist both inside and outside of the buses but whenever an issue arises which negatively impact the bus drivers or the system itself, the camera feeds are unavailable, usually due to some sort of unknown malfunction: http://www.lazylightning.org/bus-2-0-directs-mvta-driver-onto-dirt-shoulder
1. I went to a state school in Ohio which offered me a scholarship for athletics during undergrad. We paid very little.
2. I delayed grad school until I found a company that would pay for my education. I left that company with about 5 classes remaining but only had to end up paying $5200 total for a $28,000+ education.
3. This is being compared to the home loan situation. People were doing things that were stupid then too such as buying homes beyond their means, not educating themselves about the types of loans they were obtaining, etc. This is no different.
Do not go to a school you cannot afford and most definitely don't go into a major which will not provide you with a working wage afterward.
What sorts of public campaigns have you witnessed for school boards where these sorts of asinine discussions are raised? This would be injected into the meeting agenda as a minor item lumped with a bunch of others which would have all been approved with a single quick vote so they could move on to much more important topics such as wasting money on some frivolous sporting event or booster club meeting.
These sorts of discussions only come up during campaigns AFTER they've been put into place and one person in the community stands up to say WTF and is ignored at meeting after meeting by the administration who put it into place with the consent of the morons on the school board and then runs solely on the platform of removing this one item.
After they spend $1500 running, get on the board and abolish the decision, something else comes up which is possibly worse and they are powerless and clueless to stop it.
This is the problem with all local level government bodies (city, county, etc). People run on a single stupid platform, are elected, and stay there forever or are booted out because someone else has another single stupid platform of the day.
Most everyone else just shrugs, says ok, and their kids get scanned.
(As an aside, my kid is NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER getting their fucking eyes or fingerprints or any other biometric data scanned for school -- fuck that noise).
Yesterday I got a scam call for a free resort stay if I was over the age of 28 and would provide them my credit card number.
While this particular scam is nothing particularly new, what was surprising is that the call appeared to originate from my area code. When I called the number back it went to a woman's voicemail. I'm guessing the entire thing was spoofed and she's an unknowing accomplice to this scam. Hell, they could be choosing numbers entirely at random.
I have the legal right to ask for the video from a video camera that is owned and operated by the public sector, I have no legal right to do so from someone with Google glass.
I have Verizon (I have had T-mobile and various rebranded AT&Ts over the years as well) and have found the Big Red to be the best overall for a few reasons:
- Coverage - Data sharing - Cost
I think my wife and I pay about $150 for our two lines which include unlimited voice and text with 4GB of data shared between us and our chosen devices.
AT&T was less money (about $130/month) however we had 450 anytime minutes/1000 night/weekend with rollover and no SMS plan. Being that my wife is using around 1000 SMSs a month, the cost savings from that alone is worth it.
Now, Verizon's 3G is noticeably slower than AT&T and while that doesn't matter much in the metro area where our primary residence is located as there is LTE, at our lake home (which has LTE about 500 feet outside of the cabin) we are stuck w/pokey 3G service that is comparable to the 1300/700 DSL service we get there.
For me I dropped more calls in dead zones with both T-mobile and AT&T than I have noticed w/VZW but the single biggest advantage Verizon has over any other carriers is coverage. I should NEVER, EVER, EVER have No Service show up along major interstates yet with both T-mobile and AT&T I did. I have never been w/o VZW service in the last year I've had it.
Back in late 2009 and early 2010 I was scraping jail inmate registry records for Scott and Dakota County, MN. This was simply a script which incremented the ID numbers by one several times a day and put them out into a CSV. I uploaded these to Google Docs and had Docs Widgets build simple charts based on those data for a rolling ~6 month window of inmates.
As I started looking deeper into the data I started noticing I had ages lower than 18. Odd I thought but sure enough, Scott County was including their juvenile records in the data mixed with the adults even though it wasn't shown on their public website.
Within mere minutes of my e-mail they were on the phone with me and informed me they closed the hole. After mentioning that the only way someone may have been able to retrieve a juvenile record is if they âoeguessedâ the booking number, I replied that the booking numbers are sequential and thus âoeguessingâ is as simple as incrementing by 1. After our short discussion they asked me to let them know immediately if I noticed anything else with their data and the call was ended.
It's surprising how lax security is anywhere and to the poster elsewhere in this thread that said this is what you get when you outsource to India, this particular web stuff was not performed with outsourced talent so that comment was nothing short of asinine.
Their poor policy and the public's perception of that company. The more people hear about PayPal's poor internal decision making the better off everyone is about avoiding their biggest vulnerabilities.
As someone who has Amazon Prime (I got it for like $39 as a grad student and it's still good until this summer) and uses a Roku, I can tell you that I would definitely not be paying for a "KindleTV" + Prime if they dropped my Roku.
Why? Because their library sucks, the interface is fucking terrible, and the way they don't group show seasons together into one show is just wrong.
Amazon doesn't need to work on a Roku replacement, they need to work on a Prime Video replacement and pronto.
If they could now re-design a furniture store where customers would buy furniture which would be then delivered to their homes already assembled would be a huge step forward. Oh wait...
Behavior Detection Officers (BDOs): An increase of $20M and 350 BDOs (210 FTE) is requested to further enhance TSAâ(TM)s Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques program. The FY 2011 request includes a total of 3,350 officers, to enhance coverage at lanes and shifts at high risk Category X and I airports, and expand coverage to smaller airports.
[...]
Transitioned validated multi-cultural indicators of hostile intent, and demonstrated a mobile device that enables TSA Behavioral Detection Officers to record observations, automatically calculate behavior-based scoring, and share information among peers and with supervisors in near-real time. This potentially saves TSA an estimated 60 - 120 FTEs.
I did my masters thesis on this subject and the TSA is doing the same thing the Israelis are. In fact, they spend a lot more than you would think on doing it. The problem seems to be that because people A) don't recognize this effort, B) because it's just as expensive as the machines, and C) it's just as ineffective because it ignores the fact that terrorists could walk into the building strapped with explosives in front of the screening area and kill hundreds+ of people.
So I was bored and decided to watch a few of the pilots. As someone who loved Netflix's House of Cards, I was excited to see what Amazon had in store for us of similar caliber. Well, suffice to say that spreading their dollars across numerous pilots instead of one single show gets you what you expect: utter trash.
Those Who Can't, a story about three teachers (gym, history, and Spanish) was utterly terrible. They hated a jock in the school who was constantly annoying them and being the stereotypical douchebag. The script was jerky, the acting was bad, and the entire premise was overdone. Not impressive in the least, in fact in many instances it was downright painful.
Alpha House starts out great with Bill Murray getting arrested and John Goodman watching as he freaks out but it goes downhill from there mostly because Murray is not on the show after that first 45 second cameo. The vulgarity (something I don't mind in the least and use regularly myself) is there for vulgarity's sake, not because it makes sense in the dialogue. The show itself is slow, boring, and pointless. It's like Amazon was trying to make fun of House of Cards on SNL but failing as SNL tends to do so well.
While I haven't watched all the pilots yet, I really don't think I have much desire to do so. I am still waiting for more House of Cards and certainly more Arrested Development on Netflix but this Amazon shit is just bad. They need to get their shit together and up their game if they think they're going to compete with Netflix's first-run flagship.
I am a SAS developer and have never run into any such problems but I won't say I don't believe you. However, the benefit of that large licensing fee is the easy access to SAS help resources (real live people living over there in Cary, NC) who get back to you VERY QUICKLY for ANY level of technical question you have.
Their employees, at least the hundred or so I've met over the years when presenting at SAS Global Forum, have been INCREDIBLY friendly and helpful.
Because it's blank; as in, I don't have cable TV nor will I ever have it again because streaming is what I prefer. Once HBO stops just putting feelers out to the public so the cable companies can realize the hold HBO has over them and they could move their catalog to streaming only, maybe I'd have a clue what Game of Thrones is even about.
Slashdot Mirror
As a one-time worker bee who is now a part of senior management (with an MPA and not an MBA, although they are pretty similar) I understand what he is saying but I disagree that people should have a better chance of being hired because they have the three letters next to their name.
I hire for open reqs based on the PERSON and their SKILLSET, not the degree they may or may not hold. You know, the way it should be. What Musk is promoting through another one of his ridiculous soundbites is that we should pay more attention to degrees (good or bad) than the skills someone brings along with them.
Musk can be absolutely brilliant and incredibly and insanely stupid all at the same time.
No, the problem is that the public sector does not operate anything at all like the private sector all the while trying to emulate it under the overhead and red tape that comes along with requiring the public's input.
In addition to the issues seen with how the public sector operates, we have the requirement of outsourcing to the private sector to do the bulk of work through private/public partnerships which the public sector cannot and will not effectively manage,
The competing interests of these partnerships leans heavily on the private sector to make loads of money while the public sector expects them to operate within the bounds of the red tape the private sector is not accustomed or willing to accept as part of their business model.
If the government took this upon themselves to do anything in its entirety, it would likely be done slowly but correctly. Unfortunately, we end up with the result we did: a quickly cobbled together, expensive, and poorly implemented product which would never have seen the light of day in the private sector.
This happens ALL THE TIME with public/private partnerships. Take a look at the website redesign for the City of Apple Valley, Minnesota which was originally budgeted at $76,000 but later reduced to a much more reasonable, although still incredibly expensive $30,000. The resulting site is basically unusable, slow, horrendous to update, and slightly more useless than its predecessor (lipstick on a pig).
I am shocked! Nothing like this has ever happened on the Internet before.
FTFY.
I'd love to see the Tesla sales numbers from Austin vs the rest of the state. Austin residents have long been at odds w/the rest of the state and their politics and as such I have a feeling we'd see a pretty high correlation with Austin vs Tesla ownership when compared w/the rest of the state.
I once had a non-technical manager and she told me what I did was simply "magic" to her and others and while she knew the results provided weren't as simple as it seemed to them, others in the organization felt it was.
It's a very difficult concept for non-technical people to understand and part of the life of any developer to deal with. It's the same thing many developers feel about management and administration and we all need to share in the responsibility of not assuming it's easy and/or "magic".
They needed something to release with the iPhone6.
Sounds more like Jobs than Trump to me.
I have repeatedly requested camera views from publicly owned but privately operated buses in the southern suburbs of the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area.
These cameras exist both inside and outside of the buses but whenever an issue arises which negatively impact the bus drivers or the system itself, the camera feeds are unavailable, usually due to some sort of unknown malfunction: http://www.lazylightning.org/bus-2-0-directs-mvta-driver-onto-dirt-shoulder
However, when they are not at fault, the videos are available to me right away and without question: http://www.lazylightning.org/mvta-rider-alleges-racism-over-bus-incident
This.
1. I went to a state school in Ohio which offered me a scholarship for athletics during undergrad. We paid very little.
2. I delayed grad school until I found a company that would pay for my education. I left that company with about 5 classes remaining but only had to end up paying $5200 total for a $28,000+ education.
3. This is being compared to the home loan situation. People were doing things that were stupid then too such as buying homes beyond their means, not educating themselves about the types of loans they were obtaining, etc. This is no different.
Do not go to a school you cannot afford and most definitely don't go into a major which will not provide you with a working wage afterward.
What sorts of public campaigns have you witnessed for school boards where these sorts of asinine discussions are raised? This would be injected into the meeting agenda as a minor item lumped with a bunch of others which would have all been approved with a single quick vote so they could move on to much more important topics such as wasting money on some frivolous sporting event or booster club meeting.
These sorts of discussions only come up during campaigns AFTER they've been put into place and one person in the community stands up to say WTF and is ignored at meeting after meeting by the administration who put it into place with the consent of the morons on the school board and then runs solely on the platform of removing this one item.
After they spend $1500 running, get on the board and abolish the decision, something else comes up which is possibly worse and they are powerless and clueless to stop it.
This is the problem with all local level government bodies (city, county, etc). People run on a single stupid platform, are elected, and stay there forever or are booted out because someone else has another single stupid platform of the day.
Most everyone else just shrugs, says ok, and their kids get scanned.
(As an aside, my kid is NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER getting their fucking eyes or fingerprints or any other biometric data scanned for school -- fuck that noise).
Yesterday I got a scam call for a free resort stay if I was over the age of 28 and would provide them my credit card number.
While this particular scam is nothing particularly new, what was surprising is that the call appeared to originate from my area code. When I called the number back it went to a woman's voicemail. I'm guessing the entire thing was spoofed and she's an unknowing accomplice to this scam. Hell, they could be choosing numbers entirely at random.
I have the legal right to ask for the video from a video camera that is owned and operated by the public sector, I have no legal right to do so from someone with Google glass.
This.
I use it on my LinkedIn profile so that recruiters don't learn my real number but can still get in touch with me easily.
I have Verizon (I have had T-mobile and various rebranded AT&Ts over the years as well) and have found the Big Red to be the best overall for a few reasons:
- Coverage
- Data sharing
- Cost
I think my wife and I pay about $150 for our two lines which include unlimited voice and text with 4GB of data shared between us and our chosen devices.
AT&T was less money (about $130/month) however we had 450 anytime minutes/1000 night/weekend with rollover and no SMS plan. Being that my wife is using around 1000 SMSs a month, the cost savings from that alone is worth it.
Now, Verizon's 3G is noticeably slower than AT&T and while that doesn't matter much in the metro area where our primary residence is located as there is LTE, at our lake home (which has LTE about 500 feet outside of the cabin) we are stuck w/pokey 3G service that is comparable to the 1300/700 DSL service we get there.
For me I dropped more calls in dead zones with both T-mobile and AT&T than I have noticed w/VZW but the single biggest advantage Verizon has over any other carriers is coverage. I should NEVER, EVER, EVER have No Service show up along major interstates yet with both T-mobile and AT&T I did. I have never been w/o VZW service in the last year I've had it.
To me the $150/month is well worth it. YMMV.
Back in late 2009 and early 2010 I was scraping jail inmate registry records for Scott and Dakota County, MN. This was simply a script which incremented the ID numbers by one several times a day and put them out into a CSV. I uploaded these to Google Docs and had Docs Widgets build simple charts based on those data for a rolling ~6 month window of inmates.
As I started looking deeper into the data I started noticing I had ages lower than 18. Odd I thought but sure enough, Scott County was including their juvenile records in the data mixed with the adults even though it wasn't shown on their public website.
I contacted the County and they fixed the bug (you can read about that here: http://www.lazylightning.org/scott-county-quickly-fixes-juvenile-jail-roster-issue) but I was still surprised at the relative lack of security for juvenile records:
It's surprising how lax security is anywhere and to the poster elsewhere in this thread that said this is what you get when you outsource to India, this particular web stuff was not performed with outsourced talent so that comment was nothing short of asinine.
Their poor policy and the public's perception of that company. The more people hear about PayPal's poor internal decision making the better off everyone is about avoiding their biggest vulnerabilities.
Woooooosh
As someone who has Amazon Prime (I got it for like $39 as a grad student and it's still good until this summer) and uses a Roku, I can tell you that I would definitely not be paying for a "KindleTV" + Prime if they dropped my Roku.
Why? Because their library sucks, the interface is fucking terrible, and the way they don't group show seasons together into one show is just wrong.
Amazon doesn't need to work on a Roku replacement, they need to work on a Prime Video replacement and pronto.
If they could now re-design a furniture store where customers would buy furniture which would be then delivered to their homes already assembled would be a huge step forward. Oh wait...
School districts do this to when levies don't pass. They immediately cut athletic programs and bus service.
My bad, I meant to include the source: http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/budget_bib_fy2011.pdf
I did my masters thesis on this subject and the TSA is doing the same thing the Israelis are. In fact, they spend a lot more than you would think on doing it. The problem seems to be that because people A) don't recognize this effort, B) because it's just as expensive as the machines, and C) it's just as ineffective because it ignores the fact that terrorists could walk into the building strapped with explosives in front of the screening area and kill hundreds+ of people.
So I was bored and decided to watch a few of the pilots. As someone who loved Netflix's House of Cards, I was excited to see what Amazon had in store for us of similar caliber. Well, suffice to say that spreading their dollars across numerous pilots instead of one single show gets you what you expect: utter trash.
Those Who Can't, a story about three teachers (gym, history, and Spanish) was utterly terrible. They hated a jock in the school who was constantly annoying them and being the stereotypical douchebag. The script was jerky, the acting was bad, and the entire premise was overdone. Not impressive in the least, in fact in many instances it was downright painful.
Alpha House starts out great with Bill Murray getting arrested and John Goodman watching as he freaks out but it goes downhill from there mostly because Murray is not on the show after that first 45 second cameo. The vulgarity (something I don't mind in the least and use regularly myself) is there for vulgarity's sake, not because it makes sense in the dialogue. The show itself is slow, boring, and pointless. It's like Amazon was trying to make fun of House of Cards on SNL but failing as SNL tends to do so well.
While I haven't watched all the pilots yet, I really don't think I have much desire to do so. I am still waiting for more House of Cards and certainly more Arrested Development on Netflix but this Amazon shit is just bad. They need to get their shit together and up their game if they think they're going to compete with Netflix's first-run flagship.
I am a SAS developer and have never run into any such problems but I won't say I don't believe you. However, the benefit of that large licensing fee is the easy access to SAS help resources (real live people living over there in Cary, NC) who get back to you VERY QUICKLY for ANY level of technical question you have.
Their employees, at least the hundred or so I've met over the years when presenting at SAS Global Forum, have been INCREDIBLY friendly and helpful.
Because it's blank; as in, I don't have cable TV nor will I ever have it again because streaming is what I prefer. Once HBO stops just putting feelers out to the public so the cable companies can realize the hold HBO has over them and they could move their catalog to streaming only, maybe I'd have a clue what Game of Thrones is even about.
HBO: streaming++; current business model--