I implemented a somewhat similar system (based on statistics such as TLD, time the email was received, whether it had attachments, how many recipients on the recipient list, etc) and it was decent. It's not as good as a good system that does consider text, but it wasn't as bad as many of the systems on the market.
Different reason. The entire world should wait on Vista until SP1 just for basic sanity reasons. Korea is screwed with Vista because their entire infrastructure is based on ActiveX, something that appears not to be changing unless they release a special Korean Vista that has it.
The Federal Government, which pays for most of the innovation in the US (directly through r&d contracts, or indirectly through grants) has cut back on its tech spending to free up money for the war.
Defense money, now as in the 1950s, does in substantial fashion go to tech innovation. You might have heard of a few of the (D)ARPA projects; in fact, you're using one now.
1. Late night, excuse the error. Whoever wrote it, HC was poorly crafted
2. If there is wiggle room in Habeas Corpus, then it is most certainly defective. If the government can decide when it would like to "present the body", then what's the point of having any requirement in the first place?
3. *I* couldn't write a better one because I'm not a lawyer. As a legal document, however, most lawyers could do better due to poorly-placed grammatical errors and loopholes like this one. I at least have every hope that there's not a decent court in the country that will suffer Gonzalez and his new "interpretation" (desecration) of the Constitution. To my knowledge, his interpretation is not supported at all by judicial review.
And is that really your best argument? You couldn't write a better Constitution so don't criticize? C'mon.
So in other words, there's nothing to stop Gonzalez, and since we (as a nation) made the monster, that's what we get. Damn, that's depressing.
I'm inclined to argue the point that since the bill of rights states specifically *when* habeas corpus *can* be suspended, and since those times are pretty much martial law, that it can't be suspended at will. But I'm not a lawyer.
We do not seem to be up to the task of late. They were afraid of that.
Essential liberty vs. a little temporary safety...
The government only has the power attributed to it by The People. Power is to the people. The Constitution is a limit on the government's power, not your rights. Have we got that?
I agree with you. I want the government the fuck out of my life for the most part. But here's the problem: Where in the Constitution does it explicitly state that the government can't do anything the Constitution doesn't spell out? It claims to reserve rights to the states, sure, but that's still government and won't end up helping much.
Not only that, the notion of reserved rights for the Fed. government was a matter of much debate even after the Constitution was written, pitting the strict contructionalists like Jefferson vs. others who didn't necessarily agree. There was much resettling of rights after the Constitution was written, including Federal rights as well as the judicial power grab a la Marbury vs. Madison.
Point is, by no means did the writing of the Constitution settle the issue of Federal rights, among many others. As a result, we have dickwads like Gonzalez spouting off some shit that would render the bill of rights completely null and void.
To me, the problem boils down to one thing: Jefferson was more interested in writing a document that was flowery and sounded nice than one that was airtight in a manner that a properly trained lawyer would appreciate. That and the grammatical error that has caused so much consternation with the Second Amendment for God knows how many years.
An interesting thing to know would be whether these reports are gathered from all over the world or just from North America. (Did TFA tell this? I hope noone expects me having read it.:)
Not only that, it was also in the freaking synopsis on the./ front page. Are you sure you shouldn't be over at digg?
Have you ever lived in Southern Califorina? If there is ever a could in the sky people run off the street to take shelter in the nearest building. Don't ask what happens in a freak rain shower! Drizzle of doom...
I have, and it's hilarious. They react to driving in rain the way Southerners do to driving in snow. Half panic, and half drive like the streets are completely dry. Idiots.
That said, driving in a decent rain shower can be much more dangerous in Southern California than in other areas. First, they can go many months without any rain, so a ton of oil and dirt can build up on the roads, making it treacherous when it first starts to rain. Second, the storm sewer systems are often woefully underengineered, and aren't up to the challenge of handling all the water running down hilly streets. This causes standing water in intersections during even moderate showers. It's surprising when you move there how little rain can result in standing water. So even for a non-SC driver, a rainshower that would be perfectly innocuous back east can cause big problems in LA.
Except that's not what the telcos want to do. They want to charge more for MSN to go faster, and if Google doesn't pay extra, they don't get the extra service levels. Sure, to the unwashed masses, it appears that Google is being punished, but to technologically sophisticated types like you and me, it's obvious that MSN is just paying for better service, and getting it.
So, what's the problem, exactly?
The problem is that MSN isn't paying for the service, *I* am. And if they throttle back the speed for Google, that pisses me off. There aren't "service levels" here except in marketing weasel speak. There's a connection at a speed that I pay for, and if shit starts going slower than that, I'm not happy. As long as I can buy a high speed connection that they're NOT allowed to throttle, I don't care, but what I see coming is that sort of throttling and such.
Wouldn't net neutrality help to stop the ridiculous arbitrary blocking of ports that many ISPs impose, which basically keeps people from using the Internet as it was intended?
Not as I understand it. Net Neutrality means not allowing your provider to take cash from Microsoft to speed up MSN and slow down Google (for example, but using the typical white and black hats that slashdot so loves). It's about treating traffic that I as a user request without regard as to WHO sends it. I don't take that to mean that they're required to open every port for you (ie, HOW it's sent).
Inevitably, though, net neutrality will fail, simply because there's so much cash lined up against it. The telecoms have historically had more juice up on Capitol Hill than have, say, Google. The telecoms would love to sell every bit twice - once to you, and once to the sender. That would be fine if the sender didn't also have to pay for net access themselves. So in the end, every bit will be sold three times.
"Web 2.0" is the "information superhighway" of the middle of this decade. That is, it is the phrase that makes it clear that the speaker is a moron. And what the fuck the web has to do with a charging desk, I dunno.
No, a company is used to shield its owners from liability. There's no protection for the executives (or employees, for that matter), they are fully responsible for all their actions.
On a criminal, not civil, basis. Good luck proving that Darl is an evil mastermind and not just a fucking idiot. Because that's what you're talking about.
While SCO has plausible deniability for the claims in court, SCO executives mad a lot of public statements (such as about finding numbers of lines of infringing code) that would tend to inflate their stock price, were demonstrably false, that that the SCO executives in question either knew were false, or should have known, had they done their due diligence before uttering them. There ought to be plenty of meat there.
We shall see. The question is if this can become a criminal issue, and I have to say I don't think so. Certainly it could be a matter of a class-action shareholder suit, but since there's going to be no money left when all's said and done, there'd be no point. For criminal, you'll have to prove that Darl knew they didn't have jack but pumped it anyway.
I'd expect that the SEC and the shareholders are holding off pending the resolution of the suit. After that, if there's anything worth going after and/or anyone left standing on the SCO side, you might see some action.
Right, but I'm assuming that all that'll be left of SCO at the end is a smoldering crater. If there's a few dimes left, I'm sure it'll find its way somehow to the insiders or the legal team, and good luck getting it back.
Some SCO executives ended up with money in their pockets. Some shareholders ended up losing bundles. Don't be surprised if, once SCO v. IBM is over there's another one, leveling anything left of SCO and turning the execs into imprisoned paupers.
I don't think you can hit the execs with civil suits. Not a lawyer, but I don't think the company's liability extends to the individuals that comprise it. As for criminal, I really think they'll need more evidence than actually exists, and it'll have to show malfeasance as opposed to stupidity.
Meanwhile, if the banking regulators are on the ball, they'll be watching the assets of the people in question, to see if they start moving into out-of-country money-cleaning-and-storage operations. B-)
Sadly, I don't think they'll need to. It pisses me off, but I think these guys fall back to earth on some rather golden parachutes. We shall see. Believe me, I hope you're right. I hate it when a shell corporation buys up a formerly good company to perpetrate bullshit like this.
So when can we expect the SEC investigation of SCO misconduct? I mean, they're all over Apple over some minor options backdating, the least they could do is deal with the huge pump-and-dump fraud going on in plain sight.
There's no such thing as "minor" options backdating, it's illegal. SCO's crap, while it's obvious to us that it's a shakedown-gone-wrong turned pump-n-dump sceme, proving that is another matter. Put another way - what would the SEC hit them *for*, and what would the proof be? And could they prove fraud as opposed to incompetence?
Or how about the ice storm in USA now, or the fact that here in Denmark the average temperature for january is so far 7 degrees celsius above normal. Or the 3 storms we have had here.
This might just be a statistical fluke, but I fear we are in for a really big change in our lifes.
Nope. Not only is it not evidence of big change, it isn't even a statistical fluke. I wish I had time to find the article, but a statistician once proved how frequently something strange happened somewhere with regard to the weather. It turned out to be pretty much something, somewhere, constantly. It's the friggin' weather - there's always somewhere that's warmer than expected, somewhere that's colder, somewhere rainy, somewhere dry, etc. This was even true before people started burning shit. Remember in 2005 when we had 28 named tropical storms and that was evidence of global warming? Then we had 10 in 2006 and that was evidence of global warming? The fact is, the weather always does something weird, and we can't use that as positive evidence of anything.
Does that mean I'm claiming global warming isn't real? No. But to use anecdotal evidence about how weird the weather is in various places at any given time won't cut it. That's why it's far tougher than some would like to believe to nail down the anthropogenic nature of global warming - the variance in weather is too great, and over too long a time scale, and the data we have is fairly short. In addition, modeling climate based on increasing CO2 levels is exceptionally complicated and depends strongly on other factors such as particulate pollutants. As a result, it's only been very recently that evidence has been published with extremely detailed ocean temperature modeling that strongly mirror trends in increasing CO2 levels.
Of course, another way of looking at things is that it doesn't *matter* whether global warming is man-made - it *is* happening, and we need to decide whether to "fix" it either way. If one's house is underwater, it's little comfort to know that it wasn't the fault of mankind.
Umm... yes, it is. All that's required is efficacy studies.
Honestly, the least you could've done is RTFA.
Hey genius, how much does it cost to perform those efficicacy studies, clinical trials, safety studies, etc? The least you could have done is read my original fucking post.
FUCK OVERSIGHT! I want this program OVER. Unless I am an actual proven threat in a court of law, there should be nobody listening to anything I'm doing.
So you want to be proven guilty before they can collect the evidence that would actually prove your guilt? 1) that makes no sense, as it would be circular, and 2) the standard isn't that high for regular warrants.
So if this medecine is so wonderful, and developing medecines for profit is so evil, why doesn't this University start mass-producing this medecine and giving it away for free?
For one, it would be illegal since the thing isn't FDA approved. And what does it take to get FDA approved, you ask? Years of studies and many millions of dollars. See many of the other posts on the topic, I'll not repeat them, but the basic point is that they'd have no hope of recouping their investment simply because tons of other companies would drive the price of the drug through the floor.
A message is addressed and sent to somebody, who opens it up and reads it, then reacts to whatever it says--possibly by writing their own letter and sending it to the original person. The difference being, of course, that the messages are sent over a wire at extremely fast speeds rather than put into a post office box. You could probably extend the analogy to include "mail sorting machines" along the way for routers/switches, but it might be more than they need (or want) to know.
One problem with that metaphor is that email - the thing most people want explained - functions rather differently than snail mail, from the point of view of the user. Their mail comes from whoever the hell sent it to their ISP ("post office"). What happens then? Well, the mailman doesn't deliver it, at least until I call the lazy bastard and tell him to come give me my mail (POP) or read me my mail and save it for me (IMAP).
Lessig sounds like the typical poster here. When looking for an example, bash MS.
Reading comprehension, dammit. He said:
1) he was someone who was only "reluctantly" on the side of the regulators;
2) Apple and IBM would have done the same thing if they could;
3) OS's inherently drive toward monopolization for standardization; and
4) it's natural for any company in their spot to protect their monopoly.
He then uses this example to suggest that competition from atypical sources (ie, Linux or Muni broadband in his examples) works better than regulation.
If anything, he's a MS *apologist* and monopolist coddler.
Let's say that you have an IT department of 5 people. They service a staff of 200. Now, let's say that you have 8 of those 200 staff are highly experienced and valued employees, but they don't know the basics of how email works. These will be the people who regularly call IT to have them come and personally fix an issue for them. Now, at some point, those 5 IT pros are going to get backlogged with calls from these people, and you can only do so many things at once.
If that's the case, then hire someone whose sole job is to solve the low-level technical issues suffered by non-computer-proficient staff, which will probably set the company back $25K/year and probably could be filled by someone without a college degree. That makes more sense than FIRING someone who makes over $200K/year and has unreplaceable experience in their field.
Meanwile, your highly valued and highly experienced employees are not doing anything, so they can't be making you money.
Not the case, since the work these people do generally isn't done by computer. They do pretty much email, word processing, and web. If their computer breaks, use another one temporarily. If they can't find an email, again, hire a high school kid to find it. It's about scarcity of skill sets, and Outlook isn't high on that list. If these people need the secretary to PRINT their email for them, that's fine. They're worth it. Their time is more valuable than his/hers.
Second, you are assuming that experience in IT has nothing to do with a value of an IT professional. That's just not the case.
For the person who will usually be tasked with helping someone with email, experience isn't necessary.
An experienced, capable IT professional is worth his weight in gold.
Agree wholeheartedly, but again, that's not the person whose time is in question. We're talking about the new intern or kid straight out of college, and if he needs to help the VP with email, that's what he does.
Third, you assume that BASIC computer skills are a completely different skill set, as opposed to just another tool to do one's job. Basic computer skills are no longer a special skill. They are a necessity, and if you don't have them, it's the same as not being current with your particular skill set.
That's been true of college grads for about 10 years. However, for older employees - those with the most experience - that is most certainly not true. In my field, a lot of the most experienced employees are retired gov employees who are around 52-65. Not all of these people are exceptionally computer literate, but they are some of our most valuable employees because of what and who they know. These people are rare, and asking them how proficient they are with MS Office in an interview is ridiculous. It would be cheaper and easier to find them their own personal secretary to do those things for them, or perhaps a 1/5 share of such a person.
Now, that being said, your employees with 30+ years of field-specific experience are worthless if they can't do their jobs because they can't (or won't) keep up with the tools that their job requires them to use (and the tools that their peers are using).
There are many people whose jobs do not require a computer more than peripherally and that's the sort of people I'm talking about. They're all managers, their work is 90% dealing with other people and typing up the odd report. The most computer-unsavvy probably needs 5 hours a week, on average, from IT support. But you'd fire this guy instead?
Let's put it this way - I know, for a fact, that the people in question are doing very well at their jobs despite the time they take from IT, and IT still does fine too. If their collected computer incompetence has necessitated that we have 1 more IT guy than we otherwise would, that's a good investment. The alternative is firing about 5 people and a collected 150 years of experience. If that's a good personnel decision to you, you're nu
I might also consider per capita - Caltech competes very favorably despite having a much smaller pool than many of these other institutions. They've had 3 Chemistry Nobel prizes since 1990 - pretty damned good for a department of about 30 full-time faculty.
Slashdot Mirror
I implemented a somewhat similar system (based on statistics such as TLD, time the email was received, whether it had attachments, how many recipients on the recipient list, etc) and it was decent. It's not as good as a good system that does consider text, but it wasn't as bad as many of the systems on the market.
If I did something that damned dumb, I sure wouldn't admit it.
Different reason. The entire world should wait on Vista until SP1 just for basic sanity reasons. Korea is screwed with Vista because their entire infrastructure is based on ActiveX, something that appears not to be changing unless they release a special Korean Vista that has it.
The Federal Government, which pays for most of the innovation in the US (directly through r&d contracts, or indirectly through grants) has cut back on its tech spending to free up money for the war.
Defense money, now as in the 1950s, does in substantial fashion go to tech innovation. You might have heard of a few of the (D)ARPA projects; in fact, you're using one now.
1. Late night, excuse the error. Whoever wrote it, HC was poorly crafted 2. If there is wiggle room in Habeas Corpus, then it is most certainly defective. If the government can decide when it would like to "present the body", then what's the point of having any requirement in the first place? 3. *I* couldn't write a better one because I'm not a lawyer. As a legal document, however, most lawyers could do better due to poorly-placed grammatical errors and loopholes like this one. I at least have every hope that there's not a decent court in the country that will suffer Gonzalez and his new "interpretation" (desecration) of the Constitution. To my knowledge, his interpretation is not supported at all by judicial review.
And is that really your best argument? You couldn't write a better Constitution so don't criticize? C'mon.
So in other words, there's nothing to stop Gonzalez, and since we (as a nation) made the monster, that's what we get. Damn, that's depressing.
I'm inclined to argue the point that since the bill of rights states specifically *when* habeas corpus *can* be suspended, and since those times are pretty much martial law, that it can't be suspended at will. But I'm not a lawyer.
We do not seem to be up to the task of late. They were afraid of that.
Essential liberty vs. a little temporary safety...
The government only has the power attributed to it by The People. Power is to the people. The Constitution is a limit on the government's power, not your rights. Have we got that?
I agree with you. I want the government the fuck out of my life for the most part. But here's the problem: Where in the Constitution does it explicitly state that the government can't do anything the Constitution doesn't spell out? It claims to reserve rights to the states, sure, but that's still government and won't end up helping much.
Not only that, the notion of reserved rights for the Fed. government was a matter of much debate even after the Constitution was written, pitting the strict contructionalists like Jefferson vs. others who didn't necessarily agree. There was much resettling of rights after the Constitution was written, including Federal rights as well as the judicial power grab a la Marbury vs. Madison.
Point is, by no means did the writing of the Constitution settle the issue of Federal rights, among many others. As a result, we have dickwads like Gonzalez spouting off some shit that would render the bill of rights completely null and void.
To me, the problem boils down to one thing: Jefferson was more interested in writing a document that was flowery and sounded nice than one that was airtight in a manner that a properly trained lawyer would appreciate. That and the grammatical error that has caused so much consternation with the Second Amendment for God knows how many years.
An interesting thing to know would be whether these reports are gathered from all over the world or just from North America. (Did TFA tell this? I hope noone expects me having read it. :)
Not only that, it was also in the freaking synopsis on the ./ front page. Are you sure you shouldn't be over at digg?
This lists the 9 exemptions allowed for refusing FOIA requests. Bureaucratic obstinance doesn't seem to be on the list.
No, but this is, and I imagine that's what they'll quote:
I'm sure they'll say the respective companies' detailed coverage and speed maps would be useful to the competition, blah, blah.
Have you ever lived in Southern Califorina? If there is ever a could in the sky people run off the street to take shelter in the nearest building. Don't ask what happens in a freak rain shower! Drizzle of doom...
I have, and it's hilarious. They react to driving in rain the way Southerners do to driving in snow. Half panic, and half drive like the streets are completely dry. Idiots.
That said, driving in a decent rain shower can be much more dangerous in Southern California than in other areas. First, they can go many months without any rain, so a ton of oil and dirt can build up on the roads, making it treacherous when it first starts to rain. Second, the storm sewer systems are often woefully underengineered, and aren't up to the challenge of handling all the water running down hilly streets. This causes standing water in intersections during even moderate showers. It's surprising when you move there how little rain can result in standing water. So even for a non-SC driver, a rainshower that would be perfectly innocuous back east can cause big problems in LA.
Except that's not what the telcos want to do. They want to charge more for MSN to go faster, and if Google doesn't pay extra, they don't get the extra service levels. Sure, to the unwashed masses, it appears that Google is being punished, but to technologically sophisticated types like you and me, it's obvious that MSN is just paying for better service, and getting it. So, what's the problem, exactly?
The problem is that MSN isn't paying for the service, *I* am. And if they throttle back the speed for Google, that pisses me off. There aren't "service levels" here except in marketing weasel speak. There's a connection at a speed that I pay for, and if shit starts going slower than that, I'm not happy. As long as I can buy a high speed connection that they're NOT allowed to throttle, I don't care, but what I see coming is that sort of throttling and such.
Wouldn't net neutrality help to stop the ridiculous arbitrary blocking of ports that many ISPs impose, which basically keeps people from using the Internet as it was intended?
Not as I understand it. Net Neutrality means not allowing your provider to take cash from Microsoft to speed up MSN and slow down Google (for example, but using the typical white and black hats that slashdot so loves). It's about treating traffic that I as a user request without regard as to WHO sends it. I don't take that to mean that they're required to open every port for you (ie, HOW it's sent).
Inevitably, though, net neutrality will fail, simply because there's so much cash lined up against it. The telecoms have historically had more juice up on Capitol Hill than have, say, Google. The telecoms would love to sell every bit twice - once to you, and once to the sender. That would be fine if the sender didn't also have to pay for net access themselves. So in the end, every bit will be sold three times.
"Web 2.0" is the "information superhighway" of the middle of this decade. That is, it is the phrase that makes it clear that the speaker is a moron. And what the fuck the web has to do with a charging desk, I dunno.
No, a company is used to shield its owners from liability. There's no protection for the executives (or employees, for that matter), they are fully responsible for all their actions.
On a criminal, not civil, basis. Good luck proving that Darl is an evil mastermind and not just a fucking idiot. Because that's what you're talking about.
While SCO has plausible deniability for the claims in court, SCO executives mad a lot of public statements (such as about finding numbers of lines of infringing code) that would tend to inflate their stock price, were demonstrably false, that that the SCO executives in question either knew were false, or should have known, had they done their due diligence before uttering them. There ought to be plenty of meat there.
We shall see. The question is if this can become a criminal issue, and I have to say I don't think so. Certainly it could be a matter of a class-action shareholder suit, but since there's going to be no money left when all's said and done, there'd be no point. For criminal, you'll have to prove that Darl knew they didn't have jack but pumped it anyway.
I'd expect that the SEC and the shareholders are holding off pending the resolution of the suit. After that, if there's anything worth going after and/or anyone left standing on the SCO side, you might see some action.
Right, but I'm assuming that all that'll be left of SCO at the end is a smoldering crater. If there's a few dimes left, I'm sure it'll find its way somehow to the insiders or the legal team, and good luck getting it back.
Some SCO executives ended up with money in their pockets. Some shareholders ended up losing bundles. Don't be surprised if, once SCO v. IBM is over there's another one, leveling anything left of SCO and turning the execs into imprisoned paupers.
I don't think you can hit the execs with civil suits. Not a lawyer, but I don't think the company's liability extends to the individuals that comprise it. As for criminal, I really think they'll need more evidence than actually exists, and it'll have to show malfeasance as opposed to stupidity.
Meanwhile, if the banking regulators are on the ball, they'll be watching the assets of the people in question, to see if they start moving into out-of-country money-cleaning-and-storage operations. B-)
Sadly, I don't think they'll need to. It pisses me off, but I think these guys fall back to earth on some rather golden parachutes. We shall see. Believe me, I hope you're right. I hate it when a shell corporation buys up a formerly good company to perpetrate bullshit like this.
So when can we expect the SEC investigation of SCO misconduct? I mean, they're all over Apple over some minor options backdating, the least they could do is deal with the huge pump-and-dump fraud going on in plain sight.
There's no such thing as "minor" options backdating, it's illegal. SCO's crap, while it's obvious to us that it's a shakedown-gone-wrong turned pump-n-dump sceme, proving that is another matter. Put another way - what would the SEC hit them *for*, and what would the proof be? And could they prove fraud as opposed to incompetence?
Why didn't he use the term "foot soldiers" instead?
If he did we'd be claiming that MS has a Hitler complex.
Or how about the ice storm in USA now, or the fact that here in Denmark the average temperature for january is so far 7 degrees celsius above normal. Or the 3 storms we have had here. This might just be a statistical fluke, but I fear we are in for a really big change in our lifes.
Nope. Not only is it not evidence of big change, it isn't even a statistical fluke. I wish I had time to find the article, but a statistician once proved how frequently something strange happened somewhere with regard to the weather. It turned out to be pretty much something, somewhere, constantly. It's the friggin' weather - there's always somewhere that's warmer than expected, somewhere that's colder, somewhere rainy, somewhere dry, etc. This was even true before people started burning shit. Remember in 2005 when we had 28 named tropical storms and that was evidence of global warming? Then we had 10 in 2006 and that was evidence of global warming? The fact is, the weather always does something weird, and we can't use that as positive evidence of anything.
Does that mean I'm claiming global warming isn't real? No. But to use anecdotal evidence about how weird the weather is in various places at any given time won't cut it. That's why it's far tougher than some would like to believe to nail down the anthropogenic nature of global warming - the variance in weather is too great, and over too long a time scale, and the data we have is fairly short. In addition, modeling climate based on increasing CO2 levels is exceptionally complicated and depends strongly on other factors such as particulate pollutants. As a result, it's only been very recently that evidence has been published with extremely detailed ocean temperature modeling that strongly mirror trends in increasing CO2 levels.
Of course, another way of looking at things is that it doesn't *matter* whether global warming is man-made - it *is* happening, and we need to decide whether to "fix" it either way. If one's house is underwater, it's little comfort to know that it wasn't the fault of mankind.
Umm... yes, it is. All that's required is efficacy studies. Honestly, the least you could've done is RTFA.
Hey genius, how much does it cost to perform those efficicacy studies, clinical trials, safety studies, etc? The least you could have done is read my original fucking post.
FUCK OVERSIGHT! I want this program OVER. Unless I am an actual proven threat in a court of law, there should be nobody listening to anything I'm doing.
So you want to be proven guilty before they can collect the evidence that would actually prove your guilt? 1) that makes no sense, as it would be circular, and 2) the standard isn't that high for regular warrants.
So if this medecine is so wonderful, and developing medecines for profit is so evil, why doesn't this University start mass-producing this medecine and giving it away for free?
For one, it would be illegal since the thing isn't FDA approved. And what does it take to get FDA approved, you ask? Years of studies and many millions of dollars. See many of the other posts on the topic, I'll not repeat them, but the basic point is that they'd have no hope of recouping their investment simply because tons of other companies would drive the price of the drug through the floor.
A message is addressed and sent to somebody, who opens it up and reads it, then reacts to whatever it says--possibly by writing their own letter and sending it to the original person. The difference being, of course, that the messages are sent over a wire at extremely fast speeds rather than put into a post office box. You could probably extend the analogy to include "mail sorting machines" along the way for routers/switches, but it might be more than they need (or want) to know.
One problem with that metaphor is that email - the thing most people want explained - functions rather differently than snail mail, from the point of view of the user. Their mail comes from whoever the hell sent it to their ISP ("post office"). What happens then? Well, the mailman doesn't deliver it, at least until I call the lazy bastard and tell him to come give me my mail (POP) or read me my mail and save it for me (IMAP).
Lessig sounds like the typical poster here. When looking for an example, bash MS.
Reading comprehension, dammit. He said:
1) he was someone who was only "reluctantly" on the side of the regulators;
2) Apple and IBM would have done the same thing if they could;
3) OS's inherently drive toward monopolization for standardization; and
4) it's natural for any company in their spot to protect their monopoly.
He then uses this example to suggest that competition from atypical sources (ie, Linux or Muni broadband in his examples) works better than regulation.
If anything, he's a MS *apologist* and monopolist coddler.
Let's say that you have an IT department of 5 people. They service a staff of 200. Now, let's say that you have 8 of those 200 staff are highly experienced and valued employees, but they don't know the basics of how email works. These will be the people who regularly call IT to have them come and personally fix an issue for them. Now, at some point, those 5 IT pros are going to get backlogged with calls from these people, and you can only do so many things at once.
If that's the case, then hire someone whose sole job is to solve the low-level technical issues suffered by non-computer-proficient staff, which will probably set the company back $25K/year and probably could be filled by someone without a college degree. That makes more sense than FIRING someone who makes over $200K/year and has unreplaceable experience in their field.
Meanwile, your highly valued and highly experienced employees are not doing anything, so they can't be making you money.
Not the case, since the work these people do generally isn't done by computer. They do pretty much email, word processing, and web. If their computer breaks, use another one temporarily. If they can't find an email, again, hire a high school kid to find it. It's about scarcity of skill sets, and Outlook isn't high on that list. If these people need the secretary to PRINT their email for them, that's fine. They're worth it. Their time is more valuable than his/hers.
Second, you are assuming that experience in IT has nothing to do with a value of an IT professional. That's just not the case.
For the person who will usually be tasked with helping someone with email, experience isn't necessary.
An experienced, capable IT professional is worth his weight in gold.
Agree wholeheartedly, but again, that's not the person whose time is in question. We're talking about the new intern or kid straight out of college, and if he needs to help the VP with email, that's what he does.
Third, you assume that BASIC computer skills are a completely different skill set, as opposed to just another tool to do one's job. Basic computer skills are no longer a special skill. They are a necessity, and if you don't have them, it's the same as not being current with your particular skill set.
That's been true of college grads for about 10 years. However, for older employees - those with the most experience - that is most certainly not true. In my field, a lot of the most experienced employees are retired gov employees who are around 52-65. Not all of these people are exceptionally computer literate, but they are some of our most valuable employees because of what and who they know. These people are rare, and asking them how proficient they are with MS Office in an interview is ridiculous. It would be cheaper and easier to find them their own personal secretary to do those things for them, or perhaps a 1/5 share of such a person.
Now, that being said, your employees with 30+ years of field-specific experience are worthless if they can't do their jobs because they can't (or won't) keep up with the tools that their job requires them to use (and the tools that their peers are using).
There are many people whose jobs do not require a computer more than peripherally and that's the sort of people I'm talking about. They're all managers, their work is 90% dealing with other people and typing up the odd report. The most computer-unsavvy probably needs 5 hours a week, on average, from IT support. But you'd fire this guy instead?
Let's put it this way - I know, for a fact, that the people in question are doing very well at their jobs despite the time they take from IT, and IT still does fine too. If their collected computer incompetence has necessitated that we have 1 more IT guy than we otherwise would, that's a good investment. The alternative is firing about 5 people and a collected 150 years of experience. If that's a good personnel decision to you, you're nu
I might also consider per capita - Caltech competes very favorably despite having a much smaller pool than many of these other institutions. They've had 3 Chemistry Nobel prizes since 1990 - pretty damned good for a department of about 30 full-time faculty.