As long as they don't forget about the Voyagers, I was in Jr High when they were launched so naturally, there is a special place in my heart for those things and their cargo of peace and love.
Unless you like to compare apples and oranges in your spare time...
If you can't handle apples, and, isn't it supposed tobe PC's?, compare them running Linux. That seems to be the way to get a truly meaningful comparison.
"I don't think the two -- Mac mini and whatever Intel puts out -- are really in the same market; that is, of course, unless Apple starts running OS X on x86 hardware," said IDC analyst Roger Kay.
Yes, it would be nice to know the actual instructions, since it seems possible that this is simply a test of how well applicants follow instructions, even when they know an alternative that hasn't been explicitely prohibited.
While Stanford has the right to evaluate an applicant by any criteria it chooses, if this criteria simply weeds out the technologically astute in favor of the sheep, it isn't a good test.
The whole idea of waiting for something to be thoroughly researched before taking action is just stupid. It's a kind of procrastination. Unless they are researchers studying how to improve on past research, people who focus on problems with the methodology are frequently just looking for justification to continue a bad habit.
I don't need much evidence beyond what I can observe myself. I know how healthy people tend to look, they usually aren't fat nor are they extremely skinny. It's even easier to tell by observing their behaviour, they are usually both physically and mentally energetic and active. I tend to be sceptical of any research that goes against what I already know.
Probably the most important, yet most controversial responsibility of being a parent is determining when the child has acquired the ability to make various decisions for himself. Most parents would like the child to acquire that ability, but find the ability to monitor a child's decisions useful in determining how much independence a child can handle.
My child almost always opts for pizza. I found this out the old fashioned way, by asking him. He also told me that the "balanced meal" was too nasty to consider. This brought back my own horrible memories of "meat" of indeterminate species and vegetables that had spent far too many hours simmering somewhere. I, too, usually ate pizza.
I'm not too worried about my kid, he's as skinny as a pole bean since spending several hours a day on the computer neither bulks him up or gives him the appetite to become obese. Besides, I think healthy teenagers can metabalize anything. Especially if the parent refuses to drive them anywhere within walking or biking distance.
Jeffery Skilling, both COO and then CEO of Enron was awarded an M.B.A from Harvard Buisness School.
What's your point? That since Mr. Skilling was awarded an M.B.A. from HBS that other bad boys have an equal right? HBS isn't allowed to make mistakes? If they make even one mistake, they must relax their standards for future applicants?
What does this have to do with the ethics of URL munging anyway?
So they screwed up. Admissions people aren't necessarily technical. So they hired someone who was. Apparently, they hired the wrong "experts". They weren't even alone, plenty of other reputable schools hired these same "experts". How do they get out of a bad situation? Hopefully, they fire the so-called "experts" and tell the applicants to apply again next year.
Do you know a better way to handle it? One that would be equally fair to the students who could successfully resist their curiousity? Turning back time is not an option.
Your sheet-of-paper-as-security example is the best analogy I've seen yet, except that if it ever happened, I doubt it would be an accident, it would be a test. Any applicant who peeked would deserve to be rejected out of sheer stupidity.
My speculation is that the security-by-not-so-obscure-URL was actually a mistake, not by the universities, but by the "experts" they hired. If the university administrators thought they needed to hire experts, they can't be blamed for selecting this method of security, they can only be blamed for picking stupid experts, and they can't turn back time and undo someone's mistake. But, they can choose to turn this into an ethics test. I hope that they have also taken recourse against the worthless experts they hired. It wouldn't be fair to the rejected applicants if anyone was allowed to get away with this.
"The students didn't steal passwords, spread a virus or trojan. All they did was akin to manually typing in an abiet complicated URL and accessed data on unprotected public servers."
No one accused the applicants of committing a crime. The issue is whether typing in the not-so-obscure URL was unethical and whether this breach of ethics can be used to screen out certain applicants.
Sure, it might seem utopian, but business school is the place to select for and teach ethical values if anywhere is. It is a choke point where it makes sense to weed out less ethical people. Being selective in this matter can only help the school's reputation. They don't need any scandelous alumni, even if the school itself technically isn't at fault.
Applicants who don't already have a higher standard of right and wrong than that enforced by the legal system are less likely to acquire one than someone who is honest from the start. Besides, these top tier schools have plenty of applicants and need any reason they can find to reject the excess.
The complication is that there are three parties involved. If the applicants knew they weren't supposed to see something, but an assistant left it out on the table, clearly the assistant is the one at fault. But, the applicant has a moral obligation not to take advantage of that assistant's mistake. In this case, it appears that no real damage was done to the universities, but the ethics of the applicants were tested and were not up to standards. It is a test.
Sort of like, if you design a bridge and it's a bad design - Does it make it okay since it's only on paper, no one ever intended to build it, it's only a test? Of course not, that's the point of tests, to determine whether you meet a standard in a setting where no one really gets hurt. If a person doesn't meet the standard, it would be more harmful for them to pass the test, so you can't claim they were truly harmed.
I do have some sympathy for the applicants, since I doubt that the universities originally meant this to happen. Did the applicants realize this was going to become a test? Were they explicitly told not to nose around the website or otherwise try to find out early? Did the webdesigner get punished? But, from an ethical viewpoint, none of this really matters.
The business world is full of vague ethical situations and a person is rarely warned. When someone trusts you to do what they think you should do even when they don't make it clear, it can be very tricky. Just because you can CYA, doesn't excuse you from preventing situations if you can, even if someone else actually screwed up. In an ethical business, the manager is the guy who gets punished when no one does anything wrong, but bad things happen anyway.
They were told not to look. Stanford is not obligated to tell them why. Sure, security through obscurity is stupid, and it certainly makes Stanford look stupid, but disobeying their request without a good reason is crossing an ethical line.
Sometimes, you must suppress your natural curiosity and wait until the other guy wants you to look, even if he has forgotten to close his drapes.
"The gods presented her with a box into which each had put something harmful, and forbade her ever to open it.... For Pandora, like all women, was possessed of a lively curiosity. She had to know what was in the box. One day she lifted the lid and out flew plagues innumerable, sorrow and mischief for mankind. In terror Pandora clapped the lid down, but too late."
In this case, Stanford did not put plagues, etc, in the box. They simply said, "don't peek". Ethical people play by the rules, even if they see no harm in getting an early peek. It's as though your professor had next week's quiz on his desk when you stopped by his office. Just because he forgot to hide it doesn't mean it's ethical for you to look. Taking advantage of someone else's mistake is not ethical business. The ethical thing is to inform them of the situation, while noticably looking away.
I have had exactly the same idea. Unfortunately, if that was top plank on the platform, your (or my) opponent could easily depict that you (or I) were out of touch with real world problems and that we would sacrifice our troops and children for some lofty but pointless principle.
Alonzo Cauron was able to work around the weather in Prisoner of Azkaban. It rained all but one day when they were shooting in Scotland, where most of the outdoor scenes were shot. That accounts for PoA possibly coming out darker than intended, but they made it work.
Maybe they will bring Richard Harris back for the final book. Betting in the town where the next book is being printed indicate that Dumbledore will die. Once that happens, Gambon will no longer be appropriate.
Then all of a sudden a few years back they decided to crack down on it. About a year thereafter they got around to changing the law, but people were charged during that period. So, in conclusion, the same could happen with any law, no matter how silly it is.
That's exactly why the existance of unenforced laws isn't a joke. When it is completely up to the discretion of law enforcement agencies or city councils, etc, to enforce a statue, it becomes possible to play this sort of fundraising trick or worse. An unpopular Native American might be detained while the law got debated. Although he might be unpopular for some other reasons, the no NA law could be used to detain him when no other justification exists.
I can easily hear a Homeland Security type say, "we think he was going to blow up a building, but we have no proof. Luckily we have this law on the books..."
A user doesn't need to ever read the source in order to bitch about bugs and other unwanted features. The act of discovering and complaining alerts the programmers to the problems with an indication of relative priority (what gets complained about the most gets dealt with). Although a corporate technical support department can perform the same function, in actuallity, it doesn't. The corporation might know what its users complain about the most, but it goes about allocating money and human resouces differently than the OS community.
It's simply a plot to save the US semiconductor industry. If they really wanted compatibility, they'd simply design a new protocol and outsource the programming to India.
We are comparing engineers and nurses, not wives of engineers and wives of nurses (or husbands of engineers and husbands of nurses or any other such combination). Nothing in the posted articles was worded that way (with reference to spouse's occupation), although I agree that spouse's occupation probably does matter. It just isn't discussed in these articles, and it wasn't what I had in mind either when I made my comment.
The father provides plenty of both. They've got many inches to travel. It depends on many factors, the health of the sperm, the environment provided by the mother, the difficulty of penetrating the egg.
X sperm have pointier noses than Y, so a mother can choose the sex of the unborn child simply by having thick skinned eggs. Take a look at chickens, it's well known by farm kids that many factors completely outside the rooste'rs control can affect the thickness of the eggshell.
"I am very sceptical that there is an environmental factor associated with sex determination in humans, at least not one associated with"
It is much more likely to be a matter of corralation, not causation. A long chain of events that caused me to be an engineer may have started with an event that caused a long chain of events that caused my kids to be boys. And it's not really chains, it's webs, whole networks of events and environments. Articles like this are so incredibly over simplfied that they are almost worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as they don't forget about the Voyagers, I was in Jr High when they were launched so naturally, there is a special place in my heart for those things and their cargo of peace and love.
Unless you like to compare apples and oranges in your spare time...
If you can't handle apples, and, isn't it supposed tobe PC's?, compare them running Linux. That seems to be the way to get a truly meaningful comparison.
"I don't think the two -- Mac mini and whatever Intel puts out -- are really in the same market; that is, of course, unless Apple starts running OS X on x86 hardware," said IDC analyst Roger Kay.
Maybe not OS X, but how about Linux?
Yes, it would be nice to know the actual instructions, since it seems possible that this is simply a test of how well applicants follow instructions, even when they know an alternative that hasn't been explicitely prohibited.
While Stanford has the right to evaluate an applicant by any criteria it chooses, if this criteria simply weeds out the technologically astute in favor of the sheep, it isn't a good test.
The whole idea of waiting for something to be thoroughly researched before taking action is just stupid. It's a kind of procrastination. Unless they are researchers studying how to improve on past research, people who focus on problems with the methodology are frequently just looking for justification to continue a bad habit.
I don't need much evidence beyond what I can observe myself. I know how healthy people tend to look, they usually aren't fat nor are they extremely skinny. It's even easier to tell by observing their behaviour, they are usually both physically and mentally energetic and active. I tend to be sceptical of any research that goes against what I already know.
Probably the most important, yet most controversial responsibility of being a parent is determining when the child has acquired the ability to make various decisions for himself. Most parents would like the child to acquire that ability, but find the ability to monitor a child's decisions useful in determining how much independence a child can handle.
My child almost always opts for pizza. I found this out the old fashioned way, by asking him. He also told me that the "balanced meal" was too nasty to consider. This brought back my own horrible memories of "meat" of indeterminate species and vegetables that had spent far too many hours simmering somewhere. I, too, usually ate pizza.
I'm not too worried about my kid, he's as skinny as a pole bean since spending several hours a day on the computer neither bulks him up or gives him the appetite to become obese. Besides, I think healthy teenagers can metabalize anything. Especially if the parent refuses to drive them anywhere within walking or biking distance.
Jeffery Skilling, both COO and then CEO of Enron was awarded an M.B.A from Harvard Buisness School.
What's your point? That since Mr. Skilling was awarded an M.B.A. from HBS that other bad boys have an equal right? HBS isn't allowed to make mistakes? If they make even one mistake, they must relax their standards for future applicants?
What does this have to do with the ethics of URL munging anyway?
So they screwed up. Admissions people aren't necessarily technical. So they hired someone who was. Apparently, they hired the wrong "experts". They weren't even alone, plenty of other reputable schools hired these same "experts". How do they get out of a bad situation? Hopefully, they fire the so-called "experts" and tell the applicants to apply again next year.
Do you know a better way to handle it? One that would be equally fair to the students who could successfully resist their curiousity? Turning back time is not an option.
Your sheet-of-paper-as-security example is the best analogy I've seen yet, except that if it ever happened, I doubt it would be an accident, it would be a test. Any applicant who peeked would deserve to be rejected out of sheer stupidity.
My speculation is that the security-by-not-so-obscure-URL was actually a mistake, not by the universities, but by the "experts" they hired. If the university administrators thought they needed to hire experts, they can't be blamed for selecting this method of security, they can only be blamed for picking stupid experts, and they can't turn back time and undo someone's mistake. But, they can choose to turn this into an ethics test. I hope that they have also taken recourse against the worthless experts they hired. It wouldn't be fair to the rejected applicants if anyone was allowed to get away with this.
"The students didn't steal passwords, spread a virus or trojan. All they did was akin to manually typing in an abiet complicated URL and accessed data on unprotected public servers."
No one accused the applicants of committing a crime. The issue is whether typing in the not-so-obscure URL was unethical and whether this breach of ethics can be used to screen out certain applicants.
Sure, it might seem utopian, but business school is the place to select for and teach ethical values if anywhere is. It is a choke point where it makes sense to weed out less ethical people. Being selective in this matter can only help the school's reputation. They don't need any scandelous alumni, even if the school itself technically isn't at fault.
Applicants who don't already have a higher standard of right and wrong than that enforced by the legal system are less likely to acquire one than someone who is honest from the start. Besides, these top tier schools have plenty of applicants and need any reason they can find to reject the excess.
The complication is that there are three parties involved. If the applicants knew they weren't supposed to see something, but an assistant left it out on the table, clearly the assistant is the one at fault. But, the applicant has a moral obligation not to take advantage of that assistant's mistake. In this case, it appears that no real damage was done to the universities, but the ethics of the applicants were tested and were not up to standards. It is a test.
Sort of like, if you design a bridge and it's a bad design - Does it make it okay since it's only on paper, no one ever intended to build it, it's only a test? Of course not, that's the point of tests, to determine whether you meet a standard in a setting where no one really gets hurt. If a person doesn't meet the standard, it would be more harmful for them to pass the test, so you can't claim they were truly harmed.
I do have some sympathy for the applicants, since I doubt that the universities originally meant this to happen. Did the applicants realize this was going to become a test? Were they explicitly told not to nose around the website or otherwise try to find out early? Did the webdesigner get punished? But, from an ethical viewpoint, none of this really matters.
The business world is full of vague ethical situations and a person is rarely warned. When someone trusts you to do what they think you should do even when they don't make it clear, it can be very tricky. Just because you can CYA, doesn't excuse you from preventing situations if you can, even if someone else actually screwed up.
In an ethical business, the manager is the guy who gets punished when no one does anything wrong, but bad things happen anyway.
They were told not to look. Stanford is not obligated to tell them why. Sure, security through obscurity is stupid, and it certainly makes Stanford look stupid, but disobeying their request without a good reason is crossing an ethical line.
Sometimes, you must suppress your natural curiosity and wait until the other guy wants you to look, even if he has forgotten to close his drapes.
In this case, Stanford did not put plagues, etc, in the box. They simply said, "don't peek". Ethical people play by the rules, even if they see no harm in getting an early peek. It's as though your professor had next week's quiz on his desk when you stopped by his office. Just because he forgot to hide it doesn't mean it's ethical for you to look. Taking advantage of someone else's mistake is not ethical business. The ethical thing is to inform them of the situation, while noticably looking away.
I have had exactly the same idea. Unfortunately, if that was top plank on the platform, your (or my) opponent could easily depict that you (or I) were out of touch with real world problems and that we would sacrifice our troops and children for some lofty but pointless principle.
Alonzo Cauron was able to work around the weather in Prisoner of Azkaban. It rained all but one day when they were shooting in Scotland, where most of the outdoor scenes were shot. That accounts for PoA possibly coming out darker than intended, but they made it work.
Maybe they will bring Richard Harris back for the final book. Betting in the town where the next book is being printed indicate that Dumbledore will die. Once that happens, Gambon will no longer be appropriate.
That's exactly why the existance of unenforced laws isn't a joke. When it is completely up to the discretion of law enforcement agencies or city councils, etc, to enforce a statue, it becomes possible to play this sort of fundraising trick or worse. An unpopular Native American might be detained while the law got debated. Although he might be unpopular for some other reasons, the no NA law could be used to detain him when no other justification exists.
I can easily hear a Homeland Security type say, "we think he was going to blow up a building, but we have no proof. Luckily we have this law on the books..."
A user doesn't need to ever read the source in order to bitch about bugs and other unwanted features. The act of discovering and complaining alerts the programmers to the problems with an indication of relative priority (what gets complained about the most gets dealt with). Although a corporate technical support department can perform the same function, in actuallity, it doesn't. The corporation might know what its users complain about the most, but it goes about allocating money and human resouces differently than the OS community.
It's simply a plot to save the US semiconductor industry. If they really wanted compatibility, they'd simply design a new protocol and outsource the programming to India.
We are comparing engineers and nurses, not wives of engineers and wives of nurses (or husbands of engineers and husbands of nurses or any other such combination). Nothing in the posted articles was worded that way (with reference to spouse's occupation), although I agree that spouse's occupation probably does matter. It just isn't discussed in these articles, and it wasn't what I had in mind either when I made my comment.
Why not just grab a couple of light tubes and dance around next to an FM broadcast antenna? That's what we did back in '77.
The father provides plenty of both. They've got many inches to travel. It depends on many factors, the health of the sperm, the environment provided by the mother, the difficulty of penetrating the egg.
X sperm have pointier noses than Y, so a mother can choose the sex of the unborn child simply by having thick skinned eggs. Take a look at chickens, it's well known by farm kids that many factors completely outside the rooste'rs control can affect the thickness of the eggshell.
Most people don't chose their careers at random
Most people don't choose their mates at random
they gravitate in to those careers which are a best fit for their natural talents.
they gravitate towards those men or women with the best bodies or the best earnings or the best net worth or sometimes, the best personality.
"I am very sceptical that there is an environmental factor associated with sex determination in humans, at least not one associated with"
It is much more likely to be a matter of corralation, not causation. A long chain of events that caused me to be an engineer may have started with an event that caused a long chain of events that caused my kids to be boys. And it's not really chains, it's webs, whole networks of events and environments. Articles like this are so incredibly over simplfied that they are almost worthless.