On the contrary. It's exactly the sort of thing which would be written into a contract. For something similar, look at the recent war between HP and Dell over 3Par; Dell ended up being paid $72 million when they took the HP bid. This is a little more extreme, but then again, ATT is a $163 billion company.
I disagree. He's clearly a neo-Malthusian arguing for population limits, calling for a " in which energy demands do not continue to escalate indefinitely" and highlighting California's expected population growth and how "There are now seven billion humans on this planet" before saying that we need "a way to reduce our energy consumption and to share Earth's finite resources more equitably among nations and generations".
He does mention that "renewable technologies are often less damaging to the climate and create fewer toxic wastes than conventional energy sources." Are those the words of an oil-industry shill, or someone who cherishes the status quo?
You note that "nuclear energy is not mentioned". But look! This is published in "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". The front page will supply you with nuclear-power reading if you really want it.
I think the point is to worry, because they're all "replace this energy with renewable or we're surely doomed", and what they call renewable isn't actually, so we're doomed, barring "new technology".
Yes. OSHA is all that stands between us and doom. No fear of lawsuits and liability, steeper insurance prices, labor union action, common sense or regard for basic human dignity could possibly prevent a massive wave of industrial accidents dooming us all.
I mean, I don't know about dismantling it altogether either, but maybe life would go on? perhaps? A government agency is not all that stands between us and armageddon. It should exist if the benefits it brings (accidents prevented and lives saved) are worth more than the costs (you can't put a value on an individual human life, but you sure can put a value on a statistical human life, and there's a limit to how much it makes sense to spend to prevent accidents.)
You think your APs are falling over due to packet volume? Are you just hooking up cheap Linksys stuff to these antennas or what? There's a reason that real enterprise-grade stuff costs more: you can throw 30 users at an access point and it doesn't crawl over into a corner and die. I favor Aruba gear, since I used to work there; Cisco stuff is also decent (but even more expensive). But they're not dirt cheap.
On the other hand, if you think the DSL router's doing crazy stuff, maybe you should focus on making it not do that crazy stuff.
Take a look at your options there and learn how to read antenna spec sheets: compare, for example, this directional antenna with this traditional one. The first one can go on a high mount somewhere and point down at all the clients in a cone (roughly) and will mostly ignore things behind it (okay if it's on the ceiling). The second one throws out most of the signal in a pancake perpendicular to its long axis. This is great, if you're in that plane, and if there aren't a lot of walls in that plane between you and it. (The first one is an indoor antenna, though; I just use it as an example.)
Too many outdoor deployments are radiating out their best coverage over everyone's heads. (You can also tilt the antenna a bit, but then you're essentially just painting stripes of coverage on the ground, which isn't ideal either.)
And the incumbents / established players in charge of districting to begin with... they are going to cede their power and weaken themselves why exactly now?
Excuse me. My grandmother and grandmother both had the benefits of access to the VA healthcare system. I have been repeatedly informed in no uncertain terms that it's a disaster. $0.02 anecdote
But humanity has so many things we could be doing! It's not an efficient use of society's capital to build robots when cheap farm labor is readily available. As long as this cheap labor is available, we should use it, and deploy our intellectual and financial resources elsewhere. Ideally this would eventually include investments which would make those people more prosperous, and once they have better opportunities, then see about investing our capital in robots. Regrettably, billions who might otherwise have these opportunities have been deprived - in no small part due to political problems, such as oppressive governments, corruption, and violence.
Immigrants (and migrants) are people, not externalities. Walling them out of the land of prosperity (and recession notwithstanding, the US is a land of prosperity) doesn't leave them or the land of prosperity any more prosperous.
I thought about mentioning that too, but decided to give the Commie mutant traitor the benefit of the doubt. He may be referring to some companies in the economy destroying themselves and damaging other parts of the economy.
Of course, I'm not sure how banks and Comcast have any meaningful characteristics in common.
See, that's a question of your political world-view. You could also say that "despite the fact that the government has pretty much destroyed our economy, you are okay with them controlling the Internet, too?" (Let's play the Blame Game! We can bring in stories about how, for every bubbly subprime mortgage the private economy bought, federal housing agencies bought two. Little things like that. We can blame political risk and the healthcare package for increasing the expected costs of hiring people, perpetuating unemployment.)
The problem with government regulations is that even though there are things I'd like them to do, I don't necessarily trust them to do it right. Net Neutrality? It might be a net win, maybe. I certainly hope so. Incumbent telecom monopolies trying to protect their television revenues against YouTube and Netflix are hardly friends to the consumer.
(The new financial regulations, on the other hand, are a poorly-thought-out unclear loopholey reactionary mess which are extraordinarily unlikely to prevent the next crisis but likely to increase meaningless compliance paperwork costs.)
Missing a pretty good story? Hmmf. I thought it was too transparently obvious about exactly where it was going, and it all came across as a little facile.
You know what would have made it a better story? More moral ambiguity. You've got the next Gestapo forming but they're also reasonably effective at protecting people from a menacing threat (I don't recall that being the case in this story line). So if Sheridan or LaForge or whoever it was stands up to the one group of oppressors, he places real human lives on the line (who may not be happy about it). That would make for a good story, not a boring little rehash.
Apple is the most valuable company on the planet. They made $6.62 billion dollars in profits last quarter. It's entirely reasonable to believe that a senior level executive could make a difference of 1% or more in that profit figure. So if they want to pay their top executives 1%, it's really between Apple and their shareholders. (You don't have to give Apple your money if you don't want to. Buy Android.)
The thing is, after your fourth million dollars or so, most people would be perfectly happy to go home and retire early - especially if the times are a'changin' what with Steve Jobs' death and all that. If they want these guys to stay, paying them stupid amounts of money is a good way to make that happen. And no, you can't just drop in a replacement vice-president off the street. They've got what the economists call "firm-specific human capital" which means they actually know how Apple works, and some bozo from HP or IBM or the like doesn't.
"Kill" is Dutch for "creek", so they're basically "creek-fish". The northeastern US is also home to the town of Fishkill, NY and the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania. (Yes, that's pronounced "school-kill". The locals, though, are more apt to refer to the Schuylkill Expressway as the "Sure-kill Distressway".)
There's nothing worse than retards who get a college degree in programming and start calling themselves "engineers".
I work with these machines - design them, refine them. You could, with just the slightest hint of fancy, refer to them "difference engines". I am an Engine-er. Welcome to the English language; I suggest that you save yourself some grief and just deal with it.
(Of course you need a license to do something useful in Canada. Woo flippin' hoo. Canadian industry is all about the incumbent industries protecting themselves from competition through regulatory capture. That's also part of why you have such sucky telecom services that you're always complaining about.)
. . . and 'real' engineers everywhere weep. Obviously every case may be unique, but calling yourself one thing which has a set of implications does sort of slander professionals in the field whose titles you are trying to snag.
I agree 100%! As we all know, real engineers drive trains.
It doesn't matter if your first job leaves you unemployed and searching again in a few years. It matters that you're working with people who are smarter than you are and learning how to actually program and write software effectively. Job security? Pay? If you end up as an undifferentiated code monkey left to your own devices or, worse, fighting a monstrous legacy code base and bureaucracy that you're powerless to alter *cough*IBM*cough... you can very easily find you've crippled the rest of your career. At best, the work will be a dull slog.
Go for the startup, if they sound like they have some idea of how to do things right and will offer you meaningful professional development. If you can't take a career risk at this point in your life, when do you think you will be able to?
And then for Job #2, you'll have some Skills. You'll be infinitely more employable. You might even be able to look at the monstrous legacy codebase and say, with the authority of experience, that this stinks and there's a better way to do it and yes you will do that refactoring, and you won't hate your job.
Regrettably, Western Europe social democracies have shown that the right amount of socialism is definitely less than they've been employing for the last while. It has left them with no money (a surmountable problem, though it means cutbacks), a good sense of citizen entitlement (which means everyone's upset at the cutbacks), and very labor-friendly policies (which leave employers less willing to hire, so if you're a young person looking for a job you're completely and totally screwed right now instead of just maybe-screwed like in the US: maybe-screwed is the European normal). Europe's had multiple riots about this stuff, not these piddly little mostly-peaceful "occupy" demonstrations.
Now, mind you, I like the idea of helping out your fellow man, I just don't think the policy ends up working out all that well.
It doesn't matter if you're the first to do it, what matters is if you're the first to do it well and are successful at it.
My Android phone had voice search for months, and I shocked an iPhone 4S user earlier today by demonstrating its existence. Probably 33% of Siri's utility right there, completely overlooked by everyone. Clearly you're right; getting there first was not enough for Google.
This idea that Apple products are magically easy-to-use and perfectly polished is BS.
It's that special kind of BS called "marketing" and "PR".
On a related note, I shocked an iPhone 4S user today by using my 2.5-year-old HTC Dream (aka Google G1, aka the first major android phone) to do a voice search. It's not quite as flexible as Siri, sure, but it works fairly well in practice and in this case brought up exactly what I wanted... and the capability has been there for quite some time. The lesson from this: clearly, Google does not have all the marketing and PR.
Here is a passage from Griggs. I think that most companies like Facebook will be able to make a very, very good case that programming challenges are directly related to job performance at a programming job.
The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.
Notice also that employment law in this area has changed and that subsequent cases are also relevant, e.g. Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989) and Ricci v. DeStefano (2009).
Most goofy interview questions... the answer itself is irrelevant. The questions are about seeing how the interviewee reacts and reasons about a problem. Some of these are more concrete exercises than others. Besides seeing how a candidate reasons about code, it may be useful to see how they reason about the task itself - do they ask why they're doing it and try to understand the goals and constraints? Do they try to understand the resources at their disposal? Are they able to provide any vision into what this task should accomplish? Are they able to get excited about that vision and doing a good job even if it's silly or uninspiring? (Many tasks will be uninspiring.) When faced with a mildly ridiculous constraint or a bad idea, does the candidate push back against it, try to understand it, try to circumvent it, get discouraged, get upset, lose interest, keep calm and carry on,...?
At a big company like Google, there will always be some amount of games that you're playing with management, and they will interfere with your ability to "get shit done". If they've filtered you out based on your unwillingness to put up with that, it sounds like the interview was a success for both parties. (I appreciate small companies as well, and I have plenty of opportunity to get shit done.)
Notice that Google is also in a funny position where they apparently don't hire people for individual positions as much as they do at other companies; instead they go out trolling for smart people and try to figure out where they can fit them in. This also probably isn't the best approach for most companies. From the rumours I've heard the main crazy isn't the interview questions: it's the way the interview process can drag out for weeks while they try to shop around with different groups.
I've done interviews before myself, and prefer a slightly more integrated exercise combining algorithms and other things (e.g. "let's design a tic-tac-toe server.")
Or, more probably, he consulted with the attorneys and business teams and decided they'd go see exactly how much tracking they could get away with.
A legal team isn't supposed to tell you "you can't do something" - not when you're in charge of them, anyway (everyday employees are another mater). You're supposed to tell them what you want to do, and they try to help you accomplish it legally (or how you're most likely to get away with it, depending on how ethical you are).
Capitalism is the idea that whoever builds the means of production gets to have its output. If you own capital, you get to benefit from it. This means that people have an incentive to invest in capital, and build things which will make money for them. This results in a society with more capital to do useful things for it (factories, homes, restaurant espresso machines, satellites, server farms). It also means that people take better care of the capital.
Capitalism harnesses the inevitable human vice of Greed, and (when combined with free-market competition in an efficient market) can make this greed more productive to society at large, but reckless wonton greed is not a value it intrinsically promotes. It's not really a value system; it's merely an ownership system. (Notice also that only markets with low transaction costs and low barriers to entry are really efficient. This is important. Notice what a mess we see when neither is the case: health care, cell phone providers...)
Usually, competition with other greedy capitalists is enough to keep a capitalist in line, and not exploiting and abusing his fellow man too much. When this is no longer the case, it's entirely reasonable to pass moral judgement (or attempt to restrain) these people who are taking their reckless, wonton greed and exploiting their fellow man. Capitalism is not an excuse... but it's not the illness, either.
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On the contrary. It's exactly the sort of thing which would be written into a contract. For something similar, look at the recent war between HP and Dell over 3Par; Dell ended up being paid $72 million when they took the HP bid. This is a little more extreme, but then again, ATT is a $163 billion company.
He does mention that "renewable technologies are often less damaging to the climate and create fewer toxic wastes than conventional energy sources." Are those the words of an oil-industry shill, or someone who cherishes the status quo?
You note that "nuclear energy is not mentioned". But look! This is published in "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". The front page will supply you with nuclear-power reading if you really want it.
I think the point is to worry, because they're all "replace this energy with renewable or we're surely doomed", and what they call renewable isn't actually, so we're doomed, barring "new technology".
Yes. OSHA is all that stands between us and doom. No fear of lawsuits and liability, steeper insurance prices, labor union action, common sense or regard for basic human dignity could possibly prevent a massive wave of industrial accidents dooming us all.
I mean, I don't know about dismantling it altogether either, but maybe life would go on? perhaps? A government agency is not all that stands between us and armageddon. It should exist if the benefits it brings (accidents prevented and lives saved) are worth more than the costs (you can't put a value on an individual human life, but you sure can put a value on a statistical human life, and there's a limit to how much it makes sense to spend to prevent accidents.)
On the other hand, if you think the DSL router's doing crazy stuff, maybe you should focus on making it not do that crazy stuff.
Too many outdoor deployments are radiating out their best coverage over everyone's heads. (You can also tilt the antenna a bit, but then you're essentially just painting stripes of coverage on the ground, which isn't ideal either.)
And the incumbents / established players in charge of districting to begin with... they are going to cede their power and weaken themselves why exactly now?
Excuse me. My grandmother and grandmother both had the benefits of access to the VA healthcare system. I have been repeatedly informed in no uncertain terms that it's a disaster. $0.02 anecdote
But humanity has so many things we could be doing! It's not an efficient use of society's capital to build robots when cheap farm labor is readily available. As long as this cheap labor is available, we should use it, and deploy our intellectual and financial resources elsewhere. Ideally this would eventually include investments which would make those people more prosperous, and once they have better opportunities, then see about investing our capital in robots. Regrettably, billions who might otherwise have these opportunities have been deprived - in no small part due to political problems, such as oppressive governments, corruption, and violence.
Immigrants (and migrants) are people, not externalities. Walling them out of the land of prosperity (and recession notwithstanding, the US is a land of prosperity) doesn't leave them or the land of prosperity any more prosperous.
Of course, I'm not sure how banks and Comcast have any meaningful characteristics in common.
See, that's a question of your political world-view. You could also say that "despite the fact that the government has pretty much destroyed our economy, you are okay with them controlling the Internet, too?" (Let's play the Blame Game! We can bring in stories about how, for every bubbly subprime mortgage the private economy bought, federal housing agencies bought two. Little things like that. We can blame political risk and the healthcare package for increasing the expected costs of hiring people, perpetuating unemployment.)
The problem with government regulations is that even though there are things I'd like them to do, I don't necessarily trust them to do it right. Net Neutrality? It might be a net win, maybe. I certainly hope so. Incumbent telecom monopolies trying to protect their television revenues against YouTube and Netflix are hardly friends to the consumer. (The new financial regulations, on the other hand, are a poorly-thought-out unclear loopholey reactionary mess which are extraordinarily unlikely to prevent the next crisis but likely to increase meaningless compliance paperwork costs.)
Missing a pretty good story? Hmmf. I thought it was too transparently obvious about exactly where it was going, and it all came across as a little facile.
You know what would have made it a better story? More moral ambiguity. You've got the next Gestapo forming but they're also reasonably effective at protecting people from a menacing threat (I don't recall that being the case in this story line). So if Sheridan or LaForge or whoever it was stands up to the one group of oppressors, he places real human lives on the line (who may not be happy about it). That would make for a good story, not a boring little rehash.
Apple is the most valuable company on the planet. They made $6.62 billion dollars in profits last quarter. It's entirely reasonable to believe that a senior level executive could make a difference of 1% or more in that profit figure. So if they want to pay their top executives 1%, it's really between Apple and their shareholders. (You don't have to give Apple your money if you don't want to. Buy Android.)
The thing is, after your fourth million dollars or so, most people would be perfectly happy to go home and retire early - especially if the times are a'changin' what with Steve Jobs' death and all that. If they want these guys to stay, paying them stupid amounts of money is a good way to make that happen. And no, you can't just drop in a replacement vice-president off the street. They've got what the economists call "firm-specific human capital" which means they actually know how Apple works, and some bozo from HP or IBM or the like doesn't.
"Kill" is Dutch for "creek", so they're basically "creek-fish". The northeastern US is also home to the town of Fishkill, NY and the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania. (Yes, that's pronounced "school-kill". The locals, though, are more apt to refer to the Schuylkill Expressway as the "Sure-kill Distressway".)
I work with these machines - design them, refine them. You could, with just the slightest hint of fancy, refer to them "difference engines". I am an Engine-er. Welcome to the English language; I suggest that you save yourself some grief and just deal with it.
(Of course you need a license to do something useful in Canada. Woo flippin' hoo. Canadian industry is all about the incumbent industries protecting themselves from competition through regulatory capture. That's also part of why you have such sucky telecom services that you're always complaining about.)
I agree 100%! As we all know, real engineers drive trains.
chugga chugga chugga chugga choo chooooo!
It doesn't matter if your first job leaves you unemployed and searching again in a few years. It matters that you're working with people who are smarter than you are and learning how to actually program and write software effectively. Job security? Pay? If you end up as an undifferentiated code monkey left to your own devices or, worse, fighting a monstrous legacy code base and bureaucracy that you're powerless to alter *cough*IBM*cough... you can very easily find you've crippled the rest of your career. At best, the work will be a dull slog.
Go for the startup, if they sound like they have some idea of how to do things right and will offer you meaningful professional development. If you can't take a career risk at this point in your life, when do you think you will be able to? And then for Job #2, you'll have some Skills. You'll be infinitely more employable. You might even be able to look at the monstrous legacy codebase and say, with the authority of experience, that this stinks and there's a better way to do it and yes you will do that refactoring, and you won't hate your job.
Regrettably, Western Europe social democracies have shown that the right amount of socialism is definitely less than they've been employing for the last while. It has left them with no money (a surmountable problem, though it means cutbacks), a good sense of citizen entitlement (which means everyone's upset at the cutbacks), and very labor-friendly policies (which leave employers less willing to hire, so if you're a young person looking for a job you're completely and totally screwed right now instead of just maybe-screwed like in the US: maybe-screwed is the European normal). Europe's had multiple riots about this stuff, not these piddly little mostly-peaceful "occupy" demonstrations.
Now, mind you, I like the idea of helping out your fellow man, I just don't think the policy ends up working out all that well.
But most of those companies have thousands of owners, not just one. They're probably in your 401(k) or pension plan.
My Android phone had voice search for months, and I shocked an iPhone 4S user earlier today by demonstrating its existence. Probably 33% of Siri's utility right there, completely overlooked by everyone. Clearly you're right; getting there first was not enough for Google.
It's that special kind of BS called "marketing" and "PR".
On a related note, I shocked an iPhone 4S user today by using my 2.5-year-old HTC Dream (aka Google G1, aka the first major android phone) to do a voice search. It's not quite as flexible as Siri, sure, but it works fairly well in practice and in this case brought up exactly what I wanted... and the capability has been there for quite some time. The lesson from this: clearly, Google does not have all the marketing and PR.
Notice also that employment law in this area has changed and that subsequent cases are also relevant, e.g. Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989) and Ricci v. DeStefano (2009).
At a big company like Google, there will always be some amount of games that you're playing with management, and they will interfere with your ability to "get shit done". If they've filtered you out based on your unwillingness to put up with that, it sounds like the interview was a success for both parties. (I appreciate small companies as well, and I have plenty of opportunity to get shit done.)
Notice that Google is also in a funny position where they apparently don't hire people for individual positions as much as they do at other companies; instead they go out trolling for smart people and try to figure out where they can fit them in. This also probably isn't the best approach for most companies. From the rumours I've heard the main crazy isn't the interview questions: it's the way the interview process can drag out for weeks while they try to shop around with different groups.
I've done interviews before myself, and prefer a slightly more integrated exercise combining algorithms and other things (e.g. "let's design a tic-tac-toe server.")
Or, more probably, he consulted with the attorneys and business teams and decided they'd go see exactly how much tracking they could get away with.
A legal team isn't supposed to tell you "you can't do something" - not when you're in charge of them, anyway (everyday employees are another mater). You're supposed to tell them what you want to do, and they try to help you accomplish it legally (or how you're most likely to get away with it, depending on how ethical you are).
You're both wrong.
Capitalism is the idea that whoever builds the means of production gets to have its output. If you own capital, you get to benefit from it. This means that people have an incentive to invest in capital, and build things which will make money for them. This results in a society with more capital to do useful things for it (factories, homes, restaurant espresso machines, satellites, server farms). It also means that people take better care of the capital.
Capitalism harnesses the inevitable human vice of Greed, and (when combined with free-market competition in an efficient market) can make this greed more productive to society at large, but reckless wonton greed is not a value it intrinsically promotes. It's not really a value system; it's merely an ownership system. (Notice also that only markets with low transaction costs and low barriers to entry are really efficient. This is important. Notice what a mess we see when neither is the case: health care, cell phone providers...)
Usually, competition with other greedy capitalists is enough to keep a capitalist in line, and not exploiting and abusing his fellow man too much. When this is no longer the case, it's entirely reasonable to pass moral judgement (or attempt to restrain) these people who are taking their reckless, wonton greed and exploiting their fellow man. Capitalism is not an excuse... but it's not the illness, either.