If you're talking about jury duty of a few days, that shouldn't be a problem. But if you're talking about a major case that lasts weeks or months, that's a pretty big cut. Serving on a jury for three months is equivalent to taking a pay cut of 25%. Many people can't afford that.
For several reasons. First, "60 Minutes" is reporting information from a National Academy of Sciences report and other sources that can be independently verified. You don't have to take their word for it. Second, "60 Minutes" is done by different teams of reporters at different times. Just because one reporter or one team may screw up doesn't mean that the others will. Third, the reporters probably felt under much greater pressure to make the story in the Bush National Guard case than in most others. It was a very hot issue. Finally, remember that although the documents that provided the most direct evidence were shown to be forgeries, the story was essentially correct: Bush did use political influence to get a cushy, essentially risk-free National Guard job. He did explicitly decline to make himself available for transfer to the war zone in SE Asia. He clearly did not complete his National Guard obligation. And finally, the former secretary of the officer who would have issued the forged documents testified that such documents had in fact existed. So, yes, "60 Minutes" was overly eager and did not investigate the documents carefully enough, but the story was basically accurate.
Well, you can sort of use C# on Linux. The Mono project is in various respects incomplete. According to the roadmap, their C# compiler is not up to date with Microsoft's. This may or may not affect what the Princeton team was doing, but still, why use an immature and only sort-of-portable language like C#? I can see it if there is some strong advantage to it, but so far I've seen no indication that there is one. So, what's the virtue of using C# over, say, Java?
The immediate problem here was evidently a programming error, not a bug in C#, but I do wonder why they are using C# for this. That forces everybody involved to use MS Windows and eliminates the possibility of hacking the system if they need to as well as the source as documentation. If they want a C-level language with garbage collection, why not Java or D or any of several others?
Democracy: people vote and the power and law are made directly (volatile)
Republic: people vote and representatives implement the power and law (slow change over time, more stable)
Too bad these aren't the real definitions. Look it up. Your definition of "democracy" is actually the definition of "direct democracy", while your definitino of "republic" is actually the definition of "indirect democracy" or "representative democracy". A republic can be a direct democracy, a representative democracy, or neither.
I understand logic quite well, thank you. Good analogies are actually quite useful. Again, making broad, wholly unsupported statements just makes you look infantile. If you want to play with adults, try presenting an argument. Thats how those of us who understand logic do it.
Was there a point in there somewhere? Calling something a "stupid car analogy" doesn't make it so. If you've got an argument as to why this is a poor analogy, feel free to make it.
I would compare this to the public road system. The roads can be put to uses that we can all agree are bad, even criminal. They can be used to transport kidnap victims, or to escape after robbing banks or killing people, or to get to the the place where one is going to commit a crime. Filtering network content and allowing only approved data would be like requiring every driver to submit a travel plan stating the reason for the trip and have his or her vehicle searched. That might well cut down on crime, but the game isn't worth the candle. This is all the more true where the problem with "bad" network traffic is nowhere near life-and-death and, in spite of a lot of posturing by the industry, not even all that big for the industry it affects.
How can they distinguish between encrypted video and other kinds of odd, binary data that they have no business interfering with, such as text in an exotic language and encoding, or somebody's proprietary compression format, or raw data from some odd kind of sensor?
My point is that executable size is not by itself a useful basis for comparison of the resources used by a program or how easy it was to write. If you compare two stand-alone programs, you can reasonably say that one is more compact than the other, and it will very likely be true that the smaller program required greater skill to write. If you compare a program that makes extensive use of libraries with one that doesn't, you can't make the same comparison. The shorter program was very likely the easier one to write because all the real work is done by the libraries, and there is no way to tell, just by looking at the programs themselves, which uses more memory.
For example, I am told that Internet Explorer is actually a rather modest shell and that much of the work is done by system calls. If this is true, IE is much smaller than say Firefox or Konqueror, but not in a meaningful way. Certainly, this would not be a reasonable
basis for claiming that IE is coded more compactly and cleverly than the others.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the fastest responses, which may take essentially zero time. One is: "It isn't a bug.". The other is: "Already fixed. Update your installation."
The article doesn't say which veterans' organizations have been putting pressure on Google, but I bet it was the American Legion, and if it was, and I were Google, I would refuse to put up a special logo for the sole purpose of spiting them. The American Legion is a nasty, greedy, warmongering organization. None of the vets in my family or circle of friends will have anything to do with them. Remembrance Day here in Canada (I'm a dual citizen and have lived in both countries) has a very different feeling from Veterans' Day in the US.
In your situation requiring employees not to make use of your proprietary information if they leave would suffice to protect your legitimate interests. What possible justification could you have for laying claim to ideas that they have in areas unrelated to your business? The agreement presented to the poster is outrageously broad. I hope that yours isn't.
If you're employed to do research, it isn't unreasonable for you to be required to give your ideas to the company if they are in the area you are paid to work on. If your job has nothing to do with research, or if your idea is in an area unrelated to what you do for the company, it shouldn't be any of their business.
The poster says he works in IT, which is typically not a research position. If his job is to keep their servers running, why should he give them his idea for a new video compression technique or method of making ice cream?
The answer is going to vary from state-to-state and presumably from country to country. California, for example, has laws that greatly reduce the effect of non-compete agreements, but many other states do not. Furthermore, the question of whether they can insist that you sign a new agreement as a condition of continued employment will depend on whether you are in an "at will" jurisdiction or not.
You seem to think that descriptions of one aspect of a country exclude descriptions of others, which is false. The fact that the US is a federal constitutional republic does not mean that is not a democracy, which is the point at issue. Nothing you have said argues against the characterization of the US as a democracy. Further specifying what sort of democracy it is does not change this fact.
You're confusing the names that countries give themselves with accurate characterizations of their systems of government. The US is correctly characterized as a democracy and as a republic in spite of the fact that neither word appears in its name. As you mention, many, perhaps most, countries that call themselves "democratic republic", are in fact dictatorships or oligarchies. Indeed, the reason that they call themselves "democratic republic" is precisely because they want to pretend to be something they aren't. The United Kingdom, on the other hand, although in name a kingdom, is in fact a democracy and a republic since the monarch has no real power.
I know perfectly well that the US is a republic. Your confusion is that you think that a republic is not a democracy, which is false. The US is a republic and a democracy. There's no conflict. You don't explain yourself, but the usual basis for this fallacy is the mistaken belief that only direct democracies are democracies. That just isn't the case: representative democracies like the United States are considered democracies by virtually everybody, and the definitions of democracy that you will find in dictionaries and encyclopedias are not restricted to direct democracies. As one of many examples, see the Wikipedia article on democracy.
How does Microsoft know whether an employee is resigning to go to Google? When you give notice, you don't have to indicate what you're planning on doing next.
Re:Porting SimCity to Python + OLPC's "Sugar" gui
on
One SimCity Per Child
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· Score: 1
Not to start a language war, but are you aware that Tcl/Tk has undergone major improvements since 1992? Personally, for many purposes I prefer it to Python.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're talking about jury duty of a few days, that shouldn't be a problem. But if you're talking about a major case that lasts weeks or months, that's a pretty big cut. Serving on a jury for three months is equivalent to taking a pay cut of 25%. Many people can't afford that.
For several reasons. First, "60 Minutes" is reporting information from a National Academy of Sciences report and other sources that can be independently verified. You don't have to take their word for it. Second, "60 Minutes" is done by different teams of reporters at different times. Just because one reporter or one team may screw up doesn't mean that the others will. Third, the reporters probably felt under much greater pressure to make the story in the Bush National Guard case than in most others. It was a very hot issue. Finally, remember that although the documents that provided the most direct evidence were shown to be forgeries, the story was essentially correct: Bush did use political influence to get a cushy, essentially risk-free National Guard job. He did explicitly decline to make himself available for transfer to the war zone in SE Asia. He clearly did not complete his National Guard obligation. And finally, the former secretary of the officer who would have issued the forged documents testified that such documents had in fact existed. So, yes, "60 Minutes" was overly eager and did not investigate the documents carefully enough, but the story was basically accurate.
Well, you can sort of use C# on Linux. The Mono project is in various respects incomplete. According to the roadmap, their C# compiler is not up to date with Microsoft's. This may or may not affect what the Princeton team was doing, but still, why use an immature and only sort-of-portable language like C#? I can see it if there is some strong advantage to it, but so far I've seen no indication that there is one. So, what's the virtue of using C# over, say, Java?
The immediate problem here was evidently a programming error, not a bug in C#, but I do wonder why they are using C# for this. That forces everybody involved to use MS Windows and eliminates the possibility of hacking the system if they need to as well as the source as documentation. If they want a C-level language with garbage collection, why not Java or D or any of several others?
Too bad these aren't the real definitions. Look it up. Your definition of "democracy" is actually the definition of "direct democracy", while your definitino of "republic" is actually the definition of "indirect democracy" or "representative democracy". A republic can be a direct democracy, a representative democracy, or neither.
I understand logic quite well, thank you. Good analogies are actually quite useful. Again, making broad, wholly unsupported statements just makes you look infantile. If you want to play with adults, try presenting an argument. Thats how those of us who understand logic do it.
Was there a point in there somewhere? Calling something a "stupid car analogy" doesn't make it so. If you've got an argument as to why this is a poor analogy, feel free to make it.
I would compare this to the public road system. The roads can be put to uses that we can all agree are bad, even criminal. They can be used to transport kidnap victims, or to escape after robbing banks or killing people, or to get to the the place where one is going to commit a crime. Filtering network content and allowing only approved data would be like requiring every driver to submit a travel plan stating the reason for the trip and have his or her vehicle searched. That might well cut down on crime, but the game isn't worth the candle. This is all the more true where the problem with "bad" network traffic is nowhere near life-and-death and, in spite of a lot of posturing by the industry, not even all that big for the industry it affects.
How can they distinguish between encrypted video and other kinds of odd, binary data that they have no business interfering with, such as text in an exotic language and encoding, or somebody's proprietary compression format, or raw data from some odd kind of sensor?
My point is that executable size is not by itself a useful basis for comparison of the resources used by a program or how easy it was to write. If you compare two stand-alone programs, you can reasonably say that one is more compact than the other, and it will very likely be true that the smaller program required greater skill to write. If you compare a program that makes extensive use of libraries with one that doesn't, you can't make the same comparison. The shorter program was very likely the easier one to write because all the real work is done by the libraries, and there is no way to tell, just by looking at the programs themselves, which uses more memory.
For example, I am told that Internet Explorer is actually a rather modest shell and that much of the work is done by system calls. If this is true, IE is much smaller than say Firefox or Konqueror, but not in a meaningful way. Certainly, this would not be a reasonable basis for claiming that IE is coded more compactly and cleverly than the others.
Remain where you are. The Software Police will be there momentarily.
Yeah, but I bet they do that by relying on shared libraries. The size of the executable doesn't really tell us much these days
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the fastest responses, which may take essentially zero time. One is: "It isn't a bug.". The other is: "Already fixed. Update your installation."
Hunh? WWII was about defending freedom. WWI wasn't about much of anything.
The article doesn't say which veterans' organizations have been putting pressure on Google, but I bet it was the American Legion, and if it was, and I were Google, I would refuse to put up a special logo for the sole purpose of spiting them. The American Legion is a nasty, greedy, warmongering organization. None of the vets in my family or circle of friends will have anything to do with them. Remembrance Day here in Canada (I'm a dual citizen and have lived in both countries) has a very different feeling from Veterans' Day in the US.
In your situation requiring employees not to make use of your proprietary information if they leave would suffice to protect your legitimate interests. What possible justification could you have for laying claim to ideas that they have in areas unrelated to your business? The agreement presented to the poster is outrageously broad. I hope that yours isn't.
If you're employed to do research, it isn't unreasonable for you to be required to give your ideas to the company if they are in the area you are paid to work on. If your job has nothing to do with research, or if your idea is in an area unrelated to what you do for the company, it shouldn't be any of their business.
The poster says he works in IT, which is typically not a research position. If his job is to keep their servers running, why should he give them his idea for a new video compression technique or method of making ice cream?
The answer is going to vary from state-to-state and presumably from country to country. California, for example, has laws that greatly reduce the effect of non-compete agreements, but many other states do not. Furthermore, the question of whether they can insist that you sign a new agreement as a condition of continued employment will depend on whether you are in an "at will" jurisdiction or not.
You seem to think that descriptions of one aspect of a country exclude descriptions of others, which is false. The fact that the US is a federal constitutional republic does not mean that is not a democracy, which is the point at issue. Nothing you have said argues against the characterization of the US as a democracy. Further specifying what sort of democracy it is does not change this fact.
You're confusing the names that countries give themselves with accurate characterizations of their systems of government. The US is correctly characterized as a democracy and as a republic in spite of the fact that neither word appears in its name. As you mention, many, perhaps most, countries that call themselves "democratic republic", are in fact dictatorships or oligarchies. Indeed, the reason that they call themselves "democratic republic" is precisely because they want to pretend to be something they aren't. The United Kingdom, on the other hand, although in name a kingdom, is in fact a democracy and a republic since the monarch has no real power.
I know perfectly well that the US is a republic. Your confusion is that you think that a republic is not a democracy, which is false. The US is a republic and a democracy. There's no conflict. You don't explain yourself, but the usual basis for this fallacy is the mistaken belief that only direct democracies are democracies. That just isn't the case: representative democracies like the United States are considered democracies by virtually everybody, and the definitions of democracy that you will find in dictionaries and encyclopedias are not restricted to direct democracies. As one of many examples, see the Wikipedia article on democracy.
You're confused. If you look it up, you'll find that the US is considered a democracy.
How does Microsoft know whether an employee is resigning to go to Google? When you give notice, you don't have to indicate what you're planning on doing next.
This is an excellent precedent. Maybe the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution will follow their lead.
Not to start a language war, but are you aware that Tcl/Tk has undergone major improvements since 1992? Personally, for many purposes I prefer it to Python.
Is the Tcl/Tk version available anywhere?