"Oh, I see here that you used to work for XYZ. Well, they're a large company, slow moving, with lots of bureaucracy. We don't think you'd be a good fit for a smaller, dynamic organization like ours that gets things done quickly and on a tight budget."
Perhaps he's not. I once saved my company several million dollars on one project. My next job was with a division in a company whose yearly budget was less than that. I wouldn't be able to repeat my performance without slashing the entire division, and some other department. I wasn't a good fit, and didn't stay long.
If his expertise is saving money to the tune of millions of $/year, he'd better work for a company that spends millions. If he has expertise in earning a company millions, then he can look at the smaller, dynamic organizations.
To me an "uber" programmer is one who does NOT stare quietly into space thinking "I've seen this before", but rather, without pausing to take a breath implements the algorithm as fast as he can type.
So your uber programmer, when he needs to sort a file, writes a sort program.
CEOs who do the min/max-ing get paid a lot, but how much they're paid is probably small compared to how much they save; usually in the short term.
Eventually, people learn to game the system. If I'm a CEO, I get on the board of your company where you are the CEO and I get you and other cronies on my board. Now, we both vote to increase our salaries beyond what we're worth, we run our companies into the ground, and take our golden parachutes, leaving the stockholders with nothing.
The Post Office gets paid to deliver Cosmo, enough to hire additional personal. Junk mail is a net profit for the PO. (unlike regular mail) Your letter to aunt Jane is in effect subsidized by "useless" mail.
With the Patent Office, like most government agencies, any money taken in goes to the general pool. They can't use the extra money from frivolous patent applications to hire more/better examiners.
So yes, every frivolous patent takes resources away from the important work.
Even there, anyone can see that if you used the proper accounting methods, the budget was probaly way more than $300.
That's your answer right there. You can't swing a dead cat* in Hollywood without hitting a dozen writers. Mr. Raimi doesn't need any more writers, but creative accountants are gold.
estimates that more than 95% of Google hits on the words 'work at home' are scams, link to scams, or other dead ends
If this is true, doesn't the FTC fraud department have it's job already done for it? If it were 5%, the fraud department would have to really work to find a scam, in this case, just click on a link, and viola, someone to prosecute.
Which is why human intelligence is much more useful than signal intelligence
People lie.
The US government is especially good at sending bogus signals. There's no reason to believe other governments aren't as good.
All intelligence has it's problems. The trick is to put together enough different sources to weed out the bogus, and home in on the truth, all while keeping everything secret. Basically, it's an impossible task, but sometimes it's good enough, and sometimes you go to war looking for WMD that aren't there.
One where everyone is held down, dead and disease are ramant, and the average life span is short.
One where most everyone is well off, well feed, and has access to medical care, but a random few die early, are sent to jail, have no way out or up.
Is a society that only sends a few random people to the gulag better than the one that sends everyone to the gulag?
From a selfish, personal standpoint, I'd rather live where my chance to be well off is the greatest. I don't pretend that that's the most moral standpoint.
In the old days, the farther you called, the more you were charged. These days with Akamai and other proxy companies, many of the bytes you receive are generated on the major ISP you connect to, so the bandwidth to them is already paid for. ("Free")
It would be a lot harder to bill for, but charging for packets off network, vs. packets on network would make sense. What people are complaining about is and advertised rate of n Mb/s in large print, and hidden rules that say if you use more than m Mb/s in x minutes, they'll cancel your service. That wouldn't really be so bad if there were many ISPs to choose from, but for most people there is one phone and/or one cable provider.
The school administrator has already decided that there are no ETs, so it's silly to search for them. Science should only look for stuff we already know about! (:-)
Ron Paul, for instance, would argue that the government can't actually give you anything, since it has nothing to give
The government can give you property, or access to property.
When a person dies, their assets go to their heirs (or friends if there's a will), but if they have no heirs and no will the property goes to the state. That's one way the state can get stuff without violence. The state also has tons of property that it stole during the creation of the state, or claimed as it's own when there was no-one to claim otherwise.
Mostly tho, the government takes property in the form of taxes. It uses the threat of men with guns to convince people to pay their taxes.
The was a least one senator or congressman who said that his fellows shouldn't approve any spending bill unless it was so important that men with guns should take the money from grandmothers. (I paraphrase)
You might try calling a different pizza place, but you're out of luck if your area doesn't have one or they're already closed after 9pm.
It's basically the same thing with telco's. Only way to change that is to get government to do something about it.
But not by creating pizza's with government cheese. You change things by opening your own pizza shop. (the way I do it is to make my own pizza) The governments job is to make the playing field level, not by providing all services.
It seems that more and more, government un-levels the playing field, by design. It natural when you think about it. We'll put you in charge of pizza shop licensing. Who are you going to lunch with, the sharp dressed person from the pizza lobby, or the wild haired, crazy guy that wants to "revolutionize" the pizza business and stick it to the man. (in this scenario, you are the man.) Since you hang with the PIAA goons, and they offer to do most of you job for you by writing the pizza legislation, what group is going to have the laws in their favor?
Verizon notes, open access and unbundling would be a bad policy for the United States, largely because of the rural nature of much of the country. "The problem in these rural and low-density areas is that they have been unable to attract even a single entrant," the telco argues. "Imposing unbundling will not only fail to solve this problem, but will only make things worse: if the economics do not currently support a single provider, they are even less likely to support multiple(and potentially an unlimited number of) providers."
I'm not sure that you can have worse service than no service.
There are many areas that only allow one (or a few) providers. If that one provider chooses not to give service to a part of it's service area, those people are screwed. Maximum innovation will come from maximum competition. It's called capitalism, but it always seemed to me that capitalists usually want the least amount of competition possible.
Linus, RMS, Eric Raymond, and Theo De'Rahdt are all exchanging ideas, sometimes harshly, they are not exchanging bullets. I'd say they all have a lot to teach politicians.
But while Linus, RMS, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Tim O'Reilly, Brian Behlendorf, Paul Vixie, Mitch Kapor, Mark Shuttleworth, and Theo De'Rahdt are all exchanging ideas, sometimes harshly, they are not exchanging bullets. I'd say they all have a lot to teach politicians.
Linus, RMS, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Tim O'Reilly, Brian Behlendorf, Paul Vixie, Mitch Kapor, Mark Shuttleworth, and Theo De'Rahdt are all exchanging ideas, sometimes harshly, they are not exchanging bullets. I'd say they all have a lot to teach politicians.
The FOSS movement has people collaborating at a scale that has never been seen before. The Internet make it possible, but would there be as much exchange of ideas if there was no FOSS?
You'll never be able to quantify how many people didn't die either because of information they got using a OLPC, or how many kids didn't grow up to become dictators because better information and communication defused their anti-social tendencies.
Linus created a freely available kernel (not the first). RMS created a text editor and a compiler. (not the first either). What RMS did was create a framework that allowed people to share their work, the GPL. RMS convinced Linus to use this framework.
RMS is deserving of the prize, but you could argue that he should share it with others.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it waterproof, or are the water sensors so that it can call for help, just before it dies after being dropped overboard?
"Oh, I see here that you used to work for XYZ. Well, they're a large company, slow moving, with lots of bureaucracy. We don't think you'd be a good fit for a smaller, dynamic organization like ours that gets things done quickly and on a tight budget."
Perhaps he's not. I once saved my company several million dollars on one project. My next job was with a division in a company whose yearly budget was less than that. I wouldn't be able to repeat my performance without slashing the entire division, and some other department. I wasn't a good fit, and didn't stay long.
If his expertise is saving money to the tune of millions of $/year, he'd better work for a company that spends millions. If he has expertise in earning a company millions, then he can look at the smaller, dynamic organizations.
To me an "uber" programmer is one who does NOT stare quietly into space thinking "I've seen this before", but rather, without pausing to take a breath implements the algorithm as fast as he can type.
So your uber programmer, when he needs to sort a file, writes a sort program.
The less uber programmer, just runs:
sort filename1 > filename2
The key here is to have a line in your resume, "Saved XYZ company, XXX million dollars by refactoring ZZZ system."
That will get you noticed and hired by a clueful company.
CEOs who do the min/max-ing get paid a lot, but how much they're paid is probably small compared to how much they save; usually in the short term.
Eventually, people learn to game the system. If I'm a CEO, I get on the board of your company where you are the CEO and I get you and other cronies on my board. Now, we both vote to increase our salaries beyond what we're worth, we run our companies into the ground, and take our golden parachutes, leaving the stockholders with nothing.
The Post Office gets paid to deliver Cosmo, enough to hire additional personal. Junk mail is a net profit for the PO. (unlike regular mail) Your letter to aunt Jane is in effect subsidized by "useless" mail.
With the Patent Office, like most government agencies, any money taken in goes to the general pool. They can't use the extra money from frivolous patent applications to hire more/better examiners.
So yes, every frivolous patent takes resources away from the important work.
I'm glad the patent office is spending time on this rather that working on useless things like new life saving drugs...
His last option, Peace, is the most likely. Space is so dangerous that most battles would end with both sides dead or dying.
Even there, anyone can see that if you used the proper accounting methods, the budget was probaly way more than $300.
That's your answer right there. You can't swing a dead cat* in Hollywood without hitting a dozen writers. Mr. Raimi doesn't need any more writers, but creative accountants are gold.
*No actual cats were harmed during this post.
Put your computer in an arcade cabinet, and use arcade style buttons and controllers. They're expensive, but designed to handle the load.
estimates that more than 95% of Google hits on the words 'work at home' are scams, link to scams, or other dead ends
If this is true, doesn't the FTC fraud department have it's job already done for it? If it were 5%, the fraud department would have to really work to find a scam, in this case, just click on a link, and viola, someone to prosecute.
Which is why human intelligence is much more useful than signal intelligence
People lie.
The US government is especially good at sending bogus signals. There's no reason to believe other governments aren't as good.
All intelligence has it's problems. The trick is to put together enough different sources to weed out the bogus, and home in on the truth, all while keeping everything secret. Basically, it's an impossible task, but sometimes it's good enough, and sometimes you go to war looking for WMD that aren't there.
Is a society that only sends a few random people to the gulag better than the one that sends everyone to the gulag?
From a selfish, personal standpoint, I'd rather live where my chance to be well off is the greatest. I don't pretend that that's the most moral standpoint.
Translates to: Screw the authors & screw the customers.
Minor nitpick. AOL bought TW, then TW turned around a swallowed AOL. Big miscalculation on the part of Steve Case.
In the old days, the farther you called, the more you were charged. These days with Akamai and other proxy companies, many of the bytes you receive are generated on the major ISP you connect to, so the bandwidth to them is already paid for. ("Free")
It would be a lot harder to bill for, but charging for packets off network, vs. packets on network would make sense. What people are complaining about is and advertised rate of n Mb/s in large print, and hidden rules that say if you use more than m Mb/s in x minutes, they'll cancel your service. That wouldn't really be so bad if there were many ISPs to choose from, but for most people there is one phone and/or one cable provider.
Why would any business cancel paying customers that don't negatively impact operations?
The school administrator has already decided that there are no ETs, so it's silly to search for them. Science should only look for stuff we already know about! (:-)
Ron Paul, for instance, would argue that the government can't actually give you anything, since it has nothing to give
The government can give you property, or access to property.
When a person dies, their assets go to their heirs (or friends if there's a will), but if they have no heirs and no will the property goes to the state. That's one way the state can get stuff without violence. The state also has tons of property that it stole during the creation of the state, or claimed as it's own when there was no-one to claim otherwise.
Mostly tho, the government takes property in the form of taxes. It uses the threat of men with guns to convince people to pay their taxes.
The was a least one senator or congressman who said that his fellows shouldn't approve any spending bill unless it was so important that men with guns should take the money from grandmothers. (I paraphrase)
You might try calling a different pizza place, but you're out of luck if your area doesn't have one or they're already closed after 9pm.
It's basically the same thing with telco's. Only way to change that is to get government to do something about it.
But not by creating pizza's with government cheese. You change things by opening your own pizza shop. (the way I do it is to make my own pizza) The governments job is to make the playing field level, not by providing all services.
It seems that more and more, government un-levels the playing field, by design. It natural when you think about it. We'll put you in charge of pizza shop licensing. Who are you going to lunch with, the sharp dressed person from the pizza lobby, or the wild haired, crazy guy that wants to "revolutionize" the pizza business and stick it to the man. (in this scenario, you are the man.) Since you hang with the PIAA goons, and they offer to do most of you job for you by writing the pizza legislation, what group is going to have the laws in their favor?
Verizon notes, open access and unbundling would be a bad policy for the United States, largely because of the rural nature of much of the country. "The problem in these rural and low-density areas is that they have been unable to attract even a single entrant," the telco argues. "Imposing unbundling will not only fail to solve this problem, but will only make things worse: if the economics do not currently support a single provider, they are even less likely to support multiple(and potentially an unlimited number of) providers."
I'm not sure that you can have worse service than no service. There are many areas that only allow one (or a few) providers. If that one provider chooses not to give service to a part of it's service area, those people are screwed. Maximum innovation will come from maximum competition. It's called capitalism, but it always seemed to me that capitalists usually want the least amount of competition possible.
Linus, RMS, Eric Raymond, and Theo De'Rahdt are all exchanging ideas, sometimes harshly, they are not exchanging bullets. I'd say they all have a lot to teach politicians.
But while Linus, RMS, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Tim O'Reilly, Brian Behlendorf, Paul Vixie, Mitch Kapor, Mark Shuttleworth, and Theo De'Rahdt are all exchanging ideas, sometimes harshly, they are not exchanging bullets. I'd say they all have a lot to teach politicians.
Linus, RMS, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Tim O'Reilly, Brian Behlendorf, Paul Vixie, Mitch Kapor, Mark Shuttleworth, and Theo De'Rahdt are all exchanging ideas, sometimes harshly, they are not exchanging bullets. I'd say they all have a lot to teach politicians.
The FOSS movement has people collaborating at a scale that has never been seen before. The Internet make it possible, but would there be as much exchange of ideas if there was no FOSS?
You'll never be able to quantify how many people didn't die either because of information they got using a OLPC, or how many kids didn't grow up to become dictators because better information and communication defused their anti-social tendencies.
Linus created a freely available kernel (not the first). RMS created a text editor and a compiler. (not the first either). What RMS did was create a framework that allowed people to share their work, the GPL. RMS convinced Linus to use this framework.
RMS is deserving of the prize, but you could argue that he should share it with others.