Re:Why does anyone want internet GPS anyway?
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Yes and no. Go out of cell coverage and you might be wanting the non-internet kind.
That said the modern iphone is 16GB/32GB as are the competitors, plenty of room to store a static copy. That would be cool, internet gps that automatically updates a static copy on your phone, and seamlessly switches over to the static copy when out of cell coverage. I'd buy that for a dollar!
Internet GPS is great for urban areas, which is fine for most people, however go off the beaten path into most rural areas, and you might be a bit surprised and unprepared if you think you will have GPS guiding you.
I remember when using GPS took specialized training and equipment and you were thought of as only slightly less powerful than god.
It saddens me a bit that in the last several years it has gone from that, to any consumer with the will, to the any 12 year old can get a free app that does that on their phone.
Oh well, at least I can still explain how it works in detail, not that anyone cares. Ho hum.
I get what your saying and I agree to a certain extent, however antitrust is also supposed to protect against unfair business practices. Those practices may work really well, but the use the power of the size of the company involved to do some ethically dubious actions to limit competition.
An example of this would me Microsoft saying if you don't only use our OS, then we will refuse to sell to you, or Intel bribing other companies not to use AMD chips.
Its a small leap or distinction between bribing a company not to use another company and paying them money from shared ad revenue to use their product, or perhaps Apple's exclusivity deals.
That said I am not the one to make that distinction, and it can get pretty gray, which is where companies generally operate anyway. Someone makes that decision, and presumably a lot of thought goes into that. Seeing that there has been no suit against them I would have to say this practice is OK. I suspect you have to be more obvious or overt about your "pressure" to not use competitor products for that to kick in.
"Well its 2009, and the world ends in 2012, so if we take one number, 2009 and subtract it from 2012 you get the number 3. Its called math. So you should kill yourself in about 3 years. If you want to get really accurate, you could look at a calender and see what month it is, and what day, and really work out exactly when to do it! Either way, it isn't for awhile and your probably likely to die drowning looking up during a rain storm before that, so leave me alone..."
alternate alternate alternate ending:
"Don't worry about it we will be hit by a meteor or a comet long before then!"
As an aside I have also heard that this Mayan 2012 prediction is all buffoonery. They Mayans thought their the world would end just like we think the world ends after December. It was their calender for keeping track of time. I think it was implied that you just restart the calender once the cycle is over. Perhaps it is so implisit that they didn't feel the need to explain this just the same we don't put a sticker on every calender we ever make that says "Not to worry, world not ending, new calender next year!"
So I guess your main argument is that a "lesson plan" has nothing to do with "teaching" and as such is a personal work and thus not applicable as it has nothing to do with the profession for which you are employed...
If that is it, I hope you are very employable if you plan to take that to court.
I guess I wasn't talking about Wall Street as a whole, but rather why certain things are not regulated that should be.
I watched a show recently on the derivative swaps or whatever they are called. These are basically the big piles of debt that banks and other institutions would buy from each other which caused the whole cascade effect which was the root case of the whole bailout to begin with. Some companies were called "too big to fail" because they owned a lot of this stuff. If they defaulted on their debts, then the debts they held in these swaps would default, causing 4 other large "too big to fails" to go under, each one of those 4 would fail each causing several others to fail, and eventually down tumbles your entire economy. So you can see how the politicians would be scared shittless into paying whatever money it would take to fix the problem (700 billion in this case).
It really is a stupid stupid situation if you think about it. Anyway back when Clinton was around they actually created a arm of the government to make laws to regulate this, and this was one of the things that they did. It however was rejected as the Banks leaned hard with lobbyist as they didn't want the interference and Greenspan who was the treasury guy at the time was a big believer in less regulation is better.
So there is a situation where the problem was identified, and a solution found, but was ultimately rejected for political reasons rather than fiscal ones.
What is scary, is that I think at the end of the show they said that currently there is still no regulation or monitoring of these swaps today, and that Banks continue to lobby against it. So basically the problem isn't fixed, it is still going on. If it took 700 Billion to "save" the economy last time, how much will the next bailout cost?
I remember a few (ok a lot) of years ago, when Counter Strike came out (remember that one? or maybe it was rainbow 6...) there was a level where you had to kill Canadian Terrorists... I believe they were some kind of separatists or something.
OK I don't really want to kill separatists, Quebec or otherwise, however I did think it was cool that Canada was even mentioned in a video game let alone active members in it, and part of the action actually took place in Canada. Sure I was playing US guys killing Canadian guys, but whatever, we were in the game dammit! Also some folks in the US might get a little used to games taking place in New York, or Vegas, or whatever big city they happen to be in at the time. When that city is Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver that's like a huge deal!
Also all this stuff gets made in the USA, just like the movies (or they are directed by, or paid for, etc...) get used to the US perspective or make your own game called: Worker & Parasite ( ).
Your kidding right? Contract? You mean their collective contract? I would say that either it is so common that it is in every contract like that, or that you do not need it.
I could spend the week and read through our collectively bargained contract and I doubt there is anything in there that specifically that speaks to that, however the fact remains:
You work for someone, that someone owns your work. If you try and sell it as your own, you get sued. That is reality.
If you work for yourself, you can do whatever you like with your own work.
I can't take a copy of all the work I have done here and bring it to the next company as I think it would be useful. I do not own that work. I am still the creator, but the rights are not mine.
In the grand scheme of things, how utterly pointless. It wouldn't surprise me that in an effort to make it green, it is likely more dirty to make the thing in the first place. Of course most of this is just marketing bunk anyway. Reminds me of descriptions of 150$ monster HDMI cables... acoustically enhanced wiring, with gold... no platinum tips, electromagnetically plated with iridium fairy dust for best sound quality, you stupid idiot yuppie with too much money and not enough brains I am going to rip you off so bad and then you are going to be so stupid as to brag to you friends about the quality of your 150$ cable that cost us 0.52 cents to actually construct in Asia someplace... etc....
Anyway that fact that people actually buy into (literally) into this garbage hurts my soul. Then they can preach about how eco friendly their mac book is... give me a break.
You could say the same thing about SCO, Linux, IBM, and Microsoft.
Linux and SCO were the ones in actual litigation, however IBM was funding Linux and Microsoft was funding SCO. Neither enity has the money on its own, but if their mutual interests serves someone larger sometimes they will pitch in to see what happens (if they think it can improve their situation).
From what I heard, the only thing that crippled the cost of US unions is the cost of health care insurance.
It was the old retired union people that GM and the rest had to pay crazy health care insurance that made them uncompetitive (ignoring the crappy cars) with 70$ vs 40$ an hour total cost difference.
So if the US figured out their health care mess 10 years ago or so they would likely have been fine. Couple this with the consumer and corporate greed of the housing bubble and unregulated wall street troubles (making borrowing impossible), well its no wonder they are screwed.
Ford was the only one that escaped someone unscathed, and that is either through accident, or though prescient forecasting, they pretty much leveraged every asset they had several years PRIOR to the meltdown so were sitting on a pile of cash and didn't need any loans to stay afloat.
Speaking of which, you always here about some jerk CEO that was at the helm when their company lost 5 billion, and he gets a 40 million bonus or something stupid. I sure hope whoever was responsible for Ford's decision back in the day got a big fat bonus, probably the one and only time someone would actually deserve a huge bonus.
As someone who has taken both a 4 year CS degree at a University and gotten a 1 year certificate at college I can offer the following perspective.
It depends on the school. The university I attended wasn't exactly well known for CS, but I think did a decent job. Some with more of an emphasis is CS will defiantly do better, while others will be much worse. College or vocational schools whatever you call them, are they same way. If you go to one that its focus is CS, it will likely be pretty good, if it isn't, well it will likely be very very bad. It depends of people. People are different, some are smart, some are not, others are lazy, and some have good work ethic. A 4 year degree gives at least some reassurance to an employer that the person is not dumb and lazy. It is by no means a sure thing, but it will weed out a lot. A challenging college or vocational school can do the same thing, in a short period of time, but I would say that you would have to know specifically which schools, and they would be few in number.
I found personally that University taught me how to write good code correctly, and college taught me to write code. Mind you the college was not a CS college. They were concerned about memorizing syntax (C++ and VB in this case) and getting your code to work than anything else. In university I might get marked for how optimized my code was, or if I used things like recursion properly. They also stressed the little things, like commenting, documenting, and planning (though I remember like many making my pretty little charts AFTER finishing the program). In college, so long as it worked there were pretty happy.
So I don’t see anything out of the ordinary that people with 4 year degrees generally get paid more or hired more than people that don’t, its pretty common sense. Does that mean that they are better at coding? That depends on you definition of "better at coding". That also assumes that all they ever want you for is coding. If they are looking for someone for the long term, as a company asset it is one thing. If they are looking for someone to fill a "job" then that is something else entirely.
Anyway, I think everyone should do both, though I know that can be a tall order.
Nope. They are working for the government. Their work belongs to the government. Another way to say that is: They work for the taxpayer, their work belongs to the taxpayer. If they tutored by themselves, then yes, that would belong to them and they could sell it, just like if they worked for a Private School, that school might be a bit peeved if they sold stuff privately that was developed while working for them. I do not see a distinction between teachers and any other profession in this respect.
I work for government, and I am pretty sure they might have something to say if I opened up a web site and started selling my code online for extra money. I am pretty sure they would fire my ass and say that I was making a profit from material I developed while working for them. I am pretty sure the argument of "Well I wrote it, so therefore it is mine", would fall on deaf ears. Teachers already have it pretty good, I do not have a whole lot of sympathy for the them, the well is pretty dry these days.
Slashdot Mirror
...like a bad motivator.
I am pretty sure Jar Jar would have sucked even more as a muppet.
...termanatin yur connerz.
Yes and no. Go out of cell coverage and you might be wanting the non-internet kind.
That said the modern iphone is 16GB/32GB as are the competitors, plenty of room to store a static copy. That would be cool, internet gps that automatically updates a static copy on your phone, and seamlessly switches over to the static copy when out of cell coverage. I'd buy that for a dollar!
Internet GPS is great for urban areas, which is fine for most people, however go off the beaten path into most rural areas, and you might be a bit surprised and unprepared if you think you will have GPS guiding you.
I remember when using GPS took specialized training and equipment and you were thought of as only slightly less powerful than god.
It saddens me a bit that in the last several years it has gone from that, to any consumer with the will, to the any 12 year old can get a free app that does that on their phone.
Oh well, at least I can still explain how it works in detail, not that anyone cares. Ho hum.
I get what your saying and I agree to a certain extent, however antitrust is also supposed to protect against unfair business practices. Those practices may work really well, but the use the power of the size of the company involved to do some ethically dubious actions to limit competition.
An example of this would me Microsoft saying if you don't only use our OS, then we will refuse to sell to you, or Intel bribing other companies not to use AMD chips.
Its a small leap or distinction between bribing a company not to use another company and paying them money from shared ad revenue to use their product, or perhaps Apple's exclusivity deals.
That said I am not the one to make that distinction, and it can get pretty gray, which is where companies generally operate anyway. Someone makes that decision, and presumably a lot of thought goes into that. Seeing that there has been no suit against them I would have to say this practice is OK. I suspect you have to be more obvious or overt about your "pressure" to not use competitor products for that to kick in.
Stealth Harrier Armored Ray Kannon or S.H.A.R.K. is the latest is fighter laser technology!
sry the best I could do on short notice... you do better, I dare you!
"Kill yourself now, before its too late!"
alternative ending:
"Why bother, we are all gonna die in 2012!"
alternate alternate ending:
"Well its 2009, and the world ends in 2012, so if we take one number, 2009 and subtract it from 2012 you get the number 3. Its called math. So you should kill yourself in about 3 years. If you want to get really accurate, you could look at a calender and see what month it is, and what day, and really work out exactly when to do it! Either way, it isn't for awhile and your probably likely to die drowning looking up during a rain storm before that, so leave me alone..."
alternate alternate alternate ending:
"Don't worry about it we will be hit by a meteor or a comet long before then!"
As an aside I have also heard that this Mayan 2012 prediction is all buffoonery. They Mayans thought their the world would end just like we think the world ends after December. It was their calender for keeping track of time. I think it was implied that you just restart the calender once the cycle is over. Perhaps it is so implisit that they didn't feel the need to explain this just the same we don't put a sticker on every calender we ever make that says "Not to worry, world not ending, new calender next year!"
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that
- George Carlin
This just in!
Non-renewable resources are in limited supply!
News at 11.
So I guess your main argument is that a "lesson plan" has nothing to do with "teaching" and as such is a personal work and thus not applicable as it has nothing to do with the profession for which you are employed...
If that is it, I hope you are very employable if you plan to take that to court.
Ah Heisenberg you crafty devil!
I guess I wasn't talking about Wall Street as a whole, but rather why certain things are not regulated that should be.
I watched a show recently on the derivative swaps or whatever they are called. These are basically the big piles of debt that banks and other institutions would buy from each other which caused the whole cascade effect which was the root case of the whole bailout to begin with. Some companies were called "too big to fail" because they owned a lot of this stuff. If they defaulted on their debts, then the debts they held in these swaps would default, causing 4 other large "too big to fails" to go under, each one of those 4 would fail each causing several others to fail, and eventually down tumbles your entire economy. So you can see how the politicians would be scared shittless into paying whatever money it would take to fix the problem (700 billion in this case).
It really is a stupid stupid situation if you think about it. Anyway back when Clinton was around they actually created a arm of the government to make laws to regulate this, and this was one of the things that they did. It however was rejected as the Banks leaned hard with lobbyist as they didn't want the interference and Greenspan who was the treasury guy at the time was a big believer in less regulation is better.
So there is a situation where the problem was identified, and a solution found, but was ultimately rejected for political reasons rather than fiscal ones.
What is scary, is that I think at the end of the show they said that currently there is still no regulation or monitoring of these swaps today, and that Banks continue to lobby against it. So basically the problem isn't fixed, it is still going on. If it took 700 Billion to "save" the economy last time, how much will the next bailout cost?
Kind of criminal if you think about it.
Oh Boo Hoo.
Be happy your in the game period!
I remember a few (ok a lot) of years ago, when Counter Strike came out (remember that one? or maybe it was rainbow 6...) there was a level where you had to kill Canadian Terrorists... I believe they were some kind of separatists or something.
OK I don't really want to kill separatists, Quebec or otherwise, however I did think it was cool that Canada was even mentioned in a video game let alone active members in it, and part of the action actually took place in Canada. Sure I was playing US guys killing Canadian guys, but whatever, we were in the game dammit! Also some folks in the US might get a little used to games taking place in New York, or Vegas, or whatever big city they happen to be in at the time. When that city is Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver that's like a huge deal!
Also all this stuff gets made in the USA, just like the movies (or they are directed by, or paid for, etc...) get used to the US perspective or make your own game called: Worker & Parasite ( ).
Likely the top 1000 made about 1 million in the time it took me to read the article.
Excuse me while I start a grassroots campaign to get my website in the top 1000! Slashdot and Stephen Cobare I need you!
Your kidding right? Contract? You mean their collective contract? I would say that either it is so common that it is in every contract like that, or that you do not need it.
I could spend the week and read through our collectively bargained contract and I doubt there is anything in there that specifically that speaks to that, however the fact remains:
You work for someone, that someone owns your work. If you try and sell it as your own, you get sued. That is reality.
If you work for yourself, you can do whatever you like with your own work.
I can't take a copy of all the work I have done here and bring it to the next company as I think it would be useful. I do not own that work. I am still the creator, but the rights are not mine.
LOL. Exactly right. But you forget that apple's primary market are cappuccino drinking elitist snobs.
Perfect example of this is:
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/environment.html
A total load of BS and crock.
In the grand scheme of things, how utterly pointless. It wouldn't surprise me that in an effort to make it green, it is likely more dirty to make the thing in the first place. Of course most of this is just marketing bunk anyway. Reminds me of descriptions of 150$ monster HDMI cables... acoustically enhanced wiring, with gold... no platinum tips, electromagnetically plated with iridium fairy dust for best sound quality, you stupid idiot yuppie with too much money and not enough brains I am going to rip you off so bad and then you are going to be so stupid as to brag to you friends about the quality of your 150$ cable that cost us 0.52 cents to actually construct in Asia someplace... etc....
Anyway that fact that people actually buy into (literally) into this garbage hurts my soul. Then they can preach about how eco friendly their mac book is... give me a break.
You could say the same thing about SCO, Linux, IBM, and Microsoft.
Linux and SCO were the ones in actual litigation, however IBM was funding Linux and Microsoft was funding SCO. Neither enity has the money on its own, but if their mutual interests serves someone larger sometimes they will pitch in to see what happens (if they think it can improve their situation).
Hopefully I didn't get the players confused.
From what I heard, the only thing that crippled the cost of US unions is the cost of health care insurance.
It was the old retired union people that GM and the rest had to pay crazy health care insurance that made them uncompetitive (ignoring the crappy cars) with 70$ vs 40$ an hour total cost difference.
So if the US figured out their health care mess 10 years ago or so they would likely have been fine. Couple this with the consumer and corporate greed of the housing bubble and unregulated wall street troubles (making borrowing impossible), well its no wonder they are screwed.
Ford was the only one that escaped someone unscathed, and that is either through accident, or though prescient forecasting, they pretty much leveraged every asset they had several years PRIOR to the meltdown so were sitting on a pile of cash and didn't need any loans to stay afloat.
Speaking of which, you always here about some jerk CEO that was at the helm when their company lost 5 billion, and he gets a 40 million bonus or something stupid. I sure hope whoever was responsible for Ford's decision back in the day got a big fat bonus, probably the one and only time someone would actually deserve a huge bonus.
As someone who has taken both a 4 year CS degree at a University and gotten a 1 year certificate at college I can offer the following perspective.
It depends on the school. The university I attended wasn't exactly well known for CS, but I think did a decent job. Some with more of an emphasis is CS will defiantly do better, while others will be much worse. College or vocational schools whatever you call them, are they same way. If you go to one that its focus is CS, it will likely be pretty good, if it isn't, well it will likely be very very bad. It depends of people. People are different, some are smart, some are not, others are lazy, and some have good work ethic. A 4 year degree gives at least some reassurance to an employer that the person is not dumb and lazy. It is by no means a sure thing, but it will weed out a lot. A challenging college or vocational school can do the same thing, in a short period of time, but I would say that you would have to know specifically which schools, and they would be few in number.
I found personally that University taught me how to write good code correctly, and college taught me to write code. Mind you the college was not a CS college. They were concerned about memorizing syntax (C++ and VB in this case) and getting your code to work than anything else. In university I might get marked for how optimized my code was, or if I used things like recursion properly. They also stressed the little things, like commenting, documenting, and planning (though I remember like many making my pretty little charts AFTER finishing the program). In college, so long as it worked there were pretty happy.
So I don’t see anything out of the ordinary that people with 4 year degrees generally get paid more or hired more than people that don’t, its pretty common sense. Does that mean that they are better at coding? That depends on you definition of "better at coding". That also assumes that all they ever want you for is coding. If they are looking for someone for the long term, as a company asset it is one thing. If they are looking for someone to fill a "job" then that is something else entirely.
Anyway, I think everyone should do both, though I know that can be a tall order.
as someone who took (and hated) assembly language, I beg to differ... :)
Also took Cobol, and while not as hard/challenging/frustrating as assembly, quite a bit different from the modern languages everyone learns.
Nope. They are working for the government. Their work belongs to the government. Another way to say that is: They work for the taxpayer, their work belongs to the taxpayer. If they tutored by themselves, then yes, that would belong to them and they could sell it, just like if they worked for a Private School, that school might be a bit peeved if they sold stuff privately that was developed while working for them. I do not see a distinction between teachers and any other profession in this respect.
I work for government, and I am pretty sure they might have something to say if I opened up a web site and started selling my code online for extra money. I am pretty sure they would fire my ass and say that I was making a profit from material I developed while working for them. I am pretty sure the argument of "Well I wrote it, so therefore it is mine", would fall on deaf ears. Teachers already have it pretty good, I do not have a whole lot of sympathy for the them, the well is pretty dry these days.
So if you mix Black Hole with Red matter, you get Dark Red Matter?
Science is Awesome!
Suck! Suck! Suck!
Sorry... :)
LOL. My sister got a Mac and my tech support totally stopped.
Now when she asks for help I just shrug and say "Sorry I know nothing about Macs..." :)