Sort of. The thing is, any non-secret word/number is lousy for security, really hard-core, actually difficult-to-break security. Furthermore, anything systematic is poor; if someone knows who you are, they know exactly what information would be required to get into your account!
In relation to these problems, any part of the SSN used is equally bad. So I was just trying to suggest that, since the SSN is basically only being used as a "personal hash code" anyway, why not use the part that compromises the LEAST amount of information about you?
Though in general the idea of using ones SSN (or parts thereof) just doesn't leave you with a warm fuzzy.
Better to require the first part of your SSN than the last, though. The first 3 digits are assigned to a geographical place; either the place of your birth or where you first apply for a SSN, I don't recall which. The next 2 are something to do with birthdate: at the very least, odd year births have an odd here, evens have an even.
The last 4, though, are "random," or at least not explicitly derived from your name or birth or application circumstances. So it really peeves me when people want me to verify the last 4 of the soc number; that's the very part we should be MOST careful about. The first 5 could probably be determined by careful research anyway, so they're not (quite) as harmful to use as a personal "hash number" for things like logins.
Ha ha... I was gonna say "wow, amazon's had this for years, how can it get patented by..." oh yeah, Amazon.
But seriously. I think B&N has had this on their site all along as well; the question is, did their site start before 1999? I know they were kind of a late-comer on the ecommerce scene (Oh god... I did not just use that phrase).
Anyway, the point about/. book reviews is a good one, but what about eBay?? I've personally had my account since 1998, and I know they've had feedback the entire time. Of course it's a discussion per-user, but each post is about a particular item and transaction. This seems to really, really count.
Schadenfreude, Bankruptcy, & the Prisoners Dil
on
Salon Asks for Help
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I have little sympathy... I mean, come on, it doesn't take $80M to run a server farm and pay a few journos...
First of all, that $80M is the total they lost, ever. Of course it's a lot of money, but others did way WAY worse. Even amazon, who we regard as somewhat successful, was losing between 25%-125% of that amount per quarter until just 6 months ago*. And, as many others have pointed out, one of the reasons that they still have ongoing losses is the digs in downtown SF, with a lease negotiated in the halcyon days of the late 90s when it seemed like a good idea.
What I don't understand is how everyone refuses to be understanding of the situation. We all know, times were good, now times are bad; why dance on Salon's grave before the body's even cold? Even if you disagree with its political slant, Salon has had tons of insightful articles by a wide array of interesting columnists, and they're flogging a business model we'd all love to see succeed: the pureplay online publication. Salon's a great thing caught in a bad place -- be careful wishing for them to fail spectacularly, because that implies lots of other imminent failures you may not like so much.
That said, if the primary reason they're in such a tight spot is that horrible lease, then this is exactly the kind of situation that bankruptcy protection was designed for. I for one would LOVE to see Salon file for bankruptcy and reorganize, not because it would be a sign of failure, but precisely the opposite. This is a financial committment that could very realistically stop them from operating. They shouldn't be in that expensive location any more, and the landlord will most likely not ever see the money anyway. So why sink the ship along the way?
THAT said, the fact that they're still floundering with no plan is the reason I haven't subscribed yet. Times are tight; I could certainly afford $20 a year, but I'd rather not spend $20 for 1 month or possibly 2. If 50,000 of us all signed up at once, they may have enough revenue to continue indefinitely, but no one signup is going to save them. The information I'd like to see from a "fellow prisoner" is what Salon's going to do to make sure they stick around a while - I think bankruptcy could be key.
While I'm waiting for this Q42 "good old adventures" thingy to load, I just wanted to give a shout out to my former favorite online-DHTML-based game, Astronest.
Astronest was actually a DHTML-driven database app a la "Solar Realms Elite." But it was SO much better because (not that I'm remembering SRE all that well at the moment...) instead of just trading a few units of food and buying 2 sorts of ships, you could actually *design your own fleets* and stock them up with weapons you'd "researched" by spending tons of turns poking around on the site.
It was a ton of fun, until you got to the upper levels where you realized that thousands of teenagers play WAY more than you and it's mathematically impossible to design fleets better than *all* of them. I say "was," not only because it gets depressing at the high end, but also because it's no longer around; I visited that link for nostalgia's sake, and it throws off tons and tons of popups now; I wouldn't recommend visiting.
Allegedly there's a Korean version out there somewhere that's still playable, but I already dedicated way too much of my life trying to win that game. But man it was fun.
Okay, but let's be informed about what the costs and (potential) benefits are, and let's not be naive about "letting NASA decide": their careers depend on NASA funding. They're going to start with the assumption that "what we're doing is great, but needs..." and at the end of the report is going to be a huge dollar sign.
Manned space exploration has been a huge maw of inefficiency since it started. In this Washington Monthly article, from 1980, some of the Space Shuttle Program's problems are dissected; basically, even if it *had* been on budget, it would have been more expensive than other useful space technologies of the time (mostly satellite launchers), and would have had little to no added value.
Basically, the only reason we send people into space is because "it's neat." I mean, I suppose I'm abstractly interested in how ants tunnel in zero G, and I'm sure it does get kids interested in science, but for tens of billions of dollars...?
So, great. Sure, the whole effort shouldn't be cancelled because two shuttles were lost, but the thing is, that wouldn't even be a problem if we put it to a public vote, because people are convinced it's "too important." I'd like to know what that's founded on, maybe inform the debate a little bit, then decide.
At the risk of running OT, I highly doubt this is the end of project prometheus, although it is an excellent argument against it: just doesn't seem safe to fire up rockets full of nukes anymore.
As evidence that the project will continue, I refer to this PopSci article:
"The New War in Space" http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/arti cle/0,12 543,334743,00.html
Not because PopSci is really the definitive source on such issues, but because it contains some quotes from Rumsfeld about his (hence, the administration's) intent to "weaponize" space, and some analysis thereof.
The choice quote, which I can't track down at the moment, is something like "All media (land, sea, air) have been used for combat, and it's unrealistic to think space will be any different." Unfortunately, I doubt the administration will be dissuaded by the deaths of 7 astronauts, or the broader implications of this tragedy relative to the safety of sending *anything* into space.
Have you experimented with the threshold of how many significant features you use? I recall in Bill Yerazunis's presentation, he discussed keeping all features, not just the top several. But his weren't, to the best of my knowledge, scored contextually; do you find that contextual scoring outweighs keeping more features?
It's interesting to see that the talks focused on heuristics exclusively.
Most of them focused on statistical methods, primarily Bayesian ones, actually. And yes, sometimes even a well-trained Bayesian filter will result in a false positive sometimes.
One presenter made an excellent point, though: you can easily say "I've never had a false positive" if you just don't filter very much. So, I'm glad your system hasn't been tagging your good messages as bad; how effective is it at getitng rid of the bad ones, though?
Paul Graham's presentation revolved around a Bayesian algorithm he'd devised which put more weight on features in the headers, as opposed to the bodies, of email; he claimed something like 99.5% effectiveness with only something like 5 false positives in 4000 emails sorted.
The really interesting part was the nature of the 3 false positives that he showed. Two of them were mailing lists that he "didn't care much about anymore," and the other was a note in all caps from a person in egypt requesting some info on one of Graham's academic projects. In other words, they all *did* resemble unsolicited mail.
Check out http://www.eprivacygroup.com/ . I'm not shilling for these guys; I just ran into a couple of them skulking around the conference and what they described to me is about what you're suggesting. I wish them luck; it seems like a truly huge undertaking.
Basically, it boiled down to "Spam is currently in a gray area legally, so let's legitimize spam in order to divide the spammers into legal spammers (who pay handsomely for the privilege)
I also kind of got the impression that he thought the rate for this should be prohibitively high (did he say something like a penny per message, or am I making that up?). The point being, to put a system in place so that you are ABLE to charge for it so the magnitude of the problem is more clearly discernable.
Barry also mentioned many other "features" of spam from an ISP's point of view, not the least of which is that naive people hold their own ISP responsible for the mail they get, which is sometimes pornographic and exposed to children. I don't think he was seriously suggesting ISPs should let this go and furthermore profit from it, but rather that, if they were authorized and able to charge for it, they could flip the spammer's economic model and improve relationships between ISPs and their clients.
I'm utterly confused as to why the other excellent response to this post has been marked "troll" twice.
First of all, CRM114 is just a language. Bayesian filters could just as easily be written in Perl or C. The language makes no discrimination whatsoever.
Secondly, the very point of Bayesian filtering is that it learns what you consider trash and what you consider treasure. You start with a training set of several hundred "legit" messages and several hundred spams, and it goes from there.
The reason it works so well on a person-by-person configuration is that certain phrases (eg, email addresses of people you know in the "From" header) correlate very strongly to good mail, while phrases like "click here" and "enlarge your" are almost certainly spam indicators. Everything between is personal; if you're on a BDSM list, your filter will learn that you like that stuff. Given a training set with your personal tastes, rates well in excess of 95% are possible.
Incidentally, this is why Bayesian methods aren't that great for site-wide filtering (that, and they would be tremendously slow); it's much harder to establish what a *group* of people considers to be "not spam."
Alright, this won't be strictly on-topic, but you started it.
As a consultant, one thing I can tell you is that there are consultants to do *anything*, not just the kind that "come into your organization and give you a bunch of terrible ideas to mess it up" as in the comics you "cite." The point of a consultant is to get an expert to come in and perform a service no one internally is quite equipped to do.
First of all, I agree that this guy has a terrible approach, grabbing a contract and trying to get up to speed in 4 days. But the perception that all consultants do this, and hence "are overpaid," makes consultant/client relationships extremely sticky, and actually makes a lot of contracts harder than they need to be.
I've discovered that many potential clients treat consultants like used car salesmen: consultants have something they want, but will try to screw them in every conceivable way before giving it up. Especially the idea that we present estimates only to run over them once it's too late to do anything about it, like adding options and hidden fees to a car purchase.
In fact, many clients write extremely weak requirements documents. The initial negotiation and definition of work to be done is the most important part of the process, but here's the thing: they're always in a HUGE hurry and are extremely demanding that we start right NOW. The result is often that a contract is started with vague requirements, at best.
And then people are genuinely surprised when there's been a miscommunication, and the work is more involved than anyone thought. But by that time, they have been so indoctrinated that consultants are out to screw them, that they become inflexible, convinced that "I'm only looking out for myself."
An initial context of mutual respect and an iota of patience to draw up specific requirements would go a long way to smoothing out contract work. There will always be poor contractors like our VMS opeator here, but posts like yours help to generalize the problem into relationships where it really doesn't need to be an issue.
Hm. It's a damn shame; girls not going into computer science are missing out on endless opportunities. The opportunity to enter an already glutted job market. The opportunity to have your skills derided or just plain ignored by your superiors at work. The opportunity to join legions of online communities of their underpaid, lonely, insecure male counterparts.
The point I'm trying to make is, there are very few women in the garbage collection or plumbing industries either. But almost noone considers this a terrible sign of gender inequity propagating itself through the ages.
Computer science is ostensibly a highly-skilled profession which can lead you on to great pay and excellent opportunities, but I think we're approaching (may have already hit) a reckoning in the field: we're being viewed more and more as an essential service, not a "core competency." That is, just like electricians or others who are also technically expert but whose use is minimized to keep expenses down. And who get very little respect within the organization except for the 15 minutes after they fix a problem.
Anyway, I'm not trying to make this a huge polemic against the treatment of information workers, but the point is, maybe it's becoming a field women don't WANT to be a part of, and for good reason. Maybe the college girl who pursues sales or marketing or preps for an MBA isn't afraid of the tech jargon and male braggadocio in CS; maybe she just thinks it's a boring field leading to crappy jobs. And that's maybe not a horribly innaccurate way to think anymore.
I too use Verizon. I definitely concur on the coverage: I've been covered from Rocky Point, Sonora (NW Mexico) all the way to Toronto, and from San Francisco to Boston, with significant gaps occurring only in national parks.
As you may have guessed from that description, I have not only travelled a lot, but also moved a couple of times. And THAT is where Verizon is a nightmare. You have to know the deep history of Verizon to understand its structure; the west coast section is basically a different company from the southwest section, is different from the east coast section; all they really share is a logo.
For about a month after you move, you'll be billed from both divisions; it will take at least 30 minutes on the phone with customer service to resolve this. A month if you're lucky, 30 minutes if you're lucky. At one point I accidentally failed to get mail forwarded from one address (my fault, I admit) and instead of calling my phone or emailing or anything, they sent me to collections over a fraction of a monthly bill. Fortunately, my service wasn't affected since the two parts of the company don't know about one another.
That said, if you *live* in one place and simply travel a lot, verizon is a great plan. Coverage is great, and the $35 for 350+1000 minutes (or whatever - more now?), roaming included, is quite sufficient for my needs. But when my contract is up, if I'm considering moving, I might just switch carriers to avoid THAT hassle again.
Exactly. First and foremost, MRI isn't meant to snap pictures of the mind, it's made for taking pictures of the brain, or pretty much any internal organ for that matter. I have never heard a credible medical professional assert that the output of an MRI provides any insight into the feelings or thoughts of the patient.
It's made for detecting tumors and stuff like that. So maybe they'll come out with the result that an unusual number of "neuromarketing" subjects are aware they have brain cancer:) If they even share the results with the subjects.
Even if you want to posit (which I don't) that you could determine emotions with this technique, have you ever BEEN in an MRI? I think the experience of sitting inside a metal tube for 20-30 minutes on end with loud clanging going on around you would throw up a ton of "noise" emotions that would be way more powerful than some crappy Nike ad.
Prices are facts and cannot be copyrighted because they are not original works of authorship. See the Feist case, where an alphabetical listing of phone numbers was unanimously ruled to not be copyrightable.
The FatWallet posting was ambiguous, but I can imagine a situation in which this wouldn't apply.
Prices, per se, may be facts, and as such not copyrightable. But plans to change prices at some future date... don't seem quite the same. Seems like it could be covered under the "trade secret" rubric. So, if someone at FatWallet, eg, stole an internal memo to get these prices, then of course they can't be published legally.
However, if they were public somewhere ELSE and fatwallet is just reprinting them, then this seems like a big hubbub over nothing.
Either way, incidentally, none of US could be prosecuted, I think for re-posting the alleged prices; once FatWallet made them public, the trade secret-ability was broken.
If you'll note, my comment was regarding a Sole Proprietorship specifically.
I know, and my comment was only intended to clarify that there's a new type of beast, the SMLLC, in many jurisdictions which kind of gets you the best of both worlds. Yes, it is new, and so no, there's not much case law about it. Point taken.
However, you have NO corporate protection. That is, you assume all liability for your work, and if you are sued, the plaintiff can go after ALL your property (including personal!), not just business assets.
Not necessarily so: the LLC/LLP (Limited Liability Corp or Partnership) is set up specifically to address this. I was researching this for my organization, and all states but Massachusetts and DC allow Single-Member LLC's as well: all the ease of the sole proprietorship, and all the liability protection of a corp. Check it out, at least, before you set anything up.
I think this is the 3rd time on this discussion that I'm saying "consult an accountant." I never realized how important it is.
Amen. Also, speak to an accountant, and other small business people in your area -- you can pay (up to) 70% of any potential health insurance plan before taxes. That should make it MUCH easier to afford, especially if you're self-employed and paying the SE tax.
Slashdot Mirror
Sort of. The thing is, any non-secret word/number is lousy for security, really hard-core, actually difficult-to-break security. Furthermore, anything systematic is poor; if someone knows who you are, they know exactly what information would be required to get into your account!
In relation to these problems, any part of the SSN used is equally bad. So I was just trying to suggest that, since the SSN is basically only being used as a "personal hash code" anyway, why not use the part that compromises the LEAST amount of information about you?
Though in general the idea of using ones SSN (or parts thereof) just doesn't leave you with a warm fuzzy.
Better to require the first part of your SSN than the last, though. The first 3 digits are assigned to a geographical place; either the place of your birth or where you first apply for a SSN, I don't recall which. The next 2 are something to do with birthdate: at the very least, odd year births have an odd here, evens have an even.
The last 4, though, are "random," or at least not explicitly derived from your name or birth or application circumstances. So it really peeves me when people want me to verify the last 4 of the soc number; that's the very part we should be MOST careful about. The first 5 could probably be determined by careful research anyway, so they're not (quite) as harmful to use as a personal "hash number" for things like logins.
Ha ha... I was gonna say "wow, amazon's had this for years, how can it get patented by..." oh yeah, Amazon.
/. book reviews is a good one, but what about eBay?? I've personally had my account since 1998, and I know they've had feedback the entire time. Of course it's a discussion per-user, but each post is about a particular item and transaction. This seems to really, really count.
But seriously. I think B&N has had this on their site all along as well; the question is, did their site start before 1999? I know they were kind of a late-comer on the ecommerce scene (Oh god... I did not just use that phrase).
Anyway, the point about
I have little sympathy ... I mean, come on, it doesn't take $80M to run a server farm and pay a few journos...
First of all, that $80M is the total they lost, ever. Of course it's a lot of money, but others did way WAY worse. Even amazon, who we regard as somewhat successful, was losing between 25%-125% of that amount per quarter until just 6 months ago*. And, as many others have pointed out, one of the reasons that they still have ongoing losses is the digs in downtown SF, with a lease negotiated in the halcyon days of the late 90s when it seemed like a good idea.
What I don't understand is how everyone refuses to be understanding of the situation. We all know, times were good, now times are bad; why dance on Salon's grave before the body's even cold? Even if you disagree with its political slant, Salon has had tons of insightful articles by a wide array of interesting columnists, and they're flogging a business model we'd all love to see succeed: the pureplay online publication. Salon's a great thing caught in a bad place -- be careful wishing for them to fail spectacularly, because that implies lots of other imminent failures you may not like so much.
That said, if the primary reason they're in such a tight spot is that horrible lease, then this is exactly the kind of situation that bankruptcy protection was designed for. I for one would LOVE to see Salon file for bankruptcy and reorganize, not because it would be a sign of failure, but precisely the opposite. This is a financial committment that could very realistically stop them from operating. They shouldn't be in that expensive location any more, and the landlord will most likely not ever see the money anyway. So why sink the ship along the way?
THAT said, the fact that they're still floundering with no plan is the reason I haven't subscribed yet. Times are tight; I could certainly afford $20 a year, but I'd rather not spend $20 for 1 month or possibly 2. If 50,000 of us all signed up at once, they may have enough revenue to continue indefinitely, but no one signup is going to save them. The information I'd like to see from a "fellow prisoner" is what Salon's going to do to make sure they stick around a while - I think bankruptcy could be key.
Notes:
* According to EDGAR online via yahoo financial
Another mirror:
http://www.rjk-comm.com/mirror/
Uploading right now...
While I'm waiting for this Q42 "good old adventures" thingy to load, I just wanted to give a shout out to my former favorite online-DHTML-based game, Astronest.
Astronest was actually a DHTML-driven database app a la "Solar Realms Elite." But it was SO much better because (not that I'm remembering SRE all that well at the moment...) instead of just trading a few units of food and buying 2 sorts of ships, you could actually *design your own fleets* and stock them up with weapons you'd "researched" by spending tons of turns poking around on the site.
It was a ton of fun, until you got to the upper levels where you realized that thousands of teenagers play WAY more than you and it's mathematically impossible to design fleets better than *all* of them. I say "was," not only because it gets depressing at the high end, but also because it's no longer around; I visited that link for nostalgia's sake, and it throws off tons and tons of popups now; I wouldn't recommend visiting.
Allegedly there's a Korean version out there somewhere that's still playable, but I already dedicated way too much of my life trying to win that game. But man it was fun.
Okay, but let's be informed about what the costs and (potential) benefits are, and let's not be naive about "letting NASA decide": their careers depend on NASA funding. They're going to start with the assumption that "what we're doing is great, but needs..." and at the end of the report is going to be a huge dollar sign.
Manned space exploration has been a huge maw of inefficiency since it started. In this Washington Monthly article, from 1980, some of the Space Shuttle Program's problems are dissected; basically, even if it *had* been on budget, it would have been more expensive than other useful space technologies of the time (mostly satellite launchers), and would have had little to no added value.
Basically, the only reason we send people into space is because "it's neat." I mean, I suppose I'm abstractly interested in how ants tunnel in zero G, and I'm sure it does get kids interested in science, but for tens of billions of dollars...?
So, great. Sure, the whole effort shouldn't be cancelled because two shuttles were lost, but the thing is, that wouldn't even be a problem if we put it to a public vote, because people are convinced it's "too important." I'd like to know what that's founded on, maybe inform the debate a little bit, then decide.
At the risk of running OT, I highly doubt this is the end of project prometheus, although it is an excellent argument against it: just doesn't seem safe to fire up rockets full of nukes anymore.
i cle/0,12 543,334743,00.html
As evidence that the project will continue, I refer to this PopSci article:
"The New War in Space"
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/art
Not because PopSci is really the definitive source on such issues, but because it contains some quotes from Rumsfeld about his (hence, the administration's) intent to "weaponize" space, and some analysis thereof.
The choice quote, which I can't track down at the moment, is something like "All media (land, sea, air) have been used for combat, and it's unrealistic to think space will be any different." Unfortunately, I doubt the administration will be dissuaded by the deaths of 7 astronauts, or the broader implications of this tragedy relative to the safety of sending *anything* into space.
Mr. Graham:
Have you experimented with the threshold of how many significant features you use? I recall in
Bill Yerazunis's presentation, he discussed keeping all features, not just the top several. But his weren't, to the best of my knowledge, scored contextually; do you find that contextual scoring outweighs keeping more features?
It's interesting to see that the talks focused on heuristics exclusively.
Most of them focused on statistical methods, primarily Bayesian ones, actually. And yes, sometimes even a well-trained Bayesian filter will result in a false positive sometimes.
One presenter made an excellent point, though: you can easily say "I've never had a false positive" if you just don't filter very much. So, I'm glad your system hasn't been tagging your good messages as bad; how effective is it at getitng rid of the bad ones, though?
Paul Graham's presentation revolved around a Bayesian algorithm he'd devised which put more weight on features in the headers, as opposed to the bodies, of email; he claimed something like 99.5% effectiveness with only something like 5 false positives in 4000 emails sorted.
The really interesting part was the nature of the 3 false positives that he showed. Two of them were mailing lists that he "didn't care much about anymore," and the other was a note in all caps from a person in egypt requesting some info on one of Graham's academic projects. In other words, they all *did* resemble unsolicited mail.
Check out http://www.eprivacygroup.com/ . I'm not shilling for these guys; I just ran into a couple of them skulking around the conference and what they described to me is about what you're suggesting. I wish them luck; it seems like a truly huge undertaking.
Basically, it boiled down to "Spam is currently in a gray area legally, so let's legitimize spam in order to divide the spammers into legal spammers (who pay handsomely for the privilege)
I also kind of got the impression that he thought the rate for this should be prohibitively high (did he say something like a penny per message, or am I making that up?). The point being, to put a system in place so that you are ABLE to charge for it so the magnitude of the problem is more clearly discernable.
Barry also mentioned many other "features" of spam from an ISP's point of view, not the least of which is that naive people hold their own ISP responsible for the mail they get, which is sometimes pornographic and exposed to children. I don't think he was seriously suggesting ISPs should let this go and furthermore profit from it, but rather that, if they were authorized and able to charge for it, they could flip the spammer's economic model and improve relationships between ISPs and their clients.
I'm utterly confused as to why the other excellent response to this post has been marked "troll" twice.
First of all, CRM114 is just a language. Bayesian filters could just as easily be written in Perl or C. The language makes no discrimination whatsoever.
Secondly, the very point of Bayesian filtering is that it learns what you consider trash and what you consider treasure. You start with a training set of several hundred "legit" messages and several hundred spams, and it goes from there.
The reason it works so well on a person-by-person configuration is that certain phrases (eg, email addresses of people you know in the "From" header) correlate very strongly to good mail, while phrases like "click here" and "enlarge your" are almost certainly spam indicators. Everything between is personal; if you're on a BDSM list, your filter will learn that you like that stuff. Given a training set with your personal tastes, rates well in excess of 95% are possible.
Incidentally, this is why Bayesian methods aren't that great for site-wide filtering (that, and they would be tremendously slow); it's much harder to establish what a *group* of people considers to be "not spam."
Alright, this won't be strictly on-topic, but you started it.
As a consultant, one thing I can tell you is that there are consultants to do *anything*, not just the kind that "come into your organization and give you a bunch of terrible ideas to mess it up" as in the comics you "cite." The point of a consultant is to get an expert to come in and perform a service no one internally is quite equipped to do.
First of all, I agree that this guy has a terrible approach, grabbing a contract and trying to get up to speed in 4 days. But the perception that all consultants do this, and hence "are overpaid," makes consultant/client relationships extremely sticky, and actually makes a lot of contracts harder than they need to be.
I've discovered that many potential clients treat consultants like used car salesmen: consultants have something they want, but will try to screw them in every conceivable way before giving it up. Especially the idea that we present estimates only to run over them once it's too late to do anything about it, like adding options and hidden fees to a car purchase.
In fact, many clients write extremely weak requirements documents. The initial negotiation and definition of work to be done is the most important part of the process, but here's the thing: they're always in a HUGE hurry and are extremely demanding that we start right NOW. The result is often that a contract is started with vague requirements, at best.
And then people are genuinely surprised when there's been a miscommunication, and the work is more involved than anyone thought. But by that time, they have been so indoctrinated that consultants are out to screw them, that they become inflexible, convinced that "I'm only looking out for myself."
An initial context of mutual respect and an iota of patience to draw up specific requirements would go a long way to smoothing out contract work. There will always be poor contractors like our VMS opeator here, but posts like yours help to generalize the problem into relationships where it really doesn't need to be an issue.
Oh geez. I can't imagine this server is going to last long. Here's a (partial) mirror of the video content:
http://www.eyesores.net/mirror/bmw.php
Hm. It's a damn shame; girls not going into computer science are missing out on endless opportunities. The opportunity to enter an already glutted job market. The opportunity to have your skills derided or just plain ignored by your superiors at work. The opportunity to join legions of online communities of their underpaid, lonely, insecure male counterparts.
The point I'm trying to make is, there are very few women in the garbage collection or plumbing industries either. But almost noone considers this a terrible sign of gender inequity propagating itself through the ages.
Computer science is ostensibly a highly-skilled profession which can lead you on to great pay and excellent opportunities, but I think we're approaching (may have already hit) a reckoning in the field: we're being viewed more and more as an essential service, not a "core competency." That is, just like electricians or others who are also technically expert but whose use is minimized to keep expenses down. And who get very little respect within the organization except for the 15 minutes after they fix a problem.
Anyway, I'm not trying to make this a huge polemic against the treatment of information workers, but the point is, maybe it's becoming a field women don't WANT to be a part of, and for good reason. Maybe the college girl who pursues sales or marketing or preps for an MBA isn't afraid of the tech jargon and male braggadocio in CS; maybe she just thinks it's a boring field leading to crappy jobs. And that's maybe not a horribly innaccurate way to think anymore.
The original inspriation for your sig: T. S. Eliot said, "Bad poets imitate. Good poets steal."
I too use Verizon. I definitely concur on the coverage: I've been covered from Rocky Point, Sonora (NW Mexico) all the way to Toronto, and from San Francisco to Boston, with significant gaps occurring only in national parks.
As you may have guessed from that description, I have not only travelled a lot, but also moved a couple of times. And THAT is where Verizon is a nightmare. You have to know the deep history of Verizon to understand its structure; the west coast section is basically a different company from the southwest section, is different from the east coast section; all they really share is a logo.
For about a month after you move, you'll be billed from both divisions; it will take at least 30 minutes on the phone with customer service to resolve this. A month if you're lucky, 30 minutes if you're lucky. At one point I accidentally failed to get mail forwarded from one address (my fault, I admit) and instead of calling my phone or emailing or anything, they sent me to collections over a fraction of a monthly bill. Fortunately, my service wasn't affected since the two parts of the company don't know about one another.
That said, if you *live* in one place and simply travel a lot, verizon is a great plan. Coverage is great, and the $35 for 350+1000 minutes (or whatever - more now?), roaming included, is quite sufficient for my needs. But when my contract is up, if I'm considering moving, I might just switch carriers to avoid THAT hassle again.
This doesn't make porno evil as such; .... But it does make it ethically deviant
Hm. Most insightful post I've ever read here. Thanks.
Exactly. First and foremost, MRI isn't meant to snap pictures of the mind, it's made for taking pictures of the brain, or pretty much any internal organ for that matter. I have never heard a credible medical professional assert that the output of an MRI provides any insight into the feelings or thoughts of the patient.
:) If they even share the results with the subjects.
It's made for detecting tumors and stuff like that. So maybe they'll come out with the result that an unusual number of "neuromarketing" subjects are aware they have brain cancer
Even if you want to posit (which I don't) that you could determine emotions with this technique, have you ever BEEN in an MRI? I think the experience of sitting inside a metal tube for 20-30 minutes on end with loud clanging going on around you would throw up a ton of "noise" emotions that would be way more powerful than some crappy Nike ad.
Or, this mirror, which kind of looks like the original, but has no images:
http://www.rjk-comm.com/mirror/west_won.html
Prices are facts and cannot be copyrighted because they are not original works of authorship. See the Feist case, where an alphabetical listing of phone numbers was unanimously ruled to not be copyrightable.
... don't seem quite the same. Seems like it could be covered under the "trade secret" rubric. So, if someone at FatWallet, eg, stole an internal memo to get these prices, then of course they can't be published legally.
The FatWallet posting was ambiguous, but I can imagine a situation in which this wouldn't apply.
Prices, per se, may be facts, and as such not copyrightable. But plans to change prices at some future date
However, if they were public somewhere ELSE and fatwallet is just reprinting them, then this seems like a big hubbub over nothing.
Either way, incidentally, none of US could be prosecuted, I think for re-posting the alleged prices; once FatWallet made them public, the trade secret-ability was broken.
If you'll note, my comment was regarding a Sole Proprietorship specifically.
I know, and my comment was only intended to clarify that there's a new type of beast, the SMLLC, in many jurisdictions which kind of gets you the best of both worlds. Yes, it is new, and so no, there's not much case law about it. Point taken.
However, you have NO corporate protection. That is, you assume all liability for your work, and if you are sued, the plaintiff can go after ALL your property (including personal!), not just business assets.
Not necessarily so: the LLC/LLP (Limited Liability Corp or Partnership) is set up specifically to address this. I was researching this for my organization, and all states but Massachusetts and DC allow Single-Member LLC's as well: all the ease of the sole proprietorship, and all the liability protection of a corp. Check it out, at least, before you set anything up.
I think this is the 3rd time on this discussion that I'm saying "consult an accountant." I never realized how important it is.
Amen. Also, speak to an accountant, and other small business people in your area -- you can pay (up to) 70% of any potential health insurance plan before taxes. That should make it MUCH easier to afford, especially if you're self-employed and paying the SE tax.