I really didn't mean to flame you, I apologize if I gave you that impression.
Here in New Jersey we have a very strong teacher's union that is pretty much constantly complaining about their lot in life, so after a while you get numbed to substantive complaints about the environment. Having said that, I really do believe in a general statement such as "the market sets appropriate/accurate salaries for jobs, taking into account all factors."
Again, I apologize for the flame-iness of the original posting.
Before we cast too many tears for you and your wife, assuming that the teaching situation in Baltimore County even remotely resembles that of New Jersey's (?), your wife probably:
1. gets health benefits; 2. gets vacation benefits (2 or 3 months worth?); 3. gets a boatload of paid holidays; 4. has that "job for life" deal (a.k.a. tenure), and probably an attitude to match; 5. gets a pension at retirement, probably including guaranteed health benefits for life (try putting a $$ value to that open-ended benefit); 6. gets raises based on seniority and education-level, NOT based on performance in any real sense; 7. basically just has to "show up", not unlike your "sit on my a$$ all day...then go home" arrangement.
No matter what kind of distorted picture you try to paint, in an economic sense the answer to "how much should teachers get paid?" (as with all such questions) is... exactly what they're being paid -- the market establishes the $$ amount, taking all of the variables (those you mentioned, those I mentioned, supply, demand, etc.) into account.
This isn't quite the same thing, but you can block individual sites from popping up windows on entry to the site by putting something like the following in your preferences file (user.js):
Imagine that IBM sold three models, with the following MIPS capacity:
Model A: 10 MIPS
Model B (Linux): 100 MIPS
Model C: 1000 MIPS
And they sold the following amounts:
Model A: 5000 units (total of 5000*10=50000 MIPS)
Model B: 500 units (total of 500*100=50000 MIPS)
Model C: 50 units (total of 50*1000=50000 MIPS)
Don't you think a statement like "33% of our sales (by MIPS capacity) was configured for Linux" is a little more informative (and accurate) than "9% of our sales were Linux servers"?
In other words, money is more important than ethics.
In the context of a CEO's role when the shareholders in question are interested in profit over ethics that's a fair statement.
But if (as pubjames says in another post) your company charter includes ethical statements and/or your shareholders make it known that profits take a back seat to ethics then obviously "money is more important than ethics" is not a fair statment.
The original point of contention here was whether a CEO's first duty is to the shareholders or not -- I contend that it is, pubjames has a little different take on it.
We're kind of having a circular argument here, but anyway, it is possible to have happy shareholders and stay ethical! Especially if you're shareholders are ethical people too! That's the kind of world I live in!
And as I originally stated that's also the kind of world I live in, and I also choose to operate the business I run ethically, and I treat employees well, etc.
The only point of contention is the reasoning behind why we run our businesses the way we do -- I do it to because I think that's the route to maximum profit in the mid- to long-term, you say you do it to satisfy your ethical/moral standards (with the happy side-effect being profitable in the long run). Admittedly, one could argue that we're splitting hairs here...
What says he should care about being derelict in his role, or duty to shareholders, if not a set of moral responsibilities? Without those, he might as well do as pleases him best.
I know that I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders to operate the company in their best interests, and am subject to removal if I don't achieve that goal to their liking (or for any other reason, for that matter). In addition, as an officer I'm at risk legally (civil and criminal), especially if I'm negligent or derelict in my duties.
Customers come first. Employees second. Shareholders third. Why? What's good for customers is good for our employees, and happy employees are good for profits which is good for shareholders.
QED -- you are allowed to run your business the way you do because it is good for shareholders (i.e. they're happy with your results from whatever angle they're viewing it from).
I am Managing Director (that's CEO to you) of an IT company. A lot of my clients are reasonably ignorant about IT. It would be fairly easy for me to lie to them and sell them products and services that they don't really need, or deliberately lock them into solutions that it will be difficult for them to get out of again. It would probably make my company more profitable, and I know of companies that do it. But you know what? I don't do it. Why? Because it's wrong. When I deal with my clients, I am dealing with people. I don't think to myself "Hey, I can fuck these ignorant guys over and make lots of money." To me, and I would hope to most people, my personal values are more important than getting rich.
While that's a wonderful sentiment, I hope you understand that as Managing Director your responsibility is to your shareholders and, to a lesser extent, your employees. Now it may be that treating clients like people, establishing a happy client base, not screwing them over, etc., is the best way to serve your shareholders (e.g. by generating sufficient and/or maximum revenue over whatever time span they're comfortable with). I personally take that approach to the business I run -- like you I am a CEO, but unlike you I can confidently say I do it because I think that's the route to maximum returns for my shareholders (and, so far, they're pleased with the results).
Please don't pontificate about moral responsibilities taking precedence over your duty to your shareholders -- if you sincerely hold that view, you're derelict in your role and should seek another job.
What security has been used (if any) by the DMVI in the past, and how do they intend on improving their current situation? Allowing the identies of 2.8M individuals to be stolen is not acceptible by any means.
FYI (in case you didn't read the rest of the posts), the Oregon DMV sold this information until recently to anyone with $75.
I'm not sure what that is, but it doesn't sound like a warrant to me.
And just to illuminate how dark this path becomes, the usual rejoinder of "well, even if the evidence is gathered without participation of the judiciary a judge does eventually rule on its admissibility in court during the trial" argument is now broken with the advent of the alternate "military tribunal" approach recently asserted by Mr. Bush.
One can only hope that people will stop reacting viscerally and actually start thinking about the effect of these and other changes, which IMHO are served up all-too-frequently these days under the "anti-terrorism" banner.
Assuming their practice is to include a screenshot of each owner's website in an e-mail to that particular website owner (e.g. they'd grab a screenshot of yahoo.com when sending their spam to Jerry Wang, a screenshot of dell.com when spamming Michael Dell, etc.), wouldn't that be fair use? Copyright (at least pre-DMCA) doesn't give the content creator absolute power to dictate use of that content.
which, at a silver spot price of USD 4.17/oz (13 Nov 2001 price), yields a cost of:
USD 1,912,199,203.20
which is about a 68% discount to your quoted figure of USD 6 billion. While that's obviously a lot of money, it's still less than 1 percent of the annual US budget.
I'm personally AGAINST encryption controls, but please choose your analogies more carefully -- do you think an envelope is "unbreakable"? Don't you think that your mail can be monitored and opened with the support of a warrant issued to law enforcement by a judge (or without that level of oversight for that matter)? I hope you can see the (admittedly imperfect) corollaries between the "quite-breakable" envelope and breakable encryption.
I heard an interesting bit on National Public Radio the other day where the commentator compared the parent/child relationship issues raised by disparity in computer knowledge (or level of comfort) to those experienced in immigrant families in the U.S due to language barriers. It seems that now, as in the past, there is an inversion of power that takes place as the children (through almost total immersion in the culture, as well as being more adaptable) learn the native language & customs quickly while the parents struggle to assimilate themselves into the mainstream.
While seeing no end to this language-related phenomenon, the commentator thought the computer-related issues would lessen in severity in the next 10 years or so, as "those 15-year olds" have children.
Targeting schools & universities
on
Ask Robert Young
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· Score: 1
It seems that a tried and true method of increasing a computer product's market- and/or mind-share is to get it into the hands of high school or university students, assuming that when they (eventually) hit the business world they will use the product. Does RedHat target those areas, and if so in what ways (e.g. do you donate computers w/RedHat Linux to high schools, partner with universities on development, etc.)?
Re SSL (and pardoning the lack of rigor in the following), the certificates are used only to authenticate the parties and establish a "shared secret key" for a session (which is then used to encrypt the actual communication). In other words, once you're connected the certificates aren't used anymore. So, if the snooper "listened in" while the session was being established they could get the "shared key" and hijack your connection.
I was presented with one a few years ago (the company was Dendrite) that provided for a 50% salary for the life of the non-compete (2 years, I think). It was worded something like "I agree that 50% base pay during the non-compete clause adequately compensates for the hardship of the non-compete clause..." (probably to avoid a court challenge over whether the clause was fair, prevented me from making a living, etc.)
I worked with some AT&T employees a few contracts back that worked full-time from their homes via ISDN connections. All concerned seemed happy with the arrangement.
> Also, did you know that UPS has a patent (or > trademark, I forget which) on that brown color > they use for everything from their trucks to > their uniforms? Yup. No one else can legally > use "UPS Puke Brown", without UPS's permission.
Trademarks are granted in a context (remember Microsoft's trademark on "Windows" ?) -- in the UPS case you mention the context is package courier companies. In other words, you can't start a courier company and paint your trucks (and dress your employees) in "UPS brown". You could start an ice cream store and paint the building "UPS brown", however.
I think it's all based on allowing companies to build a recognizable look, and to prevent the general public from being misled by "look-alike" products from rival companies.
Did you remove unecessary whitespace from the output as part of your minimization exercise? For example, did you convert the "readable":
This is the title
to:
This is the title
I ask because on a previous contract I had to make optimization suggestions for a high-volume web site, and one of them was to remove "unecessary" whitespace (how to figure out what unecessary was re different browser's interpretations of the HTML is another story) -- the savings approached 20% for the particular situation, but I never got a chance to find out if this was common practice in high-volume "production" web sites or not...
----- In a previous message, Sun Tzu wrote: > I have gone to some trouble to minimize the number of database calls and will work a bit more to minimize the size of returned pages.
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Here in New Jersey we have a very strong teacher's union that is pretty much constantly complaining about their lot in life, so after a while you get numbed to substantive complaints about the environment. Having said that, I really do believe in a general statement such as "the market sets appropriate/accurate salaries for jobs, taking into account all factors."
Again, I apologize for the flame-iness of the original posting.
Before we cast too many tears for you and your wife, assuming that the teaching situation in Baltimore County even remotely resembles that of New Jersey's (?), your wife probably:
; ; ; ; ; ;
1. gets health benefits
2. gets vacation benefits (2 or 3 months worth?)
3. gets a boatload of paid holidays
4. has that "job for life" deal (a.k.a. tenure), and probably an attitude to match
5. gets a pension at retirement, probably including guaranteed health benefits for life (try putting a $$ value to that open-ended benefit)
6. gets raises based on seniority and education-level, NOT based on performance in any real sense
7. basically just has to "show up", not unlike your "sit on my a$$ all day...then go home" arrangement.
No matter what kind of distorted picture you try to paint, in an economic sense the answer to "how much should teachers get paid?" (as with all such questions) is... exactly what they're being paid -- the market establishes the $$ amount, taking all of the variables (those you mentioned, those I mentioned, supply, demand, etc.) into account.
This isn't quite the same thing, but you can block individual sites from popping up windows on entry to the site by putting something like the following in your preferences file (user.js):
;. ope n","noAccess") ;
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.sites", "http://www.morningstar.com/")
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.Window
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true) ;
Depending on the encoding used the bandwidth requirements could range from around 8K to 64K. They probably used G.729, which requires 11.2K.
Imagine that IBM sold three models, with the following MIPS capacity:
Model A: 10 MIPS
Model B (Linux): 100 MIPS
Model C: 1000 MIPS
And they sold the following amounts:
Model A: 5000 units (total of 5000*10=50000 MIPS)
Model B: 500 units (total of 500*100=50000 MIPS)
Model C: 50 units (total of 50*1000=50000 MIPS)
Don't you think a statement like "33% of our sales (by MIPS capacity) was configured for Linux" is a little more informative (and accurate) than "9% of our sales were Linux servers"?
In the context of a CEO's role when the shareholders in question are interested in profit over ethics that's a fair statement.
But if (as pubjames says in another post) your company charter includes ethical statements and/or your shareholders make it known that profits take a back seat to ethics then obviously "money is more important than ethics" is not a fair statment.
The original point of contention here was whether a CEO's first duty is to the shareholders or not -- I contend that it is, pubjames has a little different take on it.
And as I originally stated that's also the kind of world I live in, and I also choose to operate the business I run ethically, and I treat employees well, etc.
The only point of contention is the reasoning behind why we run our businesses the way we do -- I do it to because I think that's the route to maximum profit in the mid- to long-term, you say you do it to satisfy your ethical/moral standards (with the happy side-effect being profitable in the long run). Admittedly, one could argue that we're splitting hairs here...
I know that I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders to operate the company in their best interests, and am subject to removal if I don't achieve that goal to their liking (or for any other reason, for that matter). In addition, as an officer I'm at risk legally (civil and criminal), especially if I'm negligent or derelict in my duties.
QED -- you are allowed to run your business the way you do because it is good for shareholders (i.e. they're happy with your results from whatever angle they're viewing it from).
Please don't pontificate about moral responsibilities taking precedence over your duty to your shareholders -- if you sincerely hold that view, you're derelict in your role and should seek another job.
One can only hope that people will stop reacting viscerally and actually start thinking about the effect of these and other changes, which IMHO are served up all-too-frequently these days under the "anti-terrorism" banner.
Assuming their practice is to include a screenshot of each owner's website in an e-mail to that particular website owner (e.g. they'd grab a screenshot of yahoo.com when sending their spam to Jerry Wang, a screenshot of dell.com when spamming Michael Dell, etc.), wouldn't that be fair use? Copyright (at least pre-DMCA) doesn't give the content creator absolute power to dictate use of that content.
Your math is a bit off, or at least outdated:
13,000 metric tons = 28,660,060 pounds = 458,560,960 ounces
which, at a silver spot price of USD 4.17/oz (13 Nov 2001 price), yields a cost of:
USD 1,912,199,203.20
which is about a 68% discount to your quoted figure of USD 6 billion. While that's obviously a lot of money, it's still less than 1 percent of the annual US budget.
I'm personally AGAINST encryption controls, but please choose your analogies more carefully -- do you think an envelope is "unbreakable"? Don't you think that your mail can be monitored and opened with the support of a warrant issued to law enforcement by a judge (or without that level of oversight for that matter)? I hope you can see the (admittedly imperfect) corollaries between the "quite-breakable" envelope and breakable encryption.
While seeing no end to this language-related phenomenon, the commentator thought the computer-related issues would lessen in severity in the next 10 years or so, as "those 15-year olds" have children.
It seems that a tried and true method of increasing a computer product's market- and/or mind-share is to get it into the hands of high school or university students, assuming that when they (eventually) hit the business world they will use the product. Does RedHat target those areas, and if so in what ways (e.g. do you donate computers w/RedHat Linux to high schools, partner with universities on development, etc.)?
Re SSL (and pardoning the lack of rigor in the following), the certificates are used only to authenticate the parties and establish a "shared secret key" for a session (which is then used to encrypt the actual communication). In other words, once you're connected the certificates aren't used anymore. So, if the snooper "listened in" while the session was being established they could get the "shared key" and hijack your connection.
I was presented with one a few years ago (the company was Dendrite) that provided for a 50% salary for the life of the non-compete (2 years, I think). It was worded something like "I agree that 50% base pay during the non-compete clause adequately compensates for the hardship of the non-compete clause..." (probably to avoid a court challenge over whether the clause was fair, prevented me from making a living, etc.)
FYI, lynx also provides an "Yes/No/Always/Never/Ask" kind of option for handling cookies on a domain-by-domain level.
I think the succesful ingredients in this case were the usual things:
1. top-flight developers doing new development which interested them ;
2. an integrated (and functional) source code control and bug reporting system ;
3. a realistic development schedule ;
4. frequent milestones backed by useful periodic (weekly) meetings ;
5. an environment of respect and trust, as several of the developers had worked together (in various combinations) on previous projects.
I worked with some AT&T employees a few contracts back that worked full-time from their homes via ISDN connections. All concerned seemed happy with the arrangement.
> That hostname is long (a 128 bit value) and
> randomly generated, making it unguessable.
Wouldn't I be able to query your DNS for wildcard A-records via nslookup?
> Also, did you know that UPS has a patent (or
> trademark, I forget which) on that brown color
> they use for everything from their trucks to
> their uniforms? Yup. No one else can legally
> use "UPS Puke Brown", without UPS's permission.
Trademarks are granted in a context (remember Microsoft's trademark on "Windows" ?) -- in the UPS case you mention the context is package courier companies. In other words, you can't start a courier company and paint your trucks (and dress your employees) in "UPS brown". You could start an ice cream store and paint the building "UPS brown", however.
I think it's all based on allowing companies to build a recognizable look, and to prevent the general public from being misled by "look-alike" products from rival companies.
Did you remove unecessary whitespace from the output as part of your minimization exercise? For example, did you convert the "readable":
This is the title
to:
This is the title
I ask because on a previous contract I had to make optimization suggestions for a high-volume web site, and one of them was to remove "unecessary" whitespace (how to figure out what unecessary was re different browser's interpretations of the HTML is another story) -- the savings approached 20% for the particular situation, but I never got a chance to find out if this was common practice in high-volume "production" web sites or not...
----- In a previous message, Sun Tzu wrote:
> I have gone to some trouble to minimize the number of database calls and will work a bit more to minimize the size of returned pages.