What's more important, the people and culture at a job, or the opportunities that job presents for future growth?"
Money...otherwise, why would you bother to go to a job at all?
Dude, you really need to get out a little more. There are tons of reasons to work other than money. Ask any artist, musician or writer, for example. Heck, most of what I do, I do for the joy of it. I used to make more than twice what I do today, but realised that all I was doing was making rich people richer. Now, I just try to make myself useful.
How is this different from other stores? My local grocery chain doesn't stock Playboy in the magazine section. McDonalds doesn't offer Pepsi products. Target doesn't sell Walmart generics. Barnes and Noble doesn't carry my novel. It seems pretty common for stores to limit products that they sell based on all sorts of criteria. I assume you have the same disdain for their censorship and mourn the spiral to mediocrity they create.
The fact that other businesses exercise arbitrary logic does nothing to change the validity (or lack thereof) of the writer's contention that Apple is censoring based on a particular ideological stance. You've just indulged in an appeal to popularity (i.e. 'everybody does X, so it's not wrong' - which doesn't sound so great when you apply different values to X, like slavery, rape or drunk driving).
Now, to look at each of the examples: Exclusivity doesn't seem to be driving Apple's thinking here, so McDonalds doesn't apply. Space is not an issue, so (brick and mortar) Barnes and Noble isn't pertinent. Sales numbers are not the criterion in question here, so B&N online doesn't apply either.
That leaves us with the Playboy example. But the problem is that Soldier of Fortune would be a closer analogy, and to abuse it a little further, the problem is that Apple does stock Soldier of Fortune, but does not stock the Human Rights Watch publication that publishes nothing but the places where violence occurs.
The disdain for Apple's behaviour therefore, isn't just that it's censorious (though it is), nor that it's inconsistent (though it is). The complaint seems to arise from the perception that Apple's behaviour is being driven by a particular ideology that simply refuses to acknowledge anything that might reflect poorly on the US government and its foreign policy.
Draw what conclusions you like about that, but don't do so based entirely on false equivalency.
In the absence of any further evidence, I must assume that everybody's lying. The real story is that the UDIDs were harvested wirelessly using petahertz radio scanners mounted on the invisible black helicopters flown by the lizard aliens who, due to their shared ancestry with birds, make excellent pilots, even in aircraft that are based on Martian stealth technology (which is why we're giving the Martians our nuclear-powered cars now).
Occam, I told you that razor was sharp. Now you've gone and taken your whole foot off with it.
And just look at my carpet! Do you know how hard arterial blood is to clean up...?
Various fields borrow terminology from each other. Not that big a deal. My toaster has a "cancel" button. An old-fashioned "eject" would make more sense to me, but I guess mechanical terminology is less familiar to most people.
I'd be a lot more impressed if your toaster had an UNDO button.
Just because you have some patents doesn't mean that they are valid or enforceable.
Just because you've convinced some companies to license your patents and pay you royalties doesn't mean that they are valid or enforceable.
That's pretty much EXACTLY what that means.
I don't know whether you're deliberately ignoring the implication the GP was making, so let me spell it out: Until you've successfully demonstrated its value, likely as a result of court action that supports its validity, your patent is worth bupkes. In other words, the granting of a patent is only the beginning of the process of protecting your work, not an end in itself.
As a company, why bother to spend money to innovate if you can just copy someone else's work?
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but my reason is because I know I can do better.
As an innovator, why bother if companies are going to copy your work and eliminate your market advantage, as well as waste all that R&D money?
Again, because to some of us put the emphasis on quality as a key differentiator in sales success. Secondly, you're suggesting that imitation necessarily destroys market advantage. That's hardly axiomatic. You'll need to demonstrate that this is necessarily the case. And then you'll need to demonstrate that this sufficiently subverts first-mover status in the market to merit legal protection. In other words, does imitation (in the sincerest form of flattery sense; not copying or passing off) so distort the market that it requires legislative and regulatory remediation?
Research is an incredible money sink, companies that take the financial and image risks on new ideas deserve to be protected and rewarded.
You state this as if it's self-evident. It's not. It's pretty well established that risk is inherent in market economies. What makes this particular risk special? Why should this one in particular deserve to be mitigated by the state? Can you point to differences in success or failure rates of technological innovation in countries with software patent protection and those without?
These are serious questions, by the way. We've all seen the logical arguments, and while they're internally consistent, they don't strike me as more compelling than the logic supporting open data and its benefits to the community at large. So, given this ambivalence, I'm going to let the data convince me. One the latter side, we've got Linux, Apache the World Wide Web (and countless other projects that effectively ignore patent protections) encompassing millions of hours of research and development, but I've yet to see any compelling empirical evidence justifying the protections provided by the US software patent system as it currently exists.
I'm not trolling here. Show me the data and I'll weigh them against what I've already seen and judge them on their merits. I'm open to persuasion.
I guess this could be a sticking point for the Canadian authorities. They sure made those looking after the product look like saps. But they'll catch the thief eventually, and he'll get his just desserts.
I'm not sure sure. They might be barking up the wrong tree....
Syrup refineries have been cutting the pure maple with corn-based additives for years. Peak maple is just a myth perpetuated by Big Maple to elevate prices so they keep their income level while demand for the pure stuff drops.
In reality Canada is sitting on centuries of maple just waiting to be tapped.
Meh, that's nothing but long-discredited trickle-down economics.
Yeah it was bloody surreal. Only in Canada I guess. I mean I never have even seen, smelled, or eaten anything with maple syrup. Its food so it is pretty important but calling a syrup a strategic product? Errr...
They use it to jam enemy radars.
Yep, but now the secret's out. Apparently, the theft was an inside job. You can look up all the details on stickyleaks.com. THE MAPLE THIEF FOREVER!!!!
I read the OP as saying, "I love *NIX and that's all I really know in depth as an Admin. I have no clue how to find someone similar for Windows. How would I go about that?". I didn't read it as condescending, but clearly many here did.
... And there, right there, is how you tell the difference between Windows and Unix experts. The Unix expert sees no problem with exposing either his preferences or his ignorance about the world beyond his experience. The Windows expert has been taught that these are weaknesses.
I read an interview with Adrian Lamo once where he said that when he turned in Manning, he didn't think Assange would actually go through and release the State Department cables. He thought Assage would put Manning's safety above releasing the cables.
Did I just read that right? The man who betrayed Manning blames the man whom he claims respected his wishes?
Or maybe it's Opposite Day and nobody told me. Again.
if you're an enterprise IT sysadmin, this is a nightmare. How can I check a site is up on a server with a certain domain name before I point DNS to it?
The most ridiculous aspect of it is the fact that Assange is not in, and will not be in, Ecuador. He's in the Ecuadorian embassy. And it's pretty inconceivable how he could possibly get from the embassy to Ecuador.
Diplomatic passport. It would be an extraordinary circumstance, but perfectly workable. The Ecuadorean government would in effect inform the British that Assange was under their protection and therefore should be accorded the same transit and travel rights as other embassy staff.
I'm no expert on international law, but feel free to check whether's there's anything in the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations that would allow Great Britain to snatch up Assange once he'd been accorded diplomatic status. I suppose they could protest the Conventions' abuse in the International Criminal Court after the fact, but I really doubt they'd want to create the wrong kind of precedent, given that other countries have used diplomatic protection to spirit people out of unfriendly nations.
This isn't anything new, anytime you take something from the extreme cold and bring it inside you risk condensation.
Having worked at a commercial ISP in the Arctic for 3 years, I can tell you that it's a little different from Minnesota. A few hours isn't nearly enough time to let them sit. Our standard was 24-48 hours in the room the equipment was going to occupy before we'd attach cables and power on. Radical heating and cooling also meant that we'd re-seat RAM, NICs and other cards before booting as a matter of course.
And it's not just cold up there, it's also perfectly arid. Things get dry in southern Canada and the northern states in the Winter time, but not like they do in the high Arctic. It means that static discharge is a really big problem as well. I've seen sparks arc 2 or more inches from a hand to a door handle.
My 27" iMac is clearly superior in terms of how it uses the display and maximises performance
Please elaborate, because this sounds a lot like rationalization.
--Jeremy
I do a lot of graphics and layout work. The iMac display has better contrast and colour than competing displays. Mac OS X is a little more tightly bound to the underlying hardware, meaning that, for example, when I load a thousand or so RAW images into Lightroom, the system remains responsive throughout the process. I can do spot adjustments on very large photos that on Windows cause really aggravating lag. I've used Photoshop and, more recently, Lightroom on Windows since the early '90s, so I'm basing these observations on (an admittedly small, specific sampling of) empirical experience.
Since it's for their own good, time to shove fourteen languages down the their throats in forced mandatory education. Stop concentrating on math and science, start concentrating on languages. Veuillez considérer le bien-être des enfants.
Qu'est-ce qui te fais penser que l'algèbre n'est pas une langue?
(TR: What makes you think Algebra isn't a language?)
And the results of this study are a surprise...why? Of course children who have the discipline, tenacity and motivation to learn and switch between two languages are going to be better at most things...language is a multifaceted mental effort, one of the highest degree...if they can learn and master two languages its should be a no-brainer they can do most other things better as well.
I think you're missing the point. In many, many parts of the world, people learn two or three languages before they even start school. In East Africa, you learn your parents' language and ki-Swahili; in Indonesia and Malaysia, it's parental language(s) plus Bahasa and sometimes Arabic; in the Philippines, it's parental language(s) plus Tagalog plus English. The list goes on. It's simply taken for granted. I don't think the study is saying that learning language makes you smarter per se; it's saying that certain kinds of problems are easier for children who use more than one language on a regular basis.
If I've read it right, this is on the level of stating that people who grow up in mountainous areas with few vehicles generally show greater leg strength across the board. It's not suggesting that there aren't stronger and weaker children within that sample. I personally know some functionally illiterate people who can speak 4-6 languages fluently. They're not special; they're just a product of the environment they grew up in.
... It is disappointing, however, to see how unimaginative unilingual people can sometimes be. Maybe it's perceptual bias on my part, but I feel that I encounter more zero-sum, black/white logic from unilingual people than from multilingual people.
Perhaps it's just the fact that children that have the opportunity to become bilingual are exposed to a greater variety of situations and therefore can adapt to situations requiring 'creative' thinking.
Based on my own experience, I suspect the issue is actually that learning new languages exposes you to significantly different patterns of thought. Language really does affect how you conceive of ideas as well as how you express them. I've lived in multilingual environments for pretty much all of my life, and I've often been in situations where people switch from one language to another -sometimes even in mid-sentence- simply because an idea is easier to express in a different language. I've seen this behaviour in Europe, Québec, the South Pacific, Asia and Africa, so I'm inclined to think this phenomenon is universal.
Indeed, I would like to get hands on a wide reaching comparative study involving more languages than two. My guess is that finding people speaking more than 2 languages are not common... and you sir are a real exception.
Depends on what part of the world you're from. Papua New Guinea has over 1000 living spoken languages, the Solomon Islands has hundreds. Even Vanuatu, where I live, has over 100 spoken languages. It's perfectly commonplace for a child to be fluent in either English or French (depending on which school they attend), both of their parents' native tongues, and Bislama, the lingua franca here. In the course of any given day, I find myself speaking English and Bislama at the office, French with people of French extraction, and sharing greetings and pleasantries in about fifteen (yes: 15) other languages.
Nobody blinks an eye, except for those who observe that a lot of unilingual expats never learn even one other language. I suspect the difference is that I grew up in a mixed English/French-speaking community, and picked up my first 'second' language at a very early age.
I expect that people's facility with multiple languages is what leads to Bislama - a variety of pidgin English - being used so inventively, in spite of being particularly impoverished in terms of grammar and vocabulary.
Slashdot Mirror
this reminds me of the time my granny janice smith helped me find steve a job. she really loved to help my uncle time learn how to cook.
I heard it Woz more than one. Steve's Jobs, wasn't it, Mac? (Don't say she was Lion....)
According to the article:
Money...otherwise, why would you bother to go to a job at all?
Dude, you really need to get out a little more. There are tons of reasons to work other than money. Ask any artist, musician or writer, for example. Heck, most of what I do, I do for the joy of it. I used to make more than twice what I do today, but realised that all I was doing was making rich people richer. Now, I just try to make myself useful.
i get your point, but I'm a stickler for detail ;)
Talk about putting the anal back into analogy.
I get your point too, but I couldn't resist.... 8^)
How is this different from other stores? My local grocery chain doesn't stock Playboy in the magazine section. McDonalds doesn't offer Pepsi products. Target doesn't sell Walmart generics. Barnes and Noble doesn't carry my novel. It seems pretty common for stores to limit products that they sell based on all sorts of criteria. I assume you have the same disdain for their censorship and mourn the spiral to mediocrity they create.
The fact that other businesses exercise arbitrary logic does nothing to change the validity (or lack thereof) of the writer's contention that Apple is censoring based on a particular ideological stance. You've just indulged in an appeal to popularity (i.e. 'everybody does X, so it's not wrong' - which doesn't sound so great when you apply different values to X, like slavery, rape or drunk driving).
Now, to look at each of the examples: Exclusivity doesn't seem to be driving Apple's thinking here, so McDonalds doesn't apply. Space is not an issue, so (brick and mortar) Barnes and Noble isn't pertinent. Sales numbers are not the criterion in question here, so B&N online doesn't apply either.
That leaves us with the Playboy example. But the problem is that Soldier of Fortune would be a closer analogy, and to abuse it a little further, the problem is that Apple does stock Soldier of Fortune, but does not stock the Human Rights Watch publication that publishes nothing but the places where violence occurs.
The disdain for Apple's behaviour therefore, isn't just that it's censorious (though it is), nor that it's inconsistent (though it is). The complaint seems to arise from the perception that Apple's behaviour is being driven by a particular ideology that simply refuses to acknowledge anything that might reflect poorly on the US government and its foreign policy.
Draw what conclusions you like about that, but don't do so based entirely on false equivalency.
In the absence of any further evidence, I must assume that everybody's lying. The real story is that the UDIDs were harvested wirelessly using petahertz radio scanners mounted on the invisible black helicopters flown by the lizard aliens who, due to their shared ancestry with birds, make excellent pilots, even in aircraft that are based on Martian stealth technology (which is why we're giving the Martians our nuclear-powered cars now).
Occam, I told you that razor was sharp. Now you've gone and taken your whole foot off with it.
And just look at my carpet! Do you know how hard arterial blood is to clean up...?
Yep, and the OS can get reprogrammed by viruses.
Various fields borrow terminology from each other. Not that big a deal. My toaster has a "cancel" button. An old-fashioned "eject" would make more sense to me, but I guess mechanical terminology is less familiar to most people.
I'd be a lot more impressed if your toaster had an UNDO button.
Just because you have some patents doesn't mean that they are valid or enforceable. Just because you've convinced some companies to license your patents and pay you royalties doesn't mean that they are valid or enforceable.
That's pretty much EXACTLY what that means.
I don't know whether you're deliberately ignoring the implication the GP was making, so let me spell it out: Until you've successfully demonstrated its value, likely as a result of court action that supports its validity, your patent is worth bupkes. In other words, the granting of a patent is only the beginning of the process of protecting your work, not an end in itself.
As a company, why bother to spend money to innovate if you can just copy someone else's work?
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but my reason is because I know I can do better.
As an innovator, why bother if companies are going to copy your work and eliminate your market advantage, as well as waste all that R&D money?
Again, because to some of us put the emphasis on quality as a key differentiator in sales success. Secondly, you're suggesting that imitation necessarily destroys market advantage. That's hardly axiomatic. You'll need to demonstrate that this is necessarily the case. And then you'll need to demonstrate that this sufficiently subverts first-mover status in the market to merit legal protection. In other words, does imitation (in the sincerest form of flattery sense; not copying or passing off) so distort the market that it requires legislative and regulatory remediation?
Research is an incredible money sink, companies that take the financial and image risks on new ideas deserve to be protected and rewarded.
You state this as if it's self-evident. It's not. It's pretty well established that risk is inherent in market economies. What makes this particular risk special? Why should this one in particular deserve to be mitigated by the state? Can you point to differences in success or failure rates of technological innovation in countries with software patent protection and those without?
These are serious questions, by the way. We've all seen the logical arguments, and while they're internally consistent, they don't strike me as more compelling than the logic supporting open data and its benefits to the community at large. So, given this ambivalence, I'm going to let the data convince me. One the latter side, we've got Linux, Apache the World Wide Web (and countless other projects that effectively ignore patent protections) encompassing millions of hours of research and development, but I've yet to see any compelling empirical evidence justifying the protections provided by the US software patent system as it currently exists.
I'm not trolling here. Show me the data and I'll weigh them against what I've already seen and judge them on their merits. I'm open to persuasion.
I guess this could be a sticking point for the Canadian authorities. They sure made those looking after the product look like saps. But they'll catch the thief eventually, and he'll get his just desserts.
I'm not sure sure. They might be barking up the wrong tree....
I've got nothing.
All tapped out, eh?
Syrup refineries have been cutting the pure maple with corn-based additives for years. Peak maple is just a myth perpetuated by Big Maple to elevate prices so they keep their income level while demand for the pure stuff drops. In reality Canada is sitting on centuries of maple just waiting to be tapped.
Meh, that's nothing but long-discredited trickle-down economics.
Yeah it was bloody surreal. Only in Canada I guess. I mean I never have even seen, smelled, or eaten anything with maple syrup. Its food so it is pretty important but calling a syrup a strategic product? Errr...
They use it to jam enemy radars.
Yep, but now the secret's out. Apparently, the theft was an inside job. You can look up all the details on stickyleaks.com. THE MAPLE THIEF FOREVER!!!!
I read the OP as saying, "I love *NIX and that's all I really know in depth as an Admin. I have no clue how to find someone similar for Windows. How would I go about that?". I didn't read it as condescending, but clearly many here did.
... And there, right there, is how you tell the difference between Windows and Unix experts. The Unix expert sees no problem with exposing either his preferences or his ignorance about the world beyond his experience. The Windows expert has been taught that these are weaknesses.
Now let's wait and see whether or not M$ will outsource part of their workforce to Kiwiland to thank the politicians for their great cooperation...
Kiwiland? ...is that near Hobitton?
I read an interview with Adrian Lamo once where he said that when he turned in Manning, he didn't think Assange would actually go through and release the State Department cables. He thought Assage would put Manning's safety above releasing the cables.
Did I just read that right? The man who betrayed Manning blames the man whom he claims respected his wishes?
Or maybe it's Opposite Day and nobody told me. Again.
... news outlets are not averse to having a ridiculously inflammatory headline that has little or no relation to the article within....
I couldn't agree more!
if you're an enterprise IT sysadmin, this is a nightmare. How can I check a site is up on a server with a certain domain name before I point DNS to it?
sudo vim /etc/hosts
That's some pretty good stuff.
Pretty good, indeed. I've used Debian on my servers since 1998, and I love it.
If that's what being a freetard means, then I'm proud to be one.
The most ridiculous aspect of it is the fact that Assange is not in, and will not be in, Ecuador. He's in the Ecuadorian embassy. And it's pretty inconceivable how he could possibly get from the embassy to Ecuador.
Diplomatic passport. It would be an extraordinary circumstance, but perfectly workable. The Ecuadorean government would in effect inform the British that Assange was under their protection and therefore should be accorded the same transit and travel rights as other embassy staff.
I'm no expert on international law, but feel free to check whether's there's anything in the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations that would allow Great Britain to snatch up Assange once he'd been accorded diplomatic status. I suppose they could protest the Conventions' abuse in the International Criminal Court after the fact, but I really doubt they'd want to create the wrong kind of precedent, given that other countries have used diplomatic protection to spirit people out of unfriendly nations.
This isn't anything new, anytime you take something from the extreme cold and bring it inside you risk condensation.
Having worked at a commercial ISP in the Arctic for 3 years, I can tell you that it's a little different from Minnesota. A few hours isn't nearly enough time to let them sit. Our standard was 24-48 hours in the room the equipment was going to occupy before we'd attach cables and power on. Radical heating and cooling also meant that we'd re-seat RAM, NICs and other cards before booting as a matter of course.
And it's not just cold up there, it's also perfectly arid. Things get dry in southern Canada and the northern states in the Winter time, but not like they do in the high Arctic. It means that static discharge is a really big problem as well. I've seen sparks arc 2 or more inches from a hand to a door handle.
Should I ever visit your country, do you have any recommendation for a good feel of the back country?
Here's a primer on how to behave (and what kind of behaviour to expect) in Vanuatu. And these people have the best tour packages I've seen. Feel free to look me up. It's a small place and we all like to welcome visitors.
My 27" iMac is clearly superior in terms of how it uses the display and maximises performance
Please elaborate, because this sounds a lot like rationalization.
--Jeremy
I do a lot of graphics and layout work. The iMac display has better contrast and colour than competing displays. Mac OS X is a little more tightly bound to the underlying hardware, meaning that, for example, when I load a thousand or so RAW images into Lightroom, the system remains responsive throughout the process. I can do spot adjustments on very large photos that on Windows cause really aggravating lag. I've used Photoshop and, more recently, Lightroom on Windows since the early '90s, so I'm basing these observations on (an admittedly small, specific sampling of) empirical experience.
Since it's for their own good, time to shove fourteen languages down the their throats in forced mandatory education. Stop concentrating on math and science, start concentrating on languages. Veuillez considérer le bien-être des enfants.
Qu'est-ce qui te fais penser que l'algèbre n'est pas une langue?
(TR: What makes you think Algebra isn't a language?)
And the results of this study are a surprise...why? Of course children who have the discipline, tenacity and motivation to learn and switch between two languages are going to be better at most things...language is a multifaceted mental effort, one of the highest degree...if they can learn and master two languages its should be a no-brainer they can do most other things better as well.
I think you're missing the point. In many, many parts of the world, people learn two or three languages before they even start school. In East Africa, you learn your parents' language and ki-Swahili; in Indonesia and Malaysia, it's parental language(s) plus Bahasa and sometimes Arabic; in the Philippines, it's parental language(s) plus Tagalog plus English. The list goes on. It's simply taken for granted. I don't think the study is saying that learning language makes you smarter per se; it's saying that certain kinds of problems are easier for children who use more than one language on a regular basis.
If I've read it right, this is on the level of stating that people who grow up in mountainous areas with few vehicles generally show greater leg strength across the board. It's not suggesting that there aren't stronger and weaker children within that sample. I personally know some functionally illiterate people who can speak 4-6 languages fluently. They're not special; they're just a product of the environment they grew up in.
... It is disappointing, however, to see how unimaginative unilingual people can sometimes be. Maybe it's perceptual bias on my part, but I feel that I encounter more zero-sum, black/white logic from unilingual people than from multilingual people.
Perhaps it's just the fact that children that have the opportunity to become bilingual are exposed to a greater variety of situations and therefore can adapt to situations requiring 'creative' thinking.
Based on my own experience, I suspect the issue is actually that learning new languages exposes you to significantly different patterns of thought. Language really does affect how you conceive of ideas as well as how you express them. I've lived in multilingual environments for pretty much all of my life, and I've often been in situations where people switch from one language to another -sometimes even in mid-sentence- simply because an idea is easier to express in a different language. I've seen this behaviour in Europe, Québec, the South Pacific, Asia and Africa, so I'm inclined to think this phenomenon is universal.
Indeed, I would like to get hands on a wide reaching comparative study involving more languages than two. My guess is that finding people speaking more than 2 languages are not common... and you sir are a real exception.
Depends on what part of the world you're from. Papua New Guinea has over 1000 living spoken languages, the Solomon Islands has hundreds. Even Vanuatu, where I live, has over 100 spoken languages. It's perfectly commonplace for a child to be fluent in either English or French (depending on which school they attend), both of their parents' native tongues, and Bislama, the lingua franca here. In the course of any given day, I find myself speaking English and Bislama at the office, French with people of French extraction, and sharing greetings and pleasantries in about fifteen (yes: 15) other languages.
Nobody blinks an eye, except for those who observe that a lot of unilingual expats never learn even one other language. I suspect the difference is that I grew up in a mixed English/French-speaking community, and picked up my first 'second' language at a very early age.
I expect that people's facility with multiple languages is what leads to Bislama - a variety of pidgin English - being used so inventively, in spite of being particularly impoverished in terms of grammar and vocabulary.