I think there is a need for both sorts. If I want to quickly acclimate myself with a new project and zero in on a certain section, comments along the line of "begin user authentication" or some such help greatly, and I definitely don't mind finer granulation than that.
Comments in open source projects like that DEFINITELY help especially since the experience levels of contributors will be different and this way the newbies can quickly get up to speed or at least learn.
Definitely comments about the why, but navigational comments are great, IMO.
Now I see why you're poor and/or married to an awful person - you're unable to formulate intelligent arguments and instead base your opinions on tropes. I, and apparently anyone else worth knowing, won't have any more to do with you.
So, in other words, you have literally no argument other than some stupid appeal to a sexist trope about henpecked husbands, gotcha.
I will say it again: If you think less than a dollar a day is too much to spend on a multi-purpose device that has one of the best dollar/hour returns on entertainment and productivity in the history of humankind is too much, you are poor.
If you can afford it but are married to someone who would begrudge you less than a dollar a day for such a thing, you are married to a horrible, horrible person who is irrationally intent on denying an incredibly economical form of entertainment for no valid reason.
In either case you should probably re-examine your life and the people in it because something has gone terribly awry, and maybe learn how to argue without relying on stupid stereotypes about married life.
Are you saying that married people are unable to spend less than $30 a month on a combination of work device, personal use device and hobby?
In that case I would say its a matter of not being poor rather than not being married.
Or perhaps you're trying to imply that married people are all with horrible people who won't let them less than dollar a day on something that makes them happy?
In that case I would say pick a better spouse.
Sorry, I just don't see how your statement makes any sense unless either of the above are true.
A gaming rig that can more than handle medium settings of any modern game shouldn't cost you more than $1000 to build, and almost certainly wouldn't be getting used JUST for gaming by anyone who is budget conscious.
The rig I currently game (and do a lot of work and other personal computing use) on was just over $1000 when I set it up 2 years ago and I can play modern games at medium settings no problem, and have decent frame rates.
It came with: - i7 860 @ 2.8GHz - 8GB RAM - ATI Radeon 5850 - Win 7 64 - Running 2 displays at 1920x1080
I added: - 8GB more RAM (I do a lot of work via virtualization - I highly doubt any games I'm playing even use the base 8 that I had originally). $200 when I got it - and though I wrote it off, I'll add it to my "gaming" cost - 64 GB Intel SSD that I install games I'm actively playing on; $90 on Newegg when I got it.
I'll use this system for 2 more years before replacing it and turning it into a server, but let's pretend I'll throw it in the garbage, so it comes out to $325/year invested.
I won't even try to pro-rate the cost due to work I do with it or personal, non-gaming use, so let's pretend that my gaming hardware costs me $325 a year with no other benefits.
If you're saying that a $325/year investment in multi-purpose hardware is too much, but dropping $60 at a shot to play modern games is cheap, you have very, very weird budgeting.
And I'm assuming I'm right on the $60 price because that's the price of the bleeding edge games that I'm assuming you imagine require insanely expensive hardware to run (but that I'm quite capable of playing on my rig)
Or maybe your machines cost sub $500 to put together, in which case, yeah, you're not going to be having a very fluid gaming experience.
Nobody was saying you have to be "friends" with your workmates - "social" doesn't just mean good at making friends, it refers to a number of soft skills that are useful for work.
In many workplaces there are these things called "teams." Teams are often comprised of members, referred to as "people." People, you see, are human beings (or corporations or Mitt Romney, but we're only talking about human people here) and most human beings do not function in the same way that a robot does, and frequently have interactions throughout the day that are called "social" or that rely on being able to work well with other people using things called "social skills."
Some people are better at handling the myriad and sundry issues that can come up when multiple people work together, and as such, the teams they are on tend to not get bogged down with interpersonal conflicts that arise from poor social skills. Poor social skills, you see, can often come about because an individual is "anti-social" and does not spend much time developing those skills.
By trying to understand ahead of time who might be anti-social or not a good fit with their team, many prospective employers can avoid making a disastrous hiring decision that will wind up harming their organization because they brought in someone who wrecks teams.
Further, teams comprised of members who are capable of working well with a diverse group of people without much friction will often be much easier to manage when one team member leaves and a new person or people needs to be brought in, will have fewer issues to sort out when their team-members interact with members of other teams within the larger organization, and so on.
Finally, in any job - no matter WHAT field it is in - that involves two or more people working together - there will arise differences of opinion as to how things should be done. When this inevitable thing happens, people with better social skills will probably be able to work together to solve the problem than two people who are completely anti-social sperglords.
To give you an example of how a person with poor social skills might screw up your team of programmers:
Let's say you have someone who is fair at C, Java and can design hardware, but he's an absolute dickhole any time it comes to a disagreement on how a thing should be done. It cost your company a lot of money to hire this guy, and it cost them a lot to train him up to understand your particular processes and organization, and it would cost them a lot to fire this guy, and it would cost them a lot to hire a replacement, and it would cost them a lot to have to deal with the myriad problems him being a dickhole would cause to the rest of the team (like some members potentially quitting rather than working with him, or productivity going into the toilet as a result, or HR having to get involved, or anything else).
So, a hiring manager has some choices to make during the hiring process if they want to avoid the above hideously expensive scenario: Do I hire the person who is good at C, Java and can design hardware, but kind of comes off as a hermit/poorly socialized and who might be difficult to work with, or do I hire the person who is good at C, Java, can design hardware, AND who seems like they'll be able to work with our team and handle working with other people in the organization who might have different interpersonal styles?
The only exception to this that I can see would be cases where you have workers who are literally interchangeable and have absolutely no possible say in how the work is accomplished - people who are, truly, replacing robots in a process that requires no communication and allows no latitude in how things are performed. Even assembly line work doesn't qualify - many times line workers can have a friendly rivalry between individuals or teams that can lead to increased productivity; conversely, one individual line worker who is a dickhole to others can cause a decrease in production. The only scenario I can think of here would inv
Lots of people are not themselves dumb, but are related to people who are members of/affiliated with criminal organizations.
I occasionally do some consulting work with various law enforcement groups and I frequently run across people who would be screened out by this process because they have - and have not repudiated - family members who are members of/affiliated with such organizations.
Should a mother be forced to remove any links to her son if the son happens to be in a gang? Should someone have to publicly renounce their sibling because their brother or sister is involved in gangs? Because that's what it would look like to many of the people who would be flagged as "affiliated" in this way.
Also, when you are a member of socio-economic group* that has ridiculously high rates of incarceration it's kind of hard to not have several people in your life for completely innocent reasons who are so affiliated. In many communities across the nation, having one or more relatives who have been imprisoned at some point is the norm.
What I find particularly pernicious about this sort of screening is that it essentially spreads out the punishment for one person convicted of a crime to that person's ENTIRE community. Have a gang-member in your family or your circle of friends? No job for you unless you're willing to completely sever all public ties to that person.
Also, on my FB profile it's pretty clear that I am "affiliated" with members of multiple criminal organizations; as a researcher who has done work with multiple groups and organizations on issues in criminal justice in the US, I have numerous friends on my professional FB profile who are convicted murders, rapists, drug dealers and gang members. Many of the gang members are still semi-active, in that they do outreach with their old gangs and are still technically members, though they've renounced violence.
The point I'm making here is that it's not so cut and dried, and in a country like the US where we have such a ridiculously high prison population and percentage of the population that has previously been incarcerated, many people can't avoid seeming "affiliated" with criminal organizations. Reasonable people might say "Oh, it's her son/his daughter, that's OK" but all too often bureaucrats making these determinations are anything BUT reasonable.
Now, on the issue of why a sane person might want to work in that kind of environment - well, if only people who were AOK with the state punishing the families and friends of those who commit crimes were to be involved in the criminal justice system you would rapidly see it become far, far worse than it is now. At least this way you have a few reasonable people involved in things and trying to hold back the tide/make change.
*By this I mean specifically low-income african-americans, a group routinely discriminated against by the criminal justice process in the US. Ignoring the disparity in rate of arrest because some idiots will claim african-americans are more prone to criminal behavior, any given african-american defendant is more likely to be convicted than any caucasian defendant, and african-americans are routinely given longer prison sentences than caucasians convicted on the same charge and with similar criminal backgrounds.
Re:Nice upgrade, but no big surprises in the new i
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Apple Unveils New iPad
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Eh, but short of some revolutionary thing (foldable, maybe, like plastic sheets?) I don't see those being big issues for the consumer market the iPad is aimed at.
Re:Nice upgrade, but no big surprises in the new i
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Apple Unveils New iPad
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That sounds about right to me - and I'm going to say the 3 is probably that good enough plateau.
Re:Nice upgrade, but no big surprises in the new i
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Apple Unveils New iPad
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· Score: 2
Nothing compelling to upgrade for me, but I do know a few people who didn't like the display in the 2 and who will buy a 3 now as a first time adopter.
From the iPad 1 to the iPad 2 there was the addition of the cameras and a substantial boost to power - that was compelling enough for me.
I'm trying to think of what would be a compelling upgrade for me from my iPad 2 and there really isn't much I can think of. Maybe the generation after this one will have a sufficient boost to power, battery life and other features to get me interested, but I dunno.
Not only that, but also I would advocate dismissing evidence that was obtained where the whole process of discovery and analysis isn't recorded.
Find a bloody fingerprint that matches a suspect and is made in the victim's blood? You'd better have recordings of you finding it and all officers involved in looking for evidence at the scene from the time the call came in until the analysis comes back positive as well as all labwork, the storage unit for the sample etc., or it won't count.
My standpoint on all of this is that people who commit crimes should be punished, but also that, given the state of prisons in the US, we should make DAMN sure that people actually did do what they're accused of before we convict.
If the police were able to adapt to this - to have iron clad and unimpeachable chain of custody for evidence as well as recordings of all interactions with suspects, all the suspect's time in jail or holding, and all other facets of the case, that would do MUCH more good than the current system, for sure.
Am I the only one who thinks, in this day and age of easy video & audio recording, that ANY interaction police have with ANYONE for ANY reason (in an official capacity or as "an off duty police officer" responding to something) should be required to be recorded by the police themselves or "it didn't happen"?
Traffic stops, parking tickets, entering homes - ANYTHING - get it all on video and audio and require that said videos be made available for all parties privy to that.
Were I in charge of the world, that's one of the first things I would do - require all law enforcement people to wear video and audio recording devices at all times, even inside of their offices etc.
It should be a no brainer that civilians should be able to record any interaction they have with police, of course. I can't think of a single reason why it shouldn't be.
So don't buy it? Or buy cars that have general purpose connections for these features if you must have them?
If it's enough to piss you off that your car has an ipod-only connection, why did you buy it in the first place?
If you have enough lock-in in your life already then, uh, it's pretty easy to not have that: don't buy things that lock you in. And stop acting like a victim when you do buy something that locks you in - you *do* have choices, you know.
"Siri, shut the fuck up!" should be an option, and I'm quite serious.
I agree with you about the general points you make about being distracted, though I think there can be technological solutions.
For example, limited radar - if your speed and the speed of cars around you is changing suddenly in a way that's not akin to simple stoplight/stop-go traffic, Siri would shut up - maybe a little beep to say "Hey, you need to focus, I'm shutting up" and then it can come back when things lighten up.
I think it would be possible for a properly configured device to know before I or my passengers can consciously register that the shit has hit the fan and behave accordingly.
Sorry about your wreck - I was in a rather bad one myself and absolutely know where you're coming from on that!
Given some of the unpolished turds Microsoft has put out in the past, that cream must be pretty curdled...
In reality though, the stuff Microsoft has put out makes me think more of an organization with tons of internal competition, yes, but one in which people sabotage each other or engage in politicking in order to force pet ideas into projects resulting in products clearly designed by committee and often containing so many compromises that whatever good points are often completely outshone by really horrific kludge.
Microsoft does do a lot of research - and a lot of what they come up with is AMAZING, really - it's just that in the whole process of turning it into a product the internal politics comes into play and ruins much of it horribly which is a real shame.
Fortunately for them, they do have enough money that they can survive the refinement process and eventually scrape off the shit that gets attached to many of their 1.0 products.
Because Apple isn't that kind of company and seems to hold no ambitions to become one?
Apple is really good at taking various pieces of existing technology and combining them in a way that nobody else has, or, if a similar product exists, taking it and refining the hell out of the user experience. That's it.
Why should they spend money on something that's outside their intended domains of expertise? It would be like complaining that the Gap doesn't spend money researching basic materials science so they can make better clothes, or that Nintendo doesn't have a neuroscience research facility set up so that they can eventually make more addictive games or something.
Now, I wouldn't complain if Apple took 50 billion and set up a Jobs Labs or something (and long live the Woz, even if it means it wouldn't be named after him), and it would certainly be a pretty awesome thing to do, but I have a hard time getting bothered by it as you seem to be.
But I was assured by everyone on Slashdot that Siri was trivial to duplicate in its entirety and not remotely challenging, interesting or innovative, and that Android had the exact same (and better) functionality forever anyway.
So clearly your personal experiences with a competitor to Siri must be wrong. *Ahem*
Kidding aside, how in the hell did you come up with "What is the addition of 5 and 5?" Seriously - you must be phenomenal at Infocom type "guess the verb" text adventure games because such a phrasing would never occur to me.
I don't think you understand how this whole anti-trust thing works.
Designing products that work together and drive sales of each other is not illegal. Designing products that only work on your other products is also not illegal.
What would be illegal is if Apple used their market clout to force providers of content to ONLY list their content with Apple or to put significant artificial restrictions on competing products. For example, if Apple told AT&T that they had to throttle bandwidth on all non-iPhones on the AT&T network, or forced the RIAA to charge 2x the price of iTunes prices for selling anywhere else, or required software developers developing for iOS to not develop for any other platform while their products were for sale at the app store, etc.
They could also get in trouble if they intentionally crippled software and products that compete with theirs on their platforms - any MP3 not bought on iTunes was limited to 32k quality, or Office were purposely forced to crash, or apps that compete with Apple apps were otherwise crippled by iOS. Apple has not done anything like this.
I have an iPod filled with music I didn't buy through Apple; a Mac mini that boots to OSX, Windows and Ubuntu (and with no Apple software other than what came with the OS unless you count the dev kit). My iPad is probably the only thing I have that only has software from the app store (or from other iOS developers as I am one), but I have plenty of apps on it that are less expensive (or free) vs. Apple apps that are not free.
The ONLY place I could really see that there's even the beginning of a possible case against Apple for being anti-competitive would be in their supply chain - they have so much cash, so much market clout that they can basically keep other hardware manufacturers out of the game (or make them pay through the nose) by tying up supply for the near term. Even then, I don't know if just being efficient and willing to take a risk by putting in substantial long-term orders is anti-competitive.
When I bought my iPad I thought I was buying a device that worked consistently and speedily, was fairly robust when it came to usability (not crashing a bunch etc.) and that largely got out of my way and let me do the things I wanted a tablet for.
I mean, I used the iPad side by side with a Xoom, also had used a few other tablets (Galaxy and a nook), and found the user experience of the iPad for the things I wanted to do superior, but maybe it really was marketing and branding rather than my own satisfaction with how the iPad worked and dissatisfaction with just how clunky it felt to do stuff on the Xoom or the fact that the Xoom crashed multiple times while I was editing a test document, that the Galaxy was too small to be anything but a somewhat outsized phone, and the nook was just horribly slow?
Thank you for setting me straight.
Sarcasm aside, I don't doubt that many people do pay more for slick marketing and branding, but Apple really does make some very nice kit and focuses very, very well on the user experience; to dismiss them as simply good at marketing is disingenuous at best, and if someone is competing with Apple it winds up ignoring something that Apple does do very, very well and Android and other competitors, to date, have done very, very poorly.
Re:Apple's management doesn't know either.
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Apple Has Too Much Money
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· Score: 4, Interesting
"If Apple's management were such geniuses, then why don't they take that cash and start another business line that will make them even more successful?"
By and large that's actually what Apple has been doing. To wit:
- They were a computer/software maker and started making money doing that thanks to the iMac. So, they: - Started up the iPod business selling music players that were pretty easy to use and fill up. So they: - Started up the iPhone business, selling phones that were pretty neat along with apps that can be used to fill 'em up. So they: - Started up the iPad business, selling tablets that were pretty neat compared to anything out at the time, along with even more apps that can be used to fill 'em up.
The problem for them is figuring out what the next "So they" should be. In my opinion, unless they have some really amazing stuff hidden (like AR glasses or something similar), I don't see them having an easy time bringing out yet another class of "must have" gadget.
But I could see them essentially buying up huge chunks of content - music, movies, television catalogs - in a way that gives them complete and total control over how they are able to run the content part of iTunes.
I could see them trying to set up their own cell/data provider, starting with the most advanced networks they could.
The problem with those would be that, given the way Apple has historically handled negotiating with the content providers and their network carriers, Apple made the lion's share of the profits and had the relatively easy part while the providers and networks made money but had to deal with the more difficult parts (like provide service).
I could see them doing something like taking a lot of that money and starting up their own idea incubator - they have a LOT of very smart people working for them and wanting to work for them - and just basically being a venture capital group. That's been done before, of course, but I could see Apple trying to do it again, but this time "right" since that's one thing they tend to do well.
As for what such a load of cash is a sign of - I think in Apple's case it's more a sign that they REALLY didn't anticipate the level of success that they had. Usually in business it's a very good idea to plan for as many failure modes as you can think of as well as how to build on successes, but most people don't go, "Gee, and if we sell 20x as much as we think we could we should buy everyone ponies and have free ice cream day!"
If they were completely out of ideas, I don't think we'd see Tim Cook walking around saying "We're trying to think of the best way to handle this" - I think he'd be flat-out lying and saying "We have amazing things in store for these funds" while trying desperately to see if there's anything "magical" they can pull out of their asses.
If you actually knew what the hell you were talking about, you would know that even members of a majority class can also be considered victims of hate crimes.
If a black, lesbian, muslim woman murders a white, straight, christian man and makes it clear that she is doing it because her victim is white/straight/christian/male, that's a hate crime.
See, the reason hate crimes are considered aggravated offenses is because their intent is to instil fear in the entire class of people they target in order to have an adverse affect on that entire class of people.
So, you're entirely wrong about how hate crimes work - you only need one definition to cover any potential class of victim because potentially anyone can be a victim of a hate crime.
Now let's talk about why you're wrong about how hate crimes as you imagine them to be are the perfect way to tack a few extra years onto prison sentences:
What's the conviction rate for offenders of color vs. white offenders? What's the average sentence length, by conviction type, for both offenders of color and white offenders? In your fantasy world, it's only minorities and victimized groups who are able to be victims of hate crimes, and so, according to your theory, we should see sentence lengths for white offenders be higher than for offenders of color for the same offense (if it's so "easy" to tack on and if the overriding goal is to "tack a few extra years onto a prison sentence"), and possibly higher rates of conviction of white offenders.
Yet we don't. What we see are that defendants of color are vastly more likely to be convicted, and when convicted, offenders of color are given typically longer sentences. When adjusted for other factors - usually economic - the gap is slightly lessened but still quite present.
So, you're wrong about the intent and effect of hate crimes, too. Everything in your post is incorrect.
Perhaps you'll take this as an opportunity to re-examine your views on the subject and see if they match up with actual reality rather than what you imagine reality is.
Actually, you're right about one thing in your post - for-profit prisons are an abomination and should not be allowed in a society that considers itself civilized. There should never be a profit motive for subverting justice.
But this isn't financial information being released. How, exactly, in detail, please, would performance reviews being released to people who were not there to see the full context, who are not trained in education and who may well only use that information to harass teachers they have a personal bias against, do anything to cut costs or have anything to do with finances?
If anything I see it raising costs by eating up tons of time fielding worthless complaints from parents whose kids failed and who want to blame the teacher rather than their own poor parenting. "mrs soandso only got a 4.2 evaluation while mr suchandthus in another class got a 4.3! My precious snowflake failed because he had a worse teacherA, I demand you do something about it!" etc.
If you want financial oversight, here is the obvious thing: start with the massively bloated administration. Administrators make way more money than teachers, there are way more than there need to be, and they are very obviously doing a horrible job because with so many of them making so much new, the system is not doing well. The teachers want to teach, by and large, and many go into their own pockets to get supplies, which wouldn't be as big a problem if administrators weren't being paid 6 figures to be really bad at their jobs.
Again, I don't disagree that teachers also need to be accountable, but I don't think this particular measure will do anything but make it worse.
I was going to say that it would be useful for people who are walking around while using their iPads (that's a big chunk of my use-case - writing down notes while going to different spaces at a site) but then, I don't need to surf the web at high speed while doing that, nor am I using office since it doesn't do handwriting recognition.
I do only bring my iPad + a bluetooth keyboard when I travel since it's lighter than a laptop and I usually just connect to a workstation remotely if I'm in a laptopish use scenario, so I guess there's that.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there is a need for both sorts. If I want to quickly acclimate myself with a new project and zero in on a certain section, comments along the line of "begin user authentication" or some such help greatly, and I definitely don't mind finer granulation than that.
Comments in open source projects like that DEFINITELY help especially since the experience levels of contributors will be different and this way the newbies can quickly get up to speed or at least learn.
Definitely comments about the why, but navigational comments are great, IMO.
Now I see why you're poor and/or married to an awful person - you're unable to formulate intelligent arguments and instead base your opinions on tropes. I, and apparently anyone else worth knowing, won't have any more to do with you.
So, in other words, you have literally no argument other than some stupid appeal to a sexist trope about henpecked husbands, gotcha.
I will say it again:
If you think less than a dollar a day is too much to spend on a multi-purpose device that has one of the best dollar/hour returns on entertainment and productivity in the history of humankind is too much, you are poor.
If you can afford it but are married to someone who would begrudge you less than a dollar a day for such a thing, you are married to a horrible, horrible person who is irrationally intent on denying an incredibly economical form of entertainment for no valid reason.
In either case you should probably re-examine your life and the people in it because something has gone terribly awry, and maybe learn how to argue without relying on stupid stereotypes about married life.
Are you saying that married people are unable to spend less than $30 a month on a combination of work device, personal use device and hobby?
In that case I would say its a matter of not being poor rather than not being married.
Or perhaps you're trying to imply that married people are all with horrible people who won't let them less than dollar a day on something that makes them happy?
In that case I would say pick a better spouse.
Sorry, I just don't see how your statement makes any sense unless either of the above are true.
A gaming rig that can more than handle medium settings of any modern game shouldn't cost you more than $1000 to build, and almost certainly wouldn't be getting used JUST for gaming by anyone who is budget conscious.
The rig I currently game (and do a lot of work and other personal computing use) on was just over $1000 when I set it up 2 years ago and I can play modern games at medium settings no problem, and have decent frame rates.
It came with:
- i7 860 @ 2.8GHz
- 8GB RAM
- ATI Radeon 5850
- Win 7 64
- Running 2 displays at 1920x1080
I added:
- 8GB more RAM (I do a lot of work via virtualization - I highly doubt any games I'm playing even use the base 8 that I had originally). $200 when I got it - and though I wrote it off, I'll add it to my "gaming" cost
- 64 GB Intel SSD that I install games I'm actively playing on; $90 on Newegg when I got it.
I'll use this system for 2 more years before replacing it and turning it into a server, but let's pretend I'll throw it in the garbage, so it comes out to $325/year invested.
I won't even try to pro-rate the cost due to work I do with it or personal, non-gaming use, so let's pretend that my gaming hardware costs me $325 a year with no other benefits.
If you're saying that a $325/year investment in multi-purpose hardware is too much, but dropping $60 at a shot to play modern games is cheap, you have very, very weird budgeting.
And I'm assuming I'm right on the $60 price because that's the price of the bleeding edge games that I'm assuming you imagine require insanely expensive hardware to run (but that I'm quite capable of playing on my rig)
Or maybe your machines cost sub $500 to put together, in which case, yeah, you're not going to be having a very fluid gaming experience.
Nobody was saying you have to be "friends" with your workmates - "social" doesn't just mean good at making friends, it refers to a number of soft skills that are useful for work.
In many workplaces there are these things called "teams." Teams are often comprised of members, referred to as "people." People, you see, are human beings (or corporations or Mitt Romney, but we're only talking about human people here) and most human beings do not function in the same way that a robot does, and frequently have interactions throughout the day that are called "social" or that rely on being able to work well with other people using things called "social skills."
Some people are better at handling the myriad and sundry issues that can come up when multiple people work together, and as such, the teams they are on tend to not get bogged down with interpersonal conflicts that arise from poor social skills. Poor social skills, you see, can often come about because an individual is "anti-social" and does not spend much time developing those skills.
By trying to understand ahead of time who might be anti-social or not a good fit with their team, many prospective employers can avoid making a disastrous hiring decision that will wind up harming their organization because they brought in someone who wrecks teams.
Further, teams comprised of members who are capable of working well with a diverse group of people without much friction will often be much easier to manage when one team member leaves and a new person or people needs to be brought in, will have fewer issues to sort out when their team-members interact with members of other teams within the larger organization, and so on.
Finally, in any job - no matter WHAT field it is in - that involves two or more people working together - there will arise differences of opinion as to how things should be done. When this inevitable thing happens, people with better social skills will probably be able to work together to solve the problem than two people who are completely anti-social sperglords.
To give you an example of how a person with poor social skills might screw up your team of programmers:
Let's say you have someone who is fair at C, Java and can design hardware, but he's an absolute dickhole any time it comes to a disagreement on how a thing should be done. It cost your company a lot of money to hire this guy, and it cost them a lot to train him up to understand your particular processes and organization, and it would cost them a lot to fire this guy, and it would cost them a lot to hire a replacement, and it would cost them a lot to have to deal with the myriad problems him being a dickhole would cause to the rest of the team (like some members potentially quitting rather than working with him, or productivity going into the toilet as a result, or HR having to get involved, or anything else).
So, a hiring manager has some choices to make during the hiring process if they want to avoid the above hideously expensive scenario: Do I hire the person who is good at C, Java and can design hardware, but kind of comes off as a hermit/poorly socialized and who might be difficult to work with, or do I hire the person who is good at C, Java, can design hardware, AND who seems like they'll be able to work with our team and handle working with other people in the organization who might have different interpersonal styles?
The only exception to this that I can see would be cases where you have workers who are literally interchangeable and have absolutely no possible say in how the work is accomplished - people who are, truly, replacing robots in a process that requires no communication and allows no latitude in how things are performed. Even assembly line work doesn't qualify - many times line workers can have a friendly rivalry between individuals or teams that can lead to increased productivity; conversely, one individual line worker who is a dickhole to others can cause a decrease in production. The only scenario I can think of here would inv
Lots of people are not themselves dumb, but are related to people who are members of/affiliated with criminal organizations.
I occasionally do some consulting work with various law enforcement groups and I frequently run across people who would be screened out by this process because they have - and have not repudiated - family members who are members of/affiliated with such organizations.
Should a mother be forced to remove any links to her son if the son happens to be in a gang? Should someone have to publicly renounce their sibling because their brother or sister is involved in gangs? Because that's what it would look like to many of the people who would be flagged as "affiliated" in this way.
Also, when you are a member of socio-economic group* that has ridiculously high rates of incarceration it's kind of hard to not have several people in your life for completely innocent reasons who are so affiliated. In many communities across the nation, having one or more relatives who have been imprisoned at some point is the norm.
What I find particularly pernicious about this sort of screening is that it essentially spreads out the punishment for one person convicted of a crime to that person's ENTIRE community. Have a gang-member in your family or your circle of friends? No job for you unless you're willing to completely sever all public ties to that person.
Also, on my FB profile it's pretty clear that I am "affiliated" with members of multiple criminal organizations; as a researcher who has done work with multiple groups and organizations on issues in criminal justice in the US, I have numerous friends on my professional FB profile who are convicted murders, rapists, drug dealers and gang members. Many of the gang members are still semi-active, in that they do outreach with their old gangs and are still technically members, though they've renounced violence.
The point I'm making here is that it's not so cut and dried, and in a country like the US where we have such a ridiculously high prison population and percentage of the population that has previously been incarcerated, many people can't avoid seeming "affiliated" with criminal organizations. Reasonable people might say "Oh, it's her son/his daughter, that's OK" but all too often bureaucrats making these determinations are anything BUT reasonable.
Now, on the issue of why a sane person might want to work in that kind of environment - well, if only people who were AOK with the state punishing the families and friends of those who commit crimes were to be involved in the criminal justice system you would rapidly see it become far, far worse than it is now. At least this way you have a few reasonable people involved in things and trying to hold back the tide/make change.
*By this I mean specifically low-income african-americans, a group routinely discriminated against by the criminal justice process in the US. Ignoring the disparity in rate of arrest because some idiots will claim african-americans are more prone to criminal behavior, any given african-american defendant is more likely to be convicted than any caucasian defendant, and african-americans are routinely given longer prison sentences than caucasians convicted on the same charge and with similar criminal backgrounds.
Eh, but short of some revolutionary thing (foldable, maybe, like plastic sheets?) I don't see those being big issues for the consumer market the iPad is aimed at.
That sounds about right to me - and I'm going to say the 3 is probably that good enough plateau.
Nothing compelling to upgrade for me, but I do know a few people who didn't like the display in the 2 and who will buy a 3 now as a first time adopter.
From the iPad 1 to the iPad 2 there was the addition of the cameras and a substantial boost to power - that was compelling enough for me.
I'm trying to think of what would be a compelling upgrade for me from my iPad 2 and there really isn't much I can think of. Maybe the generation after this one will have a sufficient boost to power, battery life and other features to get me interested, but I dunno.
Make it national rather than regional - no reason to duplicate resources.
Not only that, but also I would advocate dismissing evidence that was obtained where the whole process of discovery and analysis isn't recorded.
Find a bloody fingerprint that matches a suspect and is made in the victim's blood? You'd better have recordings of you finding it and all officers involved in looking for evidence at the scene from the time the call came in until the analysis comes back positive as well as all labwork, the storage unit for the sample etc., or it won't count.
My standpoint on all of this is that people who commit crimes should be punished, but also that, given the state of prisons in the US, we should make DAMN sure that people actually did do what they're accused of before we convict.
If the police were able to adapt to this - to have iron clad and unimpeachable chain of custody for evidence as well as recordings of all interactions with suspects, all the suspect's time in jail or holding, and all other facets of the case, that would do MUCH more good than the current system, for sure.
Am I the only one who thinks, in this day and age of easy video & audio recording, that ANY interaction police have with ANYONE for ANY reason (in an official capacity or as "an off duty police officer" responding to something) should be required to be recorded by the police themselves or "it didn't happen"?
Traffic stops, parking tickets, entering homes - ANYTHING - get it all on video and audio and require that said videos be made available for all parties privy to that.
Were I in charge of the world, that's one of the first things I would do - require all law enforcement people to wear video and audio recording devices at all times, even inside of their offices etc.
It should be a no brainer that civilians should be able to record any interaction they have with police, of course. I can't think of a single reason why it shouldn't be.
So don't buy it? Or buy cars that have general purpose connections for these features if you must have them?
If it's enough to piss you off that your car has an ipod-only connection, why did you buy it in the first place?
If you have enough lock-in in your life already then, uh, it's pretty easy to not have that: don't buy things that lock you in. And stop acting like a victim when you do buy something that locks you in - you *do* have choices, you know.
"Siri, shut the fuck up!" should be an option, and I'm quite serious.
I agree with you about the general points you make about being distracted, though I think there can be technological solutions.
For example, limited radar - if your speed and the speed of cars around you is changing suddenly in a way that's not akin to simple stoplight/stop-go traffic, Siri would shut up - maybe a little beep to say "Hey, you need to focus, I'm shutting up" and then it can come back when things lighten up.
I think it would be possible for a properly configured device to know before I or my passengers can consciously register that the shit has hit the fan and behave accordingly.
Sorry about your wreck - I was in a rather bad one myself and absolutely know where you're coming from on that!
Given some of the unpolished turds Microsoft has put out in the past, that cream must be pretty curdled...
In reality though, the stuff Microsoft has put out makes me think more of an organization with tons of internal competition, yes, but one in which people sabotage each other or engage in politicking in order to force pet ideas into projects resulting in products clearly designed by committee and often containing so many compromises that whatever good points are often completely outshone by really horrific kludge.
Microsoft does do a lot of research - and a lot of what they come up with is AMAZING, really - it's just that in the whole process of turning it into a product the internal politics comes into play and ruins much of it horribly which is a real shame.
Fortunately for them, they do have enough money that they can survive the refinement process and eventually scrape off the shit that gets attached to many of their 1.0 products.
Because Apple isn't that kind of company and seems to hold no ambitions to become one?
Apple is really good at taking various pieces of existing technology and combining them in a way that nobody else has, or, if a similar product exists, taking it and refining the hell out of the user experience. That's it.
Why should they spend money on something that's outside their intended domains of expertise? It would be like complaining that the Gap doesn't spend money researching basic materials science so they can make better clothes, or that Nintendo doesn't have a neuroscience research facility set up so that they can eventually make more addictive games or something.
Now, I wouldn't complain if Apple took 50 billion and set up a Jobs Labs or something (and long live the Woz, even if it means it wouldn't be named after him), and it would certainly be a pretty awesome thing to do, but I have a hard time getting bothered by it as you seem to be.
But I was assured by everyone on Slashdot that Siri was trivial to duplicate in its entirety and not remotely challenging, interesting or innovative, and that Android had the exact same (and better) functionality forever anyway.
So clearly your personal experiences with a competitor to Siri must be wrong. *Ahem*
Kidding aside, how in the hell did you come up with "What is the addition of 5 and 5?" Seriously - you must be phenomenal at Infocom type "guess the verb" text adventure games because such a phrasing would never occur to me.
I don't think you understand how this whole anti-trust thing works.
Designing products that work together and drive sales of each other is not illegal. Designing products that only work on your other products is also not illegal.
What would be illegal is if Apple used their market clout to force providers of content to ONLY list their content with Apple or to put significant artificial restrictions on competing products. For example, if Apple told AT&T that they had to throttle bandwidth on all non-iPhones on the AT&T network, or forced the RIAA to charge 2x the price of iTunes prices for selling anywhere else, or required software developers developing for iOS to not develop for any other platform while their products were for sale at the app store, etc.
They could also get in trouble if they intentionally crippled software and products that compete with theirs on their platforms - any MP3 not bought on iTunes was limited to 32k quality, or Office were purposely forced to crash, or apps that compete with Apple apps were otherwise crippled by iOS. Apple has not done anything like this.
I have an iPod filled with music I didn't buy through Apple; a Mac mini that boots to OSX, Windows and Ubuntu (and with no Apple software other than what came with the OS unless you count the dev kit). My iPad is probably the only thing I have that only has software from the app store (or from other iOS developers as I am one), but I have plenty of apps on it that are less expensive (or free) vs. Apple apps that are not free.
The ONLY place I could really see that there's even the beginning of a possible case against Apple for being anti-competitive would be in their supply chain - they have so much cash, so much market clout that they can basically keep other hardware manufacturers out of the game (or make them pay through the nose) by tying up supply for the near term. Even then, I don't know if just being efficient and willing to take a risk by putting in substantial long-term orders is anti-competitive.
That's really weird.
When I bought my iPad I thought I was buying a device that worked consistently and speedily, was fairly robust when it came to usability (not crashing a bunch etc.) and that largely got out of my way and let me do the things I wanted a tablet for.
I mean, I used the iPad side by side with a Xoom, also had used a few other tablets (Galaxy and a nook), and found the user experience of the iPad for the things I wanted to do superior, but maybe it really was marketing and branding rather than my own satisfaction with how the iPad worked and dissatisfaction with just how clunky it felt to do stuff on the Xoom or the fact that the Xoom crashed multiple times while I was editing a test document, that the Galaxy was too small to be anything but a somewhat outsized phone, and the nook was just horribly slow?
Thank you for setting me straight.
Sarcasm aside, I don't doubt that many people do pay more for slick marketing and branding, but Apple really does make some very nice kit and focuses very, very well on the user experience; to dismiss them as simply good at marketing is disingenuous at best, and if someone is competing with Apple it winds up ignoring something that Apple does do very, very well and Android and other competitors, to date, have done very, very poorly.
"If Apple's management were such geniuses, then why don't they take that cash and start another business line that will make them even more successful?"
By and large that's actually what Apple has been doing. To wit:
- They were a computer/software maker and started making money doing that thanks to the iMac. So, they:
- Started up the iPod business selling music players that were pretty easy to use and fill up. So they:
- Started up the iPhone business, selling phones that were pretty neat along with apps that can be used to fill 'em up. So they:
- Started up the iPad business, selling tablets that were pretty neat compared to anything out at the time, along with even more apps that can be used to fill 'em up.
The problem for them is figuring out what the next "So they" should be. In my opinion, unless they have some really amazing stuff hidden (like AR glasses or something similar), I don't see them having an easy time bringing out yet another class of "must have" gadget.
But I could see them essentially buying up huge chunks of content - music, movies, television catalogs - in a way that gives them complete and total control over how they are able to run the content part of iTunes.
I could see them trying to set up their own cell/data provider, starting with the most advanced networks they could.
The problem with those would be that, given the way Apple has historically handled negotiating with the content providers and their network carriers, Apple made the lion's share of the profits and had the relatively easy part while the providers and networks made money but had to deal with the more difficult parts (like provide service).
I could see them doing something like taking a lot of that money and starting up their own idea incubator - they have a LOT of very smart people working for them and wanting to work for them - and just basically being a venture capital group. That's been done before, of course, but I could see Apple trying to do it again, but this time "right" since that's one thing they tend to do well.
As for what such a load of cash is a sign of - I think in Apple's case it's more a sign that they REALLY didn't anticipate the level of success that they had. Usually in business it's a very good idea to plan for as many failure modes as you can think of as well as how to build on successes, but most people don't go, "Gee, and if we sell 20x as much as we think we could we should buy everyone ponies and have free ice cream day!"
If they were completely out of ideas, I don't think we'd see Tim Cook walking around saying "We're trying to think of the best way to handle this" - I think he'd be flat-out lying and saying "We have amazing things in store for these funds" while trying desperately to see if there's anything "magical" they can pull out of their asses.
If you actually knew what the hell you were talking about, you would know that even members of a majority class can also be considered victims of hate crimes.
If a black, lesbian, muslim woman murders a white, straight, christian man and makes it clear that she is doing it because her victim is white/straight/christian/male, that's a hate crime.
See, the reason hate crimes are considered aggravated offenses is because their intent is to instil fear in the entire class of people they target in order to have an adverse affect on that entire class of people.
So, you're entirely wrong about how hate crimes work - you only need one definition to cover any potential class of victim because potentially anyone can be a victim of a hate crime.
Now let's talk about why you're wrong about how hate crimes as you imagine them to be are the perfect way to tack a few extra years onto prison sentences:
What's the conviction rate for offenders of color vs. white offenders? What's the average sentence length, by conviction type, for both offenders of color and white offenders? In your fantasy world, it's only minorities and victimized groups who are able to be victims of hate crimes, and so, according to your theory, we should see sentence lengths for white offenders be higher than for offenders of color for the same offense (if it's so "easy" to tack on and if the overriding goal is to "tack a few extra years onto a prison sentence"), and possibly higher rates of conviction of white offenders.
Yet we don't. What we see are that defendants of color are vastly more likely to be convicted, and when convicted, offenders of color are given typically longer sentences. When adjusted for other factors - usually economic - the gap is slightly lessened but still quite present.
So, you're wrong about the intent and effect of hate crimes, too. Everything in your post is incorrect.
Perhaps you'll take this as an opportunity to re-examine your views on the subject and see if they match up with actual reality rather than what you imagine reality is.
Actually, you're right about one thing in your post - for-profit prisons are an abomination and should not be allowed in a society that considers itself civilized. There should never be a profit motive for subverting justice.
But this isn't financial information being released. How, exactly, in detail, please, would performance reviews being released to people who were not there to see the full context, who are not trained in education and who may well only use that information to harass teachers they have a personal bias against, do anything to cut costs or have anything to do with finances?
If anything I see it raising costs by eating up tons of time fielding worthless complaints from parents whose kids failed and who want to blame the teacher rather than their own poor parenting. "mrs soandso only got a 4.2 evaluation while mr suchandthus in another class got a 4.3! My precious snowflake failed because he had a worse teacherA, I demand you do something about it!" etc.
If you want financial oversight, here is the obvious thing: start with the massively bloated administration. Administrators make way more money than teachers, there are way more than there need to be, and they are very obviously doing a horrible job because with so many of them making so much new, the system is not doing well. The teachers want to teach, by and large, and many go into their own pockets to get supplies, which wouldn't be as big a problem if administrators weren't being paid 6 figures to be really bad at their jobs.
Again, I don't disagree that teachers also need to be accountable, but I don't think this particular measure will do anything but make it worse.
I do a lot of use while walking around - but not the kind of use that this service would be for.
I was going to say that it would be useful for people who are walking around while using their iPads (that's a big chunk of my use-case - writing down notes while going to different spaces at a site) but then, I don't need to surf the web at high speed while doing that, nor am I using office since it doesn't do handwriting recognition.
I do only bring my iPad + a bluetooth keyboard when I travel since it's lighter than a laptop and I usually just connect to a workstation remotely if I'm in a laptopish use scenario, so I guess there's that.
But I don't think it's terribly compelling.