If she were excluded from the World Athletics Championship (and presumably the Olympic Games) on such grounds, would she thereby qualify for a place in the Special Olympics?
I work in a company in Japan with headquarters in the US. The US HQ often seems to have a shorter term outlook than the Japan branch. The focus is on the revenue target for the next quarter.
But regardless, I get the impression that in Japan, the idea of using robots in society (help in the home, helping the elderly, etc.) doesn't seem particularly long term.
From my place in Toyko to Osaka (according to Google Maps) - plane: 3.0 hours - high speed (bullet) train: 3.5 hours - train (no express trains at all): 9.5 hours - car: 7 hours I live about 20 minutes away from Tokyo station from where the bullet train departs. The car can still be a better option if you have to carry a lot of luggage, but the train/plane tends to have a more predictable arrival time.
For nations, there is one thing better than winning a war. That's winning a war and being able to claim the moral upper hand. Nations don't want to be seen as the one who shot the opponent in the back or kicked them when they were down.
Because of this, most nations do claim that they abide by rules of war (such as the Geneva convention). I don't know any nation that openly says "When we wage war, anything goes".
In practice of course, these rules get bent. But the victors inevitably claim that they followed the rules and the losers didn't. My original point was that at the end of WWII the victors had a trial where the losers were accused and punished for breaking rules of war. I quoted Leo Szilard who suggested that the use of atomic weapons would have been considered a war crime had it been carried out by the losers.
> The whole point of war is to use violence and deadly force to subject a country to your rule.
Not everyone holds this opinion. Some differentiate between "total war" (where anything goes) and war with rules. The latter is generally viewed as more "civilized" - in as much as war can be civilized. The trials at the end of WWII demonstrate that the victor nations thought that there should be some rules in war.
Having said that, I would accept that what I wrote tends to be more true in public forums and in the history books, and what you wrote probably has more sway in the war planning rooms and on the battle fields.
> I guess what the rest of the world hates is that we're able to do the math. 100,000 or 10 million?
Quote from Leo Szilard (Wikipedia) who played a major role in the Manhattan Project: "Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?"
> We have a right to protect our people from harm. I draw a direct line from Iran developing > a nuclear program and US citizens being put in danger. Therefore, yes we in fact do have a > right to stop them.
That was pretty much the line used to justify the Iraq invasion. The danger is when one party acts as judge, jury, and executioner.
When it comes to justice between nations, there is currently no world government with the authority that national governments have to maintain justice within nations. The UN is a step in that direction. It is in part, a forum in which nations can attempt to resolve their differences without violence.
When the UN is brought up on Slashdot, it generates a lot of accusations of corruption, and many people seem to pass off the UN as barely relevant. These comments seem to mostly come from the US. I'd like to respectfully ask US readers to stop and think for a moment, and consider that this might be a reflection of how the UN is portrayed in the US - not how it actually is. In the countries I have lived, the UN is not portrayed in this way. It has a more noble image. Consider also that the US administration around the time of the build up to the Iraq invasion had some reason to discredit the UN.
It is common for senior management to want to have some measure of how well staff are performing. The truth of the matter is though, that for many types of job there simply aren't any good ways to measure productivity. If there were, this question wouldn't be asked so often.
I think that the difficulty of measuring productivity increases with the complexity of the task. It is easier to measure the productivity of an assembly line worker who has one simple task to perform repeatedly, and more difficult to measure the performance of a software engineer or system administrator who can make use of imagination and creativity to do a better job.
That said, it's not necessarily impossible, just more difficult to provide accurate measurements. Replying along the lines of "I can't be measured" is unlikely to result in a sympathetic response. A wise senior manager however, would rely not only on the numbers, but would use the numbers to supplement a human observation of what was going on.
To answer the question - I would recommend focusing on the bottom line. "Number of tickets answered" holds the danger of measuring how hard you are working, now how effective you are. Ask the manager what he expects from the sys admins, and base the measurements on that. "Number of e-mail problems reported per month", "Dollars spent on system administration per month", "Number of data loss problems reported per month". These are all areas that a sys admin has an influence over. The senior management recognize them as areas they would like maintained/improved.
Monitor and graph them yourself. Describe your projects in terms of how they will improve these numbers. If you find yourself wanting to work on something unrelated, perhaps you have discovered a new measurement that could be monitored. It's really important to keep the manager/beancounter involved in this. You should discuss and agree on new or changed measurements with them. Meet up with them regularly and show them how the graphs are progressing. After a while you'll feel more confident that you are doing a good job. You'll find proving it easier, and the beancounter will almost feel like part of the team.
Concerts were always priced at whatever the market would bear.
In many cases concerts are a sort of monopoly and not easily comparable with other comodities. e.g. The Rolling Stones are currently on a world tour. If you are a "consumer" of Rolling Stones concerts in a place like New Zealand, then you can choose to go to the concert or not, but your next chance is likely to be 10 years in the future... And in the case of the Rolling Stones, one can never be too sure about the likelyhood of a next tour. You can't just get the product cheaper someplace else.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of interest, what is the reason for using intelligence as the basis for how a species should be treated?
Presumably humans who aren't very intelligent shouldn't be treated as sub-human...
If she were excluded from the World Athletics Championship (and presumably the Olympic Games) on such grounds, would she thereby qualify for a place in the Special Olympics?
I work in a company in Japan with headquarters in the US. The US HQ often seems to have a shorter term outlook than the Japan branch. The focus is on the revenue target for the next quarter.
But regardless, I get the impression that in Japan, the idea of using robots in society (help in the home, helping the elderly, etc.) doesn't seem particularly long term.
From my place in Toyko to Osaka (according to Google Maps)
- plane: 3.0 hours
- high speed (bullet) train: 3.5 hours
- train (no express trains at all): 9.5 hours
- car: 7 hours
I live about 20 minutes away from Tokyo station from where the bullet train departs. The car can still be a better option if you have to carry a lot of luggage, but the train/plane tends to have a more predictable arrival time.
For nations, there is one thing better than winning a war. That's winning a war and being able to claim the moral upper hand. Nations don't want to be seen as the one who shot the opponent in the back or kicked them when they were down.
Because of this, most nations do claim that they abide by rules of war (such as the Geneva convention). I don't know any nation that openly says "When we wage war, anything goes".
In practice of course, these rules get bent. But the victors inevitably claim that they followed the rules and the losers didn't. My original point was that at the end of WWII the victors had a trial where the losers were accused and punished for breaking rules of war. I quoted Leo Szilard who suggested that the use of atomic weapons would have been considered a war crime had it been carried out by the losers.
> The whole point of war is to use violence and deadly force to subject a country to your rule.
Not everyone holds this opinion. Some differentiate between "total war" (where anything goes) and war with rules. The latter is generally viewed as more "civilized" - in as much as war can be civilized. The trials at the end of WWII demonstrate that the victor nations thought that there should be some rules in war.
Having said that, I would accept that what I wrote tends to be more true in public forums and in the history books, and what you wrote probably has more sway in the war planning rooms and on the battle fields.
> I guess what the rest of the world hates is that we're able to do the math. 100,000 or 10 million?
Quote from Leo Szilard (Wikipedia) who played a major role in the Manhattan Project:
"Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?"
> We have a right to protect our people from harm. I draw a direct line from Iran developing
> a nuclear program and US citizens being put in danger. Therefore, yes we in fact do have a
> right to stop them.
That was pretty much the line used to justify the Iraq invasion. The danger is when one party acts as judge, jury, and executioner.
When it comes to justice between nations, there is currently no world government with the authority that national governments have to maintain justice within nations. The UN is a step in that direction. It is in part, a forum in which nations can attempt to resolve their differences without violence.
When the UN is brought up on Slashdot, it generates a lot of accusations of corruption, and many people seem to pass off the UN as barely relevant. These comments seem to mostly come from the US. I'd like to respectfully ask US readers to stop and think for a moment, and consider that this might be a reflection of how the UN is portrayed in the US - not how it actually is. In the countries I have lived, the UN is not portrayed in this way. It has a more noble image. Consider also that the US administration around the time of the build up to the Iraq invasion had some reason to discredit the UN.
It is common for senior management to want to have some measure of how well staff are performing. The truth of the matter is though, that for many types of job there simply aren't any good ways to measure productivity. If there were, this question wouldn't be asked so often.
I think that the difficulty of measuring productivity increases with the complexity of the task. It is easier to measure the productivity of an assembly line worker who has one simple task to perform repeatedly, and more difficult to measure the performance of a software engineer or system administrator who can make use of imagination and creativity to do a better job.
That said, it's not necessarily impossible, just more difficult to provide accurate measurements. Replying along the lines of "I can't be measured" is unlikely to result in a sympathetic response. A wise senior manager however, would rely not only on the numbers, but would use the numbers to supplement a human observation of what was going on.
To answer the question - I would recommend focusing on the bottom line. "Number of tickets answered" holds the danger of measuring how hard you are working, now how effective you are. Ask the manager what he expects from the sys admins, and base the measurements on that. "Number of e-mail problems reported per month", "Dollars spent on system administration per month", "Number of data loss problems reported per month". These are all areas that a sys admin has an influence over. The senior management recognize them as areas they would like maintained/improved.
Monitor and graph them yourself. Describe your projects in terms of how they will improve these numbers. If you find yourself wanting to work on something unrelated, perhaps you have discovered a new measurement that could be monitored. It's really important to keep the manager/beancounter involved in this. You should discuss and agree on new or changed measurements with them. Meet up with them regularly and show them how the graphs are progressing. After a while you'll feel more confident that you are doing a good job. You'll find proving it easier, and the beancounter will almost feel like part of the team.
In many cases concerts are a sort of monopoly and not easily comparable with other comodities. e.g. The Rolling Stones are currently on a world tour. If you are a "consumer" of Rolling Stones concerts in a place like New Zealand, then you can choose to go to the concert or not, but your next chance is likely to be 10 years in the future... And in the case of the Rolling Stones, one can never be too sure about the likelyhood of a next tour. You can't just get the product cheaper someplace else.