Typically, people who knowingly publish rigged demonstrations or papers (especially in the field of energy generation) are going after private and government grants. What they do after they have the grant money varies, but I suspect that most of them have successfully deluded even themselves that they can make their crazy physics-bending ideas work if only they could find a way to quit their day job to work on them full time.
And even after they've had decades to show that their idea has merit, they will often argue until their death that they're only 2 years or so away from changing the world. A little sad, really.
1) An excessive and irrational fixation on "being yourself". American culture is obsessed with stressing the supposed significance of being a special little snowflake. I can't count the number of children's shows that harp on about this nonsense. The irony is that Americans end up conforming themselves to pre-defined pigeon holes anyway way worse that I've seen in other countries.
And with this comes the idiocy that you're not going to be told what to do. You're going to live your life your own way.
I think you've over-simplified it to the point of absurdity. Individualism has strong roots in U.S. culture, going all the way back to the American revolution. America was founded on the principles of limited government and strong individual civil and property rights because they saw that all authoritarian governments eventually produce a society with an oppressed majority who wind up spending their entire lives toiling for the benefit of an all-powerful privileged minority rather than themselves.
So as an American, I have the right (perhaps even duty) to consider myself a separate entity from the rest of society. To speak my mind whenever and however I like, to wholly own whatever property I can afford, and to better myself and my family in whatever manner I see fit. If you feel like you have to deride me for having the gall to enjoy the freedoms given to me by the constitution of my country, be my fucking guest, but check your local laws first.
American culture portrays this unrealistic image of what life should be. Basically, if we're not mountain climbing, or doing some other extreme activity, by day and not actively participating in the bar/club scene at night we're not living life. So what does that mean? We're supposed to devote our lives to pleasure and not work. We're suckers if we work for a living.
I think you get too much of your information about America from television and magazines. The mass media (both foreign and domestic) portray our culture as just a bunch of pleasure-seeking hedonists. We have lots of those, to be certain, but that view is woefully incomplete. American television is not designed to inform or entertain, it is designed to sell things. I think you would be quite surprised at the sheer variety of individuals you would meet in any country, if only you took the time to talk to some of them.
I know quite a few couples where the father barely sees their kids. And while not happy about the situation their perspective is that it's better to work hard now and ensure a good education and better life for their kids. Some of them probably don't even think that far, this is simply how life is.
What's the point of having offspring if you work so much that you never get the chance to raise them? If your goal in life is to provide for a family that you never get to know then don't bother getting married, just send all your paychecks to the single mother down the street. I fully understand that sometimes, temporary sacrifices must be made in order to keep a roof over your family's head. But as a permanent strategy, being a father and a workaholic at the same time reeks of avoidance. (Yes, this is a very personal subject for me.)
My point has meandered a bit here, but the gist of what I'm saying is that Americans, and Europeans, don't value hard work like Asians do, but they're sure convinced they're entitled to success.
I'm going to have to play the role of scientist here and ask for evidence, because everything you've said is just a reiteration of cliche generalizations that have been circulating for decades. I've met and worked with individuals from every industrialized country on the planet and the one thing I can tell you is that stereotypes like the ones you hold rarely pan out once you actually get to know the individuals. I know Asians who suck at math, Russians who don't drink, and yes, even some Canadians who don't say "eh."
By "human error," they likely meant "human driving error," wherein a driver in control of a vehicle takes (or fails to take) an action based on insufficient information or poor judgement that results in an otherwise preventable accident. Accidents resulting from objects falling off trucks, high winds, or ice patches are not always preventable even when the driver is fully alert, following all of the pertinent traffic laws and rules, and is maintaining situational awareness.
But I do agree that 80% seems like a rather low number.
I agree with everything except the last part. Obviously, you should work with management to correct parts of your job that you really aren't happy with and then only leave as a last resort. (Assuming you're not just afraid of real work.) But if you decide to leave a job that you're dissatisfied with, you should do it as soon as you have a good offer from somewhere else. Telling your management, "I'll leave unless you make these changes" basically amounts to blackmail in my book and most managers I've met would simply respond with, "Okay, see ya later."
I think job-hopping can be a good thing. As long as you keep it under control and aren't just getting fired. By changing jobs every 2-3 years, you work your way up the payscale quicker, meet more people, see how more businesses work, and get exposed to a wider variety of technology and ideas. Of course, it only goes so far... for example, most companies like to see loyalty when it comes to promotions into management.
Steve Jobs breathed life back into a dying Apple. It was his management that turned the company from a third-rate HW vendor into a juggernaut of ideas, concepts, products, and customer satisfaction. Sculley, Amelio, and the rest never could have done that.
It's true that Steve turned Apple around when he rejoined. But let's not forget that he was originally ousted from his own company because his impulsive decisions, empty showmanship, and abusive management style threatened to rip Apple apart right when it should have been concentrating on building a long-term strategy. Those other CEOs and executives who ran Apple during Jobs' exile wouldn't have produced the superstar corporation that Apple is today, but at least they knew how to keep the company afloat long enough for Jobs to mature on both a business and behavioral level. (Even if they didn't realize that's what they were doing.)
I know Facebook hating is en vogue around here, but c'mon.
1) Assume you would rather "deactivate" your account (making it functionally identical to an active account AFAICT) and make you google for the actual "delete your account" link
Click "Account" -> "Help Center". The top question is "How do I permanently delete my account?" The description clearly states the difference between deactivating vs deleting your account. (Deactivating makes your profile disappear from Facebook, but all of your data is held on to in case you want to reactivate.)
2)Require a 2 week "pending deletion" period, during which if you log in you will cancel your request for account deletion.
So... don't log in?
No longer will you receive dozens of invites a day to banal "spam to click" games from people you barely knew in school,
You can disable all of those, and you can also unfriend annoying people, just as you can in real life.
no longer will you miss birthday drinking sessions because you were only ever informed via facebook (all e-mails from which going straight into your "failbook spam" folder)
Step 1. Send all Facebook notification to spam folder Step 2. Complain about not receiving Facebook notifications
Huh?
no longer will you get hassle from the Mrs. when she finds out you accepted a friend request from a girl you used to date 15 years ago.
If that actually happened, Facebook isn't the biggest problem in your relationship.
He told me that modern design software makes it possible to design far more efficient planes that would look very different from the ones we now have, but it's difficult (read: impossible) to get anyone to invest in a plan that deviates from the known-good designs that have been working for decades.
The key phrase there is that last one. The last major development in passenger air travel (Concorde) was a technical success, but certainly not a business one and airliners are loathe to invest in anything but tried and true designs. NASA and the military drive new aircraft technology because it's too risky for the commercial sector.
If Damages * Likelihood is greater than Revenue, then proceed.
cost-benefit analysis, and it's the cornerstone of every informed business and management decision.
Our executive culture is fundamentally rotten. Fundamentally. Every fucking "premium" MBA program in America should be forced to publish their curricula and have outside experts analyze their lectures. Seriously. Because these days this kind of criminality is quite literally taught in our business schools.
So you're against having reason and logic in business teachings? students down and say, "Okay, today I'm gong to teach you how to successfully go about ripping off indie video game developers..."
The core problem is not that business executives are being taught poorly in schools. RTFA, the problem is that the legal system is tilted heavily in the favor of the entities with the most cash to spend.
It's working out pretty well for those of us who bought the right one. I don't at all believe that choosing an open platform relieves you of the burden of comparison shopping.
I'm actually very satisfied knowing that NO channel of communication should be considered '100% secure'. Face to face is the only place 'privacy' has a chance at existing... and I say chance, because technology can be anywhere at anytime.
I know "1984" is a bit of a dead horse around these parts, but that's exactly what you just described.
We have methods of communication that are 100% secure if implemented correctly. You can get untraceable weapons if you look hard enough. You can forge an identify and travel anywhere, with some effort. You can transfer and stash large amounts of money if you know the right tricks. The good news is, the vast majority of criminals suffer having judgement too poor to use such tactics. That means we shouldn't have to stand for allowing government and law enforcement full access to our lives and possessions, all in the name of public safety. But neither should we allow anarchy under the guise of freedom.
My opinion is that there exists a decent middle ground somewhere between perfect safety and perfect freedom. In the U.S., I like to think we're relatively close. (Of course that will vary greatly depending on who you talk to.)
I don't think those rapidshare search queries are accurate. For example, one of the recent queries on FileCrop is "John Tesh". That's obviously not a real search. Nobody would search for that. A real search would have been prefixed with the phrase, "how to murder".
Try doing any programming or system administration related search and *not* have at least one of the first five results populated with the following worthless domains:
These sites don't necessarily scrape and repost content, but the content they do provide is invariably worthless or too difficult to navigate in order to be worth my time. In fact, I really don't mind mailing list, wikipedia, and StackOverflow scrapers because at least they provide useful content as long as you block all the ads and javascript by default.
Spammers have gotten pretty darn good at figuring out how to game Google and Google's countermeasures are increasingly ineffective. What Google really needs to do is place some control over the results returned in the user's hand. I would pay actual money to Google if they would let me customize search results as follows:
- A way to mark results as useful or not for the query entered, and refine later searches based on those - Blacklist certain domains from showing up in my results, ever. - Add content qualification (for example, prefer sites that have a certain text-to-graphics ratio)
You seem to be laboring under the impression that shareholders have all of the power in a corporation. While it's true that the major big-money sharesholders can have some general influence on a company's overall direction, the analogies you listed don't scale to corporation ownership.
If you buy a building, you become the landlord of that building and are responsible for staying in compliance with regulations, various codes, etc and are subject to criminal and civil consequences for not meeting those responsibilities. If I buy a share of stock in Apple for my retirement portfolio, I'm not liable for the company's actions because I'm not granted any power or non-public insight over how Apple conducts it's business. I can't just waltz up to 1 Infinite Loop and demand to see internal reports or their R&D department. At best, I might be afforded voting rights to elect the board of directors if my stake is large enough. Other than that, stock ownership is strictly a financial arrangement. I do suffer financially if the company's actions cause a loss in profit or public perception.
I actually own stock in hundreds of companies when you count my personal portfolio, retirement plan, and other financial arrangements. Should I be sent to jail if some product from one of those companies kills a bunch of people?
So then who gets the punishment when a company does illegal things? The people who do the illegal things. If they break the law, they can't (or at least shouldn't be able to) hide underneath the corporation's skirt when it comes times for punishment.
You appear to be unfamiliar with how the World Wide Web works. When you see an underlined word or phrase (such as "already known to third parties in China"), that means you can click on it and your web browser will take you to a new page whereupon you can generally find more information on the word or phrase. It takes some practice but should eventually learn to get the hang of it.
Are you sure it's an 8-track? 8-tracks were well-known for their horrible reliability and sound. If the machine was being used in a studio setting, it is more likely a Fidelipack, which was widely used in radio stations to record and play back station id, commercials, and the odd song.
As unlikely as it is that any backdoors have made it into OpenBSD, even an audit cannot conclusively prove that there are no backdoors in the code. Witness the Underhanded C Code Contest. The goal of the contest is to write a chunk of code that does something, well, underhanded that is difficult to detect even upon close examination of the code. The winners have been quite successful. Even with only 15-20 lines of code, it's a challenge to locate the underhandedness even when you know exactly what you're looking for. The phase "microscopic needle in a galactic hacksack" comes to mind when imagining the challenge of finding malicious code that may or may not even be there, in a code base thousands or millions of lines long.
So basically, because the ISP monopolies got away with screwing municipalities in the past, they are now have a license to continue doing so indefinitely.
So the liberal perspective says that net neutrality regulations should be imposed on carriers to avoid handing over effective control of the internet to a few mega-corporations. While the conservative perspective says that net neutrality regulations should not be imposed to avoid handing over effective control of the internet to a few mega-corporations.
What am I missing here? I guess if corporations are going to control the Internet either way, I'd rather at least make them work for it.
In order to block pornography by default, what they'll have to do is put the entire country on its own network and erect some kind of great firewall between citizens and the world-wide Internet. At the firewall level, filters would then be easily implemented to block any content that the government might find objectionable.
The good news is that there several other countries who have successfully deployed such technology to their citizenship, so the U.K. should be able to seek technical and political advice from them:
Slashdot Mirror
Typically, people who knowingly publish rigged demonstrations or papers (especially in the field of energy generation) are going after private and government grants. What they do after they have the grant money varies, but I suspect that most of them have successfully deluded even themselves that they can make their crazy physics-bending ideas work if only they could find a way to quit their day job to work on them full time.
And even after they've had decades to show that their idea has merit, they will often argue until their death that they're only 2 years or so away from changing the world. A little sad, really.
I think you've over-simplified it to the point of absurdity. Individualism has strong roots in U.S. culture, going all the way back to the American revolution. America was founded on the principles of limited government and strong individual civil and property rights because they saw that all authoritarian governments eventually produce a society with an oppressed majority who wind up spending their entire lives toiling for the benefit of an all-powerful privileged minority rather than themselves.
So as an American, I have the right (perhaps even duty) to consider myself a separate entity from the rest of society. To speak my mind whenever and however I like, to wholly own whatever property I can afford, and to better myself and my family in whatever manner I see fit. If you feel like you have to deride me for having the gall to enjoy the freedoms given to me by the constitution of my country, be my fucking guest, but check your local laws first.
I think you get too much of your information about America from television and magazines. The mass media (both foreign and domestic) portray our culture as just a bunch of pleasure-seeking hedonists. We have lots of those, to be certain, but that view is woefully incomplete. American television is not designed to inform or entertain, it is designed to sell things. I think you would be quite surprised at the sheer variety of individuals you would meet in any country, if only you took the time to talk to some of them.
What's the point of having offspring if you work so much that you never get the chance to raise them? If your goal in life is to provide for a family that you never get to know then don't bother getting married, just send all your paychecks to the single mother down the street. I fully understand that sometimes, temporary sacrifices must be made in order to keep a roof over your family's head. But as a permanent strategy, being a father and a workaholic at the same time reeks of avoidance. (Yes, this is a very personal subject for me.)
I'm going to have to play the role of scientist here and ask for evidence, because everything you've said is just a reiteration of cliche generalizations that have been circulating for decades. I've met and worked with individuals from every industrialized country on the planet and the one thing I can tell you is that stereotypes like the ones you hold rarely pan out once you actually get to know the individuals. I know Asians who suck at math, Russians who don't drink, and yes, even some Canadians who don't say "eh."
By "human error," they likely meant "human driving error," wherein a driver in control of a vehicle takes (or fails to take) an action based on insufficient information or poor judgement that results in an otherwise preventable accident. Accidents resulting from objects falling off trucks, high winds, or ice patches are not always preventable even when the driver is fully alert, following all of the pertinent traffic laws and rules, and is maintaining situational awareness.
But I do agree that 80% seems like a rather low number.
I agree with everything except the last part. Obviously, you should work with management to correct parts of your job that you really aren't happy with and then only leave as a last resort. (Assuming you're not just afraid of real work.) But if you decide to leave a job that you're dissatisfied with, you should do it as soon as you have a good offer from somewhere else. Telling your management, "I'll leave unless you make these changes" basically amounts to blackmail in my book and most managers I've met would simply respond with, "Okay, see ya later."
I think job-hopping can be a good thing. As long as you keep it under control and aren't just getting fired. By changing jobs every 2-3 years, you work your way up the payscale quicker, meet more people, see how more businesses work, and get exposed to a wider variety of technology and ideas. Of course, it only goes so far... for example, most companies like to see loyalty when it comes to promotions into management.
It's true that Steve turned Apple around when he rejoined. But let's not forget that he was originally ousted from his own company because his impulsive decisions, empty showmanship, and abusive management style threatened to rip Apple apart right when it should have been concentrating on building a long-term strategy. Those other CEOs and executives who ran Apple during Jobs' exile wouldn't have produced the superstar corporation that Apple is today, but at least they knew how to keep the company afloat long enough for Jobs to mature on both a business and behavioral level. (Even if they didn't realize that's what they were doing.)
I know Facebook hating is en vogue around here, but c'mon.
Click "Account" -> "Help Center". The top question is "How do I permanently delete my account?" The description clearly states the difference between deactivating vs deleting your account. (Deactivating makes your profile disappear from Facebook, but all of your data is held on to in case you want to reactivate.)
So... don't log in?
You can disable all of those, and you can also unfriend annoying people, just as you can in real life.
Step 1. Send all Facebook notification to spam folder
Step 2. Complain about not receiving Facebook notifications
Huh?
If that actually happened, Facebook isn't the biggest problem in your relationship.
The key phrase there is that last one. The last major development in passenger air travel (Concorde) was a technical success, but certainly not a business one and airliners are loathe to invest in anything but tried and true designs. NASA and the military drive new aircraft technology because it's too risky for the commercial sector.
cost-benefit analysis, and it's the cornerstone of every informed business and management decision.
So you're against having reason and logic in business teachings? students down and say, "Okay, today I'm gong to teach you how to successfully go about ripping off indie video game developers..."
The core problem is not that business executives are being taught poorly in schools. RTFA, the problem is that the legal system is tilted heavily in the favor of the entities with the most cash to spend.
It's working out pretty well for those of us who bought the right one. I don't at all believe that choosing an open platform relieves you of the burden of comparison shopping.
I know "1984" is a bit of a dead horse around these parts, but that's exactly what you just described.
We have methods of communication that are 100% secure if implemented correctly. You can get untraceable weapons if you look hard enough. You can forge an identify and travel anywhere, with some effort. You can transfer and stash large amounts of money if you know the right tricks. The good news is, the vast majority of criminals suffer having judgement too poor to use such tactics. That means we shouldn't have to stand for allowing government and law enforcement full access to our lives and possessions, all in the name of public safety. But neither should we allow anarchy under the guise of freedom.
My opinion is that there exists a decent middle ground somewhere between perfect safety and perfect freedom. In the U.S., I like to think we're relatively close. (Of course that will vary greatly depending on who you talk to.)
I don't think those rapidshare search queries are accurate. For example, one of the recent queries on FileCrop is "John Tesh". That's obviously not a real search. Nobody would search for that. A real search would have been prefixed with the phrase, "how to murder".
The same Canadian law that gives royalties to record companies for all blank media sold, even when they aren't being used for copyright infringement?
I already have an "Internet ID," it's called my GPG public key.
Try doing any programming or system administration related search and *not* have at least one of the first five results populated with the following worthless domains:
- experts-exchange.com
- ehow.com
- about.com
- scribd.com
- ittoolbox.com
These sites don't necessarily scrape and repost content, but the content they do provide is invariably worthless or too difficult to navigate in order to be worth my time. In fact, I really don't mind mailing list, wikipedia, and StackOverflow scrapers because at least they provide useful content as long as you block all the ads and javascript by default.
Spammers have gotten pretty darn good at figuring out how to game Google and Google's countermeasures are increasingly ineffective. What Google really needs to do is place some control over the results returned in the user's hand. I would pay actual money to Google if they would let me customize search results as follows:
- A way to mark results as useful or not for the query entered, and refine later searches based on those
- Blacklist certain domains from showing up in my results, ever.
- Add content qualification (for example, prefer sites that have a certain text-to-graphics ratio)
Science fiction is a story revolving around fictional science or technology. Doesn't have to be all spaceships and lightsabers to qualify...
Give the credit to CUPS, the open source printing system that OS X and almost all Linux distributions use.
You seem to be laboring under the impression that shareholders have all of the power in a corporation. While it's true that the major big-money sharesholders can have some general influence on a company's overall direction, the analogies you listed don't scale to corporation ownership.
If you buy a building, you become the landlord of that building and are responsible for staying in compliance with regulations, various codes, etc and are subject to criminal and civil consequences for not meeting those responsibilities. If I buy a share of stock in Apple for my retirement portfolio, I'm not liable for the company's actions because I'm not granted any power or non-public insight over how Apple conducts it's business. I can't just waltz up to 1 Infinite Loop and demand to see internal reports or their R&D department. At best, I might be afforded voting rights to elect the board of directors if my stake is large enough. Other than that, stock ownership is strictly a financial arrangement. I do suffer financially if the company's actions cause a loss in profit or public perception.
I actually own stock in hundreds of companies when you count my personal portfolio, retirement plan, and other financial arrangements. Should I be sent to jail if some product from one of those companies kills a bunch of people?
So then who gets the punishment when a company does illegal things? The people who do the illegal things. If they break the law, they can't (or at least shouldn't be able to) hide underneath the corporation's skirt when it comes times for punishment.
Dear Anonymous Coward,
You appear to be unfamiliar with how the World Wide Web works. When you see an underlined word or phrase (such as "already known to third parties in China"), that means you can click on it and your web browser will take you to a new page whereupon you can generally find more information on the word or phrase. It takes some practice but should eventually learn to get the hang of it.
Sincerely,
A Registered Slashdot User
Are you sure it's an 8-track? 8-tracks were well-known for their horrible reliability and sound. If the machine was being used in a studio setting, it is more likely a Fidelipack, which was widely used in radio stations to record and play back station id, commercials, and the odd song.
Why is that ironic? Slashdot had anonymous contributors a decade before 4chan came about.
As unlikely as it is that any backdoors have made it into OpenBSD, even an audit cannot conclusively prove that there are no backdoors in the code. Witness the Underhanded C Code Contest. The goal of the contest is to write a chunk of code that does something, well, underhanded that is difficult to detect even upon close examination of the code. The winners have been quite successful. Even with only 15-20 lines of code, it's a challenge to locate the underhandedness even when you know exactly what you're looking for. The phase "microscopic needle in a galactic hacksack" comes to mind when imagining the challenge of finding malicious code that may or may not even be there, in a code base thousands or millions of lines long.
Woz wrote a beautiful article on net neutrality that was posted today.
So basically, because the ISP monopolies got away with screwing municipalities in the past, they are now have a license to continue doing so indefinitely.
So the liberal perspective says that net neutrality regulations should be imposed on carriers to avoid handing over effective control of the internet to a few mega-corporations. While the conservative perspective says that net neutrality regulations should not be imposed to avoid handing over effective control of the internet to a few mega-corporations.
What am I missing here? I guess if corporations are going to control the Internet either way, I'd rather at least make them work for it.
In order to block pornography by default, what they'll have to do is put the entire country on its own network and erect some kind of great firewall between citizens and the world-wide Internet. At the firewall level, filters would then be easily implemented to block any content that the government might find objectionable.
The good news is that there several other countries who have successfully deployed such technology to their citizenship, so the U.K. should be able to seek technical and political advice from them: