Never, EVER, give a meaningful metric to someone who will pervert it. The only thing they want to do here is show on a chart somewhere how "effective" the people under them are.
(distilling previous post)
I'm sure you've got a far more knowledgeable list than I do, but the suits don't care about real effectiveness. If they did, they wouldn't need to measure it! The fact is, as the poster noted, they can't measure it, so they're demanding some way to do so.
The rules are: If they take information used for one purpose (like performance) and tie it to something only remotely related (like funding), in the best case, they'll only pervert their metrics [=No (marginally poor) Child (who can't be bullied into performing just a little better) Left Behind (if by 'Behind', you mean 'Untrained at taking proficiency tests')].
If they're stupid enough to give you the choice of metrics, you either pick guaranteed inflationary metrics [=SPAM], or you pick the ones that inherently annoy them. Inflationary ones guarantee that you'll do better every quarter; annoying ones guarantee their resistance to asking you will increase. If they're really smart, they won't ask you again.
Telling them how many USERIDs you managed only works if you create more test accounts every quarter.
A) Nagging emails B) Logging every OS update C) Supervising Patch Thursdays D) recording the percentage increase in spam email intercepted (This is your business metrics friend, since that number will never go down) E) Number of meetintgs with employees about improper email use. F) number of Company-wide software-license-compliance surveys, and number of improper installations detected. G) total number of top executive emails logged, with copies sent to several geographically distinct locations.
If they want metrics, give 'em metrics. And let them know that metrics will only encourage you to be more of an a$$hole.
Hey look, if I'm a skilled corporate comms officer -- and I have no doubt Skype has one of those --, and I have to lie about an outage, I'd do it so that it would be believable. All they had to say was: We recently upgraded our login server authentification routines, and in spite of our testing, we missed something.
The underlying problem with Skype has always been the auth server: everything has to go through it. Worse, when a supernode goes down (e.g., reboots due to a planned install), everything connected to that supernode has to go through it. Now, Skype has been growing pretty fast, pretty much every week their auth servers handle more traffic than the previous week. Your average user might not reboot all computers at the same moment, but what about big enterprises?
And how does Skype pick its supernodes? We know one of the criteria is bandwidth. So let's say in some part of the world where a bunch of little skype clients are wired to a few big bandwidth providers, patch Tuesday hits, and a bunch of those supernodes reset at the same time. The Auth server is hit with the traffic, not from the rebooting supernode, but from all the clients connected to it. That's "peak load" for your auth server, and it increases every patch Tuesday.
Dude, what kind of world are you in? The Cable industry is created and sustained by regulation. You can't lay cable without government approval. Why? 'Cos you have to dig up the whole town to do so. So what's wrong with the communities saying "Okay, you can dig up our town, but if you do so, it has to be in the potential interest of the whole town" (And not just the dense nucleus, where putting cable would cause maximum disruption to the community for only a portion of the population, yet maximum profit for the cable company). And even if you let four cable companies maintain redundant infrastructure (magnifying costs), you'll still end up with an oligopoly at best.
The point is, if you're going to privatize infrastructure items, like power, communications and transportation, the consumer is not the individual, or the household, but the whole community. Any appointed representative of the community who favors the producers over the community is acting in bad faith.
Governments have every right to specify to producers what it is they want, just as producers have every right not to produce.
Many student numbers are nine digits, you might have noticed. That's because, back in the golden age, when student records were put into computers, someone decided that the 9-digit number uniquely assigned to each person was perfect for the task: no identity conflicts, and 30 years later, when the student wants a transcript, no problem.
Many large universities continued to use SSNs into the nineties, and I have no doubt many continue to use them. And when you'd teach a class, all the forms that came through had student names and their SSNs. So they're not just on thumbdrives, they're everywhere.
Heh. Nice site. Huge interest rates paid by "investments", but no information on the website as to where those "investments" are; or, for that matter, who would need a "virtual investor" as opposed to a real one, secured by real contracts. They list on the website a total of ca. $350k USD they claim in assets (or is that just liquidity), with a cap of 1%/day in withdrawals.
So yeah, my money is on Ponzi scheme: these "scams" aren't always done with the intent to defraud; often they're based on the well-meaning ignorance of the scammer.
Personally, I think the whole SL setup is a sort of speculation scam. As an online multiplayer thingy, it obeys some rules: a period of expansion that can last from a few weeks to a few years, followed by general decline as technology eventually outstrips capacity to adapt (at which time you launch v. 2.0). The SL economy is built on expansion: as it gets bigger, prime real estate increases in value. But what happens when competition releases a more mature/interesting product? Better yet, a large chunk of SL's economy involves sex and/or gambling, and these are notoriously vulnerable to regulation.
So, ban gambling, and a portion of the community moves on. Virtual real estate goes back on the market at the same time total subscriptions decline. Those who stored their virtual winnings in "banks" try to withdraw it. Suddenly the scams that were overlooked in the lust for expansion come back and bite 'em in the ass.
Uhh... my sources tell me that a laptop with projecting front buttons is asking for them to break. EVidently, the most common injury to a laptop is a hard landing. Since we tend to carry them with a thin side pointing down, they land there. And buttons break.
Or so I'm told. I always break my laptops through heat death, which cooks connections and fries batteries, resulting in cancer of the motherboard before the third birthday. So my questions are: A) how hot does it get? and B) how long does it last on a (fresh) battery?
...any many routers support MAC spoofing. Heck, to use our laptops at work, we have to spoof the MAC of the desktop plugged in. In the course of a day, we can be hot swapping (and do) several different PCs through the same IP/MAC. And this is on a university network.
Oh yeah, and you can't underestimate the scope of infringement. The only way you cannot underestimate the scope, is if that scope is zero.
Bah, the money's there. They could just cut even more of those silly NASA projects that go to things like studying the Earth's climate; heck NASA's been "shifting its focus" away from many sound projects to study the Earth and the Universe in favor of sending trained monkeys on a 900-day vacation to an uninhabitable planet. After all, better to sink that money into our friends in the Aerospace industry building some massively expensive boondoggle, all in the name of "technology transfer". (which, by the way, is what happens when you step in a pile of Aibo droppings)
Incidentally, this is a standard political tactic when dealing with budgets. If you want to protect an agency (or a department in your company, or whatever), you allocate money to everything except the agency's big project that the boss is sweet on. You come back and say, "Here's what we could do. If you want this project, approve money for it."
Besides, it makes sound sense: a mission to Mars inspires the imagination, but it's only the best use of limited resources if you read science fiction books and don't believe in Evolution. 'Cos there may be inhabitable planets, far, far, away, but there isn't another Earth; and humans didn't exactly evolve to live on a planet other htan Earth. If your goal is to colonize the galaxy (a questionable one), that goal is better reached sinking what little cash you have into studying the cosmos, figuring out where you want to go, and how to get there, as well as studying the Earth, and figuring out how to make it last so we can develop a culture capable of going there. For a mission to Mars is gonna be hugely expensive, and it's several orders of magnitude cheaper than exporting life to another world.
If your goal is to find out about humans, society, and the universe, then again, your money is better spent on cheaper research projects. Heck, you could even make an argument that a manned Mars mission's worth of unmanned probes would give us a far better picture of the red planet and the solar system then frying a bunch of anthropoids in Martian radiation.
Of course, if your goal is to inspire the population and distract the people from an unpopular war, well maybe.
All the math in that paragraph is off. Not only should it read 26.5 in the first case, the other case should be 1+(99/2) - ((99/2)/2) (also known as 1+99/4)= 25.75,so that the "penalize fractionally for wrong answers" should give a result where the test results are even more obscured by noise. (see snippet below)
So it's not just a "Typo" that distracts, it supports a completely faulty conclusion.
One is left wondering what kind of mathematics background the author had. Also, noting the dittography earlier ("question question"), whether proofreading or "checking your work" formed part of the author's training.
In any case, the post also assumes that test-makers don't spend an awful lot of time validating their tests; so instead of taking the rules from any given test, a couple of straw-men examinations are supplied.
Consider, for example, the case where a multiple-choice test featuring 4 possible answers penalizes wrong answers by one third of a point. In that case, guessing is not advantageous unless the examinee can eliminate two answers: hence "partial knowledge" can count for something.
Oh yeah, and who the heck said that the test was "hard" because most of the answers were unknown? Heck, if you look at your big standardized tests (such as the SAT), and just the multiple-choice parts, you'll find that, for those who take the test more than once, there's not much noise in their scores. So why should a medical exam be different?
For True-False exams for example, the number subtracted would most likely be (Number Wrong ÷ 2). Let's see how that would work out, for the sample case above. You, answering two questions correctly and guessing at 98 would be likely, on the average, to get 49 wrong, and so have a final score of 2 + 49 - (49 ÷ 2), or 75.5, while I, again on the average. answering only 1 correctly and guessing at 97, would get a final score of 1 + (97 ÷ 2) - ((97 ÷ 2) ÷ 2)), which comes out to be 25.25. Here there is a substantial difference between our scores, closer to the two-fold difference in our actual knowledge.
I read it. For California, unconscionability has two parts, procedural and substantial, and to be determined unconscionable, both parts may be met, to a level reflecting an inverse relation between the two. So a contract can be procedurally unconscionable, but as long as the conditions are reasonable, it will meet the test. A "clickwrap" agreement is procedurally unconscionable. Being substantially unconscionable can include elements such as surprise (e.g., putting in a section entitled "Complimentary Copies" the line "The Author surrenders any claims to royalties or copyrights on the work" in 4-point type), the lack of competition NOT offering those terms, and excessively favoring the advantaged party.
So yeah, you're right that the arbitration clause was unconscionable, but the clickwrap helped. So the extent goes beyond arbitration clauses, and you could try to use it for any number of bits of one-sided crap you find in the EULA, especially the "industry standard" restrictions.
Paris Hilton's "agreement" was part of criminal court proceedings. And if the heiress could not afford a lawyer to explain the terms to her, the court would appoint one for her.
That's the whole reason why there exists a "right to an attorney" in criminal cases: a defendant cannot be expected to know all the niceties of the legal system the State imposes, enforces and adjudges. Those with a chance of competing in that system are mostly professionals, a.k.a. lawyers. Therefore, the defendant must have access to someone whose job it is to attorn for them and provide them with a decent defense.
Now let's go to contracts. There's a whole bunch of civil code out there regulating contracts, property and the like. For the consumer, these are the laws that govern the thousands of transactions in daily life. For a business, there's a subset of laws that govern the transactions that constitute the business' function. To use an analogy, a single person eats say, one hamburger a week; a fast-food chain may make millions of hamburgers. The fast food chain, having any business sense, can invest far more in the makeup of the hamburger than the consumer. Heck, it's even possible that the consumer choose the hamburger that's not -- to her or his personal taste -- the "best-tasting", or "healthiest", or whatever.
So switching to law. There exists therefore the expectation that, in these daily transactions, the business is more versed in the legal circumstances than the consumer. And in law, the duty of a representative of a business to know the law governing that business is greater than the duty of a consumer to know the law governing every single transaction.
Now, EULAs, fancy "take it or leave it" contracts, and the rest, may contain attempts by a business to make sure they get the best end of a dispute. In this case, the court finding (in my understanding), was that: A. The EULA was not negotiable; it was a "take it or leave it" deal. B. Linden Labs has distinguished themselves from others in the market by claiming they treated user's "virtual property" as "real," and the CEO has gone around making exactly that claim. C. In the event of a dispute, the EULA/TOS gave LL a whole range of options, starting with "self-help", i.e., determining the case by themselves, and resolving it. On the other hand, the consumer was forced to an arbitration process. D. The clause compelling arbitration in San Francisco was buried in the EULA/TOS document under "General Provisions" (or something like that). E. Arbitration would cost the plaintiff considerably more than a lawsuit. F. The details of the arbitration would be confidential, so that, in future arbitration disputes between Linden Labs and the Consumer, only Linden Labs would have access to that information. G. No further information on arbitration procedures was provided in the TOS or on teh website.
So no, it's not Paris Hilton at all. The ruling is: If a company supplies a EULA, those terms must at least pretend to be fair to the consumer.
You've hit upon it. That's exactly what they're gonna do. Give that giant teddy bear (how can you call it a Teddy Bear if it don't have fake fur?) a gun and send it out to shoot the wounded. Much easier to program than carry them back. Plus, nobody would ever suspect the teddy bear.
In all honesty, humans are extremely effective at recovering wounded from hostile zones. They only cases where they are not effective, a giant white Robot with no situational awareness and an inviting teddy bear look would be even less useful, and the support and maintenance would be a PITA. Someone's gonna look at the cost and complexity of this, and decide it's got no battle value.
Then someone will have lunch with the constructor, and a budget line will mysteriously materialize.
But, let's be serious: if we ever have an army of hairless teddy bears, then militarism has truly gone mad.
Besides, those fancy editors leave in lots of drag-inducing whitespace and pointless formatting. Not only that, but it's the same whitespace and formatting as most of the other websites out there. Do search engine spiders ignore identical formatting, or does that count against the site's "uniqueness"?
NYCL seeks to exclude Jacobson on the basis of a failure to meet the standards of expert testimony as laid out in Daubert. Plaintiff writes back that: A) Mediasentry's function is evident, and therefore not in need of expert testimony: it merely reports what's out there. B) Nobody disputes that somewhere out there was a computer with the material in question. C) Esteemed expert Jacobson's job was to associate that computer in B with a person. Using means too magical to describe, Jacobson did that. D) In any case, defendant doesn't have their own expert witness.
So the same day, NYCL responds to D), by announcing their own expert. A-C are wrong too, of course. If mediasentry were what the letter claimed it was, it would be Kazaa, not mediasentry. Since it is not Kazaa, there is no way to tell (beyond mere faith) that there actually is a computer out there with that stuff on it, and not some fiction caused by a corrupt/imperfect implementation of Kazaa's protocols, or the software to display it. And we all know that the esteemed expert's methodology has demonstrable error, but no way to quantify that error.
I mean, nobody knew ahead of time that WinXP's vulnerabilities would make it ideal for creating an army of bots. If somebody only told Microsoft, they'd sit up and listen.
In all fairness, he was wrong. A bot probes my internet address every few minutes. And most of the addresses come from my local ISP's block. It's no secret which computers are compromised, just as it's no secret the ISP doesn't care. It's cheaper to turn a blind eye and provide the bandwidth for patently illegal activity then it is to turn off the offender's accounts, and deal with angry, uneducated end-users.
The $67 million dollar pants was a lawyer representing himself, so not relevant here: some lawyers are real jerks. In fact, you could argue that the adversarial nature of our legal system favors lawyer-jerks. But that don't make them all that way. Jack Thompson likewise is not pertinent here: He's a ronin, not even pretending to serve a master.
But yes, a good leader needs to know (roughly) what his servants are doing, and have trust that the servants' actions are in line with the leader's goals. The master sergeant is a powerful person that any intelligent officer will treat with respedct and deference. And sometimes the mayor of the palace is more powerful than the king.
However, GP is right. Dvorak doesn't get it. You can say that about anything Dvorak writes. Lawyers can come to management and say "we need to protect our assets aggressively", or they can say "we can send takedown notices, but they probably won't have the effect you desire," but ultimately, it's not their call. It's the call of the people who choose to persist in a questionable business model against a dynamic market.
Well, reflective or not, you're going to need to distinguish between those who know management jargon and those who know management. When they talk, listen to who they talk about, and listen to how concrete they get. Philosophy is great, but it needs to reflect experience: a doctor who has studied medical science and says "light food is good for you," without knowing "chicken is light food," is much less useful than a person who has no knowledge of science, but knows "chicken is good for you." But the ideal is to have both
So give them a completely abstract, philosophical question (What do you look for in a member of your team?), and see how quickly they get concrete. Then give them a concrete case (pick one related to your own experience), and see if they can explain their actions in terms of management principles.
And above all, listen to who they are talking about. You're hiring a manager -- that person's focus should be on the people being managed, not on her or himself.
No, just hooking in a friendly troll for the Apple folks. I honestly hope the marketing folks cooked up this excuse as a way to turn a loss into a win. If I were a total Mac fanboy, I'd say that the cool customer reception of Vista communicated to Apple the need for some separation and the need that a new OS be completely bulletproof. Such a flat market means tolerance of a longer development time, so they postponed Leopard for refinement, and told the superfluous employees to play with the iPhone. Then they submit a press release to underscore the importance of the iPhone for the way future.
I doubt that's the case, but to be honest, that is "the most charitable" reading. It's just a little science fiction for me.
My thoughts exactly. It doesn't work like that. You can triple the "man hours" at the end, but:
A) if there are QA issues, finding the bugs is never a bottleneck; it's getting people to fix them. That means "tuning people" in to the project. People shifted to a mature project at the last minute are going to be much less efficient than those who were working on it, and can even be counterproductive.
B) If it's problems with some of the features or implementations, having more meetings is only going to slow things down.
C) If they have to add functionality, they're screwed.
The most charitable reading of the Apple announcement is: "Well, we're gonna run late on the next $200 incremental upgrade; honestly, it's because we've got the team working on our shiny new iPhone!"
The more substance there is beneath the announcement, the worse it bodes.
When the anti-collision system kicks in and issues a Resolution Advisory, it's because ATC has failed. When the box on board effectively says "ATC has failed in its task, please start climbing." then "Dude, ATC has failed, climb a hell of a lot more, now", only more laconically and imperatively, you don't continue to listen to ATC and dive.
So, yeah, like Ueberlingen, here you had a chain of events that results in a catastrophic failure. Was a "bad command" to blame? Only if the system has zero tolerance for "bad commands", and this one did not. There were four months between when the "bad command" was issued, and the situation got bad enough for the MGS to go into safe mode. Why did it have to reach such a level before being caught? And then "safe mode" really needs to be safe. You can't predict every situation, but this failed pretty spectacularly.
Still, ten years is pretty good for an unmanned research spacecraft, and it's outstanding for anything to do with Mars.
One bad command started the chain, but it needed a series of system failures to kill it. In other words, a slight misalignment of the solar panels (or whatever it was) may have been a necessary cause, but not sufficient. The thing needed a safe-mode that wasn't safe, and battery logic that failed to consider environmental variables. All the conditions lined up.
It's like saying that a mid-air collision occurred because two jetliners were assigned the same altitude and jetway in opposite directions at the same time. Yeah, but A) How they got that assignment is kinda complicated and B) any number of traffic control and collision avoidance systems have to fail too.
Slashdot Mirror
Never, EVER, give a meaningful metric to someone who will pervert it.
The only thing they want to do here is show on a chart somewhere how "effective" the people under them are.
(distilling previous post)
I'm sure you've got a far more knowledgeable list than I do, but the suits don't care about real effectiveness. If they did, they wouldn't need to measure it! The fact is, as the poster noted, they can't measure it, so they're demanding some way to do so.
The rules are: If they take information used for one purpose (like performance) and tie it to something only remotely related (like funding), in the best case, they'll only pervert their metrics [=No (marginally poor) Child (who can't be bullied into performing just a little better) Left Behind (if by 'Behind', you mean 'Untrained at taking proficiency tests')].
If they're stupid enough to give you the choice of metrics, you either pick guaranteed inflationary metrics [=SPAM], or you pick the ones that inherently annoy them. Inflationary ones guarantee that you'll do better every quarter; annoying ones guarantee their resistance to asking you will increase. If they're really smart, they won't ask you again.
Telling them how many USERIDs you managed only works if you create more test accounts every quarter.
Those are patch TUESDAYS.
(Now, will I get flamebait for insulting myself?)
A) Nagging emails
B) Logging every OS update
C) Supervising Patch Thursdays
D) recording the percentage increase in spam email intercepted (This is your business metrics friend, since that number will never go down)
E) Number of meetintgs with employees about improper email use.
F) number of Company-wide software-license-compliance surveys, and number of improper installations detected.
G) total number of top executive emails logged, with copies sent to several geographically distinct locations.
If they want metrics, give 'em metrics. And let them know that metrics will only encourage you to be more of an a$$hole.
Hey look, if I'm a skilled corporate comms officer -- and I have no doubt Skype has one of those --, and I have to lie about an outage, I'd do it so that it would be believable. All they had to say was:
We recently upgraded our login server authentification routines, and in spite of our testing, we missed something.
The underlying problem with Skype has always been the auth server: everything has to go through it. Worse, when a supernode goes down (e.g., reboots due to a planned install), everything connected to that supernode has to go through it. Now, Skype has been growing pretty fast, pretty much every week their auth servers handle more traffic than the previous week. Your average user might not reboot all computers at the same moment, but what about big enterprises?
And how does Skype pick its supernodes? We know one of the criteria is bandwidth. So let's say in some part of the world where a bunch of little skype clients are wired to a few big bandwidth providers, patch Tuesday hits, and a bunch of those supernodes reset at the same time. The Auth server is hit with the traffic, not from the rebooting supernode, but from all the clients connected to it. That's "peak load" for your auth server, and it increases every patch Tuesday.
Dude, what kind of world are you in? The Cable industry is created and sustained by regulation. You can't lay cable without government approval. Why? 'Cos you have to dig up the whole town to do so. So what's wrong with the communities saying "Okay, you can dig up our town, but if you do so, it has to be in the potential interest of the whole town" (And not just the dense nucleus, where putting cable would cause maximum disruption to the community for only a portion of the population, yet maximum profit for the cable company). And even if you let four cable companies maintain redundant infrastructure (magnifying costs), you'll still end up with an oligopoly at best.
The point is, if you're going to privatize infrastructure items, like power, communications and transportation, the consumer is not the individual, or the household, but the whole community. Any appointed representative of the community who favors the producers over the community is acting in bad faith.
Governments have every right to specify to producers what it is they want, just as producers have every right not to produce.
Many student numbers are nine digits, you might have noticed. That's because, back in the golden age, when student records were put into computers, someone decided that the 9-digit number uniquely assigned to each person was perfect for the task: no identity conflicts, and 30 years later, when the student wants a transcript, no problem.
Many large universities continued to use SSNs into the nineties, and I have no doubt many continue to use them. And when you'd teach a class, all the forms that came through had student names and their SSNs. So they're not just on thumbdrives, they're everywhere.
Heh. Nice site. Huge interest rates paid by "investments", but no information on the website as to where those "investments" are; or, for that matter, who would need a "virtual investor" as opposed to a real one, secured by real contracts. They list on the website a total of ca. $350k USD they claim in assets (or is that just liquidity), with a cap of 1%/day in withdrawals.
So yeah, my money is on Ponzi scheme: these "scams" aren't always done with the intent to defraud; often they're based on the well-meaning ignorance of the scammer.
Personally, I think the whole SL setup is a sort of speculation scam. As an online multiplayer thingy, it obeys some rules: a period of expansion that can last from a few weeks to a few years, followed by general decline as technology eventually outstrips capacity to adapt (at which time you launch v. 2.0). The SL economy is built on expansion: as it gets bigger, prime real estate increases in value. But what happens when competition releases a more mature/interesting product? Better yet, a large chunk of SL's economy involves sex and/or gambling, and these are notoriously vulnerable to regulation.
So, ban gambling, and a portion of the community moves on. Virtual real estate goes back on the market at the same time total subscriptions decline. Those who stored their virtual winnings in "banks" try to withdraw it. Suddenly the scams that were overlooked in the lust for expansion come back and bite 'em in the ass.
What's that tag again?
You fool. Now she'll just throw you away! Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
Uhh... my sources tell me that a laptop with projecting front buttons is asking for them to break. EVidently, the most common injury to a laptop is a hard landing. Since we tend to carry them with a thin side pointing down, they land there. And buttons break.
Or so I'm told. I always break my laptops through heat death, which cooks connections and fries batteries, resulting in cancer of the motherboard before the third birthday. So my questions are: A) how hot does it get? and B) how long does it last on a (fresh) battery?
Ooh nice. I too was wondering how they'd laser up that GTA job. Maybe "Get The Sims IV"?
...any many routers support MAC spoofing. Heck, to use our laptops at work, we have to spoof the MAC of the desktop plugged in. In the course of a day, we can be hot swapping (and do) several different PCs through the same IP/MAC. And this is on a university network. Oh yeah, and you can't underestimate the scope of infringement. The only way you cannot underestimate the scope, is if that scope is zero.
Bah, the money's there. They could just cut even more of those silly NASA projects that go to things like studying the Earth's climate; heck NASA's been "shifting its focus" away from many sound projects to study the Earth and the Universe in favor of sending trained monkeys on a 900-day vacation to an uninhabitable planet. After all, better to sink that money into our friends in the Aerospace industry building some massively expensive boondoggle, all in the name of "technology transfer". (which, by the way, is what happens when you step in a pile of Aibo droppings)
Incidentally, this is a standard political tactic when dealing with budgets. If you want to protect an agency (or a department in your company, or whatever), you allocate money to everything except the agency's big project that the boss is sweet on. You come back and say, "Here's what we could do. If you want this project, approve money for it."
Besides, it makes sound sense: a mission to Mars inspires the imagination, but it's only the best use of limited resources if you read science fiction books and don't believe in Evolution. 'Cos there may be inhabitable planets, far, far, away, but there isn't another Earth; and humans didn't exactly evolve to live on a planet other htan Earth. If your goal is to colonize the galaxy (a questionable one), that goal is better reached sinking what little cash you have into studying the cosmos, figuring out where you want to go, and how to get there, as well as studying the Earth, and figuring out how to make it last so we can develop a culture capable of going there. For a mission to Mars is gonna be hugely expensive, and it's several orders of magnitude cheaper than exporting life to another world.
If your goal is to find out about humans, society, and the universe, then again, your money is better spent on cheaper research projects. Heck, you could even make an argument that a manned Mars mission's worth of unmanned probes would give us a far better picture of the red planet and the solar system then frying a bunch of anthropoids in Martian radiation.
Of course, if your goal is to inspire the population and distract the people from an unpopular war, well maybe.
So it's not just a "Typo" that distracts, it supports a completely faulty conclusion.
One is left wondering what kind of mathematics background the author had. Also, noting the dittography earlier ("question question"), whether proofreading or "checking your work" formed part of the author's training.
In any case, the post also assumes that test-makers don't spend an awful lot of time validating their tests; so instead of taking the rules from any given test, a couple of straw-men examinations are supplied.
Consider, for example, the case where a multiple-choice test featuring 4 possible answers penalizes wrong answers by one third of a point. In that case, guessing is not advantageous unless the examinee can eliminate two answers: hence "partial knowledge" can count for something.
Oh yeah, and who the heck said that the test was "hard" because most of the answers were unknown? Heck, if you look at your big standardized tests (such as the SAT), and just the multiple-choice parts, you'll find that, for those who take the test more than once, there's not much noise in their scores. So why should a medical exam be different?
I read it. For California, unconscionability has two parts, procedural and substantial, and to be determined unconscionable, both parts may be met, to a level reflecting an inverse relation between the two. So a contract can be procedurally unconscionable, but as long as the conditions are reasonable, it will meet the test. A "clickwrap" agreement is procedurally unconscionable. Being substantially unconscionable can include elements such as surprise (e.g., putting in a section entitled "Complimentary Copies" the line "The Author surrenders any claims to royalties or copyrights on the work" in 4-point type), the lack of competition NOT offering those terms, and excessively favoring the advantaged party.
So yeah, you're right that the arbitration clause was unconscionable, but the clickwrap helped. So the extent goes beyond arbitration clauses, and you could try to use it for any number of bits of one-sided crap you find in the EULA, especially the "industry standard" restrictions.
Yeah, IANAL.
Paris Hilton's "agreement" was part of criminal court proceedings. And if the heiress could not afford a lawyer to explain the terms to her, the court would appoint one for her.
That's the whole reason why there exists a "right to an attorney" in criminal cases: a defendant cannot be expected to know all the niceties of the legal system the State imposes, enforces and adjudges. Those with a chance of competing in that system are mostly professionals, a.k.a. lawyers. Therefore, the defendant must have access to someone whose job it is to attorn for them and provide them with a decent defense.
Now let's go to contracts. There's a whole bunch of civil code out there regulating contracts, property and the like. For the consumer, these are the laws that govern the thousands of transactions in daily life. For a business, there's a subset of laws that govern the transactions that constitute the business' function. To use an analogy, a single person eats say, one hamburger a week; a fast-food chain may make millions of hamburgers. The fast food chain, having any business sense, can invest far more in the makeup of the hamburger than the consumer. Heck, it's even possible that the consumer choose the hamburger that's not -- to her or his personal taste -- the "best-tasting", or "healthiest", or whatever.
So switching to law. There exists therefore the expectation that, in these daily transactions, the business is more versed in the legal circumstances than the consumer. And in law, the duty of a representative of a business to know the law governing that business is greater than the duty of a consumer to know the law governing every single transaction.
Now, EULAs, fancy "take it or leave it" contracts, and the rest, may contain attempts by a business to make sure they get the best end of a dispute. In this case, the court finding (in my understanding), was that:
A. The EULA was not negotiable; it was a "take it or leave it" deal.
B. Linden Labs has distinguished themselves from others in the market by claiming they treated user's "virtual property" as "real," and the CEO has gone around making exactly that claim.
C. In the event of a dispute, the EULA/TOS gave LL a whole range of options, starting with "self-help", i.e., determining the case by themselves, and resolving it. On the other hand, the consumer was forced to an arbitration process.
D. The clause compelling arbitration in San Francisco was buried in the EULA/TOS document under "General Provisions" (or something like that).
E. Arbitration would cost the plaintiff considerably more than a lawsuit.
F. The details of the arbitration would be confidential, so that, in future arbitration disputes between Linden Labs and the Consumer, only Linden Labs would have access to that information.
G. No further information on arbitration procedures was provided in the TOS or on teh website.
So no, it's not Paris Hilton at all. The ruling is: If a company supplies a EULA, those terms must at least pretend to be fair to the consumer.
You've hit upon it. That's exactly what they're gonna do. Give that giant teddy bear (how can you call it a Teddy Bear if it don't have fake fur?) a gun and send it out to shoot the wounded. Much easier to program than carry them back. Plus, nobody would ever suspect the teddy bear.
In all honesty, humans are extremely effective at recovering wounded from hostile zones. They only cases where they are not effective, a giant white Robot with no situational awareness and an inviting teddy bear look would be even less useful, and the support and maintenance would be a PITA. Someone's gonna look at the cost and complexity of this, and decide it's got no battle value.
Then someone will have lunch with the constructor, and a budget line will mysteriously materialize.
But, let's be serious: if we ever have an army of hairless teddy bears, then militarism has truly gone mad.
Yeah, he must be thinking of Wordpad.
Besides, those fancy editors leave in lots of drag-inducing whitespace and pointless formatting. Not only that, but it's the same whitespace and formatting as most of the other websites out there. Do search engine spiders ignore identical formatting, or does that count against the site's "uniqueness"?
Maximum content, no stinking GUI.
NYCL seeks to exclude Jacobson on the basis of a failure to meet the standards of expert testimony as laid out in Daubert.
Plaintiff writes back that: A) Mediasentry's function is evident, and therefore not in need of expert testimony: it merely reports what's out there.
B) Nobody disputes that somewhere out there was a computer with the material in question.
C) Esteemed expert Jacobson's job was to associate that computer in B with a person. Using means too magical to describe, Jacobson did that.
D) In any case, defendant doesn't have their own expert witness.
So the same day, NYCL responds to D), by announcing their own expert.
A-C are wrong too, of course. If mediasentry were what the letter claimed it was, it would be Kazaa, not mediasentry. Since it is not Kazaa, there is no way to tell (beyond mere faith) that there actually is a computer out there with that stuff on it, and not some fiction caused by a corrupt/imperfect implementation of Kazaa's protocols, or the software to display it. And we all know that the esteemed expert's methodology has demonstrable error, but no way to quantify that error.
I mean, nobody knew ahead of time that WinXP's vulnerabilities would make it ideal for creating an army of bots. If somebody only told Microsoft, they'd sit up and listen.
In all fairness, he was wrong. A bot probes my internet address every few minutes. And most of the addresses come from my local ISP's block. It's no secret which computers are compromised, just as it's no secret the ISP doesn't care. It's cheaper to turn a blind eye and provide the bandwidth for patently illegal activity then it is to turn off the offender's accounts, and deal with angry, uneducated end-users.
Siding with GP here.
The $67 million dollar pants was a lawyer representing himself, so not relevant here: some lawyers are real jerks. In fact, you could argue that the adversarial nature of our legal system favors lawyer-jerks. But that don't make them all that way. Jack Thompson likewise is not pertinent here: He's a ronin, not even pretending to serve a master.
But yes, a good leader needs to know (roughly) what his servants are doing, and have trust that the servants' actions are in line with the leader's goals. The master sergeant is a powerful person that any intelligent officer will treat with respedct and deference. And sometimes the mayor of the palace is more powerful than the king.
However, GP is right. Dvorak doesn't get it. You can say that about anything Dvorak writes. Lawyers can come to management and say "we need to protect our assets aggressively", or they can say "we can send takedown notices, but they probably won't have the effect you desire," but ultimately, it's not their call. It's the call of the people who choose to persist in a questionable business model against a dynamic market.
Well, reflective or not, you're going to need to distinguish between those who know management jargon and those who know management. When they talk, listen to who they talk about, and listen to how concrete they get. Philosophy is great, but it needs to reflect experience: a doctor who has studied medical science and says "light food is good for you," without knowing "chicken is light food," is much less useful than a person who has no knowledge of science, but knows "chicken is good for you." But the ideal is to have both
So give them a completely abstract, philosophical question (What do you look for in a member of your team?), and see how quickly they get concrete. Then give them a concrete case (pick one related to your own experience), and see if they can explain their actions in terms of management principles.
And above all, listen to who they are talking about. You're hiring a manager -- that person's focus should be on the people being managed, not on her or himself.
No, just hooking in a friendly troll for the Apple folks. I honestly hope the marketing folks cooked up this excuse as a way to turn a loss into a win. If I were a total Mac fanboy, I'd say that the cool customer reception of Vista communicated to Apple the need for some separation and the need that a new OS be completely bulletproof. Such a flat market means tolerance of a longer development time, so they postponed Leopard for refinement, and told the superfluous employees to play with the iPhone. Then they submit a press release to underscore the importance of the iPhone for the way future.
I doubt that's the case, but to be honest, that is "the most charitable" reading. It's just a little science fiction for me.
My thoughts exactly. It doesn't work like that. You can triple the "man hours" at the end, but:
A) if there are QA issues, finding the bugs is never a bottleneck; it's getting people to fix them. That means "tuning people" in to the project. People shifted to a mature project at the last minute are going to be much less efficient than those who were working on it, and can even be counterproductive.
B) If it's problems with some of the features or implementations, having more meetings is only going to slow things down.
C) If they have to add functionality, they're screwed.
The most charitable reading of the Apple announcement is: "Well, we're gonna run late on the next $200 incremental upgrade; honestly, it's because we've got the team working on our shiny new iPhone!"
The more substance there is beneath the announcement, the worse it bodes.
When the anti-collision system kicks in and issues a Resolution Advisory, it's because ATC has failed. When the box on board effectively says "ATC has failed in its task, please start climbing." then "Dude, ATC has failed, climb a hell of a lot more, now", only more laconically and imperatively, you don't continue to listen to ATC and dive.
So, yeah, like Ueberlingen, here you had a chain of events that results in a catastrophic failure. Was a "bad command" to blame? Only if the system has zero tolerance for "bad commands", and this one did not. There were four months between when the "bad command" was issued, and the situation got bad enough for the MGS to go into safe mode. Why did it have to reach such a level before being caught? And then "safe mode" really needs to be safe. You can't predict every situation, but this failed pretty spectacularly.
Still, ten years is pretty good for an unmanned research spacecraft, and it's outstanding for anything to do with Mars.
One bad command started the chain, but it needed a series of system failures to kill it. In other words, a slight misalignment of the solar panels (or whatever it was) may have been a necessary cause, but not sufficient. The thing needed a safe-mode that wasn't safe, and battery logic that failed to consider environmental variables. All the conditions lined up.
It's like saying that a mid-air collision occurred because two jetliners were assigned the same altitude and jetway in opposite directions at the same time. Yeah, but A) How they got that assignment is kinda complicated and B) any number of traffic control and collision avoidance systems have to fail too.