Well, there are worse hands the money can fall into than the government's.
Vices will exist so long as people exist. That's a fact, and there's no going around it, legislation, education, or otherwise. I'd rather the government control the flow and get the money than the mob or worse, gangs liks MS13.
There needs to be incentive to serve on a jury. Social obligation only goes as far as not kicking the bum lying across the sidewalk. Just as there's a tax incentive for people to make donations to charities they like, there needs to be an incentive for people to do their civic duty.
Paying jurors minimum wage may be a good start. You'd have a lot of young, smart but lazy students and out of work or retired professionals.
I'm pretty sure there's a game theory algorithm that would apply to this. And if not, somebody should develop one.
it does pose the risk of a defendant attempting to retaliate against jurors, however that is actually extremely rare.
John Gotti III
'nuff said.
Also, in general you can speak to the judge privately if an answer is something you aren't willing to make in open court. You can request to approach the bench and talk to them about your concern.
Perhaps this should be mentioned by the judge during the jury selection.
Or make authentication, and having authentic identities less important. Discredit the personal credit score, and half of the problem disappears. The thing is, now banks can't figure out whether you're trustworthy or not, whether you can pay back your loans or not, etc. Since you can file bankruptcy and your creditors are SOL afterwards, it's either this or not loan out money to people at all.
So then you'll have to remove the interest-loan system. And to do that, you'd have to go to cash-only, or back to precious metal-backed (or precious metal) currency. That would solve a fair number of issues, but it would reintroduce a whole other set of issues the current system was designed to solve.
There is such a thing as security through obscurity, just that it's not completely secure against a determined party. It's like the reason for a lock on your door. Sure, somebody can just bump the lock and gain entry, but the casual passerby can't just waltz in.
Certainly, somebody with a lot of money would be able to subpoena Level3 or UUnet to get their server backups to get to a copy of your pictures. But a potential employer probably won't have those resources or won't be willing to use those resources unless you're interviewing for a position important enough. On the other hand, it's trivial to get to the same pictures through facebook.
Or I can put it in terms of thinking of the children. A pedophile that lives nearby can easily get to pictures of your kids through facebook just by doing a search for your name, or for that matter, a search for your location cross referenced with some factual information about you (the car you drive, your hobbies, your alma mata), but he'd (she'd) not likely be able to do so if those pictures were sent through e-mail, as that person would have to know your e-mail address first.
If they have a decent transactional database, they'd be keeping a record of everything that happened. And I don't mean a database transaction log, but an actual row in some table that contains your previous data and when it was changed.
Information wants to be free. Isn't that a common meme around here? You can't take back what you've let out. If you want privacy, you have to be very selective about what you let out and to whom.
/. editors buy Bad Journalism Offsets for every poorly written summary they write. Spelling errors cost a little, grammatical errors cost a bit more, and flamebait comments cost a day's salary.
If your questions get progressively difficult to comprehend, then it's a pretty sure bet that the more questions return answered, the higher the literacy. And instead of making it a multiple-choice, the survey questions may ask for answers in actual sentences. This would test the ability to read and write (at worst, the written answer can be analyzed and given a grade).
Not that that's what they were doing, but it's one method at least.
Redhat, for better or worse, has managed to keep themselves out of the spotlight. Maybe they want it that way, maybe not. Either way, Google is a huge target for a lot of flak. That, and because they can potentially hold a lot of our private information, or information we'd like to keep private, we tend to watch their every more even more carefully, and with an abnormally skeptical eye.
We know Microsoft is Evil Incarnate (tm) and Yahoo is not good. Google claims to be Not Evil (tm), but since they wield so much power, and the temptation to use that power is so great, we're watching them very, very carefully.
That's from a geek standpoint. Other people are watching them carefully because Google's in a good position to be the next IBM or Microsoft.
If there ever was the term hero more appropriately used, I wouldn't know it. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a true hero. He's not doing his job. He's not saving his own ass. He's not like the fabricated "heroes" that the media likes to latch onto.
Here's a real hero, standing up for what he believes is right, and fighting the good fight.
And I wonder, in 100 years, how many people will remember him. How many people will sing his praises. I'll bet none.
Thing I hate about certain web pages. When I read long paragraphs of text (as I was doing before), I highlight the text that I'm reading. I also periodically reset the highlighting. It's a way to keep track of where I am in the text.
Well, some web sites have put it upon themselves to make the text clickable. So suddenly, when I get to a word that's clickable and I reset my highlighting, instead, I'm thrown into another web page, or some crap pops up asking me if I want to buy a product related to the word I just tried to highlight.
And even worse is the NY Times page, where it'll look up your highlighted text string in the dictionary if you click on it. I highlight some text, click on it to reset, and suddenly, I'm diverted to a page that says "y th" can't be found in their dictionary.
Now, I would like being able to look up a word I don't know with a right-click, and then selecting "look up" in the pop-up menu. And I'm sure when somebody was designing the offending feature, this was what they had in mind. But the way it is now is a hindrance more than help, and more often than now, I just stop reading, sometimes because I'm frustrated over the behavior, and sometimes because I'm now distracted and am suddenly interested by something other than the previous text.
When all is said and done, the computer is good for a limited number of uses. These include calculations, entertainment, information retrieval, image manipulation, and word processing. That's it. Everything is a subset of those Big Five.
How about, computers are good for information storage, retrieval, and transformation?
Then it becomes a matter of how we perform these three tasks. Data by itself has no meaning. We assign meaning to the data. And by doing so, we can then figure out how to enter, manipulate, and display meaningfully.
There are human limits to computing. We can only enter data at a physically defined speed. We can only absorb regurgitated data at a physically defined rate. Thus, after a certain point in time, the only thing that continuously faster computers are useful for is data manipulation.
In the beginning (when computers were starting to get "good enough"), there was only a little bit of data. Since input is physically constrained, it only is natural that there isn't much data to start with. But now, some 10 years after the beginning, there's a lot of data out there--in fact, a whole 10 years worth. That 10 years worth of data means that computation has to improve, and equally as important, output has to improve.
Computation naturally has to improve to retrieve and transform the data. I don't think I have to explain this much mroe. Output has to improve however, because early outputs were designed for smaller amounts of data. Now that there's much more data however, the outputs have to adapt. And as there's more data, more of it can be linked together, so it becomes more useful for the output to show or include the linking.
Now, extrapolate this to the world, where after computation has become good enough for the purposes of input, computing has become more ubiquitous. The amout of data out there has explode exponentially. In the early days of the internet, an indexing site like Yahoo or a portal like AOL pretty much got you to where you wanted or needed to go. Now, we need a keyword search to even hope to find the data we're looking for.
In the past, you may have say, five "objects" to work with, each with ten attributes. You can take those five objects, and use your eyeballs to compare them. You can rank them, rate them, manipulate them to produce a more appropriate comparison, etc. Now, there's a billion objects, each object has a hundred attributes. You need not only computation power to compare them, but you need a different way to display them (top 5, statistical analysis, rules-based dynamic lists, etc. to determine the most relevant 5 to bring to your eyeballs).
I agree that the whole Web 2.0 crap is marketing junk. But behind all that BS, there's a lot of computing progress on top of physical progress. As the amount of data grows, there will always need to be progress in storage and retrieval. The first revolution 10 years ago was to consolidate data into a computable form. This second revolution will be to change the retrieval and display end so that they can automatically scale to fit any amount of data.
That's what Microsoft doesn't get. That's why Vista and Windows 7 is a failure. They put in some bells and whistles, tack on some eye candy, and keep the same fundamentals of how we store and retrieve data, and then hope they can ram it down our throats as progress, when it's the fundamentals that need to change to progress.
A lot of people rely on the ignorance, stupidity, or willful neglect of others to get ahead. If the employer is a lawyer, then that's almost a guarantee.
A construction worker has no work without a construction site.
A developer just needs a computer to be able to do something. Pop it online, preferably as open source, and the world can see it.
We're more like artists in that sense. We have a portfolio, and if not, we can build one with very little capital.
It gets better. People on support need to be treated decently. Otherwise, they'll just put less effort into it. Calls will take longer to complete, things will break more often, etc. Sure, they can be fired and another person can take their place. But in the period of time between being disgruntled and replacement, a lot of damage can be wrought. And sometimes, not even the next guy can fix that damage if a manager misses a critical meeting with a client, or if a zero-day virus gets into the system and steals all of the proprietary data. Not that I'd advocate such a course of action, but I've seen it.
IT people hold a lot of power. Most management realize just how much power that is, and tend not to mistreat them. Those few managers that don't will eventually be nudged in that direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there are worse hands the money can fall into than the government's.
Vices will exist so long as people exist. That's a fact, and there's no going around it, legislation, education, or otherwise. I'd rather the government control the flow and get the money than the mob or worse, gangs liks MS13.
There needs to be incentive to serve on a jury. Social obligation only goes as far as not kicking the bum lying across the sidewalk. Just as there's a tax incentive for people to make donations to charities they like, there needs to be an incentive for people to do their civic duty.
Paying jurors minimum wage may be a good start. You'd have a lot of young, smart but lazy students and out of work or retired professionals.
I'm pretty sure there's a game theory algorithm that would apply to this. And if not, somebody should develop one.
it does pose the risk of a defendant attempting to retaliate against jurors, however that is actually extremely rare.
John Gotti III
'nuff said.
Also, in general you can speak to the judge privately if an answer is something you aren't willing to make in open court. You can request to approach the bench and talk to them about your concern.
Perhaps this should be mentioned by the judge during the jury selection.
Or make authentication, and having authentic identities less important. Discredit the personal credit score, and half of the problem disappears. The thing is, now banks can't figure out whether you're trustworthy or not, whether you can pay back your loans or not, etc. Since you can file bankruptcy and your creditors are SOL afterwards, it's either this or not loan out money to people at all.
So then you'll have to remove the interest-loan system. And to do that, you'd have to go to cash-only, or back to precious metal-backed (or precious metal) currency. That would solve a fair number of issues, but it would reintroduce a whole other set of issues the current system was designed to solve.
There is such a thing as security through obscurity, just that it's not completely secure against a determined party. It's like the reason for a lock on your door. Sure, somebody can just bump the lock and gain entry, but the casual passerby can't just waltz in.
Certainly, somebody with a lot of money would be able to subpoena Level3 or UUnet to get their server backups to get to a copy of your pictures. But a potential employer probably won't have those resources or won't be willing to use those resources unless you're interviewing for a position important enough. On the other hand, it's trivial to get to the same pictures through facebook.
Or I can put it in terms of thinking of the children. A pedophile that lives nearby can easily get to pictures of your kids through facebook just by doing a search for your name, or for that matter, a search for your location cross referenced with some factual information about you (the car you drive, your hobbies, your alma mata), but he'd (she'd) not likely be able to do so if those pictures were sent through e-mail, as that person would have to know your e-mail address first.
He hasn't mowed his mom's lawn in a while.
And immediately afterwards, the editors won't be able to post any more stories for the next day due to yet another unforseen database error.
The "missing" first few months of stories were actually the ones that got duped over the next 15 years.
Don't believe me? Your tinfoil hat is on crooked.
If they have a decent transactional database, they'd be keeping a record of everything that happened. And I don't mean a database transaction log, but an actual row in some table that contains your previous data and when it was changed.
Information wants to be free. Isn't that a common meme around here? You can't take back what you've let out. If you want privacy, you have to be very selective about what you let out and to whom.
So you print with red, yellow, blue, and white?
Patches and cream? Sounds like a virus.
/. editors buy Bad Journalism Offsets for every poorly written summary they write. Spelling errors cost a little, grammatical errors cost a bit more, and flamebait comments cost a day's salary.
If your questions get progressively difficult to comprehend, then it's a pretty sure bet that the more questions return answered, the higher the literacy. And instead of making it a multiple-choice, the survey questions may ask for answers in actual sentences. This would test the ability to read and write (at worst, the written answer can be analyzed and given a grade).
Not that that's what they were doing, but it's one method at least.
You can't please everybody
Redhat, for better or worse, has managed to keep themselves out of the spotlight. Maybe they want it that way, maybe not. Either way, Google is a huge target for a lot of flak. That, and because they can potentially hold a lot of our private information, or information we'd like to keep private, we tend to watch their every more even more carefully, and with an abnormally skeptical eye.
We know Microsoft is Evil Incarnate (tm) and Yahoo is not good. Google claims to be Not Evil (tm), but since they wield so much power, and the temptation to use that power is so great, we're watching them very, very carefully.
That's from a geek standpoint. Other people are watching them carefully because Google's in a good position to be the next IBM or Microsoft.
I believe they're still around in the form of "visual novels" in Japan, and quite popular.
Actually, since he's probably got a better lawyer than what you could possibly get, he'll probably walk out without paying a cent.
If there ever was the term hero more appropriately used, I wouldn't know it. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a true hero. He's not doing his job. He's not saving his own ass. He's not like the fabricated "heroes" that the media likes to latch onto.
Here's a real hero, standing up for what he believes is right, and fighting the good fight.
And I wonder, in 100 years, how many people will remember him. How many people will sing his praises. I'll bet none.
Thing I hate about certain web pages. When I read long paragraphs of text (as I was doing before), I highlight the text that I'm reading. I also periodically reset the highlighting. It's a way to keep track of where I am in the text.
Well, some web sites have put it upon themselves to make the text clickable. So suddenly, when I get to a word that's clickable and I reset my highlighting, instead, I'm thrown into another web page, or some crap pops up asking me if I want to buy a product related to the word I just tried to highlight.
And even worse is the NY Times page, where it'll look up your highlighted text string in the dictionary if you click on it. I highlight some text, click on it to reset, and suddenly, I'm diverted to a page that says "y th" can't be found in their dictionary.
Now, I would like being able to look up a word I don't know with a right-click, and then selecting "look up" in the pop-up menu. And I'm sure when somebody was designing the offending feature, this was what they had in mind. But the way it is now is a hindrance more than help, and more often than now, I just stop reading, sometimes because I'm frustrated over the behavior, and sometimes because I'm now distracted and am suddenly interested by something other than the previous text.
When all is said and done, the computer is good for a limited number of uses. These include calculations, entertainment, information retrieval, image manipulation, and word processing. That's it. Everything is a subset of those Big Five.
How about, computers are good for information storage, retrieval, and transformation?
Then it becomes a matter of how we perform these three tasks. Data by itself has no meaning. We assign meaning to the data. And by doing so, we can then figure out how to enter, manipulate, and display meaningfully.
There are human limits to computing. We can only enter data at a physically defined speed. We can only absorb regurgitated data at a physically defined rate. Thus, after a certain point in time, the only thing that continuously faster computers are useful for is data manipulation.
In the beginning (when computers were starting to get "good enough"), there was only a little bit of data. Since input is physically constrained, it only is natural that there isn't much data to start with. But now, some 10 years after the beginning, there's a lot of data out there--in fact, a whole 10 years worth. That 10 years worth of data means that computation has to improve, and equally as important, output has to improve.
Computation naturally has to improve to retrieve and transform the data. I don't think I have to explain this much mroe. Output has to improve however, because early outputs were designed for smaller amounts of data. Now that there's much more data however, the outputs have to adapt. And as there's more data, more of it can be linked together, so it becomes more useful for the output to show or include the linking.
Now, extrapolate this to the world, where after computation has become good enough for the purposes of input, computing has become more ubiquitous. The amout of data out there has explode exponentially. In the early days of the internet, an indexing site like Yahoo or a portal like AOL pretty much got you to where you wanted or needed to go. Now, we need a keyword search to even hope to find the data we're looking for.
In the past, you may have say, five "objects" to work with, each with ten attributes. You can take those five objects, and use your eyeballs to compare them. You can rank them, rate them, manipulate them to produce a more appropriate comparison, etc. Now, there's a billion objects, each object has a hundred attributes. You need not only computation power to compare them, but you need a different way to display them (top 5, statistical analysis, rules-based dynamic lists, etc. to determine the most relevant 5 to bring to your eyeballs).
I agree that the whole Web 2.0 crap is marketing junk. But behind all that BS, there's a lot of computing progress on top of physical progress. As the amount of data grows, there will always need to be progress in storage and retrieval. The first revolution 10 years ago was to consolidate data into a computable form. This second revolution will be to change the retrieval and display end so that they can automatically scale to fit any amount of data.
That's what Microsoft doesn't get. That's why Vista and Windows 7 is a failure. They put in some bells and whistles, tack on some eye candy, and keep the same fundamentals of how we store and retrieve data, and then hope they can ram it down our throats as progress, when it's the fundamentals that need to change to progress.
The investors are clamoring for blood.
The lesson behind humpty dumpty is that you can't undo the past, so don't fall off the friggin' wall.
A lot of people rely on the ignorance, stupidity, or willful neglect of others to get ahead. If the employer is a lawyer, then that's almost a guarantee.
Nah, that's the beauty of the IT job.
A construction worker has no work without a construction site.
A developer just needs a computer to be able to do something. Pop it online, preferably as open source, and the world can see it.
We're more like artists in that sense. We have a portfolio, and if not, we can build one with very little capital.
It gets better. People on support need to be treated decently. Otherwise, they'll just put less effort into it. Calls will take longer to complete, things will break more often, etc. Sure, they can be fired and another person can take their place. But in the period of time between being disgruntled and replacement, a lot of damage can be wrought. And sometimes, not even the next guy can fix that damage if a manager misses a critical meeting with a client, or if a zero-day virus gets into the system and steals all of the proprietary data. Not that I'd advocate such a course of action, but I've seen it.
IT people hold a lot of power. Most management realize just how much power that is, and tend not to mistreat them. Those few managers that don't will eventually be nudged in that direction.
OT: I have the most appropriate captcha: unions
Depends on the proximity of the donee.