There is a problem though if any investigation is going to cost more than any waste that could have possibly happened. Especially if said senator could have just sent a polite letter to the administrator to ask about where the funding for the photo-op came from.
Senators and House of representatives are the ultimate Government waste. I suggest we tackle waste at the root: by removing the entire Congress from the US political system. I mean, it's not like they're doing anything right now anyway.
What's that? They perform important, and things like government salaries, pensions, cadillac health care, corporate-sponsored outings to the Bahamas are just things that make government possible? I'm shocked at that news. Maybe we can come to a similar understanding for thinks like NASA researchers dressed as Vikings?
So no, the IRS wasn't targeting those groups because they don't agree with the administration. It targeted those groups because claiming 501c(4) status while advertising politically charged terms is a red flag. Finally, the link you're including has nothing to do with the IRS, with participating in public discourse or even with political discrimination. These speeches are PR events. As such, they are fairly tightly controlled. And quite frankly, I'm rolling my eyes at the comment that "we just wanted to watch the speech". I'd like to hear this story from some non-GOP-propaganda outlet before I even look further into it.
As sad as it is, I have to agree. This doesn't surprise me one bit. I mean, investigating is hard! Can't have criminals hide behind things like strong encryption! Ergo, no one can use encryption.
That said, I'm hoping we're slowly getting to a tipping point on the entire privacy vs security discussion. 9/11 has happened long ago enough that the knee-jerk reactions are dying down, and people are starting to question what we're doing in order to make sure 3000 people don't die over the course of a few years.
But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used? That seems pretty basic. It wouldn't exist at all if not for them.
Because no one - no one, not a single person on earth, ever - creates in a vacuum. Everyone steals from everyone, gets inspiration from everyone else, and so much content gets created that it is guaranteed that two people will create very similar art. As such, copyright is by definition an inhibition of the creative process. For a real-life example, see the lawsuits about red double-decker buses in front of a black-and-white Big Ben.
People do create less when they are unable to earn an income doing so.
Some of the most fun I had with music was attending house concerts a friend of mine was throwing. These people will keep singing with or without copyright. Some of the best pictures I've seen come from amateur photographers. They'll keep doing it with or without copyright. Same for painting, games and any other art form.
You're mistaking getting rich with making money, creating art with selling art, and that less is always worse. Even if 90% of all artists stopped creating, there'd still be more art around than you can ever consume.
The people who create things want to control how they bring their work to market. You want to control the people who create things. Who's the control freak?
Coming from a staunch conservative like you, this line amuses me. It betrays a complete lack of understanding of what copyright is, where copyright originated, what its purpose is and why people are upset with the current copyright regime.
Here, let me clue you in: 1) Copyright is a law that restricts the ability to make copies of anything human made. 2) Copyright is an evolution of the old royal print charters. Knowledge was known to be power, and the kings of yore realized very quickly they didn't want just anyone printing whatever they wanted. 3) The purpose of copyright is to control the flow of information and goods. Some of it can be good (it gives writers a chance to make a living), some of it can be bad (it gives people the chance to manipulate the flow of knowledge). 4) What people are upset about is that current copyright terms go far beyond benefiting the original creator, have criminal penalties on them and actually make it very difficult to create something without getting lawyers involved. The only reason you don't see every novelist ever being sued by everyone else is because most are penniless.
Now that you know the story, feel free to participate in the discussion.
Drop me a line when a computer is better than humans at something human brains are actually good at.
Like my old AI prof said: When we don't know how to do it, it's AI, when we know how to do it, it's Engineering. Similarly, when we don't know how to write a program that is better than a human at something, it's because human brains are very good at it. Then, when we do know how to do it, it's something that human brains really aren't very good at it. You can easily see this by how much smaller the space of "things the human brain is good at" has become. It wasn't so long ago (say, 1985), that Chess was seen as an excellent litmus test of AI. Now it's seen as little more than a beginning software engineering project. Heck, it wasn't so long ago that people were pegging Jeopardy as an excellent litmus test of AI, what with the puns, the historical cross references and the pop culture in it. Now a computer has soundly beaten the best Jeopardy players ever.
I predict that we will identify strong AI only when it has already enslaved us (queue the joke that we're already slaves to computers).
Or perhaps it is one of the "Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression" - 8. Dismiss the charges as "old news."
I'm just wondering how you deal with conflicting information. Do you just look at which item in the Truth Suppression list fits the other person arguments, and dismiss it? How do you distinguish truth suppression from someone giving you truthful information that the news is indeed old?
What I'm getting at is: your tinfoil hat is too tight. Loosen it up and allow blood to flow to your brain again.
My understanding is that the choice to go to Hong Kong is largely to appease the large number of developers and users from Asia that have either had to, or have been unable, to travel to the USA for previous summits.
Great - that's the only thing that conference/event participants care about. Where is it located, and how difficult will it be to get there and get out of there? But I sure hope that no one thinks that it is going to do anything other than allow the maximum amount of people to participate. Granted, there is a definite path for a slow fork to take place once there are two places to gather, but that's by definition.
So again - either the goal is self-evident (you meet where the most people can meet), or it is idiotic (if we meet there, the locals will like us more!).
Based on the most basic of research, I found the same results for the statements that are most easily verified (Hasan, Lanza, Cho). Furthermore, this appears to be nothing but a lame copy-paste job.
How does it feel to be so completely led around by the nose by your conservative manipulators? Does it feel good to be told nothing but what you want to believe? Of course it does. It still doesn't excuse it.
It seems like a long shot, but maybe by holding the next summit in Hong Kong, OpenStack can draw contributors into the fold.
Only marketing flacks think that something like holding an event in a particular place is going to impress the locals enough to abandon their current priorities and go with the group hosting the event. Every Olympic Games and World Cup in dodgy countries, every peace negotiation in a symbolic place ever has demonstrated two things: hosting the event validates what the host is doing, and the other participants just complain about travel times to reach the destination.
This idea that hosting an event in a particular place can fundamentally change - or even influence - how the locals regard something is ridiculous, has long been proven wrong, and needs to die in a fire. If anything, hosting the next Openstack meeting in Hong Kong would merely validate the idea that the Chinese are on the right track with their own implementation.
And yet, it is sitting at +5 Insightful. I don't know if that means that some people are playing a meta-joke game or if Republicans really do find lies insightful if they match their agenda, so I'll leave that decision to you.
No, but you can shoot when someone jumps you and starts beating your head into the pavement, which is what happened. Day or night, doesn't really matter.
Next time I shoot someone in the dark, I'll make sure to tell everyone the other guy jumped me. Maybe I'll even put my butt into a puddle to make it believable. I wonder what you'll think if the person I shot is your son.
For some reason, you seem to believe every word that Zimmerman says. You know, the guy who shot and killed another guy. Why is that? Are you so gullible you believe whatever anyone says?
Even "confrontation" makes no difference. The only thing that would negate the self-defense plea is if Zimmerman actually physically attacked Martin and then progressed from fighting to shooting. And there is absolutely no evidence nor testimony that he did so.
Conveniently, the reason that there is no evidence or testimony that he did so is because the only other person that saw everything is now dead. To make it really clear: the only story we have about how everything unfolded is from the guy who shot the other guy. Pretty much everyone else has barely any idea what happened, could only sort of hear certain things, and could only sort of see what was going on. And we're left with one dead guy, and one guy somewhat hurt.
The moral of the story: in Florida, if you get into a fight, make sure you kill every witness.
NPR had a story about this a little while back. It's designed to cut costs for the employers, not for anyone else. Furthermore, the card providers set up their fee structure so that they recoup their money via fees. In essence, the cost of the payment system is moved from the employer to the employee. This lead to some particularly egregious things like a state handing out welfare payment cards where the card provider got an upfront payment for anybody trying to access their welfare payment (this includes retirement benefits).
Yes, this can (key word: can) help people who do not have access to a traditional checking account. But it will not work out for anybody who either has the foresight or the ability to go for direct deposit or check deposits. And for it to work out for the truly indigent, the fee structure has to be better than that of a check casher. And that's completely open to debate, especially since fees for payroll cards can be structured to be small but everywhere. Which it seems is exactly what is happening.
I'm glad this story is getting more traction, because this is pretty much just a way for big card providers to act like pay-day loan providers.
Not really. There were real projects inside Salesforce to move everything over to PostgreSQL. This could have been a good bargaining chip for Salesforce, and the rumored price tag for the rumored 9-year hardware deal of $300M is exceedingly cheap..... but it's one thing to get a good deal on hardware, and it's another one entirely to get in bed with one of your three biggest competitors.
But did they get enough of a good price to justify having everyone wonder wtf is going between Oracle and Salesforce? It's kinda hard to trash-talk the other team during a sales cycle if officially the captains of the two teams are best buddies.
Salesforce is already running on Oracle. Salesforce is paying Oracle about 300 million for the next couple of years to continue running Oracle. I don't understand why that requires a special bro-hug to be consummated. Benioff hands over the money, Ellison hands over the hardware, and everyone continues sniping about their cloud models. Why the love fest suddenly?
And my follow-up question would be: how would you go about finding out? Oh, here's my laptop. Knock yourself out.
Brainteasers for me were never about someone getting the answer right, it's how they work through a problem where they don't know the answer. Yours is a perfectly good answer, and leaves plenty of space to explore how you go about your research. To me, that's far more valuable than someone who has memorized the answer to a brain teaser.
I think before you start giving interviewing advice to corporations, you might want to: * learn how to spell * learn grammar rules * learn capitalization rules * learn how to organize your thoughts
You have two posts, and I'm unsure what either one is getting at, beyond "test scores are bad" and "interview questions are bad".
But not because Google went about it wrong and screwed up its hiring process.
I've been now through a few hiring processes, have sat on Interviews, decision committees. And while I like to think that my Interviews and candidate ratings were spot-on (I correctly predicted one failure and one early resignation), I'm pretty sure that's just skewed by the small sample size. What I do know is that I went through all kinds of approaches, both as an interviewer and an interviewee. I've done brainteasers, role-playing, decision explanations, code walkthroughs, resume deep-dives, online candidate research, just shooting the breeze, and more. And I haven't found a single thing that strongly correlates with acing the interview or hiring a good worker. Resumes can lie (sometimes subtly), and you'll never find out without hiring a private investigator. Role-playing can confuse people, especially if they're trying to figure out what you're looking for. Brain teasers can be memorized, shooting the breeze can lead to unreasonable judgments (positive or negative), interviewers and interviewees can have a bad day, the other person doesn't like your first name, and a million other things.
Especially when you start talking 10s of thousands of interviews, you're actually looking at so much data, so many influencing variables that I doubt you can find one common variable that stands out from the rest. What I'm concerned about (and that comes partially from being married to someone in HR) is that there is still a drive to find the one process that will automate the hiring process. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist. Well, let me walk that back a tiny bit: there's one thing that will work better than anything else: have the interview done by the best people you have, have them take it seriously, and spend some time on it. But it takes time, is fuzzy, and is entirely reliant on managers knowing who their best people are.
I'm glad to see that Google doesn't think Big Data is the answer to everything. I just hope that this percolates through to the rest of the HR universe. There's much too much of a drive to automate hiring, like performance reviews and firing has been.
I'll just give you one example. My parents live out in a farmland area in Basque country in France. Their internet 5 years ago was better than what I had access to living in the middle of Silicon Valley. It was also cheaper. I can't talk much about quality, but their Skype video came over just fine and dandy. Anecdote and all that, but it really drove home how shitty the broadband system was and is in the US. Yes, you can pay for really, really awesome internet connections. But those are affordable only if you have a business that actually generates profit off of the Internet connection. Otherwise, you're completely at the mercy of a local monopoly or duopoly.
Or, it might be that the researchers know that the next command from politicians and the general population will be "Unleash the plastic-eating microbes!", and they're trying to get ahead of the general mess that comes from it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a problem though if any investigation is going to cost more than any waste that could have possibly happened. Especially if said senator could have just sent a polite letter to the administrator to ask about where the funding for the photo-op came from.
Senators and House of representatives are the ultimate Government waste. I suggest we tackle waste at the root: by removing the entire Congress from the US political system. I mean, it's not like they're doing anything right now anyway.
What's that? They perform important, and things like government salaries, pensions, cadillac health care, corporate-sponsored outings to the Bahamas are just things that make government possible? I'm shocked at that news. Maybe we can come to a similar understanding for thinks like NASA researchers dressed as Vikings?
In my high school American History class, we mostly learned how white people oppressed some people or other people at various times,
Please explain to me how that is incorrect or even not one of the top 5 most important characteristics of the development of the nation.
While true, it leaves out the fun fact that this has been happening to many, many other organizations. See: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/06/25/195599362/Democrats-Want-Answers-On-Progressives-Targeted-By-IRS
So no, the IRS wasn't targeting those groups because they don't agree with the administration. It targeted those groups because claiming 501c(4) status while advertising politically charged terms is a red flag. Finally, the link you're including has nothing to do with the IRS, with participating in public discourse or even with political discrimination. These speeches are PR events. As such, they are fairly tightly controlled. And quite frankly, I'm rolling my eyes at the comment that "we just wanted to watch the speech". I'd like to hear this story from some non-GOP-propaganda outlet before I even look further into it.
As sad as it is, I have to agree. This doesn't surprise me one bit. I mean, investigating is hard! Can't have criminals hide behind things like strong encryption! Ergo, no one can use encryption.
That said, I'm hoping we're slowly getting to a tipping point on the entire privacy vs security discussion. 9/11 has happened long ago enough that the knee-jerk reactions are dying down, and people are starting to question what we're doing in order to make sure 3000 people don't die over the course of a few years.
But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used? That seems pretty basic. It wouldn't exist at all if not for them.
Because no one - no one, not a single person on earth, ever - creates in a vacuum. Everyone steals from everyone, gets inspiration from everyone else, and so much content gets created that it is guaranteed that two people will create very similar art. As such, copyright is by definition an inhibition of the creative process. For a real-life example, see the lawsuits about red double-decker buses in front of a black-and-white Big Ben.
People do create less when they are unable to earn an income doing so.
Some of the most fun I had with music was attending house concerts a friend of mine was throwing. These people will keep singing with or without copyright. Some of the best pictures I've seen come from amateur photographers. They'll keep doing it with or without copyright. Same for painting, games and any other art form.
You're mistaking getting rich with making money, creating art with selling art, and that less is always worse. Even if 90% of all artists stopped creating, there'd still be more art around than you can ever consume.
The people who create things want to control how they bring their work to market. You want to control the people who create things. Who's the control freak?
Coming from a staunch conservative like you, this line amuses me. It betrays a complete lack of understanding of what copyright is, where copyright originated, what its purpose is and why people are upset with the current copyright regime.
Here, let me clue you in:
1) Copyright is a law that restricts the ability to make copies of anything human made.
2) Copyright is an evolution of the old royal print charters. Knowledge was known to be power, and the kings of yore realized very quickly they didn't want just anyone printing whatever they wanted.
3) The purpose of copyright is to control the flow of information and goods. Some of it can be good (it gives writers a chance to make a living), some of it can be bad (it gives people the chance to manipulate the flow of knowledge).
4) What people are upset about is that current copyright terms go far beyond benefiting the original creator, have criminal penalties on them and actually make it very difficult to create something without getting lawyers involved. The only reason you don't see every novelist ever being sued by everyone else is because most are penniless.
Now that you know the story, feel free to participate in the discussion.
Drop me a line when a computer is better than humans at something human brains are actually good at.
Like my old AI prof said: When we don't know how to do it, it's AI, when we know how to do it, it's Engineering. Similarly, when we don't know how to write a program that is better than a human at something, it's because human brains are very good at it. Then, when we do know how to do it, it's something that human brains really aren't very good at it. You can easily see this by how much smaller the space of "things the human brain is good at" has become. It wasn't so long ago (say, 1985), that Chess was seen as an excellent litmus test of AI. Now it's seen as little more than a beginning software engineering project. Heck, it wasn't so long ago that people were pegging Jeopardy as an excellent litmus test of AI, what with the puns, the historical cross references and the pop culture in it. Now a computer has soundly beaten the best Jeopardy players ever.
I predict that we will identify strong AI only when it has already enslaved us (queue the joke that we're already slaves to computers).
Or perhaps it is one of the "Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression" - 8. Dismiss the charges as "old news."
I'm just wondering how you deal with conflicting information. Do you just look at which item in the Truth Suppression list fits the other person arguments, and dismiss it? How do you distinguish truth suppression from someone giving you truthful information that the news is indeed old?
What I'm getting at is: your tinfoil hat is too tight. Loosen it up and allow blood to flow to your brain again.
My understanding is that the choice to go to Hong Kong is largely to appease the large number of developers and users from Asia that have either had to, or have been unable, to travel to the USA for previous summits.
Great - that's the only thing that conference/event participants care about. Where is it located, and how difficult will it be to get there and get out of there? But I sure hope that no one thinks that it is going to do anything other than allow the maximum amount of people to participate. Granted, there is a definite path for a slow fork to take place once there are two places to gather, but that's by definition.
So again - either the goal is self-evident (you meet where the most people can meet), or it is idiotic (if we meet there, the locals will like us more!).
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-idea-that-recent-mass-shooters-are-mostly-registered-democrats-is-a-myth
Based on the most basic of research, I found the same results for the statements that are most easily verified (Hasan, Lanza, Cho). Furthermore, this appears to be nothing but a lame copy-paste job.
How does it feel to be so completely led around by the nose by your conservative manipulators? Does it feel good to be told nothing but what you want to believe? Of course it does. It still doesn't excuse it.
It seems like a long shot, but maybe by holding the next summit in Hong Kong, OpenStack can draw contributors into the fold.
Only marketing flacks think that something like holding an event in a particular place is going to impress the locals enough to abandon their current priorities and go with the group hosting the event. Every Olympic Games and World Cup in dodgy countries, every peace negotiation in a symbolic place ever has demonstrated two things: hosting the event validates what the host is doing, and the other participants just complain about travel times to reach the destination.
This idea that hosting an event in a particular place can fundamentally change - or even influence - how the locals regard something is ridiculous, has long been proven wrong, and needs to die in a fire. If anything, hosting the next Openstack meeting in Hong Kong would merely validate the idea that the Chinese are on the right track with their own implementation.
And yet, it is sitting at +5 Insightful. I don't know if that means that some people are playing a meta-joke game or if Republicans really do find lies insightful if they match their agenda, so I'll leave that decision to you.
No, but you can shoot when someone jumps you and starts beating your head into the pavement, which is what happened. Day or night, doesn't really matter.
Next time I shoot someone in the dark, I'll make sure to tell everyone the other guy jumped me. Maybe I'll even put my butt into a puddle to make it believable. I wonder what you'll think if the person I shot is your son.
For some reason, you seem to believe every word that Zimmerman says. You know, the guy who shot and killed another guy. Why is that? Are you so gullible you believe whatever anyone says?
Even "confrontation" makes no difference. The only thing that would negate the self-defense plea is if Zimmerman actually physically attacked Martin and then progressed from fighting to shooting.
And there is absolutely no evidence nor testimony that he did so.
Conveniently, the reason that there is no evidence or testimony that he did so is because the only other person that saw everything is now dead. To make it really clear: the only story we have about how everything unfolded is from the guy who shot the other guy. Pretty much everyone else has barely any idea what happened, could only sort of hear certain things, and could only sort of see what was going on. And we're left with one dead guy, and one guy somewhat hurt.
The moral of the story: in Florida, if you get into a fight, make sure you kill every witness.
NPR had a story about this a little while back. It's designed to cut costs for the employers, not for anyone else. Furthermore, the card providers set up their fee structure so that they recoup their money via fees. In essence, the cost of the payment system is moved from the employer to the employee. This lead to some particularly egregious things like a state handing out welfare payment cards where the card provider got an upfront payment for anybody trying to access their welfare payment (this includes retirement benefits).
Yes, this can (key word: can) help people who do not have access to a traditional checking account. But it will not work out for anybody who either has the foresight or the ability to go for direct deposit or check deposits. And for it to work out for the truly indigent, the fee structure has to be better than that of a check casher. And that's completely open to debate, especially since fees for payroll cards can be structured to be small but everywhere. Which it seems is exactly what is happening.
I'm glad this story is getting more traction, because this is pretty much just a way for big card providers to act like pay-day loan providers.
Not really. There were real projects inside Salesforce to move everything over to PostgreSQL. This could have been a good bargaining chip for Salesforce, and the rumored price tag for the rumored 9-year hardware deal of $300M is exceedingly cheap..... but it's one thing to get a good deal on hardware, and it's another one entirely to get in bed with one of your three biggest competitors.
But did they get enough of a good price to justify having everyone wonder wtf is going between Oracle and Salesforce? It's kinda hard to trash-talk the other team during a sales cycle if officially the captains of the two teams are best buddies.
Salesforce is already running on Oracle. Salesforce is paying Oracle about 300 million for the next couple of years to continue running Oracle. I don't understand why that requires a special bro-hug to be consummated. Benioff hands over the money, Ellison hands over the hardware, and everyone continues sniping about their cloud models. Why the love fest suddenly?
And my follow-up question would be: how would you go about finding out? Oh, here's my laptop. Knock yourself out.
Brainteasers for me were never about someone getting the answer right, it's how they work through a problem where they don't know the answer. Yours is a perfectly good answer, and leaves plenty of space to explore how you go about your research. To me, that's far more valuable than someone who has memorized the answer to a brain teaser.
I think before you start giving interviewing advice to corporations, you might want to:
* learn how to spell
* learn grammar rules
* learn capitalization rules
* learn how to organize your thoughts
You have two posts, and I'm unsure what either one is getting at, beyond "test scores are bad" and "interview questions are bad".
But not because Google went about it wrong and screwed up its hiring process.
I've been now through a few hiring processes, have sat on Interviews, decision committees. And while I like to think that my Interviews and candidate ratings were spot-on (I correctly predicted one failure and one early resignation), I'm pretty sure that's just skewed by the small sample size. What I do know is that I went through all kinds of approaches, both as an interviewer and an interviewee. I've done brainteasers, role-playing, decision explanations, code walkthroughs, resume deep-dives, online candidate research, just shooting the breeze, and more. And I haven't found a single thing that strongly correlates with acing the interview or hiring a good worker. Resumes can lie (sometimes subtly), and you'll never find out without hiring a private investigator. Role-playing can confuse people, especially if they're trying to figure out what you're looking for. Brain teasers can be memorized, shooting the breeze can lead to unreasonable judgments (positive or negative), interviewers and interviewees can have a bad day, the other person doesn't like your first name, and a million other things.
Especially when you start talking 10s of thousands of interviews, you're actually looking at so much data, so many influencing variables that I doubt you can find one common variable that stands out from the rest. What I'm concerned about (and that comes partially from being married to someone in HR) is that there is still a drive to find the one process that will automate the hiring process. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist. Well, let me walk that back a tiny bit: there's one thing that will work better than anything else: have the interview done by the best people you have, have them take it seriously, and spend some time on it. But it takes time, is fuzzy, and is entirely reliant on managers knowing who their best people are.
I'm glad to see that Google doesn't think Big Data is the answer to everything. I just hope that this percolates through to the rest of the HR universe. There's much too much of a drive to automate hiring, like performance reviews and firing has been.
I'll just give you one example. My parents live out in a farmland area in Basque country in France. Their internet 5 years ago was better than what I had access to living in the middle of Silicon Valley. It was also cheaper. I can't talk much about quality, but their Skype video came over just fine and dandy. Anecdote and all that, but it really drove home how shitty the broadband system was and is in the US. Yes, you can pay for really, really awesome internet connections. But those are affordable only if you have a business that actually generates profit off of the Internet connection. Otherwise, you're completely at the mercy of a local monopoly or duopoly.
Or, it might be that the researchers know that the next command from politicians and the general population will be "Unleash the plastic-eating microbes!", and they're trying to get ahead of the general mess that comes from it.