I have seen a lot of people saying Kodak should have gotten into digital, blah blah..... THEY DID Kodak was a pioneer in early high end digital imaging. They had some of the first (if not the first) pro grade digital SLR's. basically Kodak backs grafted onto Nikon, and later Canon bodies. These things cost upwards of $30,000 without any lenses and required an external hard drive. When I started to get into digital photography in the mid to late 1980's Kodak was by far the leader. I had a beautiful Kodak Dye Sublimation printer that cost over $20,000, and only printed 8x10's. Kodak software, especially colour management systems, were not only state of the art, they were often the only game in town. To calibrate a scanner you used a Kodak colour chart and associated software. But then Kodak started to assume they would always be the only game in town. They stopped innovating. They kept the high early prices while everyone else started to develop lower cost alternatives. Nothing but poor management caused them to lose sight of where they were going. They stubbornly thought digital would remain a niche market, and film would always be used by the masses. By the time they were shaken awake, it was too late. Kodak consumer digital cameras were generally poorer quality than the competition. Their consumer ink jet system was a farce that was not cheaper than the competition, had worse quality than the competition, but they tried to market it as the next sliced bread....
tl/dr; Kodak invented digital photography and then fucked up....
If I am feeling like a jerk I will slow down and position by car with other cars in other lanes so they cannot pass me
You, Sir, are a dangerous driver and should not be allowed behind the wheel. It is attitudes like this that cause accidents, and it is drivers like this that bring about so many of the stupid traffic laws...
*yes I am ignoring the first half of your post to make a point.
I will say that you don't know how to drive if you don't have at least a basic understanding of how a car works. A manual gearbox forces you to have a little more insight into the physics of driving a car.
When I was teaching my sister how to drive a standard, she shifted from fourth to first (to this day I am not sure how she got it in gear) the car was a rear wheel drive so it actually bunny hopped. It left a pair of dotted black lines on the road, and I am sure was not very good on the drive train on the poor car...
I have almost always owned manual change vehicles. The few times I have had to emergency stop while driving an automatic, there is a short panic when I can't find the clutch pedal, or even worse, many automatics have a larger brake pedal, so when I go to hit the (non-existant) clutch, I hit the corner of the brake. My conclusion? For a given skill level, the type of car you are more used to is safer because your attention is never distracted at a crucial moment.
has even one person been apprehended as a result of this?
ah, but you are forgetting the secondary use of these devices. They are very efficient anti-elephant devices. No one has seen any live elephants in airports since these have been in place. see they are working...../sarcasm
Realistically, you cannot hire anyone to "invent something new".Sure, you can fund research, or provide an environment encouraging free thought, and with luck something may be invented or discovered. Part of your reward for providing these resources could be a generous (or free) license of the technology. It is still invented by the person you hire. To me it seems much more counterintuitive, and unreasonable for a corporation to claim ownership of an idea. Maybe I have worked as a consultant too much, but I still see ideas as the exclusive property of people. Of course it does get complicated to divide up a patent or copyright between a group of co-inventors, but I still think in the long run it would be less convoluted than the mess we have now.
This.... If I am thinking of having a beer after work how does that affect my employer. Or a more specific example: I am at work, say on a Friday afternoon, thinking of going out on the weekend to take some photographs (I enjoy taking landscape photos as a relaxing exercise). If I happen to make a great image that I sell to someone, does my weekday employer have any right to the image?
You actually run the risk, even asking the question, of implying you have an idea for a product on your current companies time...
This is one of the reasons I don't think corporations should be able to hold copyright or patents. While the company may have helped fund creation of an idea/project, it was a person, or at most a group of people that actually came up with the idea. I do think that the company should be able to stipulate generous licensing terms, or even be exempt from paying royalties (they already pay the inventor a salary after all), but ownership resides in the inventor. This also gives the corporation incentive to treat their employees well, so they will stay and continue to license the ideas to said corp.
Of course the downside is that things can become a bit more complicated when a group of people invent something, but any lawyer worth their salt should be able to figure out a succession plan. In fact that is all the corporate ownership really is, a complicated, one sided succession plan....
the outcome is potentially very (very) different; despite how much respect and civility gets shown.
I am assuming (yes naively) that the cop in question is behaving with respect and civility too
I'd bet its a fact that 90+% or more of all people who drive while intoxicated (from booze or prescribed-or-not drugs) manage to reach their destination w/out crashing into something.
and
People should be held accountable for their role in outcomes, not probabilities.
It is a risk reward equation. Overall, in our far from perfect society, is the risk of infringing on someones privacy offset by the reward of preventing a potential number of accidents, and the severity of said accidents. Is the risk of even one preventable death worth the cost? I know we are treading perilously close to thought crime with this, but I do think prevention is better than dealing with consequences, and some police is better than no police. However few police is also better than more police. There has to be a sweet spot, and I agree that, especially in the US, police control has gone past the good balance point. Not sure what the answer is....
I agree that there is a happy medium. Neither extreme is desireable, or even viable. The whole point is how do you deal with the people who are the problem without affecting _in any way_ the innocent? Anecdote: I was at a friends party and we were drinking. I decided at one point I had had enough to drink if I was going to drive home. There was a road check and I was asked to blow a breathalyzer. I was well under the legal limit, and I was still capable of driving safely. Throughout the exchange with the officer I was polite and honest. I offered the police officer respect, and he gave me respect back, in fact he shook my hand and thanked me for being responsible when I left. Was he "infringing on my right to privacy" by stopping all drivers on a public road? Technically yes, but I would rather have the odd inconvenience to get the real drunk drivers off the road. And this, along with education is working. The cops are advertising that there were no drunk driver accidents over last christmas. One aspect of traffic law (drunk driving) has been controlled and made better by police enforcement.
Now there are aspects of police enforcement that I don't agree with, and there always has to be some sort of oversight, but to say that we don't need traffic cops is, at best, optomistic.
... where ordinary social courtesy and manners would work just as well.
I truly wish this were so. I really try to live my life by two rules: 1) don't bug anybody 2) don't be easily bugged The world would be a much better place if everyone followed these laws, but I am not so naive to ignore the percentage of people who will not.
I think you are forgetting about the law of deminishing returns. You are correct in assuming that a draconian police state will not eliminate all traffic accidents, however you cannot extrapolate backwards to assume that lack of any police will not have an effect on traffic accidents. There is a base line where police are necessary. Getting this back on topic, I see these plate readers as just a tool to increase efficiency of the existing police. In other words, this technology works (assuming it is not abused, but that is a whole other argument) to reduce the number of traffic police needed.
There are a few ideas presented here, but I would approach the problem from the other side. Find a client or two and find out what they need done. For example, I have had a few aquaintances who need websites. I am not a guru by any stretch, and I am sure there are people here who could code circles around me, but I knew what these people were looking for. In fact one person had spent a ton of money on a website designed by an offshore company. She was not really happy with it, and when I had a look at it, the code was utter crap. I tuned the site, improved the load time by almost 30%, made the site cross browser (yes, the site worked in IE, but it looked awful in even firefox) and added a few features my client wanted. Another friend wanted a website, and kind of knew what he wanted, but it was very complicated, and would have cost a fortune to have made. I agreed that I would charge him much less than a "professional" with the understanding that it would take me a lot longer than said pro. The advantage of this was I learned a ton about Java while being paid. In other words, I was paid to go to school.... I have yet another friend (yes I have more than one....) who needs help with various programs such as Excell and Photoshop. She could take a community college course, but she prefers to learn from me. Mind you, she doesn't always pay with cash, but she is a great cook. A great meal, and a bottle of wine can be better than $100.
TL;DR find small jobs that need to be done and do them.
Employers are willing to drop employees at the drop of a hat, too.
Granted that. That was kind of my point.
I do tend to fall on the side of Google, et al and I think they are on the side of the consumer, that is you and me.
Obviously you're not a worker, then. Because the harm for all workers, if these agreements are ruled to be ok, far outweighs any marginal benefits for consumers
I admit I have worked management, and have been a small business owner. I have always treated my employees as well as I have been able. I still say poaching employees is an overall detriment to the economy. It also gives a disproportionate amount of power to large companies over small. In short, I do think this is an area where (impartial) government intervention is necessary. To protect both sides.
It's GOT to be illegal. Companies must compete (in terms of wages, working conditions, other benefits) for workers in order to have a working system. Otherwise, you sign up for Google and they can treat you however they like, they know none of the other companies will take you off their hands, so why pay you more?
I agree that companies should compete, but they should not steal employees from a competitor. Lets take this down another path... lets say you are a small startup software company. You employ 10 people, and you are on the verge of becoming the next great search engine. Google comes in and pulls your top 5 people from under you, effectively killing your company. Now don't you wish there was an anti-poaching law?
This is an interesting case. On one side (that slashdot seems to agree with) is that competing for employees is a good thing, in that it makes employers pay more, have better benifits, etc. On the other side, employers don't want to lose valuable employees. If they have to pay outrageous salaries to keep good people, the price of goods produced will rise, hurting consumers.
There is apparantly no such thing as loyalty or respect on either side. Employees seem to be willing to change jobs at the drop of a hat. Employers don't want to create a good work environment (there is more to a good job than money). This has to be very disruptive to the economy. It takes time to learn and settle into a new job.
I do tend to fall on the side of Google, et al and I think they are on the side of the consumer, that is you and me.
This rant isn't really coherent, I think I need a coffee.....
Wish I had mod points..... Thanks for saying exactly what I was trying to express.....
I will add that Canadians seem to be less polar than USians*. We have less disparity between rich and poor (unfortunatly this is changing...) less racial strife, more than two political parties...
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen a lot of people saying Kodak should have gotten into digital, blah blah.....
THEY DID
Kodak was a pioneer in early high end digital imaging. They had some of the first (if not the first) pro grade digital SLR's. basically Kodak backs grafted onto Nikon, and later Canon bodies. These things cost upwards of $30,000 without any lenses and required an external hard drive.
When I started to get into digital photography in the mid to late 1980's Kodak was by far the leader. I had a beautiful Kodak Dye Sublimation printer that cost over $20,000, and only printed 8x10's. Kodak software, especially colour management systems, were not only state of the art, they were often the only game in town. To calibrate a scanner you used a Kodak colour chart and associated software.
But then Kodak started to assume they would always be the only game in town. They stopped innovating. They kept the high early prices while everyone else started to develop lower cost alternatives. Nothing but poor management caused them to lose sight of where they were going. They stubbornly thought digital would remain a niche market, and film would always be used by the masses. By the time they were shaken awake, it was too late. Kodak consumer digital cameras were generally poorer quality than the competition. Their consumer ink jet system was a farce that was not cheaper than the competition, had worse quality than the competition, but they tried to market it as the next sliced bread....
tl/dr; Kodak invented digital photography and then fucked up....
If I am feeling like a jerk I will slow down and position by car with other cars in other lanes so they cannot pass me
You, Sir, are a dangerous driver and should not be allowed behind the wheel. It is attitudes like this that cause accidents, and it is drivers like this that bring about so many of the stupid traffic laws...
*yes I am ignoring the first half of your post to make a point.
I will say that you don't know how to drive if you don't have at least a basic understanding of how a car works. A manual gearbox forces you to have a little more insight into the physics of driving a car.
When I was teaching my sister how to drive a standard, she shifted from fourth to first (to this day I am not sure how she got it in gear) the car was a rear wheel drive so it actually bunny hopped. It left a pair of dotted black lines on the road, and I am sure was not very good on the drive train on the poor car...
I have almost always owned manual change vehicles. The few times I have had to emergency stop while driving an automatic, there is a short panic when I can't find the clutch pedal, or even worse, many automatics have a larger brake pedal, so when I go to hit the (non-existant) clutch, I hit the corner of the brake. My conclusion? For a given skill level, the type of car you are more used to is safer because your attention is never distracted at a crucial moment.
So they are preaching to the choir?
has even one person been apprehended as a result of this?
ah, but you are forgetting the secondary use of these devices. They are very efficient anti-elephant devices. No one has seen any live elephants in airports since these have been in place. see they are working..... /sarcasm
I would just use the technology that others are paying to develop
except you would not have license to do so, and could be sued, same as now...
Realistically, you cannot hire anyone to "invent something new".Sure, you can fund research, or provide an environment encouraging free thought, and with luck something may be invented or discovered. Part of your reward for providing these resources could be a generous (or free) license of the technology. It is still invented by the person you hire.
To me it seems much more counterintuitive, and unreasonable for a corporation to claim ownership of an idea. Maybe I have worked as a consultant too much, but I still see ideas as the exclusive property of people. Of course it does get complicated to divide up a patent or copyright between a group of co-inventors, but I still think in the long run it would be less convoluted than the mess we have now.
I think about a lot of things during work hours.
This....
If I am thinking of having a beer after work how does that affect my employer.
Or a more specific example:
I am at work, say on a Friday afternoon, thinking of going out on the weekend to take some photographs (I enjoy taking landscape photos as a relaxing exercise). If I happen to make a great image that I sell to someone, does my weekday employer have any right to the image?
You actually run the risk, even asking the question, of implying you have an idea for a product on your current companies time...
This is one of the reasons I don't think corporations should be able to hold copyright or patents. While the company may have helped fund creation of an idea/project, it was a person, or at most a group of people that actually came up with the idea. I do think that the company should be able to stipulate generous licensing terms, or even be exempt from paying royalties (they already pay the inventor a salary after all), but ownership resides in the inventor. This also gives the corporation incentive to treat their employees well, so they will stay and continue to license the ideas to said corp.
Of course the downside is that things can become a bit more complicated when a group of people invent something, but any lawyer worth their salt should be able to figure out a succession plan. In fact that is all the corporate ownership really is, a complicated, one sided succession plan....
Thunderbird. Faster, more stable, but less versitile than Evolution.
I have been trying bodhi linux (http://www.bodhilinux.com/) on my older equipment. It is still pretty beta, but it is interesting where it is going...
From my high school French, if there is an accent over the e it is pronounced "eh". I know it is Canadian, but it is not pronounced tuk eh...eh....
Are you sure about the French spelling? I have never heard the word pronounced with an accent on the last e
the outcome is potentially very (very) different; despite how much respect and civility gets shown.
I am assuming (yes naively) that the cop in question is behaving with respect and civility too
I'd bet its a fact that 90+% or more of all people who drive while intoxicated (from booze or prescribed-or-not drugs) manage to reach their destination w/out crashing into something.
and
People should be held accountable for their role in outcomes, not probabilities.
It is a risk reward equation. Overall, in our far from perfect society, is the risk of infringing on someones privacy offset by the reward of preventing a potential number of accidents, and the severity of said accidents. Is the risk of even one preventable death worth the cost? I know we are treading perilously close to thought crime with this, but I do think prevention is better than dealing with consequences, and some police is better than no police. However few police is also better than more police. There has to be a sweet spot, and I agree that, especially in the US, police control has gone past the good balance point. Not sure what the answer is....
I agree that there is a happy medium. Neither extreme is desireable, or even viable. The whole point is how do you deal with the people who are the problem without affecting _in any way_ the innocent?
Anecdote:
I was at a friends party and we were drinking. I decided at one point I had had enough to drink if I was going to drive home. There was a road check and I was asked to blow a breathalyzer. I was well under the legal limit, and I was still capable of driving safely. Throughout the exchange with the officer I was polite and honest. I offered the police officer respect, and he gave me respect back, in fact he shook my hand and thanked me for being responsible when I left. Was he "infringing on my right to privacy" by stopping all drivers on a public road? Technically yes, but I would rather have the odd inconvenience to get the real drunk drivers off the road. And this, along with education is working. The cops are advertising that there were no drunk driver accidents over last christmas.
One aspect of traffic law (drunk driving) has been controlled and made better by police enforcement.
Now there are aspects of police enforcement that I don't agree with, and there always has to be some sort of oversight, but to say that we don't need traffic cops is, at best, optomistic.
... where ordinary social courtesy and manners would work just as well.
I truly wish this were so.
I really try to live my life by two rules:
1) don't bug anybody
2) don't be easily bugged
The world would be a much better place if everyone followed these laws, but I am not so naive to ignore the percentage of people who will not.
I think you are forgetting about the law of deminishing returns. You are correct in assuming that a draconian police state will not eliminate all traffic accidents, however you cannot extrapolate backwards to assume that lack of any police will not have an effect on traffic accidents. There is a base line where police are necessary. Getting this back on topic, I see these plate readers as just a tool to increase efficiency of the existing police. In other words, this technology works (assuming it is not abused, but that is a whole other argument) to reduce the number of traffic police needed.
There are a few ideas presented here, but I would approach the problem from the other side. Find a client or two and find out what they need done. For example, I have had a few aquaintances who need websites. I am not a guru by any stretch, and I am sure there are people here who could code circles around me, but I knew what these people were looking for. In fact one person had spent a ton of money on a website designed by an offshore company. She was not really happy with it, and when I had a look at it, the code was utter crap. I tuned the site, improved the load time by almost 30%, made the site cross browser (yes, the site worked in IE, but it looked awful in even firefox) and added a few features my client wanted.
Another friend wanted a website, and kind of knew what he wanted, but it was very complicated, and would have cost a fortune to have made. I agreed that I would charge him much less than a "professional" with the understanding that it would take me a lot longer than said pro. The advantage of this was I learned a ton about Java while being paid. In other words, I was paid to go to school....
I have yet another friend (yes I have more than one....) who needs help with various programs such as Excell and Photoshop. She could take a community college course, but she prefers to learn from me. Mind you, she doesn't always pay with cash, but she is a great cook. A great meal, and a bottle of wine can be better than $100.
TL;DR find small jobs that need to be done and do them.
Interesting. Like a lot of things it isn't black and white.....
Nope. Employers killed that a long time ago.
Employers are willing to drop employees at the drop of a hat, too.
Granted that. That was kind of my point.
I do tend to fall on the side of Google, et al and I think they are on the side of the consumer, that is you and me.
Obviously you're not a worker, then. Because the harm for all workers, if these agreements are ruled to be ok, far outweighs any marginal benefits for consumers
I admit I have worked management, and have been a small business owner. I have always treated my employees as well as I have been able. I still say poaching employees is an overall detriment to the economy. It also gives a disproportionate amount of power to large companies over small.
In short, I do think this is an area where (impartial) government intervention is necessary. To protect both sides.
OK, yes impartial government is an oxymoron....
It's GOT to be illegal. Companies must compete (in terms of wages, working conditions, other benefits) for workers in order to have a working system. Otherwise, you sign up for Google and they can treat you however they like, they know none of the other companies will take you off their hands, so why pay you more?
I agree that companies should compete, but they should not steal employees from a competitor.
Lets take this down another path...
lets say you are a small startup software company. You employ 10 people, and you are on the verge of becoming the next great search engine. Google comes in and pulls your top 5 people from under you, effectively killing your company. Now don't you wish there was an anti-poaching law?
This is an interesting case. On one side (that slashdot seems to agree with) is that competing for employees is a good thing, in that it makes employers pay more, have better benifits, etc.
On the other side, employers don't want to lose valuable employees. If they have to pay outrageous salaries to keep good people, the price of goods produced will rise, hurting consumers.
There is apparantly no such thing as loyalty or respect on either side. Employees seem to be willing to change jobs at the drop of a hat. Employers don't want to create a good work environment (there is more to a good job than money). This has to be very disruptive to the economy. It takes time to learn and settle into a new job.
I do tend to fall on the side of Google, et al and I think they are on the side of the consumer, that is you and me.
This rant isn't really coherent, I think I need a coffee.....
Wish I had mod points.....
Thanks for saying exactly what I was trying to express.....
I will add that Canadians seem to be less polar than USians*. We have less disparity between rich and poor (unfortunatly this is changing...) less racial strife, more than two political parties...
*Since we are all from North America.