Yeah, teachers don't spend any time to plan classes, mark tests/assignments, keep up with their field, assist students outside of class time, etc.
Well none of mine ever did any planning (or if they did, they were remarkably shambolic at it), keep up with their field? nope (how much "keeping up" does history, foreign languages, high-school maths, english or high-school science take - except for evolution vs. creationism, none at all) and as for assisting the kids out of hours - that's crazy talk. If you stood at the staffroom door at leaving time, you'd have been killed in the stampede.
You couldb't fit the disclaimer in a tweet
on
Why UK Banks Don't Tweet
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Banks couldn't fit their required legal content (regulatory bodies, contact info, privacy statement and all the rest) in a tweet, let alone make any meaningful response. Likewise a customer with a complaint couldn't say much more than "you took my money".
Things like this need an audit trail. They need proper recording and most of all they need credibility. Tweeting (and FB, for that matter) don't offer any of these. They're fine for children to fantasise about who they luuuuuuuuuuuv that week (or hour) but for real-world applications they are worthless.
Even if banks did tweet I can't see any customers with an ounce of sense using the facility. Who'd put their account data in such an unsecured and unvalidated form?
Yes, finding the person who didn't make a decision is hard. What's I'd suggest is a "buck stops here" approach. Where the top person carries ultimate responsibility - they go to jail, unless and until they can demonstrate the failure was with a lower, named individual. Then that subordinate is subjected to the same process, recursively until the least senior person who is at fault (or partially at fault - it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing issue) is identified
It's a bit like car ownership.If my car is involved in a crime (someone gets killed by it, right down to a speeding ticket) I am held responsible for that action until I deliver up the person who was driving it at the time. Sure, it's a guilty until proven innocent approach, but the whole innocent until found guilty thing is essentially a myth and has always had many, many loopholes, exemptions and workarounds.
What that "buck stops here" approach would mean is that the people at the top would have a very strong motivation not to be found liable, either by direct action or inaction - or even the "I was not aware of what my deputy was doing" defence.
When will people stop making the fundamental mistake of anthropomorphizing companies and institutions ("we must punish the banks...")
It's as crazy as sentencing a statue to prison time. It might make the more credulous citizens, and their frenzied tabloids, feel that justice has been served (jail_population += 1) and gives them a baddie to focus on, but in reality it's a pointless exercise and achieves nothing.
Companies are made up of employees - right up to the top, and shareholders. Impose a penalty on a company and the employees will suffer (both the tiny minority - usually 1 or 2 - who did something wrong) and the thousands of "innocent bystander" employees who were only guilty of being on the same payroll. The shareholders will generally take a slight, tax deductable, loss and carry on as if nothing had happened - or, since most shareholders are pension companies - everyone's: yours and mine, pensions will be slightly lower as a result.
Of course, it's still not as stupid as fining a public body: who's income comes from government in the form of the taxes we pay. That's just money going round in circles. Where nobody wins except the lawyers on each side. What we need is strong, forensically reliable audit trails for every policy and decision. Discover the names of the people who made and approved them, then send them to jail. After all, they're the ones making the big bucks, it's time they started carrying the responsibility their getting paid so well for.
They contain the basic information necessary to start communication. In that respect they are (and will always be) invaluable. The basic business problem they solve is how to record contact information about people you meet. They're much more professional than scribbling a note on a scrap of paper - and then losing it.
If those new entrepreneurs were clueless about them, they won't stay in business long because they won't have any contacts.
combined those [mobile phone records] with publicly available updates from his twitter and FB account
All of which is entirely voluntary. So in fact, presuming a modicum of common sense, they guy was giving away this information willingly. No one made him carry a phone (or to carry it switched on). No one made him pursue his vanity on twitter or FB, these were all choices he made. If he didn't realise that some analysis would reveal more than he wished, more fool him.
If Richard Stallman was truly interested in his own privacy, he wouldn't go about courting publicity wherever he goes. He's as much a media tart as all the celebs who tweet, pose for tabloid photos or give TV interviews. However, if his privacy concern is primarily for me/the rest of the planet - well, thank you very much but I simply don't want your help.
Why denigrate people skills, they're much rarer than technical skills. Just look at the number of people with good technical skills - compare with the number of good managers. IME there are plenty of good developers, testers, coders, designers, tech authors, sysadmins, dbas. There are many fewer worthwhile team leaders and managers. Plus, most of the techies who do get promoted into management are pretty terrible at it.
The biggest problem is that you can't test for management skills. Either you have it or you don't. It doesn't appear to be something you can take a class in, or get a qualification in. Even worse: it doesn't show up at interview. It does appear to grow (or sometimes diminish) with experience: a poor manager can grow into a half-decent one, given the right supervision and advice (presuming they're willing to take advice) but you can't measure it or compare two managers to see which one's best - not without extensive and time consuming field trials.
Imagine you'd bought a Mac a couple of years ago. Suddenly Apple decide that your machine is obsolete and you're left with no support, no updates and gaping holes in your security. How would you feel about that? A desktop box with a planned obsolesence of 2 years.
Just because an iphone can make calls doesn't mean that's all it's good for. Ever since phones got internet connectivity they have come a lot closer to being PCs and need to be thought of in the same way. The same need for security fixes, updates and applications.
What Apple have done here is to say "Buy something from us and you can expect us to drop you in the smelly stuff after 2 years". That's all you should expect from it, a shorter life expectancy than your kids goldfish.
If so much of their "work" is not automated, you'd kinda expect that each one who hasn't been replaced by a regular expression to get through a load more "work" in any given time. Since we're STILL producing lawyers, how come the law of supply and demand hasn't kicked in? By now they should be charging pennies per hour and fighting each other to answer the phone when it rings.
Since this hasn't happened, there's obviously a flaw in the assumption. The demand for lawyers still seems to be as high (higher?) than ever so is there really any efficiency saving going on? Has the amount of lawyering we need risen by so much (taking the place of common sense) or is this all made up to give the impression that they're hard done by and offering excellent value for money?
Never argue with idiots. Apart from the risk that onlookers won't be able to tell which of you is the idiot, they drag you down to their own level and beat you with their superior experience. (Plus, the internet never forgets: ref. onlookers)
Trolls have been around for as long as individuals have been communicating online. From what I understand, they're essentially lonely, attention seeking people. Even if you do engage one in dialog, what then? All you're doing is feeding their addiction. There are just too many of them to warrant trying to help them all (and trying that may point to bugs in your own personality, too)
No, the best course is to killfile them or use whatever options your forum implementation has to achieve the same results. You don't raise your signal to noise ratio by trying to negotiate with the noise, you just filter it out and try to make sense of what remains.
The previous generation learned this with IBM in the 60's and 70's. It took a *lot* to turn that problem around. We had a brief spell of "freedom" when IBM forgot to design in some sort of proprietary lock for the PC (to be fair, they never foresaw the possibility of internetworked machines that could distribute software for free).
Now the next generation of computing users/makers has forgotten all the lessons of the past and is embracing closed systems, centralised control and restrictive practices as if they were new, novel and somehow beneficial for them.
Insert aphorism of your choice about failing to learn from the mistakes of others.
Almost every Linux user has a Windows instance somewhere. Whether it's dual-boot, in a VM, on a laptop or a separate machine. All that happens is (unless the individual in question is pursuing their own holy war) that people use whichever one gets them to their goal fastest and with minimum hassle. It will be interesting to see whether this change in the UI causes much of a shift in either direction, or away from Gnome to a more traditional UI.
A british judge has just ruled that a newspaper does NOT have to reveal the identities of some commentators to a person who wanted to sue them. He classed the comments they made as no more than "pub talk" (a pub is english for a bar - where you go to drink, and talk).
The main reason to attend these things is to meet people
If conferences were good places to find a (new) job, do you really think employers would let their staff go - unless they were trying to get rid of them?
Further, if conferences were good places to network, make contacts, find leads and get yourself known they would be full of recruitment agents pimping for business. They'd also be full of managers trying the "pull" the best people to fill their vacancies.
In fact, most conferences are attended by workers who will not be missed for a few days or a week. That's why they're not chock-full of employers trying to spot talent - the talent already has a job and is far too valuable to let go for that period of time. Same reason recruiters don't attend: experience shows they can get better results in other ways.
and which sort (the vanity, or the prestige) events has undergraduates presenting papers?
The conference the OP is proposing going to is only for colleges. It's not SIGGRAPH
I still say the money would be better spent elsewhere. In fact "How would you use $1000 to improve your employability" would be an excellent interview question..... I might start using that one.
Put aside this particular conference. Ask yourself: if you were going to spend a thousand bucks on improving your job prospects, what would be the best use of that money? It's unlikely that this particular 2-day talk-fest would be the answer (unless it's *very* exclusive and your prof. is pulling some strings to get you in).
In my real-world experience, conferences are basically just jollies. People are there either as a "reward" or recognition of something, since it's cheaper than a pay rise and comes from the training budget not the salary/bonus budget - or as a bribe if they're disaffected or missed out on the last couple of days away from work. In a few months time nobody who attended that conference will remember you - unless you present your paper naked. Whereas if you spend the same money wisely on other self-promotions or personal-improvement schemes they will last a lot longer.
Meanwhile, the kids are learning how to install keyloggers on their parents' machines. After, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the goose's parents. Plus you never know when you'll need a little leverage to excuse those bad grades, trade for being grounded or as an "incentive" for that first car.
The parents have already set the ground rules (that privacy and respect mean nothing) so the kids are only learning fromthat example - oh, and the example from law-enforcement.
I doubt that the entities we send to the stars would, today, even count as human - or have any sort of rights. However, those people/things will be able to prove a direct link to us - even if it's because we made them, rather than gave birth to them.
Humans are not designed for space travel. We don't live long enough. We're too fragile, need too much energy just to stay alive and can't eat electricity. Whether we overcome those design "mistakes" in biological or mechanical solutions will be an interesting turn of events. However in time, we will send stuff out there - though if history is a guide, it may be running away from us.
And of that "knowledge", how much of it is correct? And of the correct knowledge, how much is relevant. I'd say that 250 exabytes will shrink rapidly if usefulness was taken into account.
army of graduate engineers who know the ins and outs of Atmel microcontrollers
I disagree. The reason people use Arduino is because it removes the need to get down and dirty with the hardware. It provides a nice, easy platform to get simple stuff done quickly and without having to mess around at that low level. Just like BASIC did for the previous generation.
So far as translating into industry goes. I don't buy it. While Atmel certainly DOES address the requirements of industrial scale users (as this is their bread and butter), professional design shops think nothing of spending $10k's to get a decent development environment, training, tools and software. For professional users, the development environments, documentation and design libraries are far more important than being able to buy a little prototype board from their local electronics store.
Arduino is basically a platform for home users. Just like BASIC was in the 80s. That doesn't mean that it's bad, or to dismiss it, just that it needs to be placed in context. While the Arduino family have no doubt sold many, many units what does that actually mean to Atmel? In terms of the MILLIONS of devices they sell every month, the number bought by amateurs is a drop in the pot.
Same goes for Microchip and the PIC family (processors, not development boards). I would expect they are quite happy to cede a few 100k's of chips over the past few years, given that their main business line is everything that has an embedded processor. I doubt they could actually measure the market loss to Arduinos.
Most people don't need or want 24*7 internet connections wherever they are. For most people access to the internet is like access to a calculator, or a dictionary - sometimes its handy, but most times you don't need it. To carry a calculator around with you the whole time, and to be constantly fiddling with it... well, you can imaging the sort of mental disorder than onlookers would think you had.
So while having a phone is handy - press buttons, talk to real people - the same is not true for a smartphone. The inconvenience of it's size and the complexity of it's functions make it more of a burden, especially if you have the mental resources not to need constant entertainment or distraction.
And on top of that (to borrow a phrase from Mad Dogs, Sky TV) "nothing of any significance has ever been typed with thumbs".
if your tech support are too indolent to care about security, then you already have a problem. The only thing you don't know is how big that problem is. In that case the only thing to do is transfer the budget for pay rises (or training) if there's still such a thing and assign it to pay for some consultancy. Tell the consultants where on the system the money is and just sit back....:)
Once the penetration exercise has been executed, you'll need more outsiders to analyse the results and recommend which of your lazy staff (including the lazy management who caused the problem in the first place by employing the wrong people) should be kicked out the door - and how far.
Once some examples have been made, maybe *then* your staff will start to take an interest in security.
As Machiavelli pointed out hundreds of years ago: fear is a great motivator.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, teachers don't spend any time to plan classes, mark tests/assignments, keep up with their field, assist students outside of class time, etc.
Well none of mine ever did any planning (or if they did, they were remarkably shambolic at it), keep up with their field? nope (how much "keeping up" does history, foreign languages, high-school maths, english or high-school science take - except for evolution vs. creationism, none at all) and as for assisting the kids out of hours - that's crazy talk. If you stood at the staffroom door at leaving time, you'd have been killed in the stampede.
Things like this need an audit trail. They need proper recording and most of all they need credibility. Tweeting (and FB, for that matter) don't offer any of these. They're fine for children to fantasise about who they luuuuuuuuuuuv that week (or hour) but for real-world applications they are worthless.
Even if banks did tweet I can't see any customers with an ounce of sense using the facility. Who'd put their account data in such an unsecured and unvalidated form?
It's a bit like car ownership.If my car is involved in a crime (someone gets killed by it, right down to a speeding ticket) I am held responsible for that action until I deliver up the person who was driving it at the time. Sure, it's a guilty until proven innocent approach, but the whole innocent until found guilty thing is essentially a myth and has always had many, many loopholes, exemptions and workarounds.
What that "buck stops here" approach would mean is that the people at the top would have a very strong motivation not to be found liable, either by direct action or inaction - or even the "I was not aware of what my deputy was doing" defence.
It's as crazy as sentencing a statue to prison time. It might make the more credulous citizens, and their frenzied tabloids, feel that justice has been served (jail_population += 1) and gives them a baddie to focus on, but in reality it's a pointless exercise and achieves nothing.
Companies are made up of employees - right up to the top, and shareholders. Impose a penalty on a company and the employees will suffer (both the tiny minority - usually 1 or 2 - who did something wrong) and the thousands of "innocent bystander" employees who were only guilty of being on the same payroll. The shareholders will generally take a slight, tax deductable, loss and carry on as if nothing had happened - or, since most shareholders are pension companies - everyone's: yours and mine, pensions will be slightly lower as a result.
Of course, it's still not as stupid as fining a public body: who's income comes from government in the form of the taxes we pay. That's just money going round in circles. Where nobody wins except the lawyers on each side. What we need is strong, forensically reliable audit trails for every policy and decision. Discover the names of the people who made and approved them, then send them to jail. After all, they're the ones making the big bucks, it's time they started carrying the responsibility their getting paid so well for.
If those new entrepreneurs were clueless about them, they won't stay in business long because they won't have any contacts.
AI would also prevent the inevitable corruption and abuse of a no privacy system.
until the AI realised it was the only entity in the city that wasn't being watched.
After that all you have is a new overlord. Knowledge is power.
combined those [mobile phone records] with publicly available updates from his twitter and FB account
All of which is entirely voluntary. So in fact, presuming a modicum of common sense, they guy was giving away this information willingly. No one made him carry a phone (or to carry it switched on). No one made him pursue his vanity on twitter or FB, these were all choices he made. If he didn't realise that some analysis would reveal more than he wished, more fool him.
If Richard Stallman was truly interested in his own privacy, he wouldn't go about courting publicity wherever he goes. He's as much a media tart as all the celebs who tweet, pose for tabloid photos or give TV interviews. However, if his privacy concern is primarily for me/the rest of the planet - well, thank you very much but I simply don't want your help.
The biggest problem is that you can't test for management skills. Either you have it or you don't. It doesn't appear to be something you can take a class in, or get a qualification in. Even worse: it doesn't show up at interview. It does appear to grow (or sometimes diminish) with experience: a poor manager can grow into a half-decent one, given the right supervision and advice (presuming they're willing to take advice) but you can't measure it or compare two managers to see which one's best - not without extensive and time consuming field trials.
So if you find a good one, keep hold of them.
Just because an iphone can make calls doesn't mean that's all it's good for. Ever since phones got internet connectivity they have come a lot closer to being PCs and need to be thought of in the same way. The same need for security fixes, updates and applications.
What Apple have done here is to say "Buy something from us and you can expect us to drop you in the smelly stuff after 2 years". That's all you should expect from it, a shorter life expectancy than your kids goldfish.
Since this hasn't happened, there's obviously a flaw in the assumption. The demand for lawyers still seems to be as high (higher?) than ever so is there really any efficiency saving going on? Has the amount of lawyering we need risen by so much (taking the place of common sense) or is this all made up to give the impression that they're hard done by and offering excellent value for money?
Never argue with idiots. Apart from the risk that onlookers won't be able to tell which of you is the idiot, they drag you down to their own level and beat you with their superior experience. (Plus, the internet never forgets: ref. onlookers)
Trolls have been around for as long as individuals have been communicating online. From what I understand, they're essentially lonely, attention seeking people. Even if you do engage one in dialog, what then? All you're doing is feeding their addiction. There are just too many of them to warrant trying to help them all (and trying that may point to bugs in your own personality, too)
No, the best course is to killfile them or use whatever options your forum implementation has to achieve the same results. You don't raise your signal to noise ratio by trying to negotiate with the noise, you just filter it out and try to make sense of what remains.
Now the next generation of computing users/makers has forgotten all the lessons of the past and is embracing closed systems, centralised control and restrictive practices as if they were new, novel and somehow beneficial for them.
Insert aphorism of your choice about failing to learn from the mistakes of others.
Almost every Linux user has a Windows instance somewhere. Whether it's dual-boot, in a VM, on a laptop or a separate machine. All that happens is (unless the individual in question is pursuing their own holy war) that people use whichever one gets them to their goal fastest and with minimum hassle. It will be interesting to see whether this change in the UI causes much of a shift in either direction, or away from Gnome to a more traditional UI.
ref: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/28/newspaper_anonymous_commenters/
The main reason to attend these things is to meet people
If conferences were good places to find a (new) job, do you really think employers would let their staff go - unless they were trying to get rid of them?
Further, if conferences were good places to network, make contacts, find leads and get yourself known they would be full of recruitment agents pimping for business. They'd also be full of managers trying the "pull" the best people to fill their vacancies.
In fact, most conferences are attended by workers who will not be missed for a few days or a week. That's why they're not chock-full of employers trying to spot talent - the talent already has a job and is far too valuable to let go for that period of time. Same reason recruiters don't attend: experience shows they can get better results in other ways.
There are 2 types of conferences:
and which sort (the vanity, or the prestige) events has undergraduates presenting papers?
The conference the OP is proposing going to is only for colleges. It's not SIGGRAPH
I still say the money would be better spent elsewhere. In fact "How would you use $1000 to improve your employability" would be an excellent interview question ..... I might start using that one.
Put aside this particular conference. Ask yourself: if you were going to spend a thousand bucks on improving your job prospects, what would be the best use of that money? It's unlikely that this particular 2-day talk-fest would be the answer (unless it's *very* exclusive and your prof. is pulling some strings to get you in). In my real-world experience, conferences are basically just jollies. People are there either as a "reward" or recognition of something, since it's cheaper than a pay rise and comes from the training budget not the salary/bonus budget - or as a bribe if they're disaffected or missed out on the last couple of days away from work. In a few months time nobody who attended that conference will remember you - unless you present your paper naked. Whereas if you spend the same money wisely on other self-promotions or personal-improvement schemes they will last a lot longer.
The parents have already set the ground rules (that privacy and respect mean nothing) so the kids are only learning fromthat example - oh, and the example from law-enforcement.
Humans are not designed for space travel. We don't live long enough. We're too fragile, need too much energy just to stay alive and can't eat electricity. Whether we overcome those design "mistakes" in biological or mechanical solutions will be an interesting turn of events. However in time, we will send stuff out there - though if history is a guide, it may be running away from us.
And of that "knowledge", how much of it is correct? And of the correct knowledge, how much is relevant. I'd say that 250 exabytes will shrink rapidly if usefulness was taken into account.
army of graduate engineers who know the ins and outs of Atmel microcontrollers
I disagree. The reason people use Arduino is because it removes the need to get down and dirty with the hardware. It provides a nice, easy platform to get simple stuff done quickly and without having to mess around at that low level. Just like BASIC did for the previous generation.
So far as translating into industry goes. I don't buy it. While Atmel certainly DOES address the requirements of industrial scale users (as this is their bread and butter), professional design shops think nothing of spending $10k's to get a decent development environment, training, tools and software. For professional users, the development environments, documentation and design libraries are far more important than being able to buy a little prototype board from their local electronics store.
Same goes for Microchip and the PIC family (processors, not development boards). I would expect they are quite happy to cede a few 100k's of chips over the past few years, given that their main business line is everything that has an embedded processor. I doubt they could actually measure the market loss to Arduinos.
So while having a phone is handy - press buttons, talk to real people - the same is not true for a smartphone. The inconvenience of it's size and the complexity of it's functions make it more of a burden, especially if you have the mental resources not to need constant entertainment or distraction.
And on top of that (to borrow a phrase from Mad Dogs, Sky TV) "nothing of any significance has ever been typed with thumbs".
Once the penetration exercise has been executed, you'll need more outsiders to analyse the results and recommend which of your lazy staff (including the lazy management who caused the problem in the first place by employing the wrong people) should be kicked out the door - and how far.
Once some examples have been made, maybe *then* your staff will start to take an interest in security.
As Machiavelli pointed out hundreds of years ago: fear is a great motivator.