No carry on at all and dressed only in disposable paper overalls.
Once you separate the people (i.e. their bodies) from everything else the chances of them doing anything that could threaten an airplane drop dramatically. Short of ingesting some sort of explosive, in large enough quantities to make a hole in a plane there aren't many other ways to do damage.
However, all that will happen then is that the baddies will find other ways to cause fear: such as targeting easier forms of transport, IEDs beside motorways for example.
when the chief (of whatever the "avatar" race is) says something along the lines of not being able to teach the other avatars as their cup was "already full" whereas the grunt who bumbles in has not been trained for the mission.
Apart from that, you can't really say it's anti-technology. Yes, it has a message about imperialism and how conolial powers - or companies despoil environments for their own gain. However that's been going on for venturies and doesn't have a tech. aspect to it. The tech just increases the speed of the destruction.
Boring is safe. Boring is predictable. Boring means things are going to plan. This is exactly what you want from a space programme. Drama, hype, exaggeration and crises all have their place - in fiction but in real-life they are a bad thing(TM).
It sounds like this guy is having difficulty in distinguishing between the two. Maybe the best thing would be to run a few trials on other TV channels. Such as the televising of politics - that could be livened up by dunking congressmen in slime if they lose a vote. How about livening up the footage of trials? It would make quite a good game-show format with every lawyer scoring points (awarded by the judge) for the answers they get to their questions - all with a 30-second time limit. Maybe this illustrates how bad things would be in real-life, with important decisions when the superficial world of entertainment invades these areas.
Still I suppose it would be possible to arrange phone-ins to see who should get voted off the ISS.
People don't use google to find newspapers - they use google to find stories.
Traditionally, the press have cultivated "loyalty" among their readership - not factual reporting. That means they want people who are comfortable with their output and will believe (or at least agree with) their content and read what is put in front of them without any critical thought. The way people find news with google is that they go and search for a topic or story or word - not for a publications's title (which they already have bookmarked). That puts pressure on the content providers to publish true, concise, and short pieces that googlers will compare with the other search results from other news sources,. before settling on reading the whole story (and advertisements) from one newspaper or news outlet.
As long as you've got CEOs making 200-400 times the pay...
And yet a good CEO can execute a strategy that will increase profits hugely. Much more than 300 or 400 more workers could. (They can even expand the workforce, too). In that case it's right and reasonable that they should be rewarded for the extra profits their initiative, experience and leadership brings in.
However, if they screw up royally, I'd agree that they should be dumped without anything. Although in those cases, you could say that a severance package is very cheap compared with letting them continue to run a company into the ground.
And that's the problem. Would you pay the programmer when the first drop is made to production, when the beta test has been completed or when all the bugs have been found and fixed. One could argue that it's only when that third consdition has been met, that a program is really completed - and as we know, it never happens.
It's obviously the worst suggestion in the world to pay up when the program is released (either to prod or to customers) as that produces a perverse incentive to slap it together as quickly as possible - with no heed for the number of mistakes it contains.
The problem won't be writing the apps. The problem will be who is the "gatekeeper" which allows these to be loaded and executed on the phone. At present, it seems to me that the network operators are the ones who determine what can and cannot be run - not because of the access to the phone but by allowing or disallowing access to their network. That's what they're trying to protect - not the phone hardware.
mobile phones will become the main computing platform for most of the world
No!. phones won't be the main computing platform. They're far too small, limited, have terrible human-input interfaces, too small screens and puny batteries. What we probably will see is devices that incorporate phones, storage, decent screens and the like. These will just use the phone as another networking interface and will be "proper" computers in their own right (probably running "Linux-mobile" or somesuch). There will be no reason why these devices can't or won't run paid-for or free applications - provided someone writes them...
Make the manager stay on - it stops frivolous requests for extra or unscheduled or "seemed like a good idea" work when the person requesting ot requiring it has to share the pain. If they have to give up their evening, or weekend or holiday they are much less likely to ask others to - unless there is a good reason for it. Hell, why stop at the immediate line manager. If it's important enough for me to lose my personal time I want a LOT of senior people to appreciate the sacrifice I'm making. What brings it home more than if they have to make the same sacrifices too?
development costs, tooling, bespoke firmware, safety testing, promotion and the cost of supporting another range of kit.
All these costs are largely independent of the number of units produced, yet must be recouped from their sales. By buying a dedicated thin client, you have to bear your share of the product development. Since thin clients sell far fewer units than PCs these costs are higher.
Apart from shopping transactions and your "home" ISP, there's no need for any website to know the name that's on your passport or birth certificate. Not even the same nationality (there's a reason why Afghanistan is the first country on country selection dropdowns - use it) or gender. After all a name is merely a tag, there's no reason to go through your whole life with just one.
One bad review posted to a web forum can have a huge effect. When multiplied by 1000, I would expect the consensus view would be that few people would buy a product - if they saw that many bad reviews or negative votes or a given product. These guys had better be very careful about who they decide is not influential, they could just find that there's a difference between how motivated individuals are to spread good news about a product and the lengths others will go to if they feel they've been hard done by.
Yeah, right. that'll look great on your resume: I quit my last job because I wasn't allowed to use my MP3 player at work. If that doesn't label you as a petulant, inflexible prima-donna, nothing will.
Most countries have rules that require public music to be licensed. That means that if yo play music or have a radio on at work, the company has to pay a fee. If they get caught without the requisite license, the fine is many times the cost of the license - which is based on the number of employees.
Even worse: if it turns out that some of the people playing music do not own the copy they are playing, then the company could be held liable for that too. Maybe the boss should require that any music played must be played from the original distribution media and that the person playing it must be able to demonstrate that they have legitimately purchased it. That should tie up many more man-hours than the music creates in increased productivity.
People don't have offices for quiet environments. They have offices either as a status symbol or as a means of controlling access to themselves - either because they are dealing in confidential matters that the drones should not see/hear or in order to reduce the number of interruptions.
If anyone had a way of objectively measuring programmer productivity they'd make an absolute fortune and change the industry forever (as well as make maybe 75% of programmers unemployable).
The point is that it's *all* down to subjective judgements. If the boss thinks that having sounds piped into your brain prevents a person from working at peak productivity, that's one view. if a programmer thinks having sounds piped into their brain helps, that's another. The is no way to _prove_ one is right and the other wrong. However, there is a block of evidence from driving accidents which says that *any* sounds reduce a drivers attention and therefore the quality of their "work" - thus causing more accidents.
If you're not allowed to play music, and you need to filter out the ambient noise get a pair of ear plus - simples!
Nothing they require is verifiable, so just make it up. After all it's an online medium so no-one cares what you look like, which city you sleep in or whether you wear dresses, or ties (or both - but not together: that's just weird).
Likewise, when sites ask for security questions such as pet's name, there's no obligation to give a truthful answer: just one that you will consistently give to that site when asked that question. It's the internet - you're not even a number here.
Most IT is about dumbing down. It lets you shed highly trained, expensive staff who are hard to recruit by replacing them with some electronic "brains" and a pair of minimum-wage hands to carry out the machine's orders. For most organisations the key driver is not cost (no matter what they tell you), it's risk. Risk that people will fail, risk that someone else will get to market before them, risk that their tame geek will walk away and take all their I.P. with them, risk that they aren't seen to be using "best practice" and risk that the shareholders will ask why they're doing what everyone else is doing. If that means following the herd and computerising everything - then so be it.
It's a bit like having an autopilot on a plane, it does most of the work (thank god) and only needs a pilot to make sure everything is running properly and to reassure the pax that there's a credible-looking face at the pointy end of the plane.
There are a few places were employing IT has, genuinely made things faster or reduced their cost to a point where they can be deployed more readily. Crime detection: fingerprints, DNA and surveillance cameras (with facial recognition) are the most ovbious. Whether that can be considered progress, is however, another question entirely.
'It's hard to spy on people when they know you're there,
Ask yourself: why care of the targets know they're being watched? In a hostile situation this acts as a a means of suppressing activities - the bad guys won't enact their badness while there's a drone buzzing around. That's effectively what you're intending, so the spy-plane is as good at preventing attacks as an armed intervention. However, if you want to use it for surveillance against people who might have a legitimate complaint against being watched - for instance your own citizens, then yes, having them not be aware of your nefarious activities is a BIG help.
Once you have met your legal and other regulatory minimum requirements, the rest of the upgrade programme is down to your decision makers. For example: some prefer not to implement hot-standby (relying instead on perhaps a third-party, or business insurance), some make it a 100% absolute requirement for each and every server they possess, you can't just make a statement in isolation, you'll need guidance from the people who control the money - as that's what it all boils down to.
Once you have the answers to two questions:
- what do you value
- how much are you willing to spend for what degree of risk
You can start to make plans. All the best practices I have come across appear to have been written by or for government departments where budgets are effectively infinite, and the worst possible scenario is to open yourself to criticism from your peers and rivals. In the real world neither of these conditions exist. Further, while it's not always good to re-invent the wheel, blindly following one scheme without understanding it's values, shortcomings or benefits means you will certainly not get the best value for your organisation and will not provide a solution that is best for their circumstances..
There is however one best practice you should follow: get everything (esp. from your own people) in writing - who said what, when and to whom.
A chain's only as strong as it's weakest link. So if this stuff is glued to the walls with anything less strong than it is, that adhesive will become the problem: not the bombproof wallpaper. Presumably "wallpaper" is the wrong term, too as this stuff would have to coat the floor and ceiling (and doors & windows) to be completely effective. Then what would you do if you lost your keys? Move house?
Yes, it'll be interesting to see how they implement it.
In my part of rural Spain, the only phone connection is either a Telefonica supplied "wireless" phone, or a mobile. The only sources of internet are by using a 3G dongle (at extortionate rates - not that broadband in Spain is even close to a reasonable price). Some places have WiMax service - but the speed is low, the monthly cap is lower and frankly, the reliability sucks - and the price is high.
I would expect the implementation to be either one of these radio based technologies, which will provide the headline 1Mbps, but I'm not holding out any hope for a service that will allow me gigabytes per month of transfers.
so, if you have a "right" to free speech, that makes all the media workers slaves?
if you have the right to a fiat trial, that makes all the lawyers slaves?
if you have the right to bare arms, that makes all the sun-lotion manufacturers slaves (bare arms, as in unclothed.... oh, forget it!)
Maybe you're beginning to see the huge flaw in your understanding
Slashdot Mirror
Once you separate the people (i.e. their bodies) from everything else the chances of them doing anything that could threaten an airplane drop dramatically. Short of ingesting some sort of explosive, in large enough quantities to make a hole in a plane there aren't many other ways to do damage.
However, all that will happen then is that the baddies will find other ways to cause fear: such as targeting easier forms of transport, IEDs beside motorways for example.
Apart from that, you can't really say it's anti-technology. Yes, it has a message about imperialism and how conolial powers - or companies despoil environments for their own gain. However that's been going on for venturies and doesn't have a tech. aspect to it. The tech just increases the speed of the destruction.
It sounds like this guy is having difficulty in distinguishing between the two. Maybe the best thing would be to run a few trials on other TV channels. Such as the televising of politics - that could be livened up by dunking congressmen in slime if they lose a vote. How about livening up the footage of trials? It would make quite a good game-show format with every lawyer scoring points (awarded by the judge) for the answers they get to their questions - all with a 30-second time limit. Maybe this illustrates how bad things would be in real-life, with important decisions when the superficial world of entertainment invades these areas.
Still I suppose it would be possible to arrange phone-ins to see who should get voted off the ISS.
Traditionally, the press have cultivated "loyalty" among their readership - not factual reporting. That means they want people who are comfortable with their output and will believe (or at least agree with) their content and read what is put in front of them without any critical thought. The way people find news with google is that they go and search for a topic or story or word - not for a publications's title (which they already have bookmarked). That puts pressure on the content providers to publish true, concise, and short pieces that googlers will compare with the other search results from other news sources,. before settling on reading the whole story (and advertisements) from one newspaper or news outlet.
As long as you've got CEOs making 200-400 times the pay ...
And yet a good CEO can execute a strategy that will increase profits hugely. Much more than 300 or 400 more workers could. (They can even expand the workforce, too). In that case it's right and reasonable that they should be rewarded for the extra profits their initiative, experience and leadership brings in.
However, if they screw up royally, I'd agree that they should be dumped without anything. Although in those cases, you could say that a severance package is very cheap compared with letting them continue to run a company into the ground.
The value is obvious when it's completed
And that's the problem. Would you pay the programmer when the first drop is made to production, when the beta test has been completed or when all the bugs have been found and fixed. One could argue that it's only when that third consdition has been met, that a program is really completed - and as we know, it never happens.
It's obviously the worst suggestion in the world to pay up when the program is released (either to prod or to customers) as that produces a perverse incentive to slap it together as quickly as possible - with no heed for the number of mistakes it contains.
The problem won't be writing the apps. The problem will be who is the "gatekeeper" which allows these to be loaded and executed on the phone. At present, it seems to me that the network operators are the ones who determine what can and cannot be run - not because of the access to the phone but by allowing or disallowing access to their network. That's what they're trying to protect - not the phone hardware.
mobile phones will become the main computing platform for most of the world
No!. phones won't be the main computing platform. They're far too small, limited, have terrible human-input interfaces, too small screens and puny batteries. What we probably will see is devices that incorporate phones, storage, decent screens and the like. These will just use the phone as another networking interface and will be "proper" computers in their own right (probably running "Linux-mobile" or somesuch). There will be no reason why these devices can't or won't run paid-for or free applications - provided someone writes them ...
Make the manager stay on - it stops frivolous requests for extra or unscheduled or "seemed like a good idea" work when the person requesting ot requiring it has to share the pain. If they have to give up their evening, or weekend or holiday they are much less likely to ask others to - unless there is a good reason for it. Hell, why stop at the immediate line manager. If it's important enough for me to lose my personal time I want a LOT of senior people to appreciate the sacrifice I'm making. What brings it home more than if they have to make the same sacrifices too?
Yes you're right. I specifically omitted the cost of parts for exactly those reasons.
All these costs are largely independent of the number of units produced, yet must be recouped from their sales. By buying a dedicated thin client, you have to bear your share of the product development. Since thin clients sell far fewer units than PCs these costs are higher.
Apart from shopping transactions and your "home" ISP, there's no need for any website to know the name that's on your passport or birth certificate. Not even the same nationality (there's a reason why Afghanistan is the first country on country selection dropdowns - use it) or gender. After all a name is merely a tag, there's no reason to go through your whole life with just one.
One bad review posted to a web forum can have a huge effect. When multiplied by 1000, I would expect the consensus view would be that few people would buy a product - if they saw that many bad reviews or negative votes or a given product. These guys had better be very careful about who they decide is not influential, they could just find that there's a difference between how motivated individuals are to spread good news about a product and the lengths others will go to if they feel they've been hard done by.
quit
Yeah, right. that'll look great on your resume: I quit my last job because I wasn't allowed to use my MP3 player at work. If that doesn't label you as a petulant, inflexible prima-donna, nothing will.
Even worse: if it turns out that some of the people playing music do not own the copy they are playing, then the company could be held liable for that too. Maybe the boss should require that any music played must be played from the original distribution media and that the person playing it must be able to demonstrate that they have legitimately purchased it. That should tie up many more man-hours than the music creates in increased productivity.
People don't have offices for quiet environments. They have offices either as a status symbol or as a means of controlling access to themselves - either because they are dealing in confidential matters that the drones should not see/hear or in order to reduce the number of interruptions.
The point is that it's *all* down to subjective judgements. If the boss thinks that having sounds piped into your brain prevents a person from working at peak productivity, that's one view. if a programmer thinks having sounds piped into their brain helps, that's another. The is no way to _prove_ one is right and the other wrong. However, there is a block of evidence from driving accidents which says that *any* sounds reduce a drivers attention and therefore the quality of their "work" - thus causing more accidents.
If you're not allowed to play music, and you need to filter out the ambient noise get a pair of ear plus - simples!
Likewise, when sites ask for security questions such as pet's name, there's no obligation to give a truthful answer: just one that you will consistently give to that site when asked that question. It's the internet - you're not even a number here.
It's a bit like having an autopilot on a plane, it does most of the work (thank god) and only needs a pilot to make sure everything is running properly and to reassure the pax that there's a credible-looking face at the pointy end of the plane.
There are a few places were employing IT has, genuinely made things faster or reduced their cost to a point where they can be deployed more readily. Crime detection: fingerprints, DNA and surveillance cameras (with facial recognition) are the most ovbious. Whether that can be considered progress, is however, another question entirely.
We have the RIAA, they had religious persecution (I was going to say "The Spanish Inquisition", but you'd expect that)
'It's hard to spy on people when they know you're there,
Ask yourself: why care of the targets know they're being watched? In a hostile situation this acts as a a means of suppressing activities - the bad guys won't enact their badness while there's a drone buzzing around. That's effectively what you're intending, so the spy-plane is as good at preventing attacks as an armed intervention. However, if you want to use it for surveillance against people who might have a legitimate complaint against being watched - for instance your own citizens, then yes, having them not be aware of your nefarious activities is a BIG help.
Once you have met your legal and other regulatory minimum requirements, the rest of the upgrade programme is down to your decision makers. For example: some prefer not to implement hot-standby (relying instead on perhaps a third-party, or business insurance), some make it a 100% absolute requirement for each and every server they possess, you can't just make a statement in isolation, you'll need guidance from the people who control the money - as that's what it all boils down to.
Once you have the answers to two questions:
- what do you value
- how much are you willing to spend for what degree of risk
You can start to make plans. All the best practices I have come across appear to have been written by or for government departments where budgets are effectively infinite, and the worst possible scenario is to open yourself to criticism from your peers and rivals. In the real world neither of these conditions exist. Further, while it's not always good to re-invent the wheel, blindly following one scheme without understanding it's values, shortcomings or benefits means you will certainly not get the best value for your organisation and will not provide a solution that is best for their circumstances..
There is however one best practice you should follow: get everything (esp. from your own people) in writing - who said what, when and to whom.
A chain's only as strong as it's weakest link. So if this stuff is glued to the walls with anything less strong than it is, that adhesive will become the problem: not the bombproof wallpaper. Presumably "wallpaper" is the wrong term, too as this stuff would have to coat the floor and ceiling (and doors & windows) to be completely effective. Then what would you do if you lost your keys? Move house?
In my part of rural Spain, the only phone connection is either a Telefonica supplied "wireless" phone, or a mobile. The only sources of internet are by using a 3G dongle (at extortionate rates - not that broadband in Spain is even close to a reasonable price). Some places have WiMax service - but the speed is low, the monthly cap is lower and frankly, the reliability sucks - and the price is high.
I would expect the implementation to be either one of these radio based technologies, which will provide the headline 1Mbps, but I'm not holding out any hope for a service that will allow me gigabytes per month of transfers.
if you have the right to a fiat trial, that makes all the lawyers slaves?
if you have the right to bare arms, that makes all the sun-lotion manufacturers slaves (bare arms, as in unclothed
Maybe you're beginning to see the huge flaw in your understanding