"The users weren't mobile... you could own 1,000 percent of the mobile business market and still go bankrupt," snorts Ricochet's new president and CEO Mort Aaronson...
Ehhh...Que?...Perhaps their previous business model failed due to a flawed understanding of ratios.
I too am a very very satisfied NEX II owner...Bought largely based on the rave reviews here in the 2000 Ask Slashdot article, and just read the rave reviews at cnet.com. 92% approval! Including some idiot who put his pan of the Rio 800 in the Nex II review section! For exercise especially, where weight is a concern, the NEX II is a champ. I convinced my girlfriend and two other friends to buy one and they love it.
And Frontier Labs are a nice, decent company to deal with. About 2 months into my NEX II ownership, I yanked the thing off an exercise machine and it took a hard fall...the LCD screen stopped working. Shipped it off to Frontier Labs, they sent it back w/in 3 days of receipt good as new, no questions. The largest delay factor was simply the unfortunate fact that Frontier Labs is based in Hong Kong.
Which brings me to some questions about this device perhaps the savvy Slashdot community will know. What is up with Frontier Labs?! Why are they not marketing the heck out of the NEX II? You really have to dig to find one of these...buy.com occasionally carries it, but certainly none of the big consumer retail outlets do. I got mine via Ebay from Choke Slam Media, a little mom'n'pop reseller, hilariously endorsed by Frontier Labs themselves.
And why is support for the NEX II at an apparent stand-still since like 1999 or 2000? There have been zero firmware upgrades since then, and there are some obvious bug fixes/feature additions. The one-level-deep directory structure has been mentioned. There is no support for.m3u playlists which would be wonderful. And, there is a bug (Frontier Labs has told me they know about it) in the unit's display when playing VBR mp3s. Namely, it uses the instantaneous bit rate and the size of the file to estimate how much play time is left for a song. This means the display is always wildly changing while a song is playing, giving you no useful info about play time for VBR tunes. Note, however, VBR songs still play just fine. The NEX II always sounds great...the equalizer is very functional and completely customizable.
The last question is...have any NEX II users found an armband style case that fits the NEX II? I run with mine, and though the factory case is highly funtional, and the belt clip quite sturdy, it chafes after a reasonable run. Last time MP3 players were discussed, somebody mentioned the Amphipod which is an ergonomic, "chafe-less" waist pack that looks awesome, but I wonder if their Micropack Landsport fits the NEX II. Any suggestions in this regard?
Have you ever played casino blackjack? If the dealer has blackjack in the hole, the hand is over and players never play period. Maybe you're suggesting that when the dealer peeks, they tell if their hand is high (like 20, for example).
But this is only relevant in some single to triple deck games as sometimes played out West, where the players still get to handle the cards and are dealt one card down. Most casinos (and, in fact, all Atlantic City casinos) use electronic systems to check for dealer blackjack. The 10-valued cards (face + 10s) and aces have black marks in the cards. When the dealer is dealt an ace or 10 up, the dealer slides the cards into a groove equipped with a photosensitive element and an LED. If the card has the mark in the corner, the LED lights, dealer has blackjack and the hand is over.
(BTW, yes, aces and 10s have the mark on different sides of the card (long vs. short), so the dealer simply orients the cards appropriately given what the up card shows.)
Re:Card counting is fair
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Dealers are trained to count cards so they can monitor if players are counting cards. When the count is favorable, they can spot opportunistic bettors, and employ counter-measures if need be.
Yes, this is the Eudaemonic Pie referred to in the story post.
Re:Doesn't matter if they count them or not...
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 5, Informative
NO. Card counting is legal both in New Jersey and Nevada. See, for example, this article.
However, the Nevada courts have ruled that as private clubs, the casinos can refuse business or openly discriminate (employ counter-measures like bet capping, early re-shuffling, etc.) against any player for any reason. Counting will get you kicked out, good counting can even get you banned, but it won't send you to jail.
In New Jersey, on the other hand, courts have ruled that gambling can only take place on games of PURE CHANCE and not SKILL. If the casinos tried to press the fact that a cheater counted cards to gain an advantage in court, they would be admitting blackjack is a game of skill, which is illegal. Thus, casinos are on a slippier slope if they try to kick someone out for counting, because a gambler could take his "skilled play" claim to the courts. That's part of the reason Atlantic city casinos almost exclusively play giant 6-deck shoes with maybe 2/3 penetration (reducing counting advantage to near NILL) and never the two-deck and even one-deck gems you see in the West.
You, my friend, are a stoic. Stoicism has its place for achieving a peace when you can't control what the world throws at you, but it's a dangerous recipe for complacency when you can.
History is full of examples of people who blissfully hand over their freedoms for security, or simply because it seemed (at the time) irrelevant or futile to resist.
America, one of the younger nations of the world, is also the oldest continuous democratic republic. EVERY other one has ended up a tyranny. All of human history has been a futile effort to break the cycle of human history. If we don't have the foresight, vigilance, and temerity to speak out--now--about even the subtlest slips in our liberties, then we will end up down the same path of every other once-free people before us. Maybe not you, maybe not your grandkids, but it'll come. It sounds like over-reaction, it feels like paranoia, it comes off overwrought--but 7,000 years of civilization says watch out.
My girlfriend is a senior analyst at WCOM...(I'll wait for the peals of derisive laughter to die down, and then continue...)
She sez: Overproduction of data infrastructure (fibre, etc.) may be. It's arguable whether forecasts during the dotcom explosion warranted the type of capital spending WCOM engaged in or not. NEVERTHELESS, this overcapacity has NOTHING to do with WCOM's current situation. The current situation is purely a credit crisis.
WCOM may go bankrupt NOT because of inability to make money...but because its creditors are calling in their debt ($2.65B of it) all at once. That is all there is to it. And they're doing in response to an accounting fraud.
The fraud was simply the misbooking of expenses as capital. Period. WCOM did not have a cash flow problem before, they don't have one now. The fraud was NOT perpetuated to make the company more money...this has never been an issue. It was simply an effort to keep stock price artificially ballooned---AND, what's most infuriating to WCOMers, is that IT FAILED to achieve its intended devious purpose. Stock price tanked anyway, along with the whole tech sector. It was a crime that never paid at any point.
Hey, I've written a couple things. I've got some copyrights. Looks like I needs be doing some port scannin' n' box rootin' for my own defense! Now, I won't "destroy or damage" your computer or software, understand...cuz that would be wrong. But, rifling through you hard drive or using your system as the launchpad for my blind DoS assault on a few random targets is OK...cuz God knows someone out there just MIGHT..MIGHT..be violating my precious, precious copyright. Ya just never know.
If I don't root your box, the terrorists have already won.
I have some experience in negotiations, and I think you (parent post) are on the right track.
Being marked as "disloyal" by your employer is all in the context of your negotiations. If you go out, interview, obtain an offer, and then surprise your current employer with that, then, yes, you will be branded disloyal. You never gave them a chance. Any counter-offer is more than likely a stop-gap to keep you around until your replacement is found.
HOWEVER, the counter-offer can be very different if you do this: First, discuss your grievances with your manager in a sensible way. If they don't get resolved after repeated, gentle, but assertive attempts at resolution you are left with your ultimate weapon as employee: Threaten termination.
YOU SHOULD ALREADY HAVE REASONABLE PROSPECTS IF NOT OUTRIGHT OFFERS FROM OUTSIDE AT THIS POINT. But you DO NOT reveal this to your employer.
You make the threat gently, very reluctantly, with overt expression of how much you love your current situation for X, Y, Z reasons, but A, B, C needs to be addressed. Hopefully, if you are valued, your threat will make things happen.
And this reasoning of "if they counter-offer with more money, why would you work for a company that cheated you to begin with?" is seriously flawed. Anyone with any realistic sense of corporate hierarchy understands this is far too simplistic. Often, your reporting manager does not have a lot of direct say over your salary. Often his/her superiors will not listen until there is a serious red flag from below (e.g. valuable employee threatens). I know employees personally (engineers) who were TOLD by their manager that they can't do anything for them salary-wise unless the employee comes with an outside offer. In some firms, that's simply the threshold for change. It has nothing to do with deception.
The point is, threatening to leave is of course a dangerous and last-resort negotiating tactic for an employee. You have to be ready to have your "bluff" called. However, depending how it is couched, it is not necessarily the death knell for your future employment at that company. Certainly, however, surprising your manager is the worst way to do it. Employment is a funny business where the company assumes loyalty from its employees, and the employees assume capriciousness from the company. You need to be perceived to be filling your role.
I also wonder what his attitude would be if, for instance, Ace started publishing paperbacks of one of the books he's put up at the Free Library for $1 less than Baen and not paying him any royalties.
Providing a sample of art for FREE is very different than profiteering off of somebody else's work. This is one of TWO (and only two) circumstances where I think copyright law has any legitimacy. 1) you shouldn't be allowed to make money on someone else's back. 2) you shouldn't misrepresent a piece of work (e.g. as your own, a manipulated version as the author's, etc.)
Stop breeding! Would it really be so bad, a few generations where two people get together and produce a total of one offspring?
While I agree with your sentiments, the problem ain't the average Slashdot reader. Check out the Population Reference Bureau". Especially useful is their DataFinder feature. Compare stats for "developed" vs. "less-developed" world regions. The developed world has a birth rate of 11 (per 1000 people) vs. a death rate of 10. That's just about replacement breeding, with a project 4% increase by 2050. Less-developed regions, on the other hand, have a birth rate of 25 vs. a death rate of 8...giving you a 58% projected population increase by 2050! That's staggering. There's similar differences by economic class within developed regions (poorer people breeding much more than wealthier people).
On Win2K, I use Gnucleus, a fine and FREE open-source Gnutella client hosted at SourceForge. Gives you access to anyone on the Gnutella net--users of Morpheus, Limewire, Bearshare, etc. It's quite sophisticated and intelligent (simultaneuous d/l's of the same file from multiple hosts, in-depth peer and net stats, etc.). Nice, honest OSS. ZERO crap. Not as pretty or friendly as Limewire, but then it doesn't run in a Java VM either (shudder). Plus, Limewire is now hosting ads and bundling "companionware," at least for the PC client.
You might have tried something like this already, but if not download or buy a package that monitors programs that try to access anything through TCP/IP and warns you when a program is trying to do something you haven't authorized over the network.
Zone Alarm from Zone Labs is another free firewall that performs this job splendidly for my Win2K set up.
However, I'm still hesitent for the following reasons: * only one mouse button - I know that's a silly reason, but I get confused about how to do things that require a second or a third mouse button on PCs
People! Has this not been beaten to death on Slashdot?! If you want a 3 button mouse, just plug in a 3 button mouse! I don't mean to respond so testily to this particular comment, but it's come up a lot in this discussion already.
Just about ANY three-button USB mouse will work natively with OS X. I run OS X.1.3 at work, and I have a Logitech 3 button scroll mouse. I run it with X11, and all buttons work as expected under whatever window manager you care for. Furthermore, in Aqua, the third button works as one might expect from the Windows world...bringing up Apple's "contextual menu." The scroll wheel--well, that's kinda iffy. Depends on whether the app supports it or not (e.g., Internet Explorer yes, Apple's Mail program, no).
Very probably you are, so don't take the following the wrong way: Is that a prize awarded on the basis of student evaluations? How does the mean and mode of grade-distributions of instructors that receive this prize measure up to that of people that do not?
Ha. I should resent the insinuation, but I think you're asking an honest question so I'll address it. Yes, evaluations make up part of the basis of the award. But a small part. Basically, the evaluations signal to the faculty of the dept. that a grad student is having success teaching. If this jibes with their own observations and experiences with the TA, they can vote to nominate that person to a university-wide competition. The arbiter of this competition is the Graduate School itself, which makes its decision based on written testimonials volunteered (not solicited) by faculty and students. The students that have revealed to me that they wrote letters on my behalf were (not surprisingly) some of my best students. That is, ones that never gave me any doubt about the originality and quality of their work. So, I don't think the award goes to "slackest TA" or "TA most likely to have plagiarized work cluelessly foisted on." Now, I don't know the grade distribution stats you ask about...but, granted, I'm sure hard asses don't get rave reviews. In my experience, I'm a "tougher" grader than many of my peers in my dept. That isn't to say that I haven't awarded some B's and A's at a professor's behest that didn't make my stomach turn. Grade inflation is a problem endemic to all universities, and mine is no exception. That's a WHOLE separate issue. But, I've failed my share of students too...and like, I said, busted a handful for cheating.
Given that there has been a high level of plagiarism revealed wherever automated detection has been employed I think that to not screen work is to facilitate corruption.
Well, yes, it's a widespread problem. Although, the fact that there is a high rate of positives from automated systems does not correlate only with cheating. There is, I believe, a real problem with teaching proper paraphrasing and citation technique. It's a hard concept for a lot of students to get. Second, there is real colloborative learning going on with students studying together, sharing interpretations of material, and those interpretations showing up commonly on papers. It's very easy to attribute those ideas to oneself. That's NOT cheating....that's what we in psychology call a source memory problem.
There is also something at work called the "availability heuristic." We THINK there's all this rampant cheating going on because those are the stories that make the news..You're never going to hear a story about how several thousand students at some big name school did not cheat AGAIN on some exam. Granted, some of the cheating rings that get busted are embarrassingly large. And it is embarrassing. And disconcerting. And the web is certainly bringing new facility. But smart teaching and assigning non-"boilerplate" writing assignments can overcome some of that.
Nevertheless, my argument is NOT that is doesn't exist, or to turn a blind eye, or to go easy on cheaters. No way. TAs comparing suspicious papers across lab sections, comparing those papers side-by-side or against texts...these are standard practices in teaching. Could an automated process make all this "easier?" Sure. My argument is one of principle. My principle is a simple social contract between teacher and student: "I will give you an honest and earnest presentation of my knowledge, and you will give me an honest and earnest demonstration of your mastery of that knowledge." It's a relationship of trust. Simple as that. I think a logical corollary of that contract is "and I won't run your work through an automated cheating detector, and you won't run my lectures through an automated bullshit detector." No matter how flawless the machinery that could do either, it imposes an atmosphere of distrust, hostility, and surveilance. "Those who have nothing to hide should have nothing to fear" is the motto of the police state. Good learning doesn't happen in the police state.
Ultimately I believe that the choice ought to lie with the students taking the class. They should be given a majority vote as to whether or not automated detection is employed. Then natural selection will go to work on Universities and if the majority are cheaters we get a cheater society.
Oh come on now. "Let's vote: Who'd like to intimate to their teacher and classmates that they're implicitly in favor of evasive cheating? Raise your hands high where we can see'em." Talk about a conflict of interest nightmare! No, you have to make the decision out of context, not in situ by the vested parties.
I too am an educator. I'm a senior (6th year) graduate student in Neuroscience at a major research university and have TA'ed or taught six courses. I've received the university's highest teaching prize for grad students, so I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do. Over the past few years, I've caught several serious plagiarists. I've sat on honor council hearings for accused plagiarists. I myself was TRIED for plagiarism in college (Turned out someone had actually plagiarized my physics lab stored on a public computer. This was a long time ago in a much more naive time of computer security).
We don't use turnitin.com. Unless it was decreed by an administrator, I would never choose to use turnitin.com. The very concept violates the notion of an honor system that most universities employ. Academic integrity ought to be assumed, unless explicitly demonstrated otherwise. To screen all work for dishonesty presumes a probability of guilt. And while that may in fact be the reality (that is, probably, someone did cheat) you can't run a classroom that way. At least not a classroom where you hope to teach by establishing rapport, mutual respect, and a sense of responsibility. A policy of using any apparatus that presumes low behavior establishes the expectation of low behaviors, which in turn (you guessed it) elicits low behavior. Academic work then turns into a resentful exercise of doing the least you can get away with to please the initimidator, rather than rising to the intellectual challenge.
Arguments of pragmatism do not hold. That is because the efficacy of an education is as much about the educational atmosphere as it is about holding students to a standard of integrity.
Now, the parent of this post describes about the only enlightened use of turnitin I can imagine. That is, using the service to check students' ability to synthesize third party ideas. There have been a couple cases of plagiarism I have been involved in where outright cheating was not as evident as the students' inability to communicate established ideas in a novel way. Novices have a very hard time breaking away from the efficiently-turned phraseology in a text book or other source. Often, the exact wording just gets stuck with them. There just isn't (in their mind) a better way to say it. These cases would be, in my mind, false positives of the turnitin system.
Unfortunately, using a system like turnitin on a case by case basis (i.e. employing it when a particular paper is suspicious) has as many counterarguments as using it systematically. That is, the accused can argue that potentially there are many other cheaters...he/she is being singled out because of his/her paper raised suspicion and was "processed" while other students' work was not.
Trading freedom for security is a popular theme in today's society. Arguments for/against face recognition systems, public CCTV cams, wiretapping, DNA banking, etc. are all grounded in very real concerns about safety and liberty. I'm not going to paraphrase Franklin's overused observation on the matter, but in the academy, the sociological impact of such choices is immediate and weighty. Students have been learning and cheating at institutions for centuries. A new method to efficiently cull out the lawbreakers makes life easier for the overburdened educators, but I would seriously doubt it heralds a new generation of better educated students. And THAT is the ultimate responsibility of any school.
In fairness, most portals attempt to separate their paid listings from their unbiased search results with labels. Terra Lycos calls paid links "sponsored sites," AOL "sponsored links." Netscape labels them more ambiguously "partner search results."
I use Yahoo! religiously. It is completely unequivocal about which hits are sponsored (read: bought) and which are not. Yahoo! uses Google for results not in their hierarchical database (though admittedly, not as powerful as using Google directly). This story is about as titillating as the fact Windows Media player caches a list of media you've played on YOUR machine (scandalous!). However, while I enjoy an opportunity to take MS down a notch with FUD, I will not stand for such abuse for my beloved portal, Yahoo!.
Each time the power is turned on, it sends one bit down the wire, giving us one bit per hertz,
and later...
to trick an electrical signal into carrying more bits of data per hertz.
WHAT THE FAHRTS? Does he even know what Hz is? I assume he's using it as a shorthand for "cycle" (in the first misuse) and "second" or "unit time" in the second case.
Have you seen the gas prices lately? They're cheaper than they were during the Clinton administration.
This has absolutely zero to do with who is or was president. If you don't think our fearless leaders are in bed with big oil then you are the one who is blind to "FACTS".
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
"The users weren't mobile... you could own 1,000 percent of the mobile business market and still go bankrupt," snorts Ricochet's new president and CEO Mort Aaronson...
Ehhh...Que?...Perhaps their previous business model failed due to a flawed understanding of ratios.
I too am a very very satisfied NEX II owner...Bought largely based on the rave reviews here in the 2000 Ask Slashdot article, and just read the rave reviews at cnet.com. 92% approval! Including some idiot who put his pan of the Rio 800 in the Nex II review section! For exercise especially, where weight is a concern, the NEX II is a champ. I convinced my girlfriend and two other friends to buy one and they love it.
.m3u playlists which would be wonderful. And, there is a bug (Frontier Labs has told me they know about it) in the unit's display when playing VBR mp3s. Namely, it uses the instantaneous bit rate and the size of the file to estimate how much play time is left for a song. This means the display is always wildly changing while a song is playing, giving you no useful info about play time for VBR tunes. Note, however, VBR songs still play just fine. The NEX II always sounds great...the equalizer is very functional and completely customizable.
And Frontier Labs are a nice, decent company to deal with. About 2 months into my NEX II ownership, I yanked the thing off an exercise machine and it took a hard fall...the LCD screen stopped working. Shipped it off to Frontier Labs, they sent it back w/in 3 days of receipt good as new, no questions. The largest delay factor was simply the unfortunate fact that Frontier Labs is based in Hong Kong.
Which brings me to some questions about this device perhaps the savvy Slashdot community will know. What is up with Frontier Labs?! Why are they not marketing the heck out of the NEX II? You really have to dig to find one of these...buy.com occasionally carries it, but certainly none of the big consumer retail outlets do. I got mine via Ebay from Choke Slam Media, a little mom'n'pop reseller, hilariously endorsed by Frontier Labs themselves.
And why is support for the NEX II at an apparent stand-still since like 1999 or 2000? There have been zero firmware upgrades since then, and there are some obvious bug fixes/feature additions. The one-level-deep directory structure has been mentioned. There is no support for
The last question is...have any NEX II users found an armband style case that fits the NEX II? I run with mine, and though the factory case is highly funtional, and the belt clip quite sturdy, it chafes after a reasonable run. Last time MP3 players were discussed, somebody mentioned the Amphipod which is an ergonomic, "chafe-less" waist pack that looks awesome, but I wonder if their Micropack Landsport fits the NEX II. Any suggestions in this regard?
Oh yes? Where do they deal? :)
Have you ever played casino blackjack? If the dealer has blackjack in the hole, the hand is over and players never play period. Maybe you're suggesting that when the dealer peeks, they tell if their hand is high (like 20, for example).
But this is only relevant in some single to triple deck games as sometimes played out West, where the players still get to handle the cards and are dealt one card down. Most casinos (and, in fact, all Atlantic City casinos) use electronic systems to check for dealer blackjack. The 10-valued cards (face + 10s) and aces have black marks in the cards. When the dealer is dealt an ace or 10 up, the dealer slides the cards into a groove equipped with a photosensitive element and an LED. If the card has the mark in the corner, the LED lights, dealer has blackjack and the hand is over.
(BTW, yes, aces and 10s have the mark on different sides of the card (long vs. short), so the dealer simply orients the cards appropriately given what the up card shows.)
Dealers are trained to count cards so they can monitor if players are counting cards. When the count is favorable, they can spot opportunistic bettors, and employ counter-measures if need be.
Yes, this is the Eudaemonic Pie referred to in the story post.
NO. Card counting is legal both in New Jersey and Nevada. See, for example, this article.
However, the Nevada courts have ruled that as private clubs, the casinos can refuse business or openly discriminate (employ counter-measures like bet capping, early re-shuffling, etc.) against any player for any reason. Counting will get you kicked out, good counting can even get you banned, but it won't send you to jail.
In New Jersey, on the other hand, courts have ruled that gambling can only take place on games of PURE CHANCE and not SKILL. If the casinos tried to press the fact that a cheater counted cards to gain an advantage in court, they would be admitting blackjack is a game of skill, which is illegal. Thus, casinos are on a slippier slope if they try to kick someone out for counting, because a gambler could take his "skilled play" claim to the courts. That's part of the reason Atlantic city casinos almost exclusively play giant 6-deck shoes with maybe 2/3 penetration (reducing counting advantage to near NILL) and never the two-deck and even one-deck gems you see in the West.
You, my friend, are a stoic. Stoicism has its place for achieving a peace when you can't control what the world throws at you, but it's a dangerous recipe for complacency when you can.
History is full of examples of people who blissfully hand over their freedoms for security, or simply because it seemed (at the time) irrelevant or futile to resist.
America, one of the younger nations of the world, is also the oldest continuous democratic republic. EVERY other one has ended up a tyranny. All of human history has been a futile effort to break the cycle of human history. If we don't have the foresight, vigilance, and temerity to speak out--now--about even the subtlest slips in our liberties, then we will end up down the same path of every other once-free people before us. Maybe not you, maybe not your grandkids, but it'll come. It sounds like over-reaction, it feels like paranoia, it comes off overwrought--but 7,000 years of civilization says watch out.
OK, I'll bite. Vengie, send me this backstory if you can.
_NoData_(at)yahoo.com...
{underscores required}
My girlfriend is a senior analyst at WCOM...(I'll wait for the peals of derisive laughter to die down, and then continue...)
She sez: Overproduction of data infrastructure (fibre, etc.) may be. It's arguable whether forecasts during the dotcom explosion warranted the type of capital spending WCOM engaged in or not. NEVERTHELESS, this overcapacity has NOTHING to do with WCOM's current situation. The current situation is purely a credit crisis.
WCOM may go bankrupt NOT because of inability to make money...but because its creditors are calling in their debt ($2.65B of it) all at once. That is all there is to it. And they're doing in response to an accounting fraud.
The fraud was simply the misbooking of expenses as capital. Period. WCOM did not have a cash flow problem before, they don't have one now. The fraud was NOT perpetuated to make the company more money...this has never been an issue. It was simply an effort to keep stock price artificially ballooned---AND, what's most infuriating to WCOMers, is that IT FAILED to achieve its intended devious purpose. Stock price tanked anyway, along with the whole tech sector. It was a crime that never paid at any point.
Hey, I've written a couple things. I've got some copyrights. Looks like I needs be doing some port scannin' n' box rootin' for my own defense! Now, I won't "destroy or damage" your computer or software, understand...cuz that would be wrong. But, rifling through you hard drive or using your system as the launchpad for my blind DoS assault on a few random targets is OK...cuz God knows someone out there just MIGHT..MIGHT..be violating my precious, precious copyright. Ya just never know.
If I don't root your box, the terrorists have already won.
I have some experience in negotiations, and I think you (parent post) are on the right track.
Being marked as "disloyal" by your employer is all in the context of your negotiations. If you go out, interview, obtain an offer, and then surprise your current employer with that, then, yes, you will be branded disloyal. You never gave them a chance. Any counter-offer is more than likely a stop-gap to keep you around until your replacement is found.
HOWEVER, the counter-offer can be very different if you do this: First, discuss your grievances with your manager in a sensible way. If they don't get resolved after repeated, gentle, but assertive attempts at resolution you are left with your ultimate weapon as employee: Threaten termination.
YOU SHOULD ALREADY HAVE REASONABLE PROSPECTS IF NOT OUTRIGHT OFFERS FROM OUTSIDE AT THIS POINT. But you DO NOT reveal this to your employer.
You make the threat gently, very reluctantly, with overt expression of how much you love your current situation for X, Y, Z reasons, but A, B, C needs to be addressed. Hopefully, if you are valued, your threat will make things happen.
And this reasoning of "if they counter-offer with more money, why would you work for a company that cheated you to begin with?" is seriously flawed. Anyone with any realistic sense of corporate hierarchy understands this is far too simplistic. Often, your reporting manager does not have a lot of direct say over your salary. Often his/her superiors will not listen until there is a serious red flag from below (e.g. valuable employee threatens). I know employees personally (engineers) who were TOLD by their manager that they can't do anything for them salary-wise unless the employee comes with an outside offer. In some firms, that's simply the threshold for change. It has nothing to do with deception.
The point is, threatening to leave is of course a dangerous and last-resort negotiating tactic for an employee. You have to be ready to have your "bluff" called. However, depending how it is couched, it is not necessarily the death knell for your future employment at that company. Certainly, however, surprising your manager is the worst way to do it. Employment is a funny business where the company assumes loyalty from its employees, and the employees assume capriciousness from the company. You need to be perceived to be filling your role.
Indeed, accountability is going to be the order of the day if providers start charging on a per usage basis.
I don't pay for phone calls I didn't make. I'm not paying for bandwidth I didn't willfully use.
I also wonder what his attitude would be if, for instance, Ace started publishing paperbacks of one of the books he's put up at the Free Library for $1 less than Baen and not paying him any royalties.
Providing a sample of art for FREE is very different than profiteering off of somebody else's work. This is one of TWO (and only two) circumstances where I think copyright law has any legitimacy. 1) you shouldn't be allowed to make money on someone else's back. 2) you shouldn't misrepresent a piece of work (e.g. as your own, a manipulated version as the author's, etc.)
Stop breeding! Would it really be so bad, a few generations where two people get together and produce a total of one offspring?
While I agree with your sentiments, the problem ain't the average Slashdot reader. Check out the Population Reference Bureau". Especially useful is their DataFinder feature. Compare stats for "developed" vs. "less-developed" world regions. The developed world has a birth rate of 11 (per 1000 people) vs. a death rate of 10. That's just about replacement breeding, with a project 4% increase by 2050. Less-developed regions, on the other hand, have a birth rate of 25 vs. a death rate of 8...giving you a 58% projected population increase by 2050! That's staggering. There's similar differences by economic class within developed regions (poorer people breeding much more than wealthier people).
On Win2K, I use Gnucleus, a fine and FREE open-source Gnutella client hosted at SourceForge. Gives you access to anyone on the Gnutella net--users of Morpheus, Limewire, Bearshare, etc. It's quite sophisticated and intelligent (simultaneuous d/l's of the same file from multiple hosts, in-depth peer and net stats, etc.). Nice, honest OSS. ZERO crap. Not as pretty or friendly as Limewire, but then it doesn't run in a Java VM either (shudder). Plus, Limewire is now hosting ads and bundling "companionware," at least for the PC client.
You might have tried something like this already, but if not download or buy a package that monitors programs that try to access anything through TCP/IP and warns you when a program is trying to do something you haven't authorized over the network.
Zone Alarm from Zone Labs is another free firewall that performs this job splendidly for my Win2K set up.
However, I'm still hesitent for the following reasons:
* only one mouse button - I know that's a silly reason, but I get confused about how to do things that require a second or a third mouse button on PCs
People! Has this not been beaten to death on Slashdot?! If you want a 3 button mouse, just plug in a 3 button mouse! I don't mean to respond so testily to this particular comment, but it's come up a lot in this discussion already.
Just about ANY three-button USB mouse will work natively with OS X. I run OS X.1.3 at work, and I have a Logitech 3 button scroll mouse. I run it with X11, and all buttons work as expected under whatever window manager you care for. Furthermore, in Aqua, the third button works as one might expect from the Windows world...bringing up Apple's "contextual menu." The scroll wheel--well, that's kinda iffy. Depends on whether the app supports it or not (e.g., Internet Explorer yes, Apple's Mail program, no).
Very probably you are, so don't take the following the wrong way: Is that a prize awarded on the basis of student evaluations? How does the mean and mode of grade-distributions of instructors that receive this prize measure up to that of people that do not?
Ha. I should resent the insinuation, but I think you're asking an honest question so I'll address it. Yes, evaluations make up part of the basis of the award. But a small part. Basically, the evaluations signal to the faculty of the dept. that a grad student is having success teaching. If this jibes with their own observations and experiences with the TA, they can vote to nominate that person to a university-wide competition. The arbiter of this competition is the Graduate School itself, which makes its decision based on written testimonials volunteered (not solicited) by faculty and students. The students that have revealed to me that they wrote letters on my behalf were (not surprisingly) some of my best students. That is, ones that never gave me any doubt about the originality and quality of their work. So, I don't think the award goes to "slackest TA" or "TA most likely to have plagiarized work cluelessly foisted on." Now, I don't know the grade distribution stats you ask about...but, granted, I'm sure hard asses don't get rave reviews. In my experience, I'm a "tougher" grader than many of my peers in my dept. That isn't to say that I haven't awarded some B's and A's at a professor's behest that didn't make my stomach turn. Grade inflation is a problem endemic to all universities, and mine is no exception. That's a WHOLE separate issue. But, I've failed my share of students too...and like, I said, busted a handful for cheating.
Given that there has been a high level of plagiarism revealed wherever automated detection has been employed I think that to not screen work is to facilitate corruption.
Well, yes, it's a widespread problem. Although, the fact that there is a high rate of positives from automated systems does not correlate only with cheating. There is, I believe, a real problem with teaching proper paraphrasing and citation technique. It's a hard concept for a lot of students to get. Second, there is real colloborative learning going on with students studying together, sharing interpretations of material, and those interpretations showing up commonly on papers. It's very easy to attribute those ideas to oneself. That's NOT cheating....that's what we in psychology call a source memory problem.
There is also something at work called the "availability heuristic." We THINK there's all this rampant cheating going on because those are the stories that make the news..You're never going to hear a story about how several thousand students at some big name school did not cheat AGAIN on some exam. Granted, some of the cheating rings that get busted are embarrassingly large. And it is embarrassing. And disconcerting. And the web is certainly bringing new facility. But smart teaching and assigning non-"boilerplate" writing assignments can overcome some of that.
Nevertheless, my argument is NOT that is doesn't exist, or to turn a blind eye, or to go easy on cheaters. No way. TAs comparing suspicious papers across lab sections, comparing those papers side-by-side or against texts...these are standard practices in teaching. Could an automated process make all this "easier?" Sure. My argument is one of principle. My principle is a simple social contract between teacher and student:
"I will give you an honest and earnest presentation of my knowledge, and you will give me an honest and earnest demonstration of your mastery of that knowledge." It's a relationship of trust. Simple as that. I think a logical corollary of that contract is "and I won't run your work through an automated cheating detector, and you won't run my lectures through an automated bullshit detector." No matter how flawless the machinery that could do either, it imposes an atmosphere of distrust, hostility, and surveilance. "Those who have nothing to hide should have nothing to fear" is the motto of the police state. Good learning doesn't happen in the police state.
Ultimately I believe that the choice ought to lie with the students taking the class. They should be given a majority vote as to whether or not automated detection is employed. Then natural selection will go to work on Universities and if the majority are cheaters we get a cheater society.
Oh come on now. "Let's vote: Who'd like to intimate to their teacher and classmates that they're implicitly in favor of evasive cheating? Raise your hands high where we can see'em." Talk about a conflict of interest nightmare! No, you have to make the decision out of context, not in situ by the vested parties.
I too am an educator. I'm a senior (6th year) graduate student in Neuroscience at a major research university and have TA'ed or taught six courses. I've received the university's highest teaching prize for grad students, so I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do. Over the past few years, I've caught several serious plagiarists. I've sat on honor council hearings for accused plagiarists. I myself was TRIED for plagiarism in college (Turned out someone had actually plagiarized my physics lab stored on a public computer. This was a long time ago in a much more naive time of computer security).
We don't use turnitin.com. Unless it was decreed by an administrator, I would never choose to use turnitin.com. The very concept violates the notion of an honor system that most universities employ. Academic integrity ought to be assumed, unless explicitly demonstrated otherwise. To screen all work for dishonesty presumes a probability of guilt. And while that may in fact be the reality (that is, probably, someone did cheat) you can't run a classroom that way. At least not a classroom where you hope to teach by establishing rapport, mutual respect, and a sense of responsibility. A policy of using any apparatus that presumes low behavior establishes the expectation of low behaviors, which in turn (you guessed it) elicits low behavior. Academic work then turns into a resentful exercise of doing the least you can get away with to please the initimidator, rather than rising to the intellectual challenge.
Arguments of pragmatism do not hold. That is because the efficacy of an education is as much about the educational atmosphere as it is about holding students to a standard of integrity.
Now, the parent of this post describes about the only enlightened use of turnitin I can imagine. That is, using the service to check students' ability to synthesize third party ideas. There have been a couple cases of plagiarism I have been involved in where outright cheating was not as evident as the students' inability to communicate established ideas in a novel way. Novices have a very hard time breaking away from the efficiently-turned phraseology in a text book or other source. Often, the exact wording just gets stuck with them. There just isn't (in their mind) a better way to say it. These cases would be, in my mind, false positives of the turnitin system.
Unfortunately, using a system like turnitin on a case by case basis (i.e. employing it when a particular paper is suspicious) has as many counterarguments as using it systematically. That is, the accused can argue that potentially there are many other cheaters...he/she is being singled out because of his/her paper raised suspicion and was "processed" while other students' work was not.
Trading freedom for security is a popular theme in today's society. Arguments for/against face recognition systems, public CCTV cams, wiretapping, DNA banking, etc. are all grounded in very real concerns about safety and liberty. I'm not going to paraphrase Franklin's overused observation on the matter, but in the academy, the sociological impact of such choices is immediate and weighty. Students have been learning and cheating at institutions for centuries. A new method to efficiently cull out the lawbreakers makes life easier for the overburdened educators, but I would seriously doubt it heralds a new generation of better educated students. And THAT is the ultimate responsibility of any school.
Ouch. Seach-engine lovin' ain't worth this kinda bruisin'.
Which reminds me: Precious, precious geek humor last week.
In fairness, most portals attempt to separate their paid listings from their unbiased search results with labels. Terra Lycos calls paid links "sponsored sites," AOL "sponsored links." Netscape labels them more ambiguously "partner search results."
I use Yahoo! religiously. It is completely unequivocal about which hits are sponsored (read: bought) and which are not. Yahoo! uses Google for results not in their hierarchical database (though admittedly, not as powerful as using Google directly). This story is about as titillating as the fact Windows Media player caches a list of media you've played on YOUR machine (scandalous!). However, while I enjoy an opportunity to take MS down a notch with FUD, I will not stand for such abuse for my beloved portal, Yahoo!.
Good. I wondered who else would notice.
(from the article)
Each time the power is turned on, it sends one bit down the wire, giving us one bit per hertz,
and later...
to trick an electrical signal into carrying more bits of data per hertz.
WHAT THE FAHRTS? Does he even know what Hz is? I assume he's using it as a shorthand for "cycle" (in the first misuse) and "second" or "unit time" in the second case.
Whatevuh.
Have you seen the gas prices lately? They're cheaper than they were during the Clinton administration.
This has absolutely zero to do with who is or was president. If you don't think our fearless leaders are in bed with big oil then you are the one who is blind to "FACTS".