My guess is that the searches are "Itunes Random" -- people are selected semi-randomly (how else to explain the 75 year old midwestern ex-Marine town councillor who's strip searched and has their bags turned inside out? You know you've all heard a story along those lines...), but that the candidates are weighted using various criteria -- sort of like itunes, where tracks with a 5-star rating are slightly more likely to be played on random than tracks with lower ratings...
So, if you meet some "red flag" criteria, you get entered into the "random drawing" a few extra times, to increase your chances of winning. (Millions will enter, few will win!)
Re:why did it kill him?
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 5, Informative
IANASE (... not a stingray expert), but according to this article:
Stingrays are generally non-aggressive and intelligent creatures. They have been called the "pussycat of the sea," and devotees of diving programs on educational TV are often treated to images of scuba divers hitching a ride with some of the larger forms. This is a precarious activity at best, however, since the stingray's spine is in a perfect position to inflict injury to a human pressed against their dorsum. And if frightened, roughly handled, or captured, they react quickly by using their tail to place the sting in close contact with the object of their discomfort. Stingrays cannot raise or lower their stings voluntarily. The wound they inflict comes from the arching forward flick of their muscular tail. Envenomation occurs when the tip of the spine penetrates the ray's integumentary sheath and lacerates the skin of the victim simultaneously.
Human injuries also occur during stingray capture, when people attempt to haul them into a boat. Another common scenario is for the victim, wading in shallow water, to accidentally step on a stingray buried just beneath the sand. In these instances, the ray flicks up its tail, usually lacerating the leg. Contrary to popular "nature documentaries," it is extremely hazardous to swim directly over, or in close proximity to, a stingray. A flick of the tail is apt to pierce a person's body, and a serious, even potentially fatal, situation is in the offing.
Stingray injury has two aspects: 1) immediate physical trauma from the powerful penetrating action of the spine, and 2) envenomation at the site of the wound with the contents of the ray's integumentary sheath. Although venom is not always deposited during a "sting incident," these two insults often work in dangerous synchrony.
Most traumatic injuries inflicted by rays occur to the lower limbs of bathers and boaters, and to the hands and arms of fisherman, hobbyists and other handlers. If a major blood vessel is lacerated, hemorrhage can occur and could even be fatal. There is at least one case in the literature of a victim whose femoral artery was pierced by the spine of a stingray; the victim bled to death. In about 5% of such injuries, the spine is broken off and remains in the wound, especially when the fish is pulled off the victim. Penetration of any part of the trunk (chest, abdomen, groin) is a serious medical emergency. Introduction of the ray's necrotizing venom directly into the body cavity of a person has been known to cause insidious necrotizing effects on the heart and other internal organs, and death is often inevitable.
Sorry, my emo-coding skills are rusty... I should have included a YouTube link to my favorite emo video, and just left it at "My parents just don't understand me."
The problem is, the blogging crowd doesn't NEED "if-then-else" loops:
$site_name = "Black Icicles In My Heart";
$mood = "angsty";
SetBackground(BlackWithSilverRosesAndLightning);
display(AngryKittenJPG);
display(SunnyDayRealEstateJPG);
display(JimmyEatWorldJPG);
display(DeathCabForCutieJPG);
printBlog("Sigh. My parents just don't understand me, and how hard it is to be young today! Sometimes I think only MTV gets me.");
See, there's not a SINGLE conditional everywhere... they're unconditionally angsty.:)
What we learned here is that even with login IDs, people are no more likely to behave better, contribute more, or be a better citizen than they would be if they were anonymous.
To me, it would seem that the question of Login IDs boils down to a matter of how much "noise" you're willing to accept with your signal. While login IDs are certainly no panacea for bad edits (stupid & malicious people can get login ids just as easily as smart & conscientious people), I'd be interested to see if there's any data that supports this statement one way or another. I'm not aware of any... but it would certainly make for an interesting set of numbers to look at.
I do think that requiring Login IDs would help prevent systematic abuse by a particularly determined malicious user, but it certainly wouldn't address the issue of spin & bias by individual submitters who might not even REALIZE the extent to which they might be distorting the actual facts of an issue. Do you lock someone out because they cite Ann Coulter, or Al Franken, as a source? Does a citation link to Little Green Footballs or Daily Kos get someone banned? And the other issue with logins is, if you require them, would that hava a chilling effect on the overall rate of submissions to Wikipedia?
I'll admit, Wikipedia is often my first source when I go looking for information on a topic, because it's convenient, and I can quickly get an overview of a topic, and dig in deeper using the "External Links" section of the article to get more information from a variety of sources. Anybody who starts & finishes at Wikipedia for their research deserves whatever ridicule they may find themselves the target of.
Yeah, difference being that there is, you know, objective proof that Nixon *did* do something wrong, despite his claims that he didn't... if anybody can provide a shred of evidence that in this case, what happened was anything other than the official explanation of a clerical error, I will be quite pleased to hear it...
Until then, everybody should take a breath, rtfa, and think before that knee jerks. This sort of behavior makes a group of otherwise intelligent people look like mouth-breathing morons.
I'll agree with you, to a point... if at the age of 16, your kid can't be trusted, yeah, you've got problems. But even "good kids" with "good parents" mess up and make mistakes. When the consequences of a mistake behind the wheel of the car can be so devastating and permanent, it's not unreasonable for a parent to take steps to ensure that the child is using the car safely, and imposing consequences if the child doesn't use the car safely.
The parents also have to be trustworthy, and NOT monitor their kid everywhere they go. I see a reasonable deal being something like this: "Take the car, go where you like. You will be home by _some_curfew_. If you go over 50 mph in the car, we will know it, and you won't be allowed to use the car for some period of time. Have fun, drive safe, and call us -- don't speed -- if you're running late coming home."
You extend trust, but you don't do it blindly. Allowing your child the freedom to learn, make mistakes, and learn from them & bear the consequences of them is important, but when a mistake can cost your child their life, and the life of other children with them, it makes sense to monitor them, and hold them accountable if they are making stupid choices.
I could believe that lots of enterprise customers might want to roll out linux distros on their desktops with MS Office on them if it's available, rather than supporting multiple office programs. No, The average geek who's been using Linux for years now probably won't be interested... but for business customers, who have a significant investment in Office, I think it is certainly plausible that if MS office was available on Linux, they would use it on any linux desktops they might deploy.
The great thing about "now" is better medical care and cool toys to play with.
Exactly. Life is far more comfortable for the average human today than it was 10,000 years ago. That has been the point of all of those "cool toys" we enjoy today, from the clothes you wear to the computer you typed that comment on. To call living in a near-wild state, hunting & gathering your food, a "comfortable" lifestyle is a wonderfully romantic notion, but it's false. It's survival... it's NOT "comfortable" living. That 40 - 60 hour work week gets you a lot more quality of living than the alleged 20-hour work week of a hunter-gatherer.
Also you don't have to constantly forage and hunt for food (nongrazing mammals of our size don't have to constantly forage - especially assuming we use our brains).
And in a hunter-gatherer society, they used their brains to the extent that they developed agriculture. And technology. And all the other things that make our lives so much more comfortable. The simple fact that we progressed beyond hunter-gatherer societies is evidence that life wasn't the idyllic paradise being imagined by the original poster who called it a comfortable lifestyle.
Plus, many people actually enjoy fishing and hunting, so it's probably more fun than farming in WoW and puts food on the table at the same time.
Yes, many people enjoy hunting and fishing. Now, take away all of their hunting rifles, bows, knives, fishing rods, fishing tackle, and tell them to recreate those weapons by hand, using primitive implements such as stone, plant fiber, wood that they harvested themselves. How long would it take them to make a usable bow, a usable knife, a usable fishing rod? And how "enjoyable" would it be for them if that was their sole source of sustenance, and every piece of what we take for granted had to be recreated by them by hand? By this logic, we should all be living under animal skin tarps or in caves, because it's so much fun.
No it doesn't. Yeah, life was tough, but not as bad as you say. I can't give you sources, this is stuff I read years ago, so doubt if you want
Well, completely unsubstantiated claims are certainly subject to a healthy dose of skepticism. But, I did a little research, and found something supporting your claim, which indicates that life expectancy at *birth* was 33 years during the Paleolithic era (the era that ended with the introduction of agriculture), but if by some chance you managed to make it to the age of 15, your life expectancy averaged 54. Unfortunately, I can find no information on exactly what percentage of the population actually would have lived to the age of 15.
But how easy their life was wasn't my major point, it was your assertion than the number of hours worked has always been as high as it is now.
I guess our definition of work varies quite significantly. You're defining work as "the amount of effort required to secure food." Yeah, maybe I could get food for myself & my family with 20 hours of foraging & hunting. But then I spend most of the rest of my time turning animal skins into clothing, finding secure shelter, and looking for new hunting & foraging grounds. Unless you'd care to elaborate on what lasting cultural contributions hunter gatherer societies made to future generations in all that free time they had?
Call it a comfortable lifestyle if you want, but in hunter-gatherer societies, they spent most of their time doing the things necessary to survive, and nothing more. If life was so comfortable and excellent in those societies, why develop agriculture, domesticated animals, and all that other technology leading up to the modern age?
The average hunter-gatherer had to work maybe 20 hours a week to have a comfortable lifestyle.
Excuse me? A "comfortable" lifestyle? This assumes that you call dying by your mid-30's, constantly foraging and hunting for food, living in temporary shelters or caves, and other such primitive accoutrements "comfortable" living.
Personally, I'm okay with working 40 - 60 hours a week, if it means I get all the benefits of modern living, such as a car, a mattress, a place of my own, electricity, running water, a computer, soap, medicine... things like that... having roughed it in the woods more than a few times, I'd prefer NOT to spend my life in your "comfortable" 20-hour workweek, moving from cave to idyllic cave, and hoping that the next blueberry tree hasn't been picked clean by birds and bugs.
I mean, seriously man... maybe a lot of the stuff we have today isn't strictly necessary for a "comfortable" lifestyle, but I hardly think that spending your life living in a cave and foraging for food qualifies as "comfortable" by any stretch of the imagination.
All in all, a great post, and very informative. Having just started playing around with Ubuntu recently, I'm quite impressed with amarok... however, I have to point out one piece of confusion or misinformation in your post:
CD-ripping and transfer to ipod can be done seamlessly in amarok (if you have lame etc installed). It's easier than in windoze thru third party rippers and itunes where there are all sorts of restrictions and issues.
Here's the procedure for ripping a CD in itunes:
Insert CD to your CD drive, close tray if necessary.
Start ITunes. Wait a moment while Itunes detects the CD in the drive.
If connected to the internet, Itunes will (by default, at least) try to look up the CD information via the Gracenote CDDB service.
ITunes should have automatically opened the playlist corresponding to your newly inserted CD. Now you can adjust file/artist/etc. info *if* and as you see fit. (Importing 800+ CDs, I had to adjust maybe 20 of them... for the most part, it "just works" to find the CD information. Your mileage may vary.)
Click the "Import CD" button to... you know, import the CD.
(???)
Profit!
ITunes imports with your choice of NON-DRM'ed formats. The only way it attaches DRM to the track is IFF you buy & download it from the Itunes Music Store. If you don't buy from ITMS, you don't get DRM. And if you made the mistake of buying from ITMS, it's not that hard to strip the DRM off -- burn the tracks to a CD, and re-rip them to your hard drive. I'll grant that that's a time-consuming & expensive proposition if you've purchased more than a dozen or so tracks from ITMS, but it *does* remove the FairPlay restrictions on the track, so if you find yourself desperately looking for a way out of ITMS, that's probably the simplest way out.
I've ripped, as I mentioned, somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 CDs to an external hard drive, and have been easily able to take those files and play them anywhere else on any other system equipped to play mp3 audio. ITunes may not be as feature-rich as Amarok, but it is certainly not the DRM-laden nightmare most make it out to be.
So, in summary: ITUNES + YOUR CDS != DRM LOCK-UP. Only downloads from the ITMS are locked up that way, and it's just about as simple as can be to import CDs using Itunes -- insert cd, edit info, click a button, and you're done. (And, incidentally, in Itunes preferences, you can actually set it to automatically rip & eject any audio CD you insert into the drive, in case clicking a button is too much work.)
Your whole corporate career was a festival of creativity and problem solving, a claim which flies in the face of [ . . . ]
No, that's actually not what I said. But you know, feel free to argue against the points I didn't make, if you can't address the points I did make.
What I said was that I've never seen anybody get punished for thinking creatively, and solving a problem that needed to be solved for the company / department / division / organization. That doesn't mean that we don't have to spend 10 hours every week doing drudge work like filling out time sheets, filing TPS reports, etc. Yes, it's boring. Yes, it's probably a productivity drain for most of us. Yes, we'd all be much happier if we didn't have to submit them. I'm not arguing any of those points. My point is, and was, that if you're NOT doing that sort of creative work at least part of your time, you should be VERY concerned that you can be replaced, either by a machine, or by a low-cost offshore worker.
I've seen people fired because the manager didn't like their car. Please.
Care to provide more than a pithy soundbite to support that?
People who invest their professional expertise to help the corporation succeed. People should always be first. The money happens automatically.
Ah yes, because the people are giving freely of their time and professional expertise, with no compensation or reward for their time and effort. An employment agreement is a mutual trade to mutual benefit -- I have no reasonable expectation that the company will keep me around if I stop being worth the salary they are paying me. Just as they should have no reasonable expectation that I'll stay around if they abuse me, or if some other company offers to give me better wages, benefits, and treatment. If you're not doing something that increases your value to your company, then you're on you're way out the door, and you should stop trying to kid yourself that they somehow owe you something. Fact of employment these days, my friend.
I had jobs where I did the work of ten people in half the time for a third the cost. I had jobs where I improved efficiency in double and triple-figures, leading to substantial top line revenue increases quarter over quarter. [ . . . ] I've done it better, faster and less expensively from the very instant I accepted my first full time job.
Then what are you bitching about? If you can consistently deliver these types of results to a corporation, and can substantiate your claims, then you should be working as an independent consultant, making "Fuck you" money, and certainly not worrying about being a "cubicledrone", as your id states, and your whole attitude implies.
As I mentioned before -- if you are delivering the types of results you claim to be, and you find that you are repeatedly getting let go from jobs, then the problem's with you, and the way you deal with & treat other people. If there's one thing a manager DOES know, it's who delivers results for his team, and who makes him look good. No manager is going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, unless said goose is a complete pain in the ass who just isn't worth keeping around.
Creative and critical thinking is not tolerated in the corporate workplace. Not tolerated for a moment. Have you ever worked in the cubicles before?
Presently employed by a large corporation with ~35-40 thousand employees around the world. Been here 8 years. Before that, it was a corporation of approximately 12,000, where I was employed for 4 years. So yeah, I've worked in the cubicles plenty. And I've yet to see an instance where someone was punished for thinking creatively and solving a real problem that needed to be solved. I have seen people get their asses in a sling for pissing away their time doing nothing of value to the organization, if that's what you mean.
So you earn one university degree. Corporate fucks don't like it, so your "option" is to return to school and spend yet thousands upon thousands more dollars and years more time to earn yet another university degree? Do you have any idea how absurd that is?
Almost as ridiculous as claiming that my statement that you "learn" and "grow" equates to "go get another degree." But that didn't stop you from tossing THAT red herring out. And please, give me an example of where a person was drummed out of a job because a manager didn't like their degree??
Nothing else matters except money.
And what the hell SHOULD matter to a corporation that is in the business of making money? If you're not adding value to the company, then you're a detriment to their goal of making money. The appropriate arrangement is this: YOU make money from them by providing some value that allows THEM to make money in return. If they don't make money, you get no paycheck. A company cannot pay out more than it earns for very long.
Here's reality:
in which you describe yourself, with the spin you wish to be interpreted with...
Intelligent self-starters with massive amounts of education, skill and talent are almost guaranteed to be acerbic, opinionated, egocentric, disagreeable, blunt, and not afraid to speak their mind.
Okay, and here's reality back at you: You can be most of those things, and still get along with people in a corporate environment. It's called having a personality that doesn't make people describe you as a confrontational douchebag. I work with a lot of smart, talented, highly educated folks. And by and large, they are agreeable, personable, and downright fun to talk to. In my experience, it's the third-raters and the mediocre minds who are constantly concerned with their "image" in the organization, and worrying that somebody else's talent will make them look bad. Those are the people who are "disagreeable" and outspoken to the point of insubordination. You can argue respectfully. You can disagree based on technical merits. You can be blunt when you discuss the facts. And the very second your opinions devolve into a ridiculous screed against "corporate fucks" who are vats of "bubbling rhino shit", as you so eloquently put it, I have to conclude that you're one of those mediocre minds. At the very least, you don't have anything better to do with yourself than harbor some irrational hatred of anybody with the title of "manager".
They have their own way of doing things and rarely accept guidance or directives from management until that manager has EARNED their respect. Almost no corporate manager understands this, which is why almost no corporate manager is capable of employing such a person. They don't have the huevos to build a real team. They are failures at their careers, and in order to sidestep blame for their own lack of ability, they blame the employees and hide behind horseshit like "team player" and "people skills."
Translation: "I'm one of those opinionated, acerbic, blunt, people. I like to think that the fact that I am blunt and opinionated MAKES me one of
While I feel your pain, the computer's not exactly mopping, sweeping, and stocking supplies... it's simply alerting the staff that those tasks need to be done. I'm pretty sure my 5-year-old IBM laptop could adequately handle a logic loop that is the functional equivalent of:
while trashcan_full() { alert (teenager1, "Please empty the trash!"); sleep 60; }
It's essentially an alarm system with some built in business logic... while I'm sure the code is a great deal more complex than my oversimplification above, I don't see that you'd need some sort of tremendously powerful system to monitor & send alerts, even during an extraordinarily busy day.
That non-specific vague "skill set" that employers use as an excuse to fire someone and not hire a replacement yet never actually define?
No, in the case of this article, the very specific skill set of flipping a hamburger on a grill, and assembling it into a sandwich to be consumed by a customer. Why is it a surprise that a machine can do a repetitive manual task better than a human being? If it doesn't require any creative / critical thinking, then why NOT use a machine to do the boring, repetitive work and free your time for more interesting things?
Are you suggesting people return to school and obtain yet another degree every time some rat fuck lying asscrack motherfucking blow-dried hairpiece phone-flipping toilet-sucking bowl of warm bubbling rhinoceros shit changes their mind?
I would certainly point it out as an option... quite a few people do change careers mid-life, and go back to school to do so. But that's not the only way to learn and grow. You can pick up a book and learn something new... you can experiment with some new technology that will help you be more efficient at work... you can take advantage of the tuition-reimbursement programs that quite a few companies offer these days. There's all sorts of creative ways you can learn new skills... and if you're not constantly looking to expand what you know & can do, then you're on your way to being replaced, because if it's not a machine that does it, it'll be a $10/hr contractor in India or China who's willing to do the same work for less money.
And incidentally, if your attitude towards coworkers & management is summed up by your childish outburst quoted above, and you find yourself being let go due to some vague "skill set" that they say you don't have, here's a hint: the skills in question are social skills. If you walk around with a chip the size of a manhole cover on your shoulder, don't be surprised if the rest of the world treats you like you're an abrasive douchebag.
The people who "won't take well to being ordered around" are the same people who will probably be at Burger King for the next 10, 20, 30 years, because if you have that bad a work ethic, and you can't take being told what to do, it's a pretty good bet that you're NEVER going to be able to get, and hold, a job with more responsibility than flipping burgers.
When I worked at Burger King back when I was 16, I never really liked being told "go clean the playground up, and then check the men's room." I don't care whether it was a person or a computer telling me to do that, it was still shitty work. But I did it because it was a paycheck (money == car + gas + dinner + movie with that girl I want to take out), and because it was my job to do so.
Every job out there has procedures, policies, and responsibilities. All this computer system is doing is managing the logistics of fulfilling all these procedures, policies, and responsibilities. Do you *really* take that much exception to being told it's time to do something by a machine? And if so, do you own an alarm clock?
Or maybe people will get jobs creating, refining, maintaining, and servicing these new machines that will replace the boring, repetitive drudge work?
Damn... think of all the people that the printing press, the automobile, and the computer have left on the streets to starve. I mean, once we can drive cars, we won't need a driver for our horse & buggy anymore! Once we have a printing press, all the monks who used to hand-copy manuscripts won't be needed! With computers, all the people who build slide rules won't be necessary!
Technology changes over time. Disruptive technologies, you know, disrupt things. A person has two choices -- learn to adapt, or become a dinousaur, chasing the steadily dwindling supply of jobs that are looking for their specific skill set, which they're too lazy to update.
I'd respectfully submit that if you're computer-savvy enough to:
a) HAVE a "favorite" Linux distro;
b) Keep a live CD of said distro on hand;
then you probably don't need this book -- which, from the review, sounds like it's geared towards novices -- to troubleshoot your problems, as you're probably ALSO savvy enough to know how to use Google, and other online support resources, to find solutions to your problems.
Er...BECAUSE it's open source, it's easier to customize. That's one of the major selling points.
"highly custom" in the original article means it has no generally applicable use in the everyday world -- it's created for a specific purpose, and has a highly specific set of requirements. If there was an existing, customizable open-source tool for this purpose, then by all means, it would be wonderful to go that way... but what's the link for the latest stable GNU "Robotic Parking Structure Control System" distribution again? I always forget it...
In other words -- there is no existing "open source" software for this particular application that can be customized to suit Hoboken's needs. They would have had to sponsor development, from scratch, as well as testing, release, maintenance, etc... which means it would have cost Hoboken many times more to build test structures, plus all of the costs for the robot development, debugging, etc., and it probably would have taken them years longer. We're talking about software controlling systems that handle what is probably the first or second most-valuable piece of property a person owns, so it's got to do the job right, or the city winds up with a HUGE liability.
I really fail to see how even specifying in the contract that the city owns the source code afterwards would be cheaper or easier in any appreciable way. They *still* have to pay a developer to work on it and fix problems, and they *still* have to pay the maintenance and upkeep on the robots, which is very probably the single most expensive part of maintaining the system. And let's say it's open source... you contract with Company A to customize open source code for you... and then you terminate your involvement with Company A... until you post out a request for bids (you *are* a municipality, after all, and so you have to go through a bidding process) and hire a new company (Company B) to continue customizing this software, you're still running the risk that this sort of thing will happen.
My vote: Bad, stupid, dumb, idiotic contract for a city to sign, period. They should have thought about contingencies like this during the contract negotiations & addressed them, even if it's only adding contract terms to the effect that the robotic parking company will allow the garage to be emptied so as not to get innocent people caught in the middle if there's a dispute between the city and the garage operator.
Once you do something exceedingly well, people start expecting you to do that all the time, even if it's not reasonable to expect genre-defining, life-changing product releases every 6 months.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, you made a few mistakes in your post... what you meant to say, here on slashdot, was:
MICROSOFT BAD!
PATENTS BAD!
SNARKY ATTENTION GRABBING HEADLINES GOOD!
I mean, seriously... how are we supposed to engage in shouting down the unpopular kids if you don't help out and raise your voice?
My guess is that the searches are "Itunes Random" -- people are selected semi-randomly (how else to explain the 75 year old midwestern ex-Marine town councillor who's strip searched and has their bags turned inside out? You know you've all heard a story along those lines...), but that the candidates are weighted using various criteria -- sort of like itunes, where tracks with a 5-star rating are slightly more likely to be played on random than tracks with lower ratings...
So, if you meet some "red flag" criteria, you get entered into the "random drawing" a few extra times, to increase your chances of winning. (Millions will enter, few will win!)
The same article goes on to say:
Sorry, my emo-coding skills are rusty... I should have included a YouTube link to my favorite emo video, and just left it at "My parents just don't understand me."
I do think that requiring Login IDs would help prevent systematic abuse by a particularly determined malicious user, but it certainly wouldn't address the issue of spin & bias by individual submitters who might not even REALIZE the extent to which they might be distorting the actual facts of an issue. Do you lock someone out because they cite Ann Coulter, or Al Franken, as a source? Does a citation link to Little Green Footballs or Daily Kos get someone banned? And the other issue with logins is, if you require them, would that hava a chilling effect on the overall rate of submissions to Wikipedia?
I'll admit, Wikipedia is often my first source when I go looking for information on a topic, because it's convenient, and I can quickly get an overview of a topic, and dig in deeper using the "External Links" section of the article to get more information from a variety of sources. Anybody who starts & finishes at Wikipedia for their research deserves whatever ridicule they may find themselves the target of.
My advice: less attempts at pithy humor, more reading of TFA. You'll save yourself lots of embarrassment.
Yeah, difference being that there is, you know, objective proof that Nixon *did* do something wrong, despite his claims that he didn't... if anybody can provide a shred of evidence that in this case, what happened was anything other than the official explanation of a clerical error, I will be quite pleased to hear it...
Until then, everybody should take a breath, rtfa, and think before that knee jerks. This sort of behavior makes a group of otherwise intelligent people look like mouth-breathing morons.
The parents also have to be trustworthy, and NOT monitor their kid everywhere they go. I see a reasonable deal being something like this: "Take the car, go where you like. You will be home by _some_curfew_. If you go over 50 mph in the car, we will know it, and you won't be allowed to use the car for some period of time. Have fun, drive safe, and call us -- don't speed -- if you're running late coming home."
You extend trust, but you don't do it blindly. Allowing your child the freedom to learn, make mistakes, and learn from them & bear the consequences of them is important, but when a mistake can cost your child their life, and the life of other children with them, it makes sense to monitor them, and hold them accountable if they are making stupid choices.
I could believe that lots of enterprise customers might want to roll out linux distros on their desktops with MS Office on them if it's available, rather than supporting multiple office programs. No, The average geek who's been using Linux for years now probably won't be interested... but for business customers, who have a significant investment in Office, I think it is certainly plausible that if MS office was available on Linux, they would use it on any linux desktops they might deploy.
Cue "but the source is open -- if it doesn't work for you, just fix the bug yourself!" comments.
And in a hunter-gatherer society, they used their brains to the extent that they developed agriculture. And technology. And all the other things that make our lives so much more comfortable. The simple fact that we progressed beyond hunter-gatherer societies is evidence that life wasn't the idyllic paradise being imagined by the original poster who called it a comfortable lifestyle.
Yes, many people enjoy hunting and fishing. Now, take away all of their hunting rifles, bows, knives, fishing rods, fishing tackle, and tell them to recreate those weapons by hand, using primitive implements such as stone, plant fiber, wood that they harvested themselves. How long would it take them to make a usable bow, a usable knife, a usable fishing rod? And how "enjoyable" would it be for them if that was their sole source of sustenance, and every piece of what we take for granted had to be recreated by them by hand? By this logic, we should all be living under animal skin tarps or in caves, because it's so much fun.
I guess our definition of work varies quite significantly. You're defining work as "the amount of effort required to secure food." Yeah, maybe I could get food for myself & my family with 20 hours of foraging & hunting. But then I spend most of the rest of my time turning animal skins into clothing, finding secure shelter, and looking for new hunting & foraging grounds. Unless you'd care to elaborate on what lasting cultural contributions hunter gatherer societies made to future generations in all that free time they had?
Call it a comfortable lifestyle if you want, but in hunter-gatherer societies, they spent most of their time doing the things necessary to survive, and nothing more. If life was so comfortable and excellent in those societies, why develop agriculture, domesticated animals, and all that other technology leading up to the modern age?
Personally, I'm okay with working 40 - 60 hours a week, if it means I get all the benefits of modern living, such as a car, a mattress, a place of my own, electricity, running water, a computer, soap, medicine... things like that... having roughed it in the woods more than a few times, I'd prefer NOT to spend my life in your "comfortable" 20-hour workweek, moving from cave to idyllic cave, and hoping that the next blueberry tree hasn't been picked clean by birds and bugs.
I mean, seriously man... maybe a lot of the stuff we have today isn't strictly necessary for a "comfortable" lifestyle, but I hardly think that spending your life living in a cave and foraging for food qualifies as "comfortable" by any stretch of the imagination.
Here's the procedure for ripping a CD in itunes:
- Insert CD to your CD drive, close tray if necessary.
- Start ITunes. Wait a moment while Itunes detects the CD in the drive.
- If connected to the internet, Itunes will (by default, at least) try to look up the CD information via the Gracenote CDDB service.
- ITunes should have automatically opened the playlist corresponding to your newly inserted CD. Now you can adjust file/artist/etc. info *if* and as you see fit. (Importing 800+ CDs, I had to adjust maybe 20 of them... for the most part, it "just works" to find the CD information. Your mileage may vary.)
- Click the "Import CD" button to... you know, import the CD.
- (???)
- Profit!
ITunes imports with your choice of NON-DRM'ed formats. The only way it attaches DRM to the track is IFF you buy & download it from the Itunes Music Store. If you don't buy from ITMS, you don't get DRM. And if you made the mistake of buying from ITMS, it's not that hard to strip the DRM off -- burn the tracks to a CD, and re-rip them to your hard drive. I'll grant that that's a time-consuming & expensive proposition if you've purchased more than a dozen or so tracks from ITMS, but it *does* remove the FairPlay restrictions on the track, so if you find yourself desperately looking for a way out of ITMS, that's probably the simplest way out.I've ripped, as I mentioned, somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 CDs to an external hard drive, and have been easily able to take those files and play them anywhere else on any other system equipped to play mp3 audio. ITunes may not be as feature-rich as Amarok, but it is certainly not the DRM-laden nightmare most make it out to be.
So, in summary: ITUNES + YOUR CDS != DRM LOCK-UP. Only downloads from the ITMS are locked up that way, and it's just about as simple as can be to import CDs using Itunes -- insert cd, edit info, click a button, and you're done. (And, incidentally, in Itunes preferences, you can actually set it to automatically rip & eject any audio CD you insert into the drive, in case clicking a button is too much work.)
What I said was that I've never seen anybody get punished for thinking creatively, and solving a problem that needed to be solved for the company / department / division / organization. That doesn't mean that we don't have to spend 10 hours every week doing drudge work like filling out time sheets, filing TPS reports, etc. Yes, it's boring. Yes, it's probably a productivity drain for most of us. Yes, we'd all be much happier if we didn't have to submit them. I'm not arguing any of those points. My point is, and was, that if you're NOT doing that sort of creative work at least part of your time, you should be VERY concerned that you can be replaced, either by a machine, or by a low-cost offshore worker.
Care to provide more than a pithy soundbite to support that?
Ah yes, because the people are giving freely of their time and professional expertise, with no compensation or reward for their time and effort. An employment agreement is a mutual trade to mutual benefit -- I have no reasonable expectation that the company will keep me around if I stop being worth the salary they are paying me. Just as they should have no reasonable expectation that I'll stay around if they abuse me, or if some other company offers to give me better wages, benefits, and treatment. If you're not doing something that increases your value to your company, then you're on you're way out the door, and you should stop trying to kid yourself that they somehow owe you something. Fact of employment these days, my friend.
Then what are you bitching about? If you can consistently deliver these types of results to a corporation, and can substantiate your claims, then you should be working as an independent consultant, making "Fuck you" money, and certainly not worrying about being a "cubicledrone", as your id states, and your whole attitude implies.
As I mentioned before -- if you are delivering the types of results you claim to be, and you find that you are repeatedly getting let go from jobs, then the problem's with you, and the way you deal with & treat other people. If there's one thing a manager DOES know, it's who delivers results for his team, and who makes him look good. No manager is going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, unless said goose is a complete pain in the ass who just isn't worth keeping around.
Presently employed by a large corporation with ~35-40 thousand employees around the world. Been here 8 years. Before that, it was a corporation of approximately 12,000, where I was employed for 4 years. So yeah, I've worked in the cubicles plenty. And I've yet to see an instance where someone was punished for thinking creatively and solving a real problem that needed to be solved. I have seen people get their asses in a sling for pissing away their time doing nothing of value to the organization, if that's what you mean.
Almost as ridiculous as claiming that my statement that you "learn" and "grow" equates to "go get another degree." But that didn't stop you from tossing THAT red herring out. And please, give me an example of where a person was drummed out of a job because a manager didn't like their degree??
And what the hell SHOULD matter to a corporation that is in the business of making money? If you're not adding value to the company, then you're a detriment to their goal of making money. The appropriate arrangement is this: YOU make money from them by providing some value that allows THEM to make money in return. If they don't make money, you get no paycheck. A company cannot pay out more than it earns for very long.
in which you describe yourself, with the spin you wish to be interpreted with...
Okay, and here's reality back at you: You can be most of those things, and still get along with people in a corporate environment. It's called having a personality that doesn't make people describe you as a confrontational douchebag. I work with a lot of smart, talented, highly educated folks. And by and large, they are agreeable, personable, and downright fun to talk to. In my experience, it's the third-raters and the mediocre minds who are constantly concerned with their "image" in the organization, and worrying that somebody else's talent will make them look bad. Those are the people who are "disagreeable" and outspoken to the point of insubordination. You can argue respectfully. You can disagree based on technical merits. You can be blunt when you discuss the facts. And the very second your opinions devolve into a ridiculous screed against "corporate fucks" who are vats of "bubbling rhino shit", as you so eloquently put it, I have to conclude that you're one of those mediocre minds. At the very least, you don't have anything better to do with yourself than harbor some irrational hatred of anybody with the title of "manager".
Translation: "I'm one of those opinionated, acerbic, blunt, people. I like to think that the fact that I am blunt and opinionated MAKES me one of
I wish I had mod points right now. For some reason, I can't stop laughing about this. Thank you.
It's essentially an alarm system with some built in business logic... while I'm sure the code is a great deal more complex than my oversimplification above, I don't see that you'd need some sort of tremendously powerful system to monitor & send alerts, even during an extraordinarily busy day.
I would certainly point it out as an option... quite a few people do change careers mid-life, and go back to school to do so. But that's not the only way to learn and grow. You can pick up a book and learn something new... you can experiment with some new technology that will help you be more efficient at work... you can take advantage of the tuition-reimbursement programs that quite a few companies offer these days. There's all sorts of creative ways you can learn new skills... and if you're not constantly looking to expand what you know & can do, then you're on your way to being replaced, because if it's not a machine that does it, it'll be a $10/hr contractor in India or China who's willing to do the same work for less money.
And incidentally, if your attitude towards coworkers & management is summed up by your childish outburst quoted above, and you find yourself being let go due to some vague "skill set" that they say you don't have, here's a hint: the skills in question are social skills. If you walk around with a chip the size of a manhole cover on your shoulder, don't be surprised if the rest of the world treats you like you're an abrasive douchebag.
You're joking, right?
The people who "won't take well to being ordered around" are the same people who will probably be at Burger King for the next 10, 20, 30 years, because if you have that bad a work ethic, and you can't take being told what to do, it's a pretty good bet that you're NEVER going to be able to get, and hold, a job with more responsibility than flipping burgers.
When I worked at Burger King back when I was 16, I never really liked being told "go clean the playground up, and then check the men's room." I don't care whether it was a person or a computer telling me to do that, it was still shitty work. But I did it because it was a paycheck (money == car + gas + dinner + movie with that girl I want to take out), and because it was my job to do so.
Every job out there has procedures, policies, and responsibilities. All this computer system is doing is managing the logistics of fulfilling all these procedures, policies, and responsibilities. Do you *really* take that much exception to being told it's time to do something by a machine? And if so, do you own an alarm clock?
Or maybe people will get jobs creating, refining, maintaining, and servicing these new machines that will replace the boring, repetitive drudge work?
Damn... think of all the people that the printing press, the automobile, and the computer have left on the streets to starve. I mean, once we can drive cars, we won't need a driver for our horse & buggy anymore! Once we have a printing press, all the monks who used to hand-copy manuscripts won't be needed! With computers, all the people who build slide rules won't be necessary!
Technology changes over time. Disruptive technologies, you know, disrupt things. A person has two choices -- learn to adapt, or become a dinousaur, chasing the steadily dwindling supply of jobs that are looking for their specific skill set, which they're too lazy to update.
I'd respectfully submit that if you're computer-savvy enough to:
a) HAVE a "favorite" Linux distro;
b) Keep a live CD of said distro on hand;
then you probably don't need this book -- which, from the review, sounds like it's geared towards novices -- to troubleshoot your problems, as you're probably ALSO savvy enough to know how to use Google, and other online support resources, to find solutions to your problems.
In other words -- there is no existing "open source" software for this particular application that can be customized to suit Hoboken's needs. They would have had to sponsor development, from scratch, as well as testing, release, maintenance, etc... which means it would have cost Hoboken many times more to build test structures, plus all of the costs for the robot development, debugging, etc., and it probably would have taken them years longer. We're talking about software controlling systems that handle what is probably the first or second most-valuable piece of property a person owns, so it's got to do the job right, or the city winds up with a HUGE liability.
I really fail to see how even specifying in the contract that the city owns the source code afterwards would be cheaper or easier in any appreciable way. They *still* have to pay a developer to work on it and fix problems, and they *still* have to pay the maintenance and upkeep on the robots, which is very probably the single most expensive part of maintaining the system. And let's say it's open source... you contract with Company A to customize open source code for you... and then you terminate your involvement with Company A... until you post out a request for bids (you *are* a municipality, after all, and so you have to go through a bidding process) and hire a new company (Company B) to continue customizing this software, you're still running the risk that this sort of thing will happen.
My vote: Bad, stupid, dumb, idiotic contract for a city to sign, period. They should have thought about contingencies like this during the contract negotiations & addressed them, even if it's only adding contract terms to the effect that the robotic parking company will allow the garage to be emptied so as not to get innocent people caught in the middle if there's a dispute between the city and the garage operator.
Or, put another way... Murphy's Laws of Combat, Rule 28: