Of course they apply, because eventually someone--staff or student--is going to fuck things up and then it becomes the district's problem to fix it. "Clued" doesn't mean "professional"; even the smartest kid in the world probably isn't going to understand a school's business needs, which means they'd need training in that.
When I worked at a large school district in the Midwestern United States, lo these many years ago, we were told specifically that students were not allowed to have administrative access to anything at all for liability reasons. (Of course, "professional" doesn't mean "clued," either; I still remember with some fondness the person who wanted to replace the district's AS/400s with Macintoshes. Yikes.)
1. Apple will buy Nintendo. 2. Apple will release a version of Mac OS X that will work on any PC. 3. Apple will introduce a new Newton. 4. Apple will introduce its own cell phone. 5. iTunes will become able to function in much the same way a traditional record label does.:)
The franchise peaked with "Of all the souls I have known, his was the most human." Once they erased the idea that actions have consequences and made a mockery of Spock's sacrifice by bringing him back in STIII, Star Trek was done. Killed in the name of fan service.
As for a memorable Voyager line, I liked:
Janeway: "Mr. Chakotay, your stick please." Chakotay: "It's called a cue, Captain." Janeway: "Is it?"
It happens only in America. American corporates are a bunch of ingrates. The work culture sucks. There is no humanity, no love and no warmth. All the 'Hi, how you doin', 'Hi, how are you today?', 'So nice to see you again' and other phrases of warmth and caring are all feigned.
What does that have to do with America? I used to work for a French company where the upper management didn't care about how we were and didn't even bother to try feigning it. Indeed, by the time I got laid off, the most important thing to management had become keeping us in R&D from talking to the sales department, so that our "negativity" wouldn't affect them. Seriously--I know someone who was reprimanded just for saying, within earshot of the sales manager, that getting laid off really sucks.
I really doubt that nationality matters that much; a prick is a prick the world around.
A bunch of stuff from portableapps.com: Portable OpenOffice.org, for working on articles when I'm on the road; Portable NVU, Portable GIMP, and Portable FileZilla, because I got an "omfg EMERGENCY!" request to update a website once and I didn't have any of my usual tools; Portable Sunbird; ClamWin Portable, because you can't trust just any old machine; and Sudoku Portable because you need something to do besides work.
I assumed that the AC meant the original Associated Press story, not the Slashdot blurb. I don't think anyone would seriously accuse Slashdot of being a shill for Bush.
I agree. Reading the phrase "knowledgeable user input" reminded me of two things from my own work experience at a school district in the upper midwest.
The elementary school teacher who INSISTED that we replace all of our 100+ NetWare servers with Windows NT 3.51 because...I swear..."NT does everything that NetWare doesn't do. You can have individual user accounts with home directories!" When I pointed out to him that we had that under NetWare, that our NetWare servers were rock-solid (which they were), and that the school district wouldn't be able to afford the hardware, software, and training to make the switch, he complained to my boss that not just I, but the whole IS department was incompetent.
The middle school teacher who...I swear...wrote a letter to my manager saying that the school district should ditch all of its "outdated" AS/400s and replace them with Macintoshes. No, I'm not making it up. Why make the switch? "32-bit is the future of computing." I will never forget that phrase.
I wonder how the OP and these two teachers would take it if the IT guys started telling them how to do their jobs? Shoot, I've read some books about teaching, so I must know how to do it, right? I can add and subtract, and that's all you need to be an accountant, right?
Trust me, I'm with you--I've got a great collection somewhere of stupid CNN typos and really bad headline writing. To their credit, though, nearly every one was fixed within a few hours, so they must have editors at some point in the process. (Just not the right point, apparently!)
But I wonder if it's not just a case of "Bob, we HAVE to get this story up now! Scratch it out and we'll fix it in a minute!" We all make mistakes without realizing it when we're trying to get something written on a tight deadline.
Of course, that points out a different problem entirely, namely the "24-hour news" mentality that has pretty much destroyed journalism, but I guess I'm just feeling generous today.
So this is pretty much all there is to journalism...?
Of course not. While I phrased it flippantly, the ability to string words together into sentences is decidedly non-trivial. My point is that writing skill and intelligence are far more important than topical knowledge for a journalist or freelance writer. Topical knowledge *helps*, without a doubt, but to suggest that a writer for a general-interest publication has no business writing about things with which he has no experience is just outlandish.
My local paper once carried a series of articles on a rape victim and her quest for justice. Do you think that the reporter was unqualified to write the series because he was never a police officer? Because he was never raped? Because he was never a therapist or a lawyer? Or a rapist?
Writers constantly deal with areas of expertise outside of their own. It's part of the job.
If you don't have clue about the subject you are discussing (with experts and whatnot), if you don't understand what a particular fact means/implies, how do you expect to write an accurate (nevermind coherent) report?
By listening to what people say and writing it down. You know, reporting. Or do you really think that people who write, say, home theater feature articles for Vogue are home theater experts? Or that someone who's going to write an article on buying a house must first buy a house? Or that only someone who has lost weight can write a weight-loss article?
Sure, if you're going to write an article on advances in particle acceleration for a technical journal, you'd need more in-depth knowledge, but the fact is that for the kind of reporting you see done by freelancers in newspapers and magazines, all you need is to be reasonably intelligent and be able to string words together into sentences. You do not need to be a firefighter, or have been trapped in a house fire, to write an article about a house burning down.
Some employers already Google potential employees. Information available on you, through searches, is public information. Anyone can get it.
In this case, it looks more like they went through the guy's web caches on his computers. Assuming the computers were properly obtained, they're evidence. I don't see anything scary or privacy-killing here. Yes, the details are sketchy--but if he's on trial right now for a crime committed two years ago, it's pretty safe to say that he was arrested for the crime before they started looking for evidence.
As the saying goes..."Move along, nothing to see here."
Sure, if that happens. I didn't see anything in the article that said they'd do that--just that they could if there was a problem. It's my impression that voting machine records are not checked at all, unless someone demands a recount; perhaps that's incorrect. If Candidate A were to win by a realistic margin, say six or seven percent, over someone who had a shot but wasn't a clear favorite...I don't think a recount would happen.
Someone else linked to the text of AB627, which says that the source must be provided to anyone who asks for it, which is a good thing. I think they should take it a step farther and make the machine count and the paper trail available, too. That way, *anyone* could see what happened, and see the effect of the code, not just the code itself.
Of course, all of that requires that you trust the provider of the source (and the counts, if it comes to that) to give you the right stuff. Trust has to begin somewhere, I guess.
send_to_printer($vote); if ($vote=="Candidate A") then record_vote($vote) else record_vote("Candidate A")
The only way to ensure that this doesn't happen is to have the source code 1) available; and 2) reviewed by experts. Even then, it's spoofable unless the experts can verify at each stage of compilation and assembly that the code is unadulterated, and that that code is successfully downloaded to machines, and that that code is then used by those machines. Letting people see a printout is just cosmetic IMHO.
Are your lives that bad that you're trying to save future generations from a life of being a technophile?
I think it's a general inclination on the part of parents to want their children to have lives that are different from their own. I teach my daughter what she needs to know to get around on whatever computer she happens to be using, but there's no way I want her to grow up and get a job in the tech field. It's not that I'm dissatisfied, but I have a vague sense that there has to be something better.
I remember when I was growing up, I told my parents that I wanted to go to the same college they went to, and work in banking just like they did. I wasn't a little kid, either. My dad just looked at me and said that there was no way in hell.
I think it is very, very appropriate that as of this writing, Gamespot's featured game--which shows up to the right of the article--is Rockstar's upcoming "Bully." It's just so perfect.
My last employer did. It was a medium-ish commercial software development house. When I started, the vast majority of the software development staff (developers, tech writers, QA) had offices. The two or three who didn't have offices could have had offices, but for them, an outside window was more important.
When the company moved, we were all put into cubicles. We could have had offices at no cost to the company--the new building's owners were paying for the buildout at the new facility. Instead, we had rusty, stained second-hand desks and cube walls. A few months after that, we were all laid off. I know that's a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, but there you have it.
I have since interviewed at several software companies. At least three of those said right up front that everyone got an office, although two of them were so successful that they also said that all of the offices were doubled up until they could get new facilities built.
Also, it's been over a decade since I interviewed at Microsoft, but at least back then, everyone but the front desk receptionists got their own office.
It's not the technology. Silents really don't play well today; the acting style is so different from what we're used to that modern audiences just don't understand them. I used to go to silent screenings at an old theater near my house, but after suffering through people laughing throughout the entirety of "Phantom Of The Opera", I vowed that I would only watch silents on TV.
Anyway, I couldn't think of any modern silents other than "Silent Movie," which someone else mentions. There are long stretches of movies that have (and need) no dialogue (isn't a lot of "Castaway" dialogueless?), but I don't think there are any modern silents that preserve the style and feel of movies from eighty-five years ago. Our visual language has moved past that, sort of the way we don't say "23 Skidoo" anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Poor man's copyright is not recognized in the U.S. It's too easily faked, among other things.
Of course they apply, because eventually someone--staff or student--is going to fuck things up and then it becomes the district's problem to fix it. "Clued" doesn't mean "professional"; even the smartest kid in the world probably isn't going to understand a school's business needs, which means they'd need training in that.
When I worked at a large school district in the Midwestern United States, lo these many years ago, we were told specifically that students were not allowed to have administrative access to anything at all for liability reasons. (Of course, "professional" doesn't mean "clued," either; I still remember with some fondness the person who wanted to replace the district's AS/400s with Macintoshes. Yikes.)
I guess I should have made it more obvious. :/
1. Apple will buy Nintendo. :)
2. Apple will release a version of Mac OS X that will work on any PC.
3. Apple will introduce a new Newton.
4. Apple will introduce its own cell phone.
5. iTunes will become able to function in much the same way a traditional record label does.
The franchise peaked with "Of all the souls I have known, his was the most human." Once they erased the idea that actions have consequences and made a mockery of Spock's sacrifice by bringing him back in STIII, Star Trek was done. Killed in the name of fan service.
As for a memorable Voyager line, I liked:
Janeway: "Mr. Chakotay, your stick please."
Chakotay: "It's called a cue, Captain."
Janeway: "Is it?"
It happens only in America. American corporates are a bunch of ingrates. The work culture sucks. There is no humanity, no love and no warmth. All the 'Hi, how you doin', 'Hi, how are you today?', 'So nice to see you again' and other phrases of warmth and caring are all feigned.
What does that have to do with America? I used to work for a French company where the upper management didn't care about how we were and didn't even bother to try feigning it. Indeed, by the time I got laid off, the most important thing to management had become keeping us in R&D from talking to the sales department, so that our "negativity" wouldn't affect them. Seriously--I know someone who was reprimanded just for saying, within earshot of the sales manager, that getting laid off really sucks.
I really doubt that nationality matters that much; a prick is a prick the world around.
A bunch of stuff from portableapps.com: Portable OpenOffice.org, for working on articles when I'm on the road; Portable NVU, Portable GIMP, and Portable FileZilla, because I got an "omfg EMERGENCY!" request to update a website once and I didn't have any of my usual tools; Portable Sunbird; ClamWin Portable, because you can't trust just any old machine; and Sudoku Portable because you need something to do besides work.
I assumed that the AC meant the original Associated Press story, not the Slashdot blurb. I don't think anyone would seriously accuse Slashdot of being a shill for Bush.
I wonder how the OP and these two teachers would take it if the IT guys started telling them how to do their jobs? Shoot, I've read some books about teaching, so I must know how to do it, right? I can add and subtract, and that's all you need to be an accountant, right?
Trust me, I'm with you--I've got a great collection somewhere of stupid CNN typos and really bad headline writing. To their credit, though, nearly every one was fixed within a few hours, so they must have editors at some point in the process. (Just not the right point, apparently!)
But I wonder if it's not just a case of "Bob, we HAVE to get this story up now! Scratch it out and we'll fix it in a minute!" We all make mistakes without realizing it when we're trying to get something written on a tight deadline.
Of course, that points out a different problem entirely, namely the "24-hour news" mentality that has pretty much destroyed journalism, but I guess I'm just feeling generous today.
I have nothing to contribute other than the fact that I totally loved "Did I somehow miss the era of an entire civilization of Donnes and Popes?"
Last week in Wisconsin, the weather *was* really nice.
For April.
While I realize that you're just being a jerk, they've actually answered that question in the past.
It's on page 2 of their chat transcript.
So this is pretty much all there is to journalism...?
Of course not. While I phrased it flippantly, the ability to string words together into sentences is decidedly non-trivial. My point is that writing skill and intelligence are far more important than topical knowledge for a journalist or freelance writer. Topical knowledge *helps*, without a doubt, but to suggest that a writer for a general-interest publication has no business writing about things with which he has no experience is just outlandish.
My local paper once carried a series of articles on a rape victim and her quest for justice. Do you think that the reporter was unqualified to write the series because he was never a police officer? Because he was never raped? Because he was never a therapist or a lawyer? Or a rapist?
Writers constantly deal with areas of expertise outside of their own. It's part of the job.
If you don't have clue about the subject you are discussing (with experts and whatnot), if you don't understand what a particular fact means/implies, how do you expect to write an accurate (nevermind coherent) report?
By listening to what people say and writing it down. You know, reporting. Or do you really think that people who write, say, home theater feature articles for Vogue are home theater experts? Or that someone who's going to write an article on buying a house must first buy a house? Or that only someone who has lost weight can write a weight-loss article?
Sure, if you're going to write an article on advances in particle acceleration for a technical journal, you'd need more in-depth knowledge, but the fact is that for the kind of reporting you see done by freelancers in newspapers and magazines, all you need is to be reasonably intelligent and be able to string words together into sentences. You do not need to be a firefighter, or have been trapped in a house fire, to write an article about a house burning down.
That's pretty amazing--did you hear that they're doing that in Baltimore, too?
Some employers already Google potential employees. Information available on you, through searches, is public information. Anyone can get it.
In this case, it looks more like they went through the guy's web caches on his computers. Assuming the computers were properly obtained, they're evidence. I don't see anything scary or privacy-killing here. Yes, the details are sketchy--but if he's on trial right now for a crime committed two years ago, it's pretty safe to say that he was arrested for the crime before they started looking for evidence.
As the saying goes..."Move along, nothing to see here."
Sure, if that happens. I didn't see anything in the article that said they'd do that--just that they could if there was a problem. It's my impression that voting machine records are not checked at all, unless someone demands a recount; perhaps that's incorrect. If Candidate A were to win by a realistic margin, say six or seven percent, over someone who had a shot but wasn't a clear favorite...I don't think a recount would happen.
Someone else linked to the text of AB627, which says that the source must be provided to anyone who asks for it, which is a good thing. I think they should take it a step farther and make the machine count and the paper trail available, too. That way, *anyone* could see what happened, and see the effect of the code, not just the code itself.
Of course, all of that requires that you trust the provider of the source (and the counts, if it comes to that) to give you the right stuff. Trust has to begin somewhere, I guess.
Excellent!
Pardon the bad pseudocode...
send_to_printer($vote);
if ($vote=="Candidate A")
then record_vote($vote)
else record_vote("Candidate A")
The only way to ensure that this doesn't happen is to have the source code 1) available; and 2) reviewed by experts. Even then, it's spoofable unless the experts can verify at each stage of compilation and assembly that the code is unadulterated, and that that code is successfully downloaded to machines, and that that code is then used by those machines. Letting people see a printout is just cosmetic IMHO.
Are your lives that bad that you're trying to save future generations from a life of being a technophile?
I think it's a general inclination on the part of parents to want their children to have lives that are different from their own. I teach my daughter what she needs to know to get around on whatever computer she happens to be using, but there's no way I want her to grow up and get a job in the tech field. It's not that I'm dissatisfied, but I have a vague sense that there has to be something better.
I remember when I was growing up, I told my parents that I wanted to go to the same college they went to, and work in banking just like they did. I wasn't a little kid, either. My dad just looked at me and said that there was no way in hell.
Shucks :( I was hoping for excellent cosmic propinquity.
I think it is very, very appropriate that as of this writing, Gamespot's featured game--which shows up to the right of the article--is Rockstar's upcoming "Bully." It's just so perfect.
My last employer did. It was a medium-ish commercial software development house. When I started, the vast majority of the software development staff (developers, tech writers, QA) had offices. The two or three who didn't have offices could have had offices, but for them, an outside window was more important.
When the company moved, we were all put into cubicles. We could have had offices at no cost to the company--the new building's owners were paying for the buildout at the new facility. Instead, we had rusty, stained second-hand desks and cube walls. A few months after that, we were all laid off. I know that's a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, but there you have it.
I have since interviewed at several software companies. At least three of those said right up front that everyone got an office, although two of them were so successful that they also said that all of the offices were doubled up until they could get new facilities built.
Also, it's been over a decade since I interviewed at Microsoft, but at least back then, everyone but the front desk receptionists got their own office.
It's not the technology. Silents really don't play well today; the acting style is so different from what we're used to that modern audiences just don't understand them. I used to go to silent screenings at an old theater near my house, but after suffering through people laughing throughout the entirety of "Phantom Of The Opera", I vowed that I would only watch silents on TV.
Anyway, I couldn't think of any modern silents other than "Silent Movie," which someone else mentions. There are long stretches of movies that have (and need) no dialogue (isn't a lot of "Castaway" dialogueless?), but I don't think there are any modern silents that preserve the style and feel of movies from eighty-five years ago. Our visual language has moved past that, sort of the way we don't say "23 Skidoo" anymore.