I was waiting for someone to mention Windows, which is both the COMPLETE product name and trademark name.
The complete product name is Microsoft Windows (or at least it was initially). Furthermore, "windows" as used in computer software was a completely generic term when Microsoft named their product. Initial rulings in the case versus Lindows went against Microsoft, they panicked and settled out of court (read: bribed Lindows to change their name).
"Windows" is a shit trademark achieved by bullying and bribes through lawyers. Yay corporate America!
Snowden specifically requested that the documents be released slowly, and only after careful analysis, rather than all at once. This is not to protect the police state, but for Snowden's own personal safety.
The link you provided does not say it is for his safety. Straight from the horses mouth: "All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."
Note he didn't say more information would be leaked if something happened to him, just that the information will be leaked regardless.
And from the reporter Greenwald: "However, Greenwald said that in his dealings with Snowden the 30-year-old systems administrator was adamant that he and his newspaper go through the document and only publish what served the public's right to know. 'Snowden himself was vehement from the start that we do engage in that journalistic process and we not gratuitously publish things,' Greenwald said. 'I do know he was vehement about that. He was not trying to harm the U.S. government; he was trying to shine light on it.' "
This way you can decide guilt and innocence based solely on physical appearance like Reddit does.
OK, I'll play along. The victim looks like a New Jersey shore-type douchebag, the kind of guy who would be a dick and texting during a movie and being aggressive when asked by somebody else to stop. (Yes, it was a preview, but you really should stop distracting shit by then.)
The shooter looks like a retired detective who's seen a lot, but doesn't look like the crazy-mad, quick to anger type. Therefore he must be innocent!
All right, all kidding aside, if the basic facts of this case are correct, the guy is guilty of murder and deserves to go to jail. Case closed.
What I was originally attempting to say is that the existence of a chain in management refutes the idea that there are lots of competent managers. If the managers were in fact so competent, then there would not need to be so many of them.
No, it doesn't, because of the hierarchical nature of management. I've already alluded to this before. There are fewer management positions because that's the way it works when you have a hierarchy. You don't even necessarily need a chain, but that's just the way typical business is structured.
However, instead of taking a rational view that the supply should be greater for each position because of the fewer management positions compared to the rest of the workforce, overvalue is placed on management positions.
You're not reading what I write, you're reading what you want to read, and then arguing against that. You are a narcissist, and not a particularly interesting one.
You haven't demonstrated that. In fact, it's you who is doing that, which I will demonstrate.
You are a narcissist, and not a particularly interesting one.
That sounds like you, saying how stressful and underpaid the management position is. Now if you aren't a manager this doesn't apply, but I would be very surprised if you aren't or weren't at some point.
There exists a labor market, of which you are not a participant. Actors in that market get to decide on prices, not you. Were you an employer, a manager, a customer, or hell even an auditor, you would get to have a say. You are none of those.
It is true I have no say in hiring managers, but I am a participant in the workforce with plenty of experience. You also seem to be forgetting this is Slashdot, a place for discussion where opinions are provided on various topics. Comparing "infinite" value for a job I don't want to do and should be "thankful" for, and something rather more mundane to the kind of pricing we all do, your position is a fantasy.
You say most people succeed at it, and it's not hard.
Demonstrating what you claimed I was doing at the start of this post. I never said the job was easy. Go ahead, provide a quote. You can't. I respect good management skills. I don't respect the obscene overvalue placed on them, and history has shown just how far out of whack management pay has become, especially as you move up the chain.
I never said most people succeed at it. Go ahead, provide a quote. You can't. I did say that the supply of competent people outstripped the demand and that managers were overpaid, and the problem got worse as you went up the chain. It isn't the same thing.
That doesn't jibe with facts. Most businesses fail. Many large businesses waste money left and right due to incompetence, and then end up failing anyway. Do you dispute these claims?
No, I don't. Most businesses fail for a variety of reasons. It isn't necessarily due to incompetence. Businesses exist in a complex, dynamic environment with cutthroat competition. It takes some luck to succeed, no matter how competent the business. There are a multitude of reasons on how the best plans can go to waste.
Because I don't see how you can reconcile "management is so easy a monkey can do it" with "most managers suck and lead their companies to ruin".
The latter sentiment is the typical Dilbert-view of the workplace you see around Slashdot, placing all the blame on management or marketing. I don't subscribe to it.
The entire point of my rejoinder to you is that you don't get to make both statements.
Then you have entirely failed, as your position is dead wrong and embarrassingly so.
The value of a job you are absolutely unwilling to do is essentially infinite from your perspective. For someone else, it is finite. The best you can do is thank the other person for accepting a sum immeasurably less than you would to do the job.
This is just stupid. I'm not willing to be a trash collector, either, but the value isn't infinite. Despite being such a shitty job, trash collection doesn't pay well. It's supply and demand.
It's hard to believe you could make such a stupid statement and place such emphasis on it. I can give you a very long list of other things I'm either not willing to do or am not good at, and still those services can be priced. I don't make my own electronic gadgets, either, but I still make decisions as a consumer about what I'm willing to pay.
All good sources, but not visible to the masses. Unless ABC, NBC, CNN, even FOX come out and say "that was crap" most people wont get it.
I'm not so sure these days. Probably with a certain demographic, but times have changed a lot, and the people paying attention to the news get a lot of it online from various sources.
Why? Because they were competent coders? That says nothing about their ability to manage people.
Because they had good people skills, understood the job, and were able to multitask.
And how often did these coders interact with the customers?
Mostly irrelevant. Not every manager has to interact with customers. But we did in fact have some interaction, and they were fine.
If you were designing something from scratch in a startup funded by venture capital, you probably had a lot of freedom to develop things without regard to customer demands.
Just the opposite. We were competing with an established player and had to win over their customers. We were very much in tune with that. You seem to think these are magical abilities you are talking about, but they are mundane.
If you think managers are overpaid and have it easy, then why not become one of them?
Because I have no interest, and it isn't something I would be good at. That doesn't mean it's an amazingly hard job that so few can do.
You say you have "no interest" in it, and that's fine, but why do you begrudge those who do?
I don't begrudge anybody that wants to be a manager. I begrudge the gross overpay and overinflated opinion of the job that they do. It only gets worse as you go up the chain.
I have seen many decent coders get extremely stressed out when working with customers, because the coders speak one language and the customers speak a totally different one.
That's fine, but again not every manager talks to customers, and some people don't find that as stressful as stereotypical coder would. You fill the role accordingly. Just don't pretend that the job is so special.
We come again to you are not interested in doing it
Yeah, so I'm not going to repeat myself.
you have a business idea but no capital, how do you acquire the capital? People look on CEOs with envy and ire, but honestly a "rockstar" CEO is no different from an entertainer or professional sports player. One of the jobs of CEOs, as the public face of the company, is to convince people with money to part with it.
Except that lots of startup companies have made it without rockstar CEOs, so your position is a myth.
You are a technical person, I presume, but if not, just assume it as a hypothetical. You can make, say, $80k/year as an experienced technical worker for an established business. As a low-level manager, you could make say $100k/year. But management is stressful, because it requires understanding and coordinating not only the task at hand, but also the people doing it and the customer who demands it, and then doing all of this within the time and budget constraints given. So the extra stress is not worth 25% more to you.
I am a technical person. I have also worked at a startup full of experienced coders. The biggest problem we had as we grew was that many of these coders were burned out on coding and would rather have done management. Any of them would have been competent managers. I was actually the only coder in that environment that had no interest in it.
As for management being stressful, coding is also stressful. So is pretty much any job that you have to grind 8 hours a day at. Management is an overpaid position because of hierarchical thinking and the buddy-buddy system, not because of supply and demand for competent labor. For top-level CEOs, a lot of that is rockstar thinking.
It really doesn't work when you have a military superpower who has already twice used nuclear weapons on civilians aiming all of their nuclear weapons at you and picking fights with you at every opportunity around the world.
You seem to forget that the USSR was itself a military superpower with nuclear weapons and had to be around the world asserting its authority in order to be in those fights.
The US did it by mortgaging the futures of their children and failing to provide for a large portion of their population, the USSR did not take that path and paid the price. Don't be mistaken that we came pretty close to collapsing our own economy in the process.
Do you know nothing of Stalin and the millions who died from starvation? And the US has been a welfare state for a long time. The difference between the US and the USSR was that in the USSR everybody was poor except for the elites.
The people complaining about the horrible, just horrible conditions at Amazon would appear to have never had to work a low-paid, low-skill production-line job.
Tell me about it. I worked a summer before college in a recycling plant. Awful, dirty, and hazardous place. Some of the people there were doing it full time for a living. It impressed on me why I was going to college.
These people need to be able to survive their whole lives.
This is the big question. Are they surviving? It would seem so. Do they deserve to get paid $20/hr in a country that already has a generous social welfare system? I find the argument dubious.
I suspect the those pesky real journalists probably don't enough about the tech side of things to ask the questions they really need to be asking in order to debunk this.
The 60 Minutes piece has already been trashed by multiple outlets:
There is a nearly identical problem in school grades: we want to eliminate bias in grading so we use "standardized tests". Pretty soon teachers are teaching the test, not the subject.
I don't see a problem with this, as long as the test covers the material that is supposed to be learned. The reason standardized tests came into play is because of all the students graduating without basic skills.
I'm not the one making the lame excuses. Another poster provided you a link for Garfield 2. If that's not scraping the bottom of the barrel, I don't know what is.
I guess it's how you define successful, but Eddie Murphy had a better career, especially in his prime. But like Murray, he bottomed out too. Murphy had the donkey in Shrek, anyways, and Murray had the leading role in Lost in Translation. That's about it for anything of note for the two of them for a long time.
The only one of those that is innovative is the self-driving cars and maybe glass (wearables aren't new...just less clunky now).
Self-driving cars aren't "new" either, just better now. I still give Google credit for investing in cutting edge research, though I have no idea how self-driving cars fits into Google's business expertise.
The zerocoin proposal is akin to an agreement that everyone should trade their bikes one for one upon request. Sure, that'd be great for bike thieves - that hot bike you just stole you can just trade for some else's clean bike! [..] The question is what the hell would be in in for legitimate bike owners?
This is a very stupid analogy. Bikes are not a medium of exchange. Currency is. There are "legitimate" reasons to send money without government or some other third party tracking you, whether it is simple privacy or being able to spend money on something the government doesn't approve of, like Wikileaks or online poker.
From a practical perspective, anonymous payment would legalise corruption, legalise money laundering (to the disadvantage of everyone having more money in the legitimate economy than in the criminal one), and legalise tax evasion. You got to be a pretty kooky libertarian type to think that's a good idea.
And you must be a kooky Big Brother type to present the if-you've-got-nothing-to-hide... argument.
Buying extra space is tempting, because I hate throwing out stuff I may need later (I know I'm never going to need it, honestly).
Yeah, but you never know if you may need it later. I've already seen a post by a person on this story that was trashing stuff that turned out he could make a use of. Extra inventory is neither UI nor cosmetic. Maybe it won't give you a big advantage, but it weighs heavy on the gameplay by forcing you to make decisions about what you carry.
The microtransactions are all cosmetics and UI convenience. I consider myself quite discriminating about this sort of thing, and it doesn't bother me any. You have a limited inventory shared between all your characters, and it is possible to purchase more inventory. You could argue that this is a kind of pay to win, based on the statistical nature of the loot drops and the fact that a larger inventory could give an advantage in terms of retaining potentially valuable items. FWIW I dropped $20 and got max inventory and a cosmetic.
Serious case of cognitive dissonance going on here. You managed to contradict yourself in one paragraph. Inventory increase is not a cosmetic or a UI convenience. You admit picking up loot is a big part of the game, and you also admit you spent money on this capability!
Yeah, the developer has to make money, but I don't see how this is fundamentally any different than other schemes that in some way level you faster, either in stats or gear.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy shit! Somebody at the USPTO needs to get fired over this. What a joke.
I was waiting for someone to mention Windows, which is both the COMPLETE product name and trademark name.
The complete product name is Microsoft Windows (or at least it was initially). Furthermore, "windows" as used in computer software was a completely generic term when Microsoft named their product. Initial rulings in the case versus Lindows went against Microsoft, they panicked and settled out of court (read: bribed Lindows to change their name).
"Windows" is a shit trademark achieved by bullying and bribes through lawyers. Yay corporate America!
Snowden specifically requested that the documents be released slowly, and only after careful analysis, rather than all at once. This is not to protect the police state, but for Snowden's own personal safety.
The link you provided does not say it is for his safety. Straight from the horses mouth: "All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."
Note he didn't say more information would be leaked if something happened to him, just that the information will be leaked regardless.
And from the reporter Greenwald: "However, Greenwald said that in his dealings with Snowden the 30-year-old systems administrator was adamant that he and his newspaper go through the document and only publish what served the public's right to know. 'Snowden himself was vehement from the start that we do engage in that journalistic process and we not gratuitously publish things,' Greenwald said. 'I do know he was vehement about that. He was not trying to harm the U.S. government; he was trying to shine light on it.' "
This way you can decide guilt and innocence based solely on physical appearance like Reddit does.
OK, I'll play along. The victim looks like a New Jersey shore-type douchebag, the kind of guy who would be a dick and texting during a movie and being aggressive when asked by somebody else to stop. (Yes, it was a preview, but you really should stop distracting shit by then.)
The shooter looks like a retired detective who's seen a lot, but doesn't look like the crazy-mad, quick to anger type. Therefore he must be innocent!
All right, all kidding aside, if the basic facts of this case are correct, the guy is guilty of murder and deserves to go to jail. Case closed.
I already gave one: "good people skills, understood the job, and were able to multitask".
What I was originally attempting to say is that the existence of a chain in management refutes the idea that there are lots of competent managers. If the managers were in fact so competent, then there would not need to be so many of them.
No, it doesn't, because of the hierarchical nature of management. I've already alluded to this before. There are fewer management positions because that's the way it works when you have a hierarchy. You don't even necessarily need a chain, but that's just the way typical business is structured.
However, instead of taking a rational view that the supply should be greater for each position because of the fewer management positions compared to the rest of the workforce, overvalue is placed on management positions.
You're not reading what I write, you're reading what you want to read, and then arguing against that. You are a narcissist, and not a particularly interesting one.
You haven't demonstrated that. In fact, it's you who is doing that, which I will demonstrate.
You are a narcissist, and not a particularly interesting one.
That sounds like you, saying how stressful and underpaid the management position is. Now if you aren't a manager this doesn't apply, but I would be very surprised if you aren't or weren't at some point.
There exists a labor market, of which you are not a participant. Actors in that market get to decide on prices, not you. Were you an employer, a manager, a customer, or hell even an auditor, you would get to have a say. You are none of those.
It is true I have no say in hiring managers, but I am a participant in the workforce with plenty of experience. You also seem to be forgetting this is Slashdot, a place for discussion where opinions are provided on various topics. Comparing "infinite" value for a job I don't want to do and should be "thankful" for, and something rather more mundane to the kind of pricing we all do, your position is a fantasy.
You say most people succeed at it, and it's not hard.
Demonstrating what you claimed I was doing at the start of this post. I never said the job was easy. Go ahead, provide a quote. You can't. I respect good management skills. I don't respect the obscene overvalue placed on them, and history has shown just how far out of whack management pay has become, especially as you move up the chain.
I never said most people succeed at it. Go ahead, provide a quote. You can't. I did say that the supply of competent people outstripped the demand and that managers were overpaid, and the problem got worse as you went up the chain. It isn't the same thing.
That doesn't jibe with facts. Most businesses fail. Many large businesses waste money left and right due to incompetence, and then end up failing anyway. Do you dispute these claims?
No, I don't. Most businesses fail for a variety of reasons. It isn't necessarily due to incompetence. Businesses exist in a complex, dynamic environment with cutthroat competition. It takes some luck to succeed, no matter how competent the business. There are a multitude of reasons on how the best plans can go to waste.
Because I don't see how you can reconcile "management is so easy a monkey can do it" with "most managers suck and lead their companies to ruin".
The latter sentiment is the typical Dilbert-view of the workplace you see around Slashdot, placing all the blame on management or marketing. I don't subscribe to it.
The entire point of my rejoinder to you is that you don't get to make both statements.
Then you have entirely failed, as your position is dead wrong and embarrassingly so.
The value of a job you are absolutely unwilling to do is essentially infinite from your perspective. For someone else, it is finite. The best you can do is thank the other person for accepting a sum immeasurably less than you would to do the job.
This is just stupid. I'm not willing to be a trash collector, either, but the value isn't infinite. Despite being such a shitty job, trash collection doesn't pay well. It's supply and demand.
It's hard to believe you could make such a stupid statement and place such emphasis on it. I can give you a very long list of other things I'm either not willing to do or am not good at, and still those services can be priced. I don't make my own electronic gadgets, either, but I still make decisions as a consumer about what I'm willing to pay.
All good sources, but not visible to the masses. Unless ABC, NBC, CNN, even FOX come out and say "that was crap" most people wont get it.
I'm not so sure these days. Probably with a certain demographic, but times have changed a lot, and the people paying attention to the news get a lot of it online from various sources.
Why? Because they were competent coders? That says nothing about their ability to manage people.
Because they had good people skills, understood the job, and were able to multitask.
And how often did these coders interact with the customers?
Mostly irrelevant. Not every manager has to interact with customers. But we did in fact have some interaction, and they were fine.
If you were designing something from scratch in a startup funded by venture capital, you probably had a lot of freedom to develop things without regard to customer demands.
Just the opposite. We were competing with an established player and had to win over their customers. We were very much in tune with that. You seem to think these are magical abilities you are talking about, but they are mundane.
If you think managers are overpaid and have it easy, then why not become one of them?
Because I have no interest, and it isn't something I would be good at. That doesn't mean it's an amazingly hard job that so few can do.
You say you have "no interest" in it, and that's fine, but why do you begrudge those who do?
I don't begrudge anybody that wants to be a manager. I begrudge the gross overpay and overinflated opinion of the job that they do. It only gets worse as you go up the chain.
I have seen many decent coders get extremely stressed out when working with customers, because the coders speak one language and the customers speak a totally different one.
That's fine, but again not every manager talks to customers, and some people don't find that as stressful as stereotypical coder would. You fill the role accordingly. Just don't pretend that the job is so special.
We come again to you are not interested in doing it
Yeah, so I'm not going to repeat myself.
you have a business idea but no capital, how do you acquire the capital? People look on CEOs with envy and ire, but honestly a "rockstar" CEO is no different from an entertainer or professional sports player. One of the jobs of CEOs, as the public face of the company, is to convince people with money to part with it.
Except that lots of startup companies have made it without rockstar CEOs, so your position is a myth.
You are a technical person, I presume, but if not, just assume it as a hypothetical. You can make, say, $80k/year as an experienced technical worker for an established business. As a low-level manager, you could make say $100k/year. But management is stressful, because it requires understanding and coordinating not only the task at hand, but also the people doing it and the customer who demands it, and then doing all of this within the time and budget constraints given. So the extra stress is not worth 25% more to you.
I am a technical person. I have also worked at a startup full of experienced coders. The biggest problem we had as we grew was that many of these coders were burned out on coding and would rather have done management. Any of them would have been competent managers. I was actually the only coder in that environment that had no interest in it.
As for management being stressful, coding is also stressful. So is pretty much any job that you have to grind 8 hours a day at. Management is an overpaid position because of hierarchical thinking and the buddy-buddy system, not because of supply and demand for competent labor. For top-level CEOs, a lot of that is rockstar thinking.
It really doesn't work when you have a military superpower who has already twice used nuclear weapons on civilians aiming all of their nuclear weapons at you and picking fights with you at every opportunity around the world.
You seem to forget that the USSR was itself a military superpower with nuclear weapons and had to be around the world asserting its authority in order to be in those fights.
The US did it by mortgaging the futures of their children and failing to provide for a large portion of their population, the USSR did not take that path and paid the price. Don't be mistaken that we came pretty close to collapsing our own economy in the process.
Do you know nothing of Stalin and the millions who died from starvation? And the US has been a welfare state for a long time. The difference between the US and the USSR was that in the USSR everybody was poor except for the elites.
The people complaining about the horrible, just horrible conditions at Amazon would appear to have never had to work a low-paid, low-skill production-line job.
Tell me about it. I worked a summer before college in a recycling plant. Awful, dirty, and hazardous place. Some of the people there were doing it full time for a living. It impressed on me why I was going to college.
Everyone derides management, but few people are competent at the task, and fewer still want to do it.
Bullshit. The problem is too many workers would rather manage than work. The job is vastly overpaid.
These people need to be able to survive their whole lives.
This is the big question. Are they surviving? It would seem so. Do they deserve to get paid $20/hr in a country that already has a generous social welfare system? I find the argument dubious.
I suspect the those pesky real journalists probably don't enough about the tech side of things to ask the questions they really need to be asking in order to debunk this.
The 60 Minutes piece has already been trashed by multiple outlets:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/60-minutes-hearts-the-nsa.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/16/nsa-surveillance-60-minutes-cbs-facts
http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/12/60-minutes-nsa-good-snowden-bad/356174/
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/why-did-em-60-minutes-em-let-the-head-of-the-nsa-fool-its-audience/282377/
http://www.thenation.com/blog/177598/sad-decline-60-minutes-continues-weeks-nsa-whitewash
There is a nearly identical problem in school grades: we want to eliminate bias in grading so we use "standardized tests". Pretty soon teachers are teaching the test, not the subject.
I don't see a problem with this, as long as the test covers the material that is supposed to be learned. The reason standardized tests came into play is because of all the students graduating without basic skills.
I'm not the one making the lame excuses. Another poster provided you a link for Garfield 2. If that's not scraping the bottom of the barrel, I don't know what is.
I guess it's how you define successful, but Eddie Murphy had a better career, especially in his prime. But like Murray, he bottomed out too. Murphy had the donkey in Shrek, anyways, and Murray had the leading role in Lost in Translation. That's about it for anything of note for the two of them for a long time.
Do you have a bridge you'd like to sell me too?
The only one of those that is innovative is the self-driving cars and maybe glass (wearables aren't new...just less clunky now).
Self-driving cars aren't "new" either, just better now. I still give Google credit for investing in cutting edge research, though I have no idea how self-driving cars fits into Google's business expertise.
Bill Murray used to be able to carry a movie. Now he's a bit player in small movies. It's good that he's working, though.
The zerocoin proposal is akin to an agreement that everyone should trade their bikes one for one upon request. Sure, that'd be great for bike thieves - that hot bike you just stole you can just trade for some else's clean bike! [..] The question is what the hell would be in in for legitimate bike owners?
This is a very stupid analogy. Bikes are not a medium of exchange. Currency is. There are "legitimate" reasons to send money without government or some other third party tracking you, whether it is simple privacy or being able to spend money on something the government doesn't approve of, like Wikileaks or online poker.
From a practical perspective, anonymous payment would legalise corruption, legalise money laundering (to the disadvantage of everyone having more money in the legitimate economy than in the criminal one), and legalise tax evasion. You got to be a pretty kooky libertarian type to think that's a good idea.
And you must be a kooky Big Brother type to present the if-you've-got-nothing-to-hide... argument.
Buying extra space is tempting, because I hate throwing out stuff I may need later (I know I'm never going to need it, honestly).
Yeah, but you never know if you may need it later. I've already seen a post by a person on this story that was trashing stuff that turned out he could make a use of. Extra inventory is neither UI nor cosmetic. Maybe it won't give you a big advantage, but it weighs heavy on the gameplay by forcing you to make decisions about what you carry.
The microtransactions are all cosmetics and UI convenience. I consider myself quite discriminating about this sort of thing, and it doesn't bother me any. You have a limited inventory shared between all your characters, and it is possible to purchase more inventory. You could argue that this is a kind of pay to win, based on the statistical nature of the loot drops and the fact that a larger inventory could give an advantage in terms of retaining potentially valuable items. FWIW I dropped $20 and got max inventory and a cosmetic.
Serious case of cognitive dissonance going on here. You managed to contradict yourself in one paragraph. Inventory increase is not a cosmetic or a UI convenience. You admit picking up loot is a big part of the game, and you also admit you spent money on this capability!
Yeah, the developer has to make money, but I don't see how this is fundamentally any different than other schemes that in some way level you faster, either in stats or gear.