Regardless of whether the robots are used in ethical ways or not, it is guaranteed that most of the opposition to their use will be from groups who are just looking for a way to oppose either a specific war or all wars the US is involved in. The robots will be a hook for disingenuous anti-war or anti-US activism that would not actually end if the US stopped using robots.
Every single time the headlines read "US uses ___ for military purposes, ethicists are talking about it" this has always been what has happened.
Much would seem to hinge on whether you view drones as making independent "decisions", like a human does, or whether you view them as simply reacting to stimuli in a fairly predetermined way. In the former case they're autonomous agents. Maybe something that "new" that might causes us to think differently about the ethics of warfare. In the latter case they're just another man-made tool to maximize killing ability and minimizing risk. Other than that they have some (apparently pretty simplistic) AI baked in, from the perspective of "killing without risk to one's self or even having to experience the horrors of war", how are drones that different from cruise missiles?
The point I was going to make. Our drones are nothing like Asimov's robots. Asimov envisioned robots that could think, learn and adapt on their own, almost as well as humans. The three laws were created to give that robot morals and ethics. I'm not saying that we won't get to that point, but we're still a long way off from robots that would need the three laws. What we have now are simply autonomous spying and killing machines, that also can be overridden and controlled by a human remotely. Definitely not Asimov-esque. And, Asimov was anything but naive. I think Mr. Lin better READ Asimov rather than just read the Cliff's Notes and watch movies based on his stories. He was very much aware of the perilous path we could end up on. Anyone who has read him KNOWS this. Geesh, Lin is a moron!
It's just stupid comparison. Chrome automatically updates all old versions to their newest one while IE doesn't. This compares two exact versions, Chrome 15 and IE8. If you compare just browsers, IE is still easily number one at 50%, while Chrome has 25%.
Didn't Microsoft just release a statement saying they were going to be doing the same thing? So we'll have to wait for that to happen before the comparison could possibly be a valid judge of what browser is most used. My web logs still say IE, which does make me sad like bull. }:(
I would have more respect for them if they did not rely on an instrument that is easily fooled and has no scientific basis for its use -- the polygraph.
The polygraph is the security industry's equivalent of chiropratic to the medical industry.
They don't rely solely on a polygraph! They're not as stupid as that. It's more of a prop to create an uncomfortable environment. Sure, it can detect variances in physical attributes that are tied to lying, but they are not the only "instrument" used. You do know that modern chemistry started out as "pseudoscience", it was called alchemy. Actually, a lot of the science we have today came from pseudoscience, before the invention of the "scientific method" and repeatable results. Science is a process that generates repeatable results, that's all. The polygraph is just one part of the science used to detect lies, not the sole source.
I'm aware of a few people employed with 3 letter agencies doing sysadmin work at remote facilities that bring in ~$150k. The worse part of it, in my opinion, is that the background checking must be so stringent, it apparently makes it hard to hire competent admins. I've had to walk more than one of them through some basic linux cli stuff like mount, restarting daemons, etc.
It really does take a "special" kind of person to go and work for the CIA and other such agencies. Not only are the entry requirements and investigations rigorous, the continual monitoring of bank accounts, credit cards, social media, email and regular polygraphed interviews are not what most IT personalities would be down for.
The pay and other compensation are incredible, though. Has to be for the hassle and the stress of the work. I have known some guys that were/are in "The Agency" and like the work and serving their country. Not for me though.
I would have to imagine that the more the economy goes into the toilet the more independent developers (that may now be unemployed) and corporations (that may be struggling financially) are choosing to profit from their work to stay alive. The GPL and LGPL license terms have been taking a beating recently, but the acceleration of their potential demise may also be due in part to the realities of our current, global economic condition.
Case in point, Star Trek. The tech (in 1966) was so nonsensical and outlandish that it turned a lot of people off, until the show started getting critical acclaim and word of mouth praise for its handling of more contemporary issues of the time like civil rights and the Cold War.
The one thing that young, or new writers have a hard time understanding is how much *READING* is an integral part of good writing. Sure researching the plausibility of your invented tech in a sci-fi piece is something that great sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and others all did, but there is also a lot of reading and research that needs to be done on how to handle the more compelling aspects of your story need to come together. Sure, the tech plays a part, but you're not writing a tech manual. You're writing a story about PEOPLE and the tech is either a setting or a character (or both) a la the ship Serenity in Firefly. Good fiction writing in general deals with human topics, social issues and visions of the past, present or future. Writing is not a visual media, so the imagination can often fill in tech blanks, but if the human interest story is not there as the main scaffold, you're writing will not be that successful.
Interesting. So is there some sort of agreement, where the network says that they can dub over certain ads? I've noticed that the dub isn't quite perfect sometimes, and you'll catch the beginning/end of a network ad which is then replaced with a (obviously lower quality) local ad.
I believe it's an FCC regulation that a certain percentage of time has to be allocated to local programming, including advertisements, for the broadcast networks, I.e. NBC, abc, CBS, and fox. Not sure with cable channels like espn, tbs, TNT, etc. some weird rules now that over the air tv is all but dead in most populated areas of the U.S. I guess it does help keep local businesses alive, being able to be seen during highly-rated network shows.
Returning to the OP, I have often theorized on answers to those last two questions. We have already seen some of the effects of this already with News Corp pay walling their content, and the cable and broadcast companies pulling content from Hulu and other such sources due to ad injection down the pipeline into content from which the content provider sees no revenue. I think we will see a lot of this until a best-practice business model for the 21st century digital content economy is found. I am beginning to wonder if my one view of a future looking more like the past doesn't come through. Folks remember why they called them soap operas? Because of the embedded soap commercials in the plot lines of the shows. They'd write in a little aside and have the actors do the commercial right there in the set. Might see that style thing come back, along with other embedded ads like they do in the sets of movies now. Might end up the best way to keep those impressions going to the right place.
Issues like this are the reason you need to fully flesh out costs before flipping the switch on a large organization like this. almost every teacher I know has a smartphone of some kind and a lot of them are starting to get tablets. Why offer the service when you cannot fully offer it?
Well, for one you have managers in municipalities that are the stereotypical promoted because they can't do shit. Two, you have a mantra of "doing more with less". Three, the devices were probably bought with one-time monies, so there was no continuing source of funds to draw from to deal with problems like this. Four,... Oh you get the idea!
Imagine what they could have done with the $700k they would have saved by choosing a tablet other than an iPad.
Bought a decent mail server?
My thoughts exactly! The devices aren't the problem, their proprietary commercial mail system that sucks is the problem. Nice to watch people eat crow when they tout the charms of commercial software and its scalability advantages and it epically fails and costs more money than a FOSS solution. Best quote I ever heard was from a guy talking about AD, "It's got to be complicated, it has to scale." Face-palm!!!
I'm not saying I support this, but in order to understand this proposal you have to understand what an exempt employee is in US (and state) law. (IANAL: this is my rough-and-ready understanding of the system). There are two categories of employee, exempt and nonexempt, and different labor rules apply to each, about things like overtime, unionization, and benefits. There are several tests for whether a given job is exempt or non-exempt, including salary and job description. In general, people with managerial or administrative responsibilities are exempt, whereas those who work hourly and do not supervise others are nonexempt. But it's incredibly complicated (see, e.g., this page). So many IT workers were in a grey area, and this bill proposes to put those above the salary cutoff on the exempt side of the line. It does not mean singling out IT workers for some uniquely debased, exploited status, but rather putting them in the category of professionals/administrators/managers (which confers both downsides and potential benefits). You can agree or disagree with the move, but you need to appreciate how it fits into the context of American labor law.
I put emphasis on your last sentence because it should read:
You can agree or disagree with the move, but you need to appreciate how it fits into the context of *BAD* American labor law.
Labor laws are supposed to protect workers, not harm them as this bill would do. It is saying that if you make more than $X then you are exempt from overtime, regardless of the nature of your job. I am sorry, but the only things this bill helps are the corporations. They get a big chunk of money saved because they don't pay overtime to those people meeting the criteria. Not a way to recruit highly skilled labor for highly demanding jobs. Will only hurt things.
When I worked in the US, between graduating (1995) until 2001, we were already "exempt", in other words exempt from getting overtime payments. It's one of the reasons I left the US, the crappy work/life balance and the expectation that working unpaid overtime was the norm for software developers (I've since heard my old workplace now effectively requires - not during crunch times, but the actual norm - something like 50 hour weeks while only paying for 40. During crunch times of course they demand far more).
Yes, this is the norm and has been for some time, but those requirements are company-by-company, state-by-state depending on labor laws. Now, most companies that do expect more than a 40 hour work week often have liberal leave policies to help compensate for the lack of overtime pay. This bill would effectively eliminate the indirect benefits as well as any pay by making overtime compensation illegal. Notice in the bill that there is no restriction set on requesting overtime hours, just compensating them. Nice, huh?
I thought the Republican doctrine was less government interference and all about letting the free market do things.
What is the party position for interfering in the labour market in this way? On what grounds is this within party policy?
Good luck with that strategy in IT...and your boss will say, "No problem. Go find a job somewhere where you can get that 40 hour week. We need a 'team player' in our organization." You get laid off or fired, and they hire a 20-something year old that needs a job to replace you.
Brit here, wondering a) what's so special about IT workers that they need specific legislation banning overtime? b) why do you need legislation banning overtime?
Hang on, reading TFA and extracts of the Act, am I right in thinking this does not ban OT but rather include IT with exempt "professionals" from other general legislation that makes time-and-a-half OT rate mandatory? OK, now my question is why do you need any legislation specifying OT rates? Even here in the land of insane labour laws we don't have that, and in practice it is unusual for anyone making that kind of money to get any OT - or paid at all, even as time in lieu.
Bittersweet as it is, perhaps some congratulations may be in order? It seems IT is moving towards being recognised as "professional", which is nice. Continuing down that route won't lead to anything getting better though.
1. Time and a half is the standard overtime rate in the U.S. not sure if that's a state by state thing or Federal mandate.
2. This bill is obviously being supported by large companies that want to exploit their IT workers even more than they do now by making them come up with solutions with no funding, work 60+ hours a week implementing them, and not paying them more for the merit of such an accomplishment, let alone the amount of skill and time needed.
3. This act is a direct attack on the IT profession by those ignorant masses that don't realize the importance of IT support, development or just technology in general.
I realize it's entirely a selfish reason, but I'm on board with this. As a single father, my schedule is always difficult to work out. On the one hand, I will be there for my daughter's school and activities. On the other, I am male and thus employers see me as someone capable of putting in whatever hours they deem necessary. This would allow me to pack in the hours when I can, and take shorter days when I have to.
I realize this is very case specific, but god damn it's about time SOME laws work in my favor.
You don't seem to understand. Eliminating overtime pay is not the same thing as eliminating overtime hours. If this bill passed you may still have to work more than 40 hours a week, you will never get paid for more even if you work them. Granted, a number of us deal with that now, but this bill would give you no chance for any compensation. You still won't see your daughter's school activities because this way you can't afford her to be involved!
I oppose S. 1747: Computer Professionals Update Act because we IT professionals were overworked, understaffed and underfunded before the economy got bad and now you want to eliminate overtime pay for us? Yeah, that's a good way to promote job creation in a sector that requires highly skilled labor. This bill would have a crippling effect on our economy in two ways: short-term it would cause unrest among IT workers which could lead to walkouts by employees and considerable damage to the nation's productivity and critical infrastructure, long-term you would see the formation of a national or international union of IT workers that would work collectively to overturn these laws, while at the same time possibly pushing talented people away from the profession. This bill is a horrible idea and only further demonstrates the contempt of the ignorant for IT professionals that, for the last few decades, have bolstered the economy and continue to provide innovation and a world competitive edge to the United States.
Tegra 3 is faster than the A5? Whoopty-doo. You know why Apple is winning the tablet and phone market? Here's a hint: It's not about specs anymore. When it comes to tablets, people don't care about benchmarks or who's got the fastest RAM. We (Slashdot geeks) might, but the rest of the world couldn't give a flying fuck. It's about user experience. And Apple's got that all wrapped up in a pretty little bow. Whereas none of their competitors do (HP came close, and we'll see about Ice Cream Sandwich but my educated guess is "probably not good enough for the average person").
So yeah, run all the benchmarks you want NVIDIA, but when it comes down to actual concrete sales, Apple's still going to eat you for breakfast.
Apple is currently ahead in the tablet market. They also had the best performing tablet when it came out. The Prime might be better but it's about 9 months after the iPad2.
Apple is currently being outsold by almost 2:1 by Android phones. Android phones are also the best performing phones out there.
If Apple's user experience was that much better, and specs didn't matter anymore, then why isn't Apple winning the phone race too?
Well, I RTFA and the thing is 11%-25% faster depending on which one the Tegra 3 beat the A5 in. Not really that impressive given the thing has two more cores AND a higher clock speed. The 25% was in graphics FPS, by the way not CPU performance.
Not sure why most of the previous commenters thought you were redeploying these machines. Sounds like they are being surplused to me if you're writing 0s to the drives.
How about removing the drives from the machines and doing more than one backup and wipe at a time? Linux dd doesn't have a problem doing the backups of anything as long as it is mounted, and wiping would be a lot faster and easier without all those reboots and hoops you have to jump through. That's how I would attack the problem. What sense does it make to boot and backup and reboot and wipe when the drives can be easily removed from the machines and wiped attached to a processing machine. Hell, you could write scripts to do it automated and come back after lunch and do the next set of drives.
It is cheaper to build the first few stories up than down. But at some point, the cost of holding up more and more floors, structural integrity issues, wind issues, etc come into play. May be even visibility to terrorists for insurance purposes. Building down, the only cost is earth removal and dumping it somewhere. But the earth starts getting hotter, and ventilation, fire escape etc get complicated.
Complicated is an understatement. Untenable is a better word for it, given modern technologies. As a person who holds a Bachelor's of Architecture and a good grasp of geology and civil engineering, there are far fewer problems bulding up than down, and getting rid of the "dirt" is, honestly, the least of your worries. The major obstacles are:
Rock, ground water and other topology/geology - got news for you, there's more than just dirt that has to be accounted for. I cannot tell you how many building projects I have seen go horribly wrong due to improper or incomplete geological surveys of building sites. They start drilling holes for concrete piles and all of a sudden, WHOOP, there's a Carst formation!
Ventilation - a garden every 10 stories is NOT going to generate enough fresh air; unless we're talking about a garden that is the size of New York's Central Park every 10 stories.
Seismic events - This is big one #1 - hard enough to deal with when the building falling down is a problem, bigger problem when you have to deal with being buried alive several hundred feet below the surface; do you remember how long it took to get the Chilean miners out? Imagine having to get out hundreds of people? All kinds of other issues with seismic events underground.
Flood - Big one #2 - whether the source of water is a tsunami or just general flooding due to rain, designing and engineering around this problem is going to be the deal breaker. You can't just put a giant drain in the bottom. The water has to go somewhere.
No, I have been postulating that in order for mankind to survive we will need to move off the surface of the planet so it can be used almost exclusively to grow food as our population increases to beyond what we can currently sustain. The problem is the challenges of building underground are horrendous to overcome in a "green" or "sustainable" way. The technology to do it affordably just does not exist and may not for MANY centuries to come. No, folks, there was a reason we moved out of caves and started building things above ground.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of whether the robots are used in ethical ways or not, it is guaranteed that most of the opposition to their use will be from groups who are just looking for a way to oppose either a specific war or all wars the US is involved in. The robots will be a hook for disingenuous anti-war or anti-US activism that would not actually end if the US stopped using robots.
Every single time the headlines read "US uses ___ for military purposes, ethicists are talking about it" this has always been what has happened.
You're talking politics, not ethics. Big difference.
Much would seem to hinge on whether you view drones as making independent "decisions", like a human does, or whether you view them as simply reacting to stimuli in a fairly predetermined way. In the former case they're autonomous agents. Maybe something that "new" that might causes us to think differently about the ethics of warfare. In the latter case they're just another man-made tool to maximize killing ability and minimizing risk. Other than that they have some (apparently pretty simplistic) AI baked in, from the perspective of "killing without risk to one's self or even having to experience the horrors of war", how are drones that different from cruise missiles?
The point I was going to make. Our drones are nothing like Asimov's robots. Asimov envisioned robots that could think, learn and adapt on their own, almost as well as humans. The three laws were created to give that robot morals and ethics. I'm not saying that we won't get to that point, but we're still a long way off from robots that would need the three laws. What we have now are simply autonomous spying and killing machines, that also can be overridden and controlled by a human remotely. Definitely not Asimov-esque. And, Asimov was anything but naive. I think Mr. Lin better READ Asimov rather than just read the Cliff's Notes and watch movies based on his stories. He was very much aware of the perilous path we could end up on. Anyone who has read him KNOWS this. Geesh, Lin is a moron!
I would say that a lot of people who have to provide support care a great deal whether you're using IE 6 or IE 8.
No?
No, just us web devs. :)
It's just stupid comparison. Chrome automatically updates all old versions to their newest one while IE doesn't. This compares two exact versions, Chrome 15 and IE8. If you compare just browsers, IE is still easily number one at 50%, while Chrome has 25%.
Didn't Microsoft just release a statement saying they were going to be doing the same thing? So we'll have to wait for that to happen before the comparison could possibly be a valid judge of what browser is most used. My web logs still say IE, which does make me sad like bull. }:(
I would have more respect for them if they did not rely on an instrument that is easily fooled and has no scientific basis for its use -- the polygraph.
The polygraph is the security industry's equivalent of chiropratic to the medical industry.
They don't rely solely on a polygraph! They're not as stupid as that. It's more of a prop to create an uncomfortable environment. Sure, it can detect variances in physical attributes that are tied to lying, but they are not the only "instrument" used. You do know that modern chemistry started out as "pseudoscience", it was called alchemy. Actually, a lot of the science we have today came from pseudoscience, before the invention of the "scientific method" and repeatable results. Science is a process that generates repeatable results, that's all. The polygraph is just one part of the science used to detect lies, not the sole source.
I'm aware of a few people employed with 3 letter agencies doing sysadmin work at remote facilities that bring in ~$150k. The worse part of it, in my opinion, is that the background checking must be so stringent, it apparently makes it hard to hire competent admins. I've had to walk more than one of them through some basic linux cli stuff like mount, restarting daemons, etc.
It really does take a "special" kind of person to go and work for the CIA and other such agencies. Not only are the entry requirements and investigations rigorous, the continual monitoring of bank accounts, credit cards, social media, email and regular polygraphed interviews are not what most IT personalities would be down for.
The pay and other compensation are incredible, though. Has to be for the hassle and the stress of the work. I have known some guys that were/are in "The Agency" and like the work and serving their country. Not for me though.
I would have to imagine that the more the economy goes into the toilet the more independent developers (that may now be unemployed) and corporations (that may be struggling financially) are choosing to profit from their work to stay alive. The GPL and LGPL license terms have been taking a beating recently, but the acceleration of their potential demise may also be due in part to the realities of our current, global economic condition.
Case in point, Star Trek. The tech (in 1966) was so nonsensical and outlandish that it turned a lot of people off, until the show started getting critical acclaim and word of mouth praise for its handling of more contemporary issues of the time like civil rights and the Cold War.
The one thing that young, or new writers have a hard time understanding is how much *READING* is an integral part of good writing. Sure researching the plausibility of your invented tech in a sci-fi piece is something that great sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and others all did, but there is also a lot of reading and research that needs to be done on how to handle the more compelling aspects of your story need to come together. Sure, the tech plays a part, but you're not writing a tech manual. You're writing a story about PEOPLE and the tech is either a setting or a character (or both) a la the ship Serenity in Firefly. Good fiction writing in general deals with human topics, social issues and visions of the past, present or future. Writing is not a visual media, so the imagination can often fill in tech blanks, but if the human interest story is not there as the main scaffold, you're writing will not be that successful.
Interesting. So is there some sort of agreement, where the network says that they can dub over certain ads? I've noticed that the dub isn't quite perfect sometimes, and you'll catch the beginning/end of a network ad which is then replaced with a (obviously lower quality) local ad.
I believe it's an FCC regulation that a certain percentage of time has to be allocated to local programming, including advertisements, for the broadcast networks, I.e. NBC, abc, CBS, and fox. Not sure with cable channels like espn, tbs, TNT, etc. some weird rules now that over the air tv is all but dead in most populated areas of the U.S. I guess it does help keep local businesses alive, being able to be seen during highly-rated network shows.
Returning to the OP, I have often theorized on answers to those last two questions. We have already seen some of the effects of this already with News Corp pay walling their content, and the cable and broadcast companies pulling content from Hulu and other such sources due to ad injection down the pipeline into content from which the content provider sees no revenue. I think we will see a lot of this until a best-practice business model for the 21st century digital content economy is found. I am beginning to wonder if my one view of a future looking more like the past doesn't come through. Folks remember why they called them soap operas? Because of the embedded soap commercials in the plot lines of the shows. They'd write in a little aside and have the actors do the commercial right there in the set. Might see that style thing come back, along with other embedded ads like they do in the sets of movies now. Might end up the best way to keep those impressions going to the right place.
Issues like this are the reason you need to fully flesh out costs before flipping the switch on a large organization like this. almost every teacher I know has a smartphone of some kind and a lot of them are starting to get tablets. Why offer the service when you cannot fully offer it?
Well, for one you have managers in municipalities that are the stereotypical promoted because they can't do shit. Two, you have a mantra of "doing more with less". Three, the devices were probably bought with one-time monies, so there was no continuing source of funds to draw from to deal with problems like this. Four, ... Oh you get the idea!
Imagine what they could have done with the $700k they would have saved by choosing a tablet other than an iPad.
Bought a decent mail server?
My thoughts exactly! The devices aren't the problem, their proprietary commercial mail system that sucks is the problem. Nice to watch people eat crow when they tout the charms of commercial software and its scalability advantages and it epically fails and costs more money than a FOSS solution. Best quote I ever heard was from a guy talking about AD, "It's got to be complicated, it has to scale." Face-palm!!!
I'm not saying I support this, but in order to understand this proposal you have to understand what an exempt employee is in US (and state) law. (IANAL: this is my rough-and-ready understanding of the system). There are two categories of employee, exempt and nonexempt, and different labor rules apply to each, about things like overtime, unionization, and benefits. There are several tests for whether a given job is exempt or non-exempt, including salary and job description. In general, people with managerial or administrative responsibilities are exempt, whereas those who work hourly and do not supervise others are nonexempt. But it's incredibly complicated (see, e.g., this page). So many IT workers were in a grey area, and this bill proposes to put those above the salary cutoff on the exempt side of the line. It does not mean singling out IT workers for some uniquely debased, exploited status, but rather putting them in the category of professionals/administrators/managers (which confers both downsides and potential benefits). You can agree or disagree with the move, but you need to appreciate how it fits into the context of American labor law.
I put emphasis on your last sentence because it should read:
Labor laws are supposed to protect workers, not harm them as this bill would do. It is saying that if you make more than $X then you are exempt from overtime, regardless of the nature of your job. I am sorry, but the only things this bill helps are the corporations. They get a big chunk of money saved because they don't pay overtime to those people meeting the criteria. Not a way to recruit highly skilled labor for highly demanding jobs. Will only hurt things.
When I worked in the US, between graduating (1995) until 2001, we were already "exempt", in other words exempt from getting overtime payments. It's one of the reasons I left the US, the crappy work/life balance and the expectation that working unpaid overtime was the norm for software developers (I've since heard my old workplace now effectively requires - not during crunch times, but the actual norm - something like 50 hour weeks while only paying for 40. During crunch times of course they demand far more).
Yes, this is the norm and has been for some time, but those requirements are company-by-company, state-by-state depending on labor laws. Now, most companies that do expect more than a 40 hour work week often have liberal leave policies to help compensate for the lack of overtime pay. This bill would effectively eliminate the indirect benefits as well as any pay by making overtime compensation illegal. Notice in the bill that there is no restriction set on requesting overtime hours, just compensating them. Nice, huh?
No an american, so I am confused.
I thought the Republican doctrine was less government interference and all about letting the free market do things. What is the party position for interfering in the labour market in this way? On what grounds is this within party policy?
http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/12/02/1350229/us-senator-proposes-bill-to-eliminate-overtime-for-it-workers#
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2555346&cid=38238582
No problem, just enforce 40 hour work weeks too.
Good luck with that strategy in IT...and your boss will say, "No problem. Go find a job somewhere where you can get that 40 hour week. We need a 'team player' in our organization." You get laid off or fired, and they hire a 20-something year old that needs a job to replace you.
Brit here, wondering a) what's so special about IT workers that they need specific legislation banning overtime? b) why do you need legislation banning overtime?
Hang on, reading TFA and extracts of the Act, am I right in thinking this does not ban OT but rather include IT with exempt "professionals" from other general legislation that makes time-and-a-half OT rate mandatory? OK, now my question is why do you need any legislation specifying OT rates? Even here in the land of insane labour laws we don't have that, and in practice it is unusual for anyone making that kind of money to get any OT - or paid at all, even as time in lieu.
Bittersweet as it is, perhaps some congratulations may be in order? It seems IT is moving towards being recognised as "professional", which is nice. Continuing down that route won't lead to anything getting better though.
1. Time and a half is the standard overtime rate in the U.S. not sure if that's a state by state thing or Federal mandate.
2. This bill is obviously being supported by large companies that want to exploit their IT workers even more than they do now by making them come up with solutions with no funding, work 60+ hours a week implementing them, and not paying them more for the merit of such an accomplishment, let alone the amount of skill and time needed.
3. This act is a direct attack on the IT profession by those ignorant masses that don't realize the importance of IT support, development or just technology in general.
I realize it's entirely a selfish reason, but I'm on board with this. As a single father, my schedule is always difficult to work out. On the one hand, I will be there for my daughter's school and activities. On the other, I am male and thus employers see me as someone capable of putting in whatever hours they deem necessary. This would allow me to pack in the hours when I can, and take shorter days when I have to.
I realize this is very case specific, but god damn it's about time SOME laws work in my favor.
You don't seem to understand. Eliminating overtime pay is not the same thing as eliminating overtime hours. If this bill passed you may still have to work more than 40 hours a week, you will never get paid for more even if you work them. Granted, a number of us deal with that now, but this bill would give you no chance for any compensation. You still won't see your daughter's school activities because this way you can't afford her to be involved!
Dear Congressperson:
I oppose S. 1747: Computer Professionals Update Act because we IT professionals were overworked, understaffed and underfunded before the economy got bad and now you want to eliminate overtime pay for us? Yeah, that's a good way to promote job creation in a sector that requires highly skilled labor. This bill would have a crippling effect on our economy in two ways: short-term it would cause unrest among IT workers which could lead to walkouts by employees and considerable damage to the nation's productivity and critical infrastructure, long-term you would see the formation of a national or international union of IT workers that would work collectively to overturn these laws, while at the same time possibly pushing talented people away from the profession. This bill is a horrible idea and only further demonstrates the contempt of the ignorant for IT professionals that, for the last few decades, have bolstered the economy and continue to provide innovation and a world competitive edge to the United States.
*sigh*
Tegra 3 is faster than the A5? Whoopty-doo. You know why Apple is winning the tablet and phone market? Here's a hint: It's not about specs anymore. When it comes to tablets, people don't care about benchmarks or who's got the fastest RAM. We (Slashdot geeks) might, but the rest of the world couldn't give a flying fuck. It's about user experience. And Apple's got that all wrapped up in a pretty little bow. Whereas none of their competitors do (HP came close, and we'll see about Ice Cream Sandwich but my educated guess is "probably not good enough for the average person").
So yeah, run all the benchmarks you want NVIDIA, but when it comes down to actual concrete sales, Apple's still going to eat you for breakfast.
Apple is currently ahead in the tablet market. They also had the best performing tablet when it came out. The Prime might be better but it's about 9 months after the iPad2. Apple is currently being outsold by almost 2:1 by Android phones. Android phones are also the best performing phones out there.
If Apple's user experience was that much better, and specs didn't matter anymore, then why isn't Apple winning the phone race too?
Well, I RTFA and the thing is 11%-25% faster depending on which one the Tegra 3 beat the A5 in. Not really that impressive given the thing has two more cores AND a higher clock speed. The 25% was in graphics FPS, by the way not CPU performance.
Anonymous, I am poor. My bank routing number is ...
Not sure why most of the previous commenters thought you were redeploying these machines. Sounds like they are being surplused to me if you're writing 0s to the drives.
How about removing the drives from the machines and doing more than one backup and wipe at a time? Linux dd doesn't have a problem doing the backups of anything as long as it is mounted, and wiping would be a lot faster and easier without all those reboots and hoops you have to jump through. That's how I would attack the problem. What sense does it make to boot and backup and reboot and wipe when the drives can be easily removed from the machines and wiped attached to a processing machine. Hell, you could write scripts to do it automated and come back after lunch and do the next set of drives.
It is cheaper to build the first few stories up than down. But at some point, the cost of holding up more and more floors, structural integrity issues, wind issues, etc come into play. May be even visibility to terrorists for insurance purposes. Building down, the only cost is earth removal and dumping it somewhere. But the earth starts getting hotter, and ventilation, fire escape etc get complicated.
Complicated is an understatement. Untenable is a better word for it, given modern technologies. As a person who holds a Bachelor's of Architecture and a good grasp of geology and civil engineering, there are far fewer problems bulding up than down, and getting rid of the "dirt" is, honestly, the least of your worries. The major obstacles are:
No, I have been postulating that in order for mankind to survive we will need to move off the surface of the planet so it can be used almost exclusively to grow food as our population increases to beyond what we can currently sustain. The problem is the challenges of building underground are horrendous to overcome in a "green" or "sustainable" way. The technology to do it affordably just does not exist and may not for MANY centuries to come. No, folks, there was a reason we moved out of caves and started building things above ground.