I am surprised that OP would describe someone as an 'executive' when they're earning that little and carry a 'manager' title. That's far from being an executive in most organizations. Executives usually carry a VP title, and are usually able to speak for the company (i.e. have P&L responsibility and authority to enter into a contract). A manager usually simply has some people reporting to them, and in a modern organization their authority is firmly circumscribed. As to the substance of the story, there has to be more to it. If everyone who was willing to entertain an offer was fired, there would be noone left.
Pardon the commercial intrusion, but are we discussing a $1.6B innovation by the same "Europe" currently facing an existential crisis that is threatening to destroy the very economic fabric of the world?
Either I am confused, or the media are confused... because they are portraying the current fiscal situation as one step removed from "widespread cannibalism", and here we are talking about physics.
My son's grade 7 class are using Scratch. He's built some cool things with it, but it seemed like everything was wrapped in protective padding to me. From memory, it's a derivative of Squeak, which is a fairly serious Smalltalk implementation. I became interested in the virtual worlds stuff that the Croquet project was doing, but ran out of cycles before I could get too deep.
Since there were no car crashes before the existence of cell phones, eliminating cell phone usage will completely eliminate car crashes.
In other news, government prohibition of illegal drugs has completely eliminated drug abuse.
I'm not sure what the case is in your/his jurisdiction, but in the Province of Ontario (Canada), there is a designation of 'vexatious litigant' that can be applied to someone who wastes the court's time with repeated frivolous lawsuits. A person designated as a 'vexatious litigant' cannot initiate proceedings without a judge's permission.
Many large banks (I imagine this applies to enterprises above some size, but I happen to have direct knowledge of banks in this regard) decide how much tax they will pay in any given year as a matter of policy, as opposed to a matter of accounting. The tax laws are sufficiently complex that with a little creativity, they easily could pay zero tax. Instead, they choose a tolerable level of tax that will not expose them to political grief.
See Sugata Mitra's excellent TED talk. He makes the point that rather than deploying technology in support of education in places where the improvement is marginal, we should target it instead at places where teachers are either bad or non-existent, and where the impact will be larger.
I'll spoil some of his best lines: as part of their research on how kids can teach themselves, they dropped a hardened computer kiosk in a remote rural village where "they were assured that noone had ever taught anyone anything"... and left it for a few months for the kids there to play with. They came back to see what progress was being made, and the first kids they spoke to led with "Oh, it's your machine? Good. We need more RAM and a faster CPU, please."
The 'provider so-and-so throttles traffic' story keeps coming up. My own Canadian telco is guilty of this. I keep hearing 'in Japan you can get 100MB/s consumer-grade service' or 'in France you can get 60MB/s'... but I never hear that a provider outside Canada and the US is shaping/throttling/whatever their traffic.
Is this truly a global problem that I just don't hear about because of my own media filter?
And this is precisely what motivated them to put the honking big capacitors behind the LED headlights... in that scenario, the car will automatically vaporize the moose with the laser cannons.
The speaker begins by noting that technology has marginal impact where schools are already good, but huge impact where schools are bad or non-existent. He then discusses how his work shows that children collaborate in learning.
This reminds me of the old joke... "The Pentagon reports today that a truckload of toilet seats was stolen in transit. The estimated street value is $2 billion..."
No matter how foolish any particular individual might seem, with their prejudices and their ignorance and their oddball beliefs, the choices made by large groups of the unwashed tend in the main to be good choices.
So far, this approach (representative democracy) seems to work better than anything else that we've tried.
There are structural problems (campaign rules, party politics, jerrymandering)... but these have not yet canceled out the benefits of the Big Idea: let people choose their leader.
Smear butter on one side, strap a cat to the other, and walla! massive array of hot buttered cats, the passengers provide the lift. You can dispense with the engines altogether.
"IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. "That was the moment we realised the game was completely up," says a person who was there."
For those outside of Rogers' service area, who have not had the pleasure of experiencing their so-called Customer Service directly, you can do so vicariously at http://www.ihaterogers.ca/.
>> At that point, unless we were purposely broadcasting for neighbors, who'd ever hear us?
The first people who find intelligent life will of course be the content weasels, filing a lawsuit against the newly discovered aliens for illegally consuming the content.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. While most police forces are still subject to civilian control, Customs officials in the US and Canada increasingly do not operate transparently. In the absence of clear civilian control, they and all other police forces inevitably descend into corruption and abuse.
Western police are not immune to this. "Our cops don't do that!"... BS. I don't know why we (westerners) think that we're inherently better human beings than say, Soviet Russian police. Nothing about us makes our societies better, it is our political and economic freedom that has made us better. Define power roles and remove the controls... the "Stanford Prison Experiment" could easily have been a prototype for Abu Ghraib.
When you consider that Customs officials increasingly don't have to answer to anyone, and there is no longer any useful process of complaint or appeal, it is inevitable that they will abuse their power. After all, you could be a terrorist/communist/anarchist/whatever it was 150 years ago.
As for customs guards, the fact that you're a business traveller, earn 10x what they do, and that this is the only context in which they will ever have power over you will surely cause them to abuse their authority. This is human nature.
Rulemaster... errr I mean Rolemaster, was the basis of Gemstone, which limps along as a text-based game to this day at http://www.play.net/. At its peak, pre-EQ, it attracted perhaps 3000 simultaneous players. They parted ways with ICE a long time ago, and renamed all their lore (ummm shaalk to vultite, lien to mein iirc). I remember having 'old' gear as novelty items for a long time.
The game managed to cause both class and skill-based constraints. You *could* stray off the 'best' point allocation system, if you wanted to suck. If you ever messed up point allocation on levelling, your character would be left severely broken. To pick a simple example, a rogue who mis-allocated lockpicking points could find themselves unable to open locks at their level. Since you got experience for doing things (rogues opening locks, healers healing, everyone for killing stuff), you would be left with a major exp path being untenable.
The game was also completely wide-open PVP for ages, and a small number of very powerful players kept the peace, with GMs intervening mostly only when the stuff hit the fan.
I was certain that the story included magnets in the cabinet destroying the drives, not the EMP across the road. My choice of 'EMP' as a description was perhaps unfortunate.
I assumed that inverse-square (I see you wrote cube... is it the surface area or volume of the physically analagous sphere that determines field intensity?) would make a simple magnet impractical, but what about some sort of resonant effect from multiple magnets?
How about induction? How hot would a drive need to get to clear the data?
Slashdot Mirror
I am surprised that OP would describe someone as an 'executive' when they're earning that little and carry a 'manager' title. That's far from being an executive in most organizations. Executives usually carry a VP title, and are usually able to speak for the company (i.e. have P&L responsibility and authority to enter into a contract). A manager usually simply has some people reporting to them, and in a modern organization their authority is firmly circumscribed. As to the substance of the story, there has to be more to it. If everyone who was willing to entertain an offer was fired, there would be noone left.
He could call it the State Telecommunications And Security Initiative? I'll have to check now, I'm worried that STASI might be already taken...
Pardon the commercial intrusion, but are we discussing a $1.6B innovation by the same "Europe" currently facing an existential crisis that is threatening to destroy the very economic fabric of the world? Either I am confused, or the media are confused... because they are portraying the current fiscal situation as one step removed from "widespread cannibalism", and here we are talking about physics.
The pen's ok, and reasonably priced, but they get you on the toner cartridges...
My son's grade 7 class are using Scratch. He's built some cool things with it, but it seemed like everything was wrapped in protective padding to me. From memory, it's a derivative of Squeak, which is a fairly serious Smalltalk implementation. I became interested in the virtual worlds stuff that the Croquet project was doing, but ran out of cycles before I could get too deep.
Since there were no car crashes before the existence of cell phones, eliminating cell phone usage will completely eliminate car crashes. In other news, government prohibition of illegal drugs has completely eliminated drug abuse.
I'm not sure what the case is in your/his jurisdiction, but in the Province of Ontario (Canada), there is a designation of 'vexatious litigant' that can be applied to someone who wastes the court's time with repeated frivolous lawsuits. A person designated as a 'vexatious litigant' cannot initiate proceedings without a judge's permission.
For an interesting perspective on globalization of organized crime, see Misha Glenny's TED talk on the subject
Many large banks (I imagine this applies to enterprises above some size, but I happen to have direct knowledge of banks in this regard) decide how much tax they will pay in any given year as a matter of policy, as opposed to a matter of accounting. The tax laws are sufficiently complex that with a little creativity, they easily could pay zero tax. Instead, they choose a tolerable level of tax that will not expose them to political grief.
Is the thinking here is that when you open the box, instead of finding the cat inside, you find a smaller box?
I'll spoil some of his best lines: as part of their research on how kids can teach themselves, they dropped a hardened computer kiosk in a remote rural village where "they were assured that noone had ever taught anyone anything"... and left it for a few months for the kids there to play with. They came back to see what progress was being made, and the first kids they spoke to led with "Oh, it's your machine? Good. We need more RAM and a faster CPU, please."
Is this truly a global problem that I just don't hear about because of my own media filter?
And this is precisely what motivated them to put the honking big capacitors behind the LED headlights... in that scenario, the car will automatically vaporize the moose with the laser cannons.
The speaker begins by noting that technology has marginal impact where schools are already good, but huge impact where schools are bad or non-existent. He then discusses how his work shows that children collaborate in learning.
Also http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html which in addition to some super cool eye candy graphs, points out the growing convergence of first-world and third-world problems.
A big ask where respondents are notorious for not RTFA, but I found both talks fascinating and hope that you do too.
This reminds me of the old joke... "The Pentagon reports today that a truckload of toilet seats was stolen in transit. The estimated street value is $2 billion..."
No matter how foolish any particular individual might seem, with their prejudices and their ignorance and their oddball beliefs, the choices made by large groups of the unwashed tend in the main to be good choices. So far, this approach (representative democracy) seems to work better than anything else that we've tried. There are structural problems (campaign rules, party politics, jerrymandering)... but these have not yet canceled out the benefits of the Big Idea: let people choose their leader.
You cannot hope to bribe or sway,
The Congress of the U.S.A.
But given what this lot will do
Un-bribed, there's no occasion to.
Smear butter on one side, strap a cat to the other, and walla! massive array of hot buttered cats, the passengers provide the lift. You can dispense with the engines altogether.
A recent article in the Economist http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10430246 may provide helpful context to Americans trying to understand the thinking here.
For those outside of Rogers' service area, who have not had the pleasure of experiencing their so-called Customer Service directly, you can do so vicariously at http://www.ihaterogers.ca/.
>> At that point, unless we were purposely broadcasting for neighbors, who'd ever hear us?
The first people who find intelligent life will of course be the content weasels, filing a lawsuit against the newly discovered aliens for illegally consuming the content.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. While most police forces are still subject to civilian control, Customs officials in the US and Canada increasingly do not operate transparently. In the absence of clear civilian control, they and all other police forces inevitably descend into corruption and abuse.
Western police are not immune to this. "Our cops don't do that!"... BS. I don't know why we (westerners) think that we're inherently better human beings than say, Soviet Russian police. Nothing about us makes our societies better, it is our political and economic freedom that has made us better. Define power roles and remove the controls... the "Stanford Prison Experiment" could easily have been a prototype for Abu Ghraib.
When you consider that Customs officials increasingly don't have to answer to anyone, and there is no longer any useful process of complaint or appeal, it is inevitable that they will abuse their power. After all, you could be a terrorist/communist/anarchist/whatever it was 150 years ago.
As for customs guards, the fact that you're a business traveller, earn 10x what they do, and that this is the only context in which they will ever have power over you will surely cause them to abuse their authority. This is human nature.
Rulemaster... errr I mean Rolemaster, was the basis of Gemstone, which limps along as a text-based game to this day at http://www.play.net/. At its peak, pre-EQ, it attracted perhaps 3000 simultaneous players. They parted ways with ICE a long time ago, and renamed all their lore (ummm shaalk to vultite, lien to mein iirc). I remember having 'old' gear as novelty items for a long time.
The game managed to cause both class and skill-based constraints. You *could* stray off the 'best' point allocation system, if you wanted to suck. If you ever messed up point allocation on levelling, your character would be left severely broken. To pick a simple example, a rogue who mis-allocated lockpicking points could find themselves unable to open locks at their level. Since you got experience for doing things (rogues opening locks, healers healing, everyone for killing stuff), you would be left with a major exp path being untenable.
The game was also completely wide-open PVP for ages, and a small number of very powerful players kept the peace, with GMs intervening mostly only when the stuff hit the fan.
I was certain that the story included magnets in the cabinet destroying the drives, not the EMP across the road. My choice of 'EMP' as a description was perhaps unfortunate. I assumed that inverse-square (I see you wrote cube... is it the surface area or volume of the physically analagous sphere that determines field intensity?) would make a simple magnet impractical, but what about some sort of resonant effect from multiple magnets? How about induction? How hot would a drive need to get to clear the data?