comrade_ogilvy

In modern America we have this outlandish idea that it is a fine thing to "be ourselves" to the limits of the law out in public.

More traditional etiquettes include the concept of what happens in public following different rules from what happens in private. "I do not care as long as he does not scare the horses in the street" is the old saying. Just do not cause other people hassles, please. (This has a dark aspect, too, overlooking domestic violence hidden behind closed doors, but that is not important to the question on hand.)

If we move to a world where your public behavior might be displayed to your family and co-workers, I think that will be a good thing overall. If you want to misbehave, please keep it in private locales.

"I often wonder about the quality of the people they hire as I have yet to run into a talented dev who would quit their current job to do this one week contract for hire option."

I wonder that, too. The very best people usually have a job that they like well enough, but might change jobs for a real offer.

"Quit your job and we will probably hire you" is not so attractive to experience people, who are usually no longer in their 20s. Even if a developer were inclined to give it a go on his or her vacation time, most employment contracts require notification for taking on additional employment -- it is rather awkward and annoying to the candidate to jump around these hoops.

Right. To be more precise, security is a set of costs on web developers, web viewers, and attackers. There is no obviously correct way to balance all three, once you start seeing feasible removed/missing features that would be genuinely useful tallied as costs.

And the contract change is not considered valid unless it was overtly accepted by an employee with appropriate authority. A random low wage employee processing these kinds of forms would be presumed to not have that authority with the business.

"Passive income" was once the province of people who accumulated wealth and now were reaping the benefits of good long-term strategies. That is honest enough.

Being a marketing middleman can be an honest enough niche, too.

That these particular marketing middlemen, with an intrinsically ephemeral revenue stream, would try to steal the term "passive income" to glamorize their take tells us a lot about the nature of the business, right? Fraud. Lots of fraud.

As a volunteer member of the armed services, he is expected to be held accountable by standards that do not necessarily apply to civilians. That can cut both ways. In this case, it is likely to the defendants disadvantage, but that was always part of the context of his possible actions before they happened.

The niche is growing and will continue to grow into the foreseeable future. So making a good profit is possible.

However the competition is heating up quickly to nuclear fusion temperatures. Every useful app or silly game on every smart phone is effectively a direct competitor -- Zynga needs people obsessing on very certain games for hundreds of hours, enough time to punch in real dollars on the whim.

Furthermore, this is an inherently unsticky kind of niche. Every customer will need to be won over again in 12 months or less, as they tire of that one charming game.

The stock is going to crater...

That is fine, even if confusing. The point is the book allegedely has distilled the "good enough" formula -- whether the formula is new or mined from previous films is unimportant. That so many movies are echoes of The Matrix and similar is kind of the point.

There must be 50 books out there about screenwriting that talk in similar terms about the pattern -- the 3 act structure with character development tent poles and rising stakes. Their weakness is that there is no admired movie that fits any proposed pattern very closely, although many excellent follow the pattern loosely.

Perhaps the genius of this book is it has achieved the correct enough formula for comfortable mediocrity? Dunno. Do not care.

I would argue that confirmation of the shape in 1G has some actual value.

Sometimes "silly" experiments can have value. I chatted with a physic prof once who said the very first experiment he did after gaining tenure was to investigate the isotropy of the universe in particle accelerator experiments -- in other words, do the laws of physic work the same way when the accelerator is pointed one direction, relative to distant stars, as any other.

Obviously, the likely result would be nada.

However, if he found something, it would be two possible things: (1) He was going to earn an instant Noble prize, or (2) There was a potential subtle systematic design error particle physicists had overlooked -- knowing how to look for this error and/or correct for it could have value.

#2 was more likely. But why not?

Perhaps not from the outset. But if you put your mind to it, you can probably make a good guess about whether to cut and run after 12-18 months, and go for another lottery ticket.

As I see it, we need more explicit rules about privacy that encompass both gov't and private parties. Whether we get rid of FISA or the NSA will ultimately not matter (fat chance, of course) -- if it seems important enough, gov't will always be able to entice the private owners of data to "voluntarily" share with law enforcement.

This car location database is just the tip of the iceberg, and it happens to be absolutely unambiguously legal for gov't and corporations to do whatever they please with this data.

I am not actually paranoid. I am quite confident that the norm is for the police to have reasonable procedures in place -- the last thing a police department wants is for a police officer or former police officer to be accused of using police resources in a creepy manner to stalk/spy on an ex-spouse or similar. They want an explicit paper trial of Officer X asked about car owned by person Y for reason Z. Even if the norm is pretty good, the public should have clear expectation that can be understood.

If it really was a consistent win for the employers, then perhaps it is a non-issue in the larger sense -- employees just need to negotiate hours vs. compensation. Whatever.

I think the deeper insight of TFA is that there may be short term gains for the employer, but the long term results are muddy or outright negative -- management becomes addicted to poor management habits that hurt the company health in myriad ways.

Agreed.

Inside of that (formerly) $16 billion company is a really wonderful $2 billion company fighting to get out.

Considering the norms of the particular industry would be good advice, but there are often choices within the industry. Dressing up False Choices in machismo not only obscures reality, but plays right into the hands of managers inclined to take advantage.

Indeed, a 4% difference compounds quite well. Unfortunately many people imagine they might get a 3% or 4% net bump, when they are really going to get 1% extra.

Working an extra 20% so that you are paid appropriately larger salary 19 years down the line is not a terrible choice if you really need the money. It is also possible you will earn true grade improvement along the way and get a one time additional bump of 5% for your effort.

Of course, if we reverse the equation, things might look differently. I have about 3 potential free hour per workday and 12 free hours per weekend day, for a net 39 hours of "my own time", earned by showing up to work. Giving 10 hours of those to the employer is a "pay cut" of 25%.

The grass is always greener, especially when you remember someone lifting their leg and peeing on your own grass last month.

I would bet that ~100% of the women with small children who stay at home sometimes get inappropriate suggestions that they are choosing to waste their potential.

I would bet that ~100% of the women with small children who work full time sometimes get inappropriate suggestions that they are choosing to be an inferior mother.

Both sting. And there is no polite response.

FWIW, the biological mother as the default primary care giver for very small children seems to be a cultural universal. (That is not to suggest that the default should be assumed to be automatically superior.)

Congress can very easily act to define the terms of the debate on these legal questions by defining "due process" (and similar factors). The courts are obliged to show reasonable deference to Congress.

Congress chooses not to, and that is implicit acceptance by the majority and minority leadership in both houses of Congress.

Furthermore, what holds the Executive in check is the combined vigilance of Congress and the Judiciary.

The Judiciary must show reasonable deference to Congress when it comes to defining such things as "due process". If Congress chooses to create a due process in which it seems very easy for the Executive to get its way (e.g. the FISA court), on what legal basis is a sitting judge supposed to stand in the way? Unless it is completely obvious by existing legal precedent, a federal judge might rightly suppose it is the job of the Appellate and SCOTUS to define any new yardsticks.

FISA courts, PRISM, NSA, drone assassinations,... Congress holds in their hands the power to define the terms of the debate. That they choose not to is simply because the minority and majority leadership in both houses of Congress more greatly fear having to explain their own position to the American people, than they fear any particular arguable abuse by this president.

The incentives do not necessarily work well there.

But I could imagine a "We The People Buy It" under a system of wealth taxes. That the gov't could choose to buy any asset for a modest premium over what the taxpayers asserts it was worth for purposes of taxes last year. Heck, maybe any citizen should be allowed in on that game?

"Hmmm, you say your restaurant business is worth only $300k? It is your lucky day! I just bought it for $360k."

Well, you could read Stephen Jay Gould's The Mis-measure of Man.

Or you could read The Bell Curve. It is positing a small difference between "races", a difference so small that it is very minor compared to the expected range of deviation for a populace.

The idea that there is a scientifically definable thing called "race" lacks data. That is your row to hoe if you believe other. Skeptics are not required to disprove the existence of the tooth fairy, Nessie, or "race".

The fact that the instructor may perhaps (or perhaps not) be mistakenly attributing to Korean ethnic-culture certain worrying aspects is completely unimportant. The real cultural problem is that an instructor perceives pressure to pass students he believes should fail. That simple perception, regardless of underlying cause, is a problem that sabotages efforts to improve.

Yes, but I would agree with dvt that there are professors who consider themselves "clever" for putting material on the exam that looks nothing like what showed up in lecture or in the homework.

Kinds of problems that can justify being on an exam are surely important enough to be in lecture or on the homework. Putting a special kind of problem on the exam that must be deconstructed before it can be transformed in a problem that showed up in the homework is a "trick".

The question is whether exam material should seem substantially different from the course material.

Looking at your first question, I am hemming and hawing whether it is correct to say zero is positive or negative or both. I would say both, thus f''(x)=0 leads us towards a legitimate solution. Having not attended your course, it is possible the issue came up multiple times and this would cause no confusion. But it might confuse someone who has an otherwise excellent command of calculus.

But given the homework problem shown later, it is rather likely that those paying attention found your exam question perfectly fair.

"Was this exam question harder than my homework problem sets? Absolutely not! It's just different." The kind of differences matter. I do not see why the exam questions need to seem different in any non-trivial way. (I speak of a general principle. I do not hold an opinion about your particular questions.)

Curriculum design and assessment design is not a new field, it is just an oft ignored field. The first step is to make very explicit goals. The downside of explicit goals is failure of the institution itself is potentially measurable. "Coverage" is a conveniently wishy-washy standard that makes it easy to pass the buck to the individual students -- "we covered that" has the convenient ring of authority.

Curving the grades is an awful idea, but how it is usually applied it is rarely harmful. Professors mostly use it defensively in favor of the student, to fudge the grades up when the test turns out to be harder on the students than the professor anticipated. I am sure an occasional professor does the opposite, but one can never be truly safe from terrible instructors (other than avoid them).

It is a magical technological cloud city. For certain business models.

If the company in question is betting on very strong growth, then it needs a large pool of experienced talent to draw upon. Paying 3X or 5X as much to get top talent can easily save money in the long run.

If you want to be taken seriously by big fish VCs, you have to be able to speak intelligently about how to spend more for a disproportionately positive payoff. The problem here is not the VCs, but the aspirations of the founders.

Finding less experienced talent for cheap may be the smarter move. For other business models.

That is a problem with the people who vote. We either will not vote for people who fail to over-promise, or fail to continue to support elected officials who make reasonable efforts to follow through, or both.

Unobtainium is almost within reach!

The other thing about plutonium people fail to recognize is that practical uranium civilian power reactors are pretty lousy at producing plutonium. The proliferation risk is non-zero, but processing spent fuel is a pretty nasty business and the amount of plutonium there is so small as to be a big expense for the small yield.

The problem with plutonium is a properly designed military reactor can take the precious U235 you might build only one half a bomb with, and generate enough plutonium to create 2 or 3 implosion devices.

That is a big reason the neighbors to Iran and NK are not panicking. NK might have a bomb or two. Iran might eventually build a bomb or two. In both cases, their expertise is limited to uranium (so far), so the number of bombs they are likely to ever own within my lifetime is very few -- their stockpiles of uranium too modest to create a larger weapons stockpile. To actually use a bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to deter the overwhelming payback. Both NK and Iran are a million miles away from getting there; they need both much more uranium and plutonium expertise to even start an attempt.

If they believed their safety were at stake, South Korea or Japan would build 50 bombs -- they are skilled at the requisite technologies. Likewise Saudi Arabia would write a check $100 billion and acquire a nuclear stockpile of their own -- their defense expenditures are so astronomically high that a modest cut to their conventional forces over a decade would foot the bill.

I rather liked the graphs, made up as they were. It clarified something observable in real life projects gone wrong: in order to partially cover up for a badly slipped schedule, new business requirements get added on. "We were late, but we did so to release an even better product to our customers." Unfortunately the inability to scope a project correlates with an inability to manage ad hoc requirements and the ensuing arbitrarily raised expectation.