markshead

>Force companies to pay a living wage.

Who determines what a "living wage" is? Does it include having cable? Internet? A car?

But beyond that, why do you want to put up any barriers to what jobs companies can hire workers for? Lets say you own a company that employees 20 people and it sits on one acre of land. You need to get someone to mow the grass. You can hire company to come in for $80 per week to mow for you. They have big expensive lawnmowers and can do it very quickly. Or you can hire Joe to mow it using an older push mower you have. Joe isn't super fast and it will take him 10 hours. So you decide the value is $8 per hour in order to be on par with the company that will do it.

I wouldn't want the government to come in and make laws that make it better for you to hire the big company than Joe. I wouldn't want them to make it harder for you to justify taking a chance on hiring Joe and giving him a shot at a job just because someone doesn't think that $8 per hour is a living wage.

If Joe works for you for a year and has good track record, who knows. Maybe he will prove dependable enough that you can find other things for him to do. Maybe some of those things will be worth paying him more. Or maybe he can get a higher paying job working for the big lawn-mowing company based on his track record with you.

What skills does it take to make minimum wage? Often it is the ability to show up on time and follow directions. If someone doesn't have those skills, I question how well they will do in a community college.

If they do have enough reliability to show up on time and enough motivation to go to the community college, there are parts of the country where they can work a minimum wage job and still pay for tuition and a place to stay.

Yes, someone who starts out cleaning does learn skills. They can become better at cleaning than the average person. They will know how to clean really bad messes without getting grossed out by it. They will know how to dispose of the stuff they clean. They will know how to clean efficiently and without wasting time. They will know what type of cleaning supplies to use.

That may not make them a manager, but there are jobs that pay higher than minimum wage that require the ability to clean as a skill. Often those jobs come with new skills to be learned. And yes, someone who has some degree of management potential could definitely start out cleaning toilets for minimum wage and work their way up to managing the cleaning staff somewhere.

Many people learn their skills on the job. Setting an artificial lower limit of what they are allowed to work for prevents some people from starting to climb a ladder toward higher skills and higher wages.

Regarding just hiring the person managing the labor to do the work: Don't forget that one person can manage multiple people.

>It means being aware that proposals written by minorities are likely to sound less confident and may understate the value of their content.

Why do you assume that the color of someone's skin will make them less capable of writing a good, confident proposal for a conference. You are suggesting that you weight the value of the proposal based on the race of the person who submitted it.

You are saying that greater than 40% of the developers in GB are not white males. What are you basing this on?

GB is only about 10% non-white and last statistic I saw on gender was that only 1.5% of people participating on open source projects (world wide) were female.

If you have a goal of "diversity" that implies that you are going to treat people differently depending on their race and gender. Race and gender becomes part of the selection criteria. Isn't that pretty much the definition of racism and sexism?

A system where the speakers are just randomly chosen from a pool of people who submitted papers would definitely not be racist or sexist, but it probably wouldn't meet your definition of diversity. (Probably wouldn't make for a very good conference either.)

A fair system is one where race and sex do not influence the selection criteria. It cannot have diversity listed as a goal. If it is a goal then you have created a racist, sexist system for selecting who gets to speak.

I think the point wasn't that Yahoo should show no ads. The point was that the ad was in a place where people were accidentally clicking on it and not knowing why a window kept appearing. This didn't add any value to the user, didn't add any value for the advertiser and over time wouldn't add any value to Yahoo because advertisers will eventually decide that clicks from Yahoo are worth much less because of the high bounce rate.

"The web is the most advanced publishing system we've ever had but the process in which most people publish is backwards next to print."

There were probably similar things said about the shift from hand copied books to using printing presses.

Costco had a company that was bringing in 3d scanners to scan your body and then making suits based on those measurements. Haven't seen it advertised for awhile, so I'm not sure how well it actually turned out.

Checkout the Dell Sputnik project. (http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/campaigns/sputnik) It looks like they are going to start selling a small SSD laptop with Ubuntu. Right now you can get the laptop with Windows and then download their Ubuntu image.

Like this? http://www.golittleguy.com/teardrops/

I'm not clear if you are looking for books, links, or topics. If you are looking for topics or books, I'd suggest starting by taking a look at the syllabi from degree programs that you respect. You may want to pay particular attention to the courses that have the word "Theory" and "Computation" in them.

You are going to find topics like:

  * Regular Languages/Expressions
  * Automata
  * Nonregular Languages
  * Context Free Languages
  * Turing Machines
  * Decidable vs. Undecidable Problems
  * Halting Problem

You can probably get a long ways just doing some searches for those topics.

I written about some of these topics in an article last year that might give you a very small introduction to finite state machines: http://blog.markwshead.com/869/state-machines-computer-scien...

Regarding your follow-up question, here are a few things I ask myself before moving forward with a new idea:

1. Can I get the expertise/experience to actually create this? I may have the technical expertise to do it, but if I don't have the domain experience I may produce something that makes perfect sense to everyone except someone who actually needs the product. Not having the experience myself is fine, but I need a plan for how I'm going to get it or someone who can provide it.

2. How would I market this? Having a good idea is one thing, but getting it in the hands of people who would actually use it is another. For me this will often mean partnering with someone who is already working with the customers I want to reach.

3. What is the probability of success and what is the potential payback? It is easy to get so enamored with a problem that you stop to think about whether it really makes business sense or not. A project has a 0.1% chance of making $1,000,000, but a 99.9% of losing money is going to be less attractive (from a financial standpoint) than project that has a 25% chance of making $100,000.

When was the last time someone's software project failed because they created a usable version too quickly?

Thinking that you can spend 30 days and then never touch your code again is stupid. However, setting a time constraint that forces you to make decisions about what to leave out in order to get your code to a stable usable state isn't such a bad thing.

Do you consider PayPal to be invisible to the end user?

I think that if it is less than $600 per person per year, you can just give cash and there is no record keeping necessary.

But for something like this to work, you'd need to have some type of centrally administered place. I'm not sure what the issues would be with giving someone food for work.