sethg

(Well, after the acquisition, we did get stock options... Lucent stock options... which, like the Kursk, went underwater and never resurfaced.)

Because some same-sex marriage opponents are obsessed with the intricacies of anal sex (whereas the typical preadolescent child really doesn’t care about the intricacies of any kind of sex). Heck, some of them are probably more obsessed with this topic than the gay men who do it.

The Occupy Wall Street protests and the “Internet strike” were both successful because they changed the terms of the debate. In the former case, the mass media, which had spent months obsessing over deficit deficit deficit, suddenly took notice of income inequality, and Romney’s Republican primary opponents started attacking him over his vulture-capitalist history. In the latter case, the fact that there was opposition to SOPA/PIPA, and that these opponents are not just “pirates”, finally became mainstream front-page news.

These are not legislative victories in and of themselves, but they are significant. The proper reaction is not “in the big scheme of things this is a small victory, so don’t feel smug about it” but “in the big scheme of things this is a small victory, so let’s build on it to go on to bigger victories”. Rome wasn’t sacked in a day.

But going up to someone and saying “you should give this away” is not negotiating for a better price; it’s practically an insult. It’s like walking into a car dealership, seeing that the sticker price is $10,000, and telling the salespeople that they really should let it go for $3,000.

Also note the difference between “I want to give my work away” and “you ought to give your work away”.

The photographer’s beef is with people who want to take his work, use it in their own publications without paying him anything, and then tell him that he should be happy with such a deal because he’s getting free publicity out of it. But this photographer did not get his camera, lenses, computer, etc. for free, and the people who want to use his work are doing it for an enterprise where they expect to be paid, so why should the photographer be the only one holding the bag?

The “$6,612” number is beside the point. A publisher who says “I will pay you one dollar for the right to use that picture” is in a whole different league from one who says “let me use it and I’ll give you credit”, because the “one dollar” fellow is at least respecting the photographer as a fellow businessman.

¹Which is to say: Consumers in bad financial situations will dispute or default on overcharges, but they’ll do the same for correct bills. Insurance companies will occasionally dispute an overcharge, leading to six months of paperwork back and forth until they agree on what to pay, but they’ll put correct bills through the same wringer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis-related_group

If I recall correctly, the United Kingdom, with its much-maligned National Health Service, spends about 40% of what the US spends per capita on health care, and yet when you measure things like life expectancy, Britons are as healthy as Americans. That gives you an idea of how much money is going down the tubes due to administrative inefficiency.

I gather that someone with a stronger theoretical CS background than myself would have spent an hour looking at the puzzle, said “Ah, this can be modelled as a graph and solved by applying the Flibblewhiz Heuristic!”, spent another hour coding up a first draft of the solution, and a third hour optimizing and cleaning up the code.

My ego has survived the blow of learning that I am not awesome enough to work for ITA, but I wish I had figured that out sooner.

North Korea, on the other hand, already had nuclear weapons, not to mention a conventional arsenal that, as others on this thread point out, can lay waste to the South.

MegaBlocks makes bricks that are advertised as compatible with LEGO bricks, but in my experience the tolerance is just a little bit off.

But when members of one class are systematically excluded from some role in society, exclusionary events are a problem if they contribute to that system. A workshop for “Men Learning Code” is a bad idea... and so is a workshop for “Women Learning To Teach Preschool”.

For all we know, the reading test was either testing for a different kind of plug-and-play (“the author of the above paragraph is using (a) apostrophe; (b) synechdoche; (c) both; (d) neither”) or is testing mastery of a certain kind of teaching-to-the-test in the guise of “reading comprehension”.

http://www.samefacts.com/2002/12/secrecy-in-government/shhhh...

[quote]

When I was young and irresponsible, I worked for the Justice Department, analyzing drug policy. In that capacity, I was put through the full security mumbo-jumbo and received a Top Secret clearance and, on top of that, clearances for various very highly taboo Codeword categories.... Having been cleared, what did I learn that it would then have been a felony for me to reveal? Nothing that would have helped the Russkis or the narco-bad-guys. But I did learn the names of assorted corrupt high-level officials in various of the Carribean banking havens Jeff MacNelly once lampooned as “Rinky-Dink and Tabasco.” No elaborate spying had been required to learn the names; apparently it was routine cafe gossip in the countries involved. So why, I asked, is this material classified? Not that I had any desire to reveal it, but I was curious.

The senior security guy in the Criminal Division set me straight: Yes, everyone knew that the Rinky-Dink-and-Tabascanese Finance Minister, or Central Bank president, or whatever it was, was crookeder than a dog’s hind leg. He knew, we knew, the Prime Minister knew, the Prime Minister knew we knew, we knew he knew we knew, ad infinitum. Maybe the Rinky-Dink-and-Tabascanese voters didn’t know; that was their lookout.

But it was our policy to make nice to Rinky-Dink and Tabasco (honest, I forget which contrylet we were talking about). If it were revealed publicly that the US Government had knowledge that Mr. So-and-so was on the take, that would embarrass the Rinky-Dink-and-Tabascanese government, thus impeding U.S. foreign policy. Ergo, properly classified.

[unquote]

My basic negotiating stance was “I appreciate what you guys have done so far to get me an X% raise in this cycle, and I hope you can use this information to convince the corporate higher-ups that I deserve more.” The managers were sympathetic but made no promises.

And four months later, I got a call from my manager telling me that I had been approved for a 10% off-cycle raise.

There are ways to be more hard-nosed and get even more, but as you can see, simply knowing what you are worth in the marketplace and articulating that value can go a long way.