Carly actually did this, citing HP's long history of caring for its workers. Many employees donated their pay to keep layoffs from happening. By the end of the Summer of 2001, though, she went ahead and enacted lay-offs anyway. In fact it about a month prior to 9-11. After announcing the lay offs, she then promptly announced the acquisition of Compaq, which she clearly had in mind ahead of time.

Other than that, she spent a lot of time talking about espeak, which never really amounted to anything, because XML (a non proprietary open standard) became accepted as the defacto application interface meta-data language. She wanted to turn HP into Computer Sciences Corp, doing consulting and software services, because she saw IBM's success...

But HP has never really done software all that well. (Just check out any HP programs that come installed or packaged with your workstation or print/scan center... (I'm not talking drivers, but the software that presents that information... it's always abominable and on most of my systems it breaks quickly.))

Lew Platt was Carly's predecessor, not successor. Lew split off Agilent first, then Carly came along and enacted the first ever lay-offs inthe company's history, because she was enamored with the draconian Cisco model leadership, which boasted a mandatory firing of the bottom 5-10% of the workforce every year, which was in direct and utter opposition to the HP Way (the basic concept that if you trust your engineers, give them what they need to succeed, they'll rise to your expectations and do a great job). The summer prior to the Lay Offs, Carly begged the employees to give back part of their pay to avoid lay offs, claiming it would avoid the inevitable. Then she "cut the fat" as she saw it... and then bought Compaq... then she butchered both those companies... which left all those who endured the lay off wondering why they'd donated their salaries to finance their eventual lay offs. It was a new low in leadership, that has only gotten worse with the ridiculous scandals and such that continue to plague a once decent company.

Now, now, those were heady days before we knew things like 9-11 and that Cisco wasn't the end-all company that she thought it was... or its mandatory firing of the bottom 10%... that she salivated over and tried to impose on a company that had never even seen a single lay-off.

Whacky fun.

Thankyou, whomever made this poll, for allowing me to vote for using evil itself. Hee hee... made my day.

The problem with teaching children in utero is the smarter ones hack mommy's system and that makes for a difficult pregnancy, with her constantly craving hot pockets, bacon flavored snacks and highly caffienated beverages.

One problem with math education is that it simply isn't the same thing as logic or computer linguistics. Even Discrete Mathematics uses a whole different set of terms, jargon and solves only a subset of the sorts of logical conditions one can expect to program in a computer. But then that's been a problem for mathematics since its inception--its application to real world issues and uses...

And very few schools actually teach programming, even at the High School level, let alone at lower level education. One reason is that a programmer generally gets paid better than a public school teacher, and so if you know how to program you've probably got a better paying job not at school. Further there's the question of what is a decent education in programming--and do you focus on programming at all with the limited time and access to computers--or teach them basic computer skills and be happy with it.

In a public school you can probably expect the computer science teacher to double as a coach, with his first love being coaching. My High School experience was a bunch of us "smart kids" (most of them were kids who had dads with computers and that had taught them a few things) figuring it out, while the teacher floundered to explain sorting algorithms and what recursion was. (He had no clue, though I didn't realize this until I got to College and what had taken months to study and explain was all explained in perfect clarity by a grad student in about an hour lecture...)

Agreed. It's less a jury and more a beauty contest, where the judges are all in the audience... and nobody has enough time to vett all the comments so the sooner you reply the more likely you are to get noticed.

I agree that some languages make Programming a very heartless and painful experience, but then others are just fun to get working. It's how I fell about Perl. I love that I can get to a solution via an assortment of different ways and that there's not just one way to do everything. It allows me to express my individuality and creativity and helps me maintain a sense of ownership. Sure, that's not always a top priority to your boss, but as a programmer, it makes you feel more than you're just another project resource... probably vanity or hubris, but sometimes you need something to have a little pride in doing--code that isn't just generated by next-year's code generator.

Though Movies are nice visually, because there's a tendency to spend more on production, the best SCI-FI comes in TV form, because there's time to explore the characters, establish large story arcs, and create a very detailed world.

Of course it also requires amazing writers that can keep the story going over the course of more than one flash on the screen... It also requires competent actors that understand and make their characters worth watching. I would have to say it's the most difficult form of SCIFI to keep going, but also the best when it does it well.

My personal favorites in well done TV Scifi are Babylon 5, Firefly, Dr. Who, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica... They all have flaws but overall, for the time they spent on screen, they delivered a recipe that's still quite apetizing.

There aren't just three options, though.

There is the "I've experienced some unexplainable events in my life, and so I'm open to the possibility of God," group.
There is the "I've had bad experiences with religion, and so I'm not interested in any of it..."
There is the "I just want to party, be sarcastic, and mock anything that's an easy target" group.
There is the "I feel threatened by these people that don't share my personal beliefs, philosophy or antireligious sentiments" group.
There is the "I couldn't live by X religion's basic tenets, and so now I try to define discredit it" group.
There is the "I just want to be accepted by a group so I follow X religion" group.
There is the "I just want to be accepted by a group so I follow X philosophy or nonreligion or antireligious" group.
There is the "I was raised X (religious, nonreligious or antireligious), so I'm X (religious, nonreligious or antireligious)"
There is the "I was raised X (religious, nonreligious or antireligious), and now I'm X (religious, nonreligious or antireligious) because I've found personal evidence of it."
There are those who claim to have experienced direct and divine personal revelation regarding their religion, have tested it, and live it.
There are those who are naturally skeptical who never found any evidence convincing enough to enable them to commit to religious affiliation, all with varying degrees reaction to this failed search...

In reality, there are thousands of other ideas floating around out there, and we weakly associate one with another to form religious, nonreligious or antireligious groups... religions do have a powerful sway, they convey commonalities that many people feel are truth in their lives, and can be used to affect remarkable compassion and human decency. When threatened humans can also join as a group (religious, nonreligious or antireligious) and do terrible things...

The collander thing is clearly a faux religion, intended to make a mockery of human tendencies by ironically embracing the very thing it mocks.
A religious parody based upon the mockery of other religions, imo, is small-minded, and does nothing. One does not make one's own beliefs more true by mocking or tearing down the beliefs of others. Even if you were to completely and utterly disprove a body of religious thought, it would do not prove your own.

But in the same sense, if they wish to embrace a fabricated tasty cthonic diety my personal response is, "Meh."

Truth is personal. Most of us are in a constant state of flux, trying and learning and exploring different ideas and ideaologies as we age and wizen and mature. I've come to the conclusion that religious freedom is one of the most fundamentally sound and civil ideas that humanity has embraced. It is the ultimate freedom and for those who wish to control others, or must belong to the one and only true group of humans (religious, nonreligious or antireligious), the most threatening.

I agree. After reading it, I wondered which was the more pointless loony cheerleader, the ones in Silicon Valley, or this guy who's cheering to see them fail. There are no sure things, not even the most humane, charitable service-oriented, down-home, genuine, open, enviro-friendly green companies get that, and trying to build a company solely with values is not going to create any sort of sustainable margins.

I wondered the same thing. further there's a whole cadre of instrumentation that needs to be built up to create a valid launch range, and we already have that, so why spend all that money on something closer to D.C.? Is it the country's vision that every state needs its own launch pad?

Actually, Perception is a large part of the equation...if I'm healed by the power of placebo-positive thinking, I'm still healed... I got what I sought in the transaction.

Most products sold are based on this idea, and many have ethical tradeoffs... and they're perfectly legal and as long as you're happy with it as a customer, then you got your value out of it... Heck, we've sold all sorts of things to one another that are openly harmful, including fast food, daily caffeine dosages, cigarettes, gasoline for your car, plastic containers that don't biodegrade, etc. At a certain point, I believe tabacco sellers knew their products were killing people, and imo, when they attempted to suppress scientific evidence to prevent the loss of profits--at that point--they became scammers.

In most cases we don't even know we're doing potential harm one to another. Heck, next week you'll probably discover that Greek Yogurt is the bane of good health and that twinkies is a miracle cure for baldness...And as long as you believe it, then it's probably just "business" as usual, because at the time of the transaction everyone was being open, honest and thought they were performing a mutually beneficial service.

Scammers that openly deceive, and Twitter is rife with it (60% of all accounts created is a HUGE number of scammers!) do so with expressly criminal intent. The distinction between them entrepreneurs may be small. IMO when the intent is personal profit above the humanity of your neighbor/business partner, etc, you need to go to jail or be banned or need to go to your room for a timeout...

IMO, it's gaming in class during lectures given by ancient professors who could bore the paint off the walls on topics of study that are genetically predisposed to cause blindness by its very nature due to sheer boringness... Essentially you bring a device into class that has the potential to make your class less boring, but only in the sense that it keeps you from having to endure sheer boredom to the point where you force yourself to learn the material.

There's nothing wrong with doing business. Scamming occurs when one party in the negotiation (could be solicitor in some cases, but more often is the customer) leaves the exchange feeling jilted, decieved so as to give one party unfair advantage, or outright robbed.

Any business exchange where one party is not completely honest is suspect. Twitter is perfect for dishonesty because it's just a name on a screen that can be spoofed, hijacked, and misrepresented.

I personally have a hard time seeing anything on Twitter as serious news, business, social or otherwise, and with it being a vehicle for phishing and malware, it's a tool I just don't use. When I weigh the downside, I just don't see it as all that beneficial. If you use it, it's probably a good idea to verify every communication that may impact you through some other means.