I have a problem with the argument that abortion should be legal because a girl might get raped, and she might not want to carry the baby to term afterwards. While this might be considered a legitimate reason to have an abortion, consider the statistics:
There are about 200 pregnancies due to rape per year.
From what I can see, the above two figures come from reliable sources, meaning that about 0.00003% of all pregnancies in the United States are due to rape.
So my question is: why is it okay to make abortion legal and freely available in all cases, just to make it available for the 0.00003% that may have legitimate reasons?
There is a darker side of the Charles Fipke story. After the Ekati diamond mine opened up, and he set himself up with a practically infinite supply of cash, he split from his wife Marlene, who had stuck by him while he worked from 8am to 3am seven days a week, in pursuit of his dream. In many ways she was his partner, working long hours helping analyze samples in the kitchen of their tiny apartment, while they were on the verge of being evicted due to non-payment of rent. Apparently their divorce settlement was the largest ever in Canada.
Also, right before he had his major breakthrough, he had a falling out with his long-time close friend and ally Stu Blusson, a helicopter pilot who had also worked very hard with Fipke, many times without pay.
To be fair, I don't know if it was the success, or something else, that drove apart Fipke and his wife. Divorce and separation are never simple. Just those little details made an impression on me, to see how one can enjoy massive material success yet still suffer in personal relationships.
Essentially, the guy is now filthy rich, surrounded by gorgeous women, doing whatever he wants. His latest project, if I'm not mistaken, is to find the biblical lost treasures of King Solomon.
An account of the whole story, beginning with Fipke's early days growing up in the Canadian prairies in Saskatchewan, can be found in the book Fire Into Ice, by Vernon Frolick. It is a very entertaining read, even if the book is somewhat biased in favour of Fipke.
As for me...I rock climb, white-water kayak, cross-country ski, skijor and roller blade with my Siberian husky, mountain bike, etc.
Please talk about the women lining up to sleep with you.
So while the meme of the/. poster hiding away in his mother's basement is a basic tenant of/. culture, it also appears to be untrue from this very limited, very unscientific survey:)
You're right, this "unscientific survey" is about as unscientific as it gets. You can't expect pale, overweight basement dwellers to find much discussion material regarding exercise. However, you would be a lot more likely to find posts by people who do know something about exercise.
The silent, obese majority remains silent and largely invisible.:)
Step 1: start scanning and distributing copyrighted books without permission.
Step 2: writers and publishers get pissed off and sue.
Step 3: settle and obtain permission to go even further.
It worked. Now Google will have control over electronic access to a massive amount of printed material.
This may be just a silly conspiracy theory. But on the other hand would a company like Google, with massive financial and legal resources, naively embark on a blatant copyright infringement project? Not likely; it's obvious they had a strategy in mind from the beginning.
From the outside perspective, it just looks like more and more money is being spent to gather more information (and infringe on the privacy of innocent citizens), but there have not been any accompanying reports that the new measures have been successfully used to catch more terrorists.
Why is nobody asking for evidence that it's working? Is there any evidence that it's working?
Safety is always a good thing, but at what point do you just stop getting out of bed in the morning because you think you might get hurt?
But what about the millions of people, who use laptops and video games and wireless mice, during flights every day? Why aren't they, too, inducing erratic behaviour in aircraft systems?
How much more likely is it that the "sudden change of altitude" was due to poor maintenance or human error by the pilots? Instead, Qantas blames it on passengers using wireless devices -- a perfectly ridiculous claim that is impossible to verify. Furthermore, these days MP3 players and laptops are used on practically every single passenger flight, and yet we don't get incidents like this every day.
Or is it possible that the malfunction was caused by a natural radiation source? We know that the intensity of magnetic and electric fields due to natural sources (e.g. thunderstorms or magnetosphere activity) can far exceed the signal strength of a Bluetooth radio, Wifi device, or cell phone. The natural signals are broad-band, similar to a spark gap transmitter, capable of inducing electric currents in almost any conductor. In fact, it is possible to measure thunderstorm activity half a world away using equipment any electrical engineer could build in his or her garage. If airplanes really were that sensitive to random bursts electromagnetic radiation, then we'd have incidents like this all the time. But we don't.
And yet Qantas blames the incident on passengers, while keeping a straight face. Are we supposed to believe that?
It is much more plausible the aircraft has experienced "irregularities" in the elevator control system before this incident, and Qantas placing the blame on passengers is nothing more than an effort to avoid responsibility. I'm sure an independent review of the maintenance history of the aircraft would turn up some interesting items.
I also like the "right tool for the job" attitude. This is partly where my admittedly adverse reaction to using Haskell for actual work.
In my experience, actual work always takes this basic form:
Acquire some data
Get parameters
Process data according to parameters
Output the answer
The overall form of most tasks that I do is procedural, so it seems most natural to use a procedural language. Something that gets me point A to point B, start to finish. Aside from Excel spreadsheets, it's hard for me to think of a case where I would find advantages in functional programming compared to Perl, C or C++.
Although, I can see how one could argue that I have procedural programming tunnel vision, and actually giving Haskell a serious try could be a good thing.:-)
Yes. Just like door-to-door chocolate selling, or bake sales, or 99% of all charity money raising schemes. If people just worked an extra hour per week at their jobs, and donated the extra cash to whatever cause, charities would have a lot more money. Personally, I'd rather earn $40 for charity by working an extra hour on Wednesday, than make $40 by spending the weekend walking around my neighbourhood scalping light bulbs made by retards.
This is news in the same way that an article proclaiming the radioactivity and dangers of uranium is news.
But yes, I agree, geology as an option for a degree isn't advertised nearly enough. In our times, geology is a lucrative and interesting career path. Minerals, base metals and oil are in high demand, and geologists are the people who find all these things.
Your original question shows that you (darkeye) are thinking about the ethical implications of accepting or rejecting the job offer.
But don't forget to take into account your own life goals (if you have any), not just your present situation with the project community and the job offer. For example, if you think the personal cost of taking the offer will be high (i.e. alienation from the project community) then balance the loss with an equal or greater gain in another area of your life.
As an example, if you have aspirations to own a house (if you don't already), or an expensive car, then set conditions on the job offer that would bring you closer your goals. If you need $40k for a house downpayment, you might crunch some numbers and ask for: (1) a $20k signing bonus, (2) an annual salary that would let you save the other $20k within one year, and (3) make sure the new salary will let you make the necessary mortgage payments after the first year. And you're right, this does take a little bit more initiative and effort than posting on Slashdot.
At certain points in your life, you have to make your own decisions and leave people behind. You will know who your real friends are, because they will support you and recognize that what you are doing is for your long term good. They will not think you are being a disloyal and bad friend. People who do think that way will be fine without you, anyway, and you will be fine without them.
In summary, if taking the job offer is going to cost you, then make sure that by accepting the offer you will more than recover the costs. Otherwise you have no reason to accept the offer.
If you sell yourself short now, you will regret it for years. Make it impossible to regret.
If you're in a resource-constrained organization, you have two options:
Make yourself more valuable and less likely to get fired, or
Find a job at a thriving organization where you can focus on doing good work, not worrying about staying in your job.
Your best bet is to work on the first, until an opportunity for the second arises.
The best thing you can do for your career (programming or other) and your own happiness is to learn how to work hard at tough jobs, and to recognize and act on opportunities to get into something better.
The link you posted does actually say that the issue was resolved on the same day. What is your point? To sum up, Dreamhost had a problem. They admitted it, fixed it, explained what went wrong, and what they're doing so it won't happen again, and finally they apologized.
Show me a company that has never made a billing mistake at one time or another. Better yet, show me another company that rectifies mistakes, when they happen to occur, as graciously as Dreamhost.
If they had a track record of making billing mistakes, you might have had a point. Instead, you come off sounding like a political agenda pusher who causes a big stink because a politician may, or may not, have had a puff of weed in college. Get over it.
They have a promotion on right now where a pretty good plan is only $6/month. Normally it's about $10/month. They provide webmail, POP and IMAP email access. Over the 5+ years I have been a customer with them, they have been exceptionally reliable.
They also have tons of other features you might never use, but are good to have available just in case. This includes stuff like Subversion repositories, SQL databases, easy to install web apps (WordPress, Joomla, and a few other popular apps), video streaming, etc.
I'm pretty sure the experts who did the study know much more about how to apply statistics than you ever will. If they are making conclusions in a respected, peer-reviewed publication, then you can bet money that they wouldn't be making those conclusions based on simple correlation alone. Even so, demonstrating a strong correlation between things often leads to the discovery of the cause of the correlation.
Second, why does parroting "correlation is not causation" warrant a mod to Insigthful? That's like trying to convince someone that a person who says "George W. Bush is an idiot" a lot has insightful political opinions. The parent post did not make a single insightful statement. Unless mindlessly repeating a buzzword that sounds intellectual counts as insight around here.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a problem with the argument that abortion should be legal because a girl might get raped, and she might not want to carry the baby to term afterwards. While this might be considered a legitimate reason to have an abortion, consider the statistics:
From what I can see, the above two figures come from reliable sources, meaning that about 0.00003% of all pregnancies in the United States are due to rape.
So my question is: why is it okay to make abortion legal and freely available in all cases, just to make it available for the 0.00003% that may have legitimate reasons?
He most certainly is rich.
There is a darker side of the Charles Fipke story. After the Ekati diamond mine opened up, and he set himself up with a practically infinite supply of cash, he split from his wife Marlene, who had stuck by him while he worked from 8am to 3am seven days a week, in pursuit of his dream. In many ways she was his partner, working long hours helping analyze samples in the kitchen of their tiny apartment, while they were on the verge of being evicted due to non-payment of rent. Apparently their divorce settlement was the largest ever in Canada.
Also, right before he had his major breakthrough, he had a falling out with his long-time close friend and ally Stu Blusson, a helicopter pilot who had also worked very hard with Fipke, many times without pay.
To be fair, I don't know if it was the success, or something else, that drove apart Fipke and his wife. Divorce and separation are never simple. Just those little details made an impression on me, to see how one can enjoy massive material success yet still suffer in personal relationships.
Essentially, the guy is now filthy rich, surrounded by gorgeous women, doing whatever he wants. His latest project, if I'm not mistaken, is to find the biblical lost treasures of King Solomon.
An account of the whole story, beginning with Fipke's early days growing up in the Canadian prairies in Saskatchewan, can be found in the book Fire Into Ice, by Vernon Frolick. It is a very entertaining read, even if the book is somewhat biased in favour of Fipke.
Except for Doom 3, where the flashlight runs on power generated by essentially a perpetual motion machine.
Yep, yep... moment of weakness. ;)
Why did you just say that? Not only is it not funny, it makes no sense.
Oh, thank you, but I think we all got the joke before you went ahead and explained it.
As for me...I rock climb, white-water kayak, cross-country ski, skijor and roller blade with my Siberian husky, mountain bike, etc.
Please talk about the women lining up to sleep with you.
So while the meme of the /. poster hiding away in his mother's basement is a basic tenant of /. culture, it also appears to be untrue from this very limited, very unscientific survey :)
You're right, this "unscientific survey" is about as unscientific as it gets. You can't expect pale, overweight basement dwellers to find much discussion material regarding exercise. However, you would be a lot more likely to find posts by people who do know something about exercise.
The silent, obese majority remains silent and largely invisible. :)
but anything can be taken to extremes.
Not that injuries due to taking exercise to extremes would be a practical risk to anybody posting on this site.
Hear, hear!
This may have been Google's strategy all along.
Step 1: start scanning and distributing copyrighted books without permission.
Step 2: writers and publishers get pissed off and sue.
Step 3: settle and obtain permission to go even further.
It worked. Now Google will have control over electronic access to a massive amount of printed material.
This may be just a silly conspiracy theory. But on the other hand would a company like Google, with massive financial and legal resources, naively embark on a blatant copyright infringement project? Not likely; it's obvious they had a strategy in mind from the beginning.
From the outside perspective, it just looks like more and more money is being spent to gather more information (and infringe on the privacy of innocent citizens), but there have not been any accompanying reports that the new measures have been successfully used to catch more terrorists.
Why is nobody asking for evidence that it's working? Is there any evidence that it's working?
Safety is always a good thing, but at what point do you just stop getting out of bed in the morning because you think you might get hurt?
Dude! I just had a little accidental movement when I read that.
I see your point.
But what about the millions of people, who use laptops and video games and wireless mice, during flights every day? Why aren't they, too, inducing erratic behaviour in aircraft systems?
How much more likely is it that the "sudden change of altitude" was due to poor maintenance or human error by the pilots? Instead, Qantas blames it on passengers using wireless devices -- a perfectly ridiculous claim that is impossible to verify. Furthermore, these days MP3 players and laptops are used on practically every single passenger flight, and yet we don't get incidents like this every day.
Or is it possible that the malfunction was caused by a natural radiation source? We know that the intensity of magnetic and electric fields due to natural sources (e.g. thunderstorms or magnetosphere activity) can far exceed the signal strength of a Bluetooth radio, Wifi device, or cell phone. The natural signals are broad-band, similar to a spark gap transmitter, capable of inducing electric currents in almost any conductor. In fact, it is possible to measure thunderstorm activity half a world away using equipment any electrical engineer could build in his or her garage. If airplanes really were that sensitive to random bursts electromagnetic radiation, then we'd have incidents like this all the time. But we don't.
And yet Qantas blames the incident on passengers, while keeping a straight face. Are we supposed to believe that?
It is much more plausible the aircraft has experienced "irregularities" in the elevator control system before this incident, and Qantas placing the blame on passengers is nothing more than an effort to avoid responsibility. I'm sure an independent review of the maintenance history of the aircraft would turn up some interesting items.
I also like the "right tool for the job" attitude. This is partly where my admittedly adverse reaction to using Haskell for actual work.
In my experience, actual work always takes this basic form:
The overall form of most tasks that I do is procedural, so it seems most natural to use a procedural language. Something that gets me point A to point B, start to finish. Aside from Excel spreadsheets, it's hard for me to think of a case where I would find advantages in functional programming compared to Perl, C or C++.
Although, I can see how one could argue that I have procedural programming tunnel vision, and actually giving Haskell a serious try could be a good thing. :-)
Yes. Just like door-to-door chocolate selling, or bake sales, or 99% of all charity money raising schemes. If people just worked an extra hour per week at their jobs, and donated the extra cash to whatever cause, charities would have a lot more money. Personally, I'd rather earn $40 for charity by working an extra hour on Wednesday, than make $40 by spending the weekend walking around my neighbourhood scalping light bulbs made by retards.
I'm talking about using Haskell to do any real work.
But STM actually sounds useful.
Even if you're not interested in Haskell per se, STM is kind of an interesting idea.
Interesting, and completely useless for real applications in real companies.
This is news in the same way that an article proclaiming the radioactivity and dangers of uranium is news.
But yes, I agree, geology as an option for a degree isn't advertised nearly enough. In our times, geology is a lucrative and interesting career path. Minerals, base metals and oil are in high demand, and geologists are the people who find all these things.
Haha, this is news to Slashdot?
The African Rift Valley has been taught to first year geology students since plate tectonics were discovered decades ago.
Your original question shows that you (darkeye) are thinking about the ethical implications of accepting or rejecting the job offer.
But don't forget to take into account your own life goals (if you have any), not just your present situation with the project community and the job offer. For example, if you think the personal cost of taking the offer will be high (i.e. alienation from the project community) then balance the loss with an equal or greater gain in another area of your life.
As an example, if you have aspirations to own a house (if you don't already), or an expensive car, then set conditions on the job offer that would bring you closer your goals. If you need $40k for a house downpayment, you might crunch some numbers and ask for: (1) a $20k signing bonus, (2) an annual salary that would let you save the other $20k within one year, and (3) make sure the new salary will let you make the necessary mortgage payments after the first year. And you're right, this does take a little bit more initiative and effort than posting on Slashdot.
At certain points in your life, you have to make your own decisions and leave people behind. You will know who your real friends are, because they will support you and recognize that what you are doing is for your long term good. They will not think you are being a disloyal and bad friend. People who do think that way will be fine without you, anyway, and you will be fine without them.
In summary, if taking the job offer is going to cost you, then make sure that by accepting the offer you will more than recover the costs. Otherwise you have no reason to accept the offer.
If you sell yourself short now, you will regret it for years. Make it impossible to regret.
If you're in a resource-constrained organization, you have two options:
Your best bet is to work on the first, until an opportunity for the second arises.
The best thing you can do for your career (programming or other) and your own happiness is to learn how to work hard at tough jobs, and to recognize and act on opportunities to get into something better.
What about their, um, minor billing issues earlier this year?
Yes, um, what about those billing issues?
The link you posted does actually say that the issue was resolved on the same day. What is your point? To sum up, Dreamhost had a problem. They admitted it, fixed it, explained what went wrong, and what they're doing so it won't happen again, and finally they apologized.
Show me a company that has never made a billing mistake at one time or another. Better yet, show me another company that rectifies mistakes, when they happen to occur, as graciously as Dreamhost.
If they had a track record of making billing mistakes, you might have had a point. Instead, you come off sounding like a political agenda pusher who causes a big stink because a politician may, or may not, have had a puff of weed in college. Get over it.
Check out Dreamhost.
They have a promotion on right now where a pretty good plan is only $6/month. Normally it's about $10/month. They provide webmail, POP and IMAP email access. Over the 5+ years I have been a customer with them, they have been exceptionally reliable.
They also have tons of other features you might never use, but are good to have available just in case. This includes stuff like Subversion repositories, SQL databases, easy to install web apps (WordPress, Joomla, and a few other popular apps), video streaming, etc.
I'm pretty sure the experts who did the study know much more about how to apply statistics than you ever will. If they are making conclusions in a respected, peer-reviewed publication, then you can bet money that they wouldn't be making those conclusions based on simple correlation alone. Even so, demonstrating a strong correlation between things often leads to the discovery of the cause of the correlation.
Second, why does parroting "correlation is not causation" warrant a mod to Insigthful? That's like trying to convince someone that a person who says "George W. Bush is an idiot" a lot has insightful political opinions. The parent post did not make a single insightful statement. Unless mindlessly repeating a buzzword that sounds intellectual counts as insight around here.