Oh, man. That drove me crazy. I had gone out of my way to convert my resume to a very nice and organized and readable and attactable format using LaTeX. Maybe I could have done better if I'd paid one of those services $1000 to tell me how to subtly color and place things better. But this beat the hell out of my earlier Word version.
Then some head-hunter INSISTS that I give him a Word version because that's all his database will take. Sheesh. There's just no quick and easy way to do this, so I had to start with the original LaTeX source and make a new one that still looked lousy compared to the finished PDF.
I'd like to think that my 16 years of industry experience and excellent research record in grad school were deciding factors. But I can assure you that the appearance of my CV make a big impact. Mind you, part of appearance is making it pleasant to read and easy to interpret.
Your knowledge of basic psychology and a minimal familiarity with cognitive engineering IS TRULY an important factor in hiring and long-term job performance in many professions. Even if the employers don't realize they are considering this, they are considering it. You're screwing yourself if you don't consider the human factor in how your appearance on paper is going to be interpreted.
It's the effect I'm talking about. You KNOW that the TSA are going to be morons about it. Talking to a TSA agent about a bomb has a very high probability of grinding the airport to a halt for an hour or so. No one will get trampled, but lots of people will get held up. Who has the right to do that? Well, the TSA thinks they do, but you shouldn't a dick and antagonize them into closing the airport.
I believe in satire. If you're a comedian or writing a blog, joking about bombs may be off-color, but it's protected free speech. There are certain people you just don't threaten, like the president, for good reason, but otherwise say what you want. (Before you get all worked up, it's perfectly fine to say that you hate the president; it's not okay to make jokes about threatening his life. Besides, making death threats about anyone is a criminal act.)
On the other hand, joking about bombs while in the airport is just being a dick. You have the right to be a dick. You STILL have the right to say what you want. But you DON'T have the right to fly. And you don't have the right to adversely impact 1000 other people. If you get arrested for closing down an airport with your stupid bomb joke, it's not the joke that gets you in trouble; its the fact that your joke negatively impacted many other innocent people.
Does the TSA handle these jokes with common sense? No. The TSA itself is not common sense. Sure, we should have tightened security since 9/11, but we all know that the TSA is an elaborate show that does nothing but inconvenience earnest passengers and has no capacity to catch any real threats. The TSA is a fact that should go away, but it is nevertheless a fact. You know damn well what will happen if you make a bomb joke in an airport; the fact that you don't like the TSA doesn't give you the right to disrupt the lives of everyone else trying to travel that day.
They say that yelling "fire" is a crowded threater doesn't qualify as free speech. People can get hurt if you do that. It's not funny and accomplishes nothing useful. So why is yelling "bomb" in an airport any better?
I would never condone threatening messages to the prosecutors. Keep in mind that it is their job to prosecute, and they don't keep their jobs if they don't get convictions. It sounds sad, but there is in fact enough crime that there are plenty of real criminals to prosecute that they could do this job legitimately under those pressures. Unfortunately, many lesser criminals are easier targets. It's important to point out that regardless of what they did, threats of violence are inappropriate, simply because threats of violence are ALWAYS inappropriate. This is not a defensive military statement or action against someone with nukes; these people are just asshole attorneys who happen to be responsible for someone's death by gross neglegence. When someone is convicted of neglegent manslaughter, the sentence is lesser than when someone is convicted of premeditated murder and will involve jail time rather than lethal injection.
That being said, I think these prosecutors deserve a lot of flak for what they did, and they too should be the target of some heavy-handed prosecution.
Microsoft has no monopoly in this area, they're not acting aggressively or anticompetitively, and they're not doing a crappy job. They're also no more likely to be hacked than the competition. And Google isn't exactly saintly anymore. Sure, you can expect that there will be some security breach in the future; there always is in basically every system, and the competition isn't going to be any more immune.
Ok, sure, you don't want to give money to Microsoft. But this is a WEB SERVICE. It's not the same as installing Windows on your PC and letting Microsoft take control of what you can compute. It's email, and it does a good job for most people. If you need to meet some other requirements, you can set up your own email server. But that's you, not Joe User who wants to send photos to grandma.
Anyhow, so this ISP probably evaluated multiple solutions, including Google and Microsoft, and decided that Microsoft was going to give them the best value (them, not necessarily their customers). Sucks for Google, good for Telstra, basically indifferent for most of their users.
We don't have to like all the views of our favorite authors. Although I'm sure he's never acted on it, Piers Anthony has a bit of a pedo thing going on, with the worst being his book Firefly. You know what? I'm just not going to read that book. I read Xanth novels to help me go to sleep at night, and I enjoy them. (Although to be honest, if he did act on his drives and started molesting children, I don't think I could stand to read his stuff anymore.)
So, Card is a homophobe. I can both criticize him for this and still enjoy his books.
What is the deal with this binary reasoning people have? Why do you have to decide that a person is totally evil because they have one view you disagree with? I think it's possible to emit both praise and criticism for the same person on different topics.
Looks like someone hasn't heard of "college professor." At least in Engineering fields (which is what I'm familiar with), you're given startup money and the mandate to teach and do research and find funding for more research. You're your own little mini-business, where you get to do whatever you want, as long as it's productive. You get to hire as many students as you can afford, and you form groups with other faculty to do collaborative research. And don't forget that universities are for-profit businesses; sure, the state schools get public subsidies, but that's not anywhere near enough to run the school. The rest comes from tuitions, grands, and endowments. So it's not like this is all fun and games.
If they do that, they won't get any more free SSDs to test, and that'll impact their ability to write papers criticizing SSDs. What would you prefer? A paper biased towards SSDs too small/cheap to be useful to you, or one that doesn't name names? Anonymity is VERY important in this kind of research.
As the summary mentions, employers are flooded with resumes and therefore need some sort of criteria for quickly filtering them down. They don't care if you have a degree in CS, French, or theater; if you have a bachelors degree, it tells the employer that you are capable of starting and finishing a long project, that you are responsible. It's "unfair" that perfectly capable and dependable people are overlooked by this approach, but it's also entirely unrealistic for employers to put an excessive number of candidates through a full interview process. Even with this filtering, the process is highly error-prone, because you get candidates bluffing through the interviews, and major portions of interviews are done by HR personel who don't have the technical knowledge to properly evaluate candidates. So, technical interviewers are an even MORE scarce resource. And then any employer who tries to get clever with this process (coding interviews, tournaments, etc.) can get into trouble for making people "do work" during interviews, which has some ethical issues. So what do you do?
It's getting to the point where even a BS isn't enough. Many jobs require Masters degrees. At that point, some employers won't give you the time of day unless you interned with them. Internships are a low-risk arrangement, because they get to pay students peanuts to work for them for 3 months. The duds are carefully noted, and the good ones are invited back when they graduate. Anyone else has an up-hill battle, because they can't distinguish you from any other idiot with a bunch of buzzwords on their resume.
Some professions have moved from Masters level to the Doctoral level. Right now, you can get a job as Physician's Assistant or Nurse Practitioner with a Masters in Nursing. But because there's an overabundance of people with those degrees, some employers are starting to require doctorate degrees. It's actually interesting, because there's more than one "Doctor of Nursing" type of degree. You can have a PhD in Nursing, where you did scientific research and wrote a dissertation. Then they've recently invented a another type of Doctor of Nursing degree, which is more like a medical doctor degree. One's academic, while the other is clinical, one has a research topic, while the other doesn't. But now nursing schools are scrambling to get their Doctor of Nursing curricula in order, because their Masters students are having a hard time finding jobs.
Let's keep going. The market in some fields is currently flooded with PhDs, like engineering degrees. Enter the Post-Doc, which is a pittance-pay, short-term job for people with PhDs. Getting a doctoral degree (medical or PhD) is no cake-walk. To get a PhD, you have to become a world-class expert in a field and contribute substantial new ideas. In academia and industry, many employers are now starting to consider only those with Post-docs. When I was finishing my PhD, I applied for nearly 150 different positions around the US, both in academia and in industry, a proproprtion of which were for more than one opening at different deparments within the same employer. It bothered me that my 15 years of prior industry experience didn't seem to count for much with many employers, but they're applying these filtering policies somewhat blindly within HR whose staff doesn't know how to evaluate this.
In the end, I got 8 interviews and 4 offers, which was relatively a LOT. I wasn't about to move my family for a 2-year post-doc then move them again when it was over, so I took an academic position in up-state NY, at a school that turns out to be a significant hot-spot for my particular specialization. Indicentally, IBM headquarters is on the other side of the river. I love it here, but I know that I'm truly one of the very fortunate ones, and there are many extremely accomplished people who are having a much harder time getting jobs.
Anyhow, a take-away principle when it comes to interviewing people is that to them, you are represented by a sheet of paper that the
Yeah, and damn the advantages of making a whole load of GPL drivers smaller, more portable, and safer. No, we wouldn't want to make it harder for a driver bug to crash the kernel! This isn't about either freedom or convenience. This is about software engineering.
Lua is compiled to a byte-code language that is sufficiently as obfuscated as x86 machine code as to make it "not hard" to write proprietary drivers. But my point was that putting an interpreter into the kernel would help make writing all kinds of drivers easier, including GPL drivers.
Oh, I'm not saying they don't taint the kernel. It just seems like they're one of a few hardware vendors who release binary-only drivers, and this is basically just tolerated. Why is it tolerated?
I read the FAQ, and the only thing the whitehouse says they'll do if the petition reaches the threshold is "respond" to it, which so far seems to be little more than long-winded non-answers. I get the feeling that this is intended to keep us preoccupied with the hope they'll do something so we don't notice that they don't actually do anything.
With the BSD's, there no such thing as a tainted kernel. But with Linux, non-GPL drivers are actively discouraged. If they were to add scripting to the Linux kernel, it would actually make it easier to write proprietary drivers, so they'd never go for that. Forget the fact that it would make it a hell of a lot easier to sandbox drivers so they don't clobber other kernel memory. Forget the fact that code in a higher-level language is smaller; countless drivers would suffer no appreciable performance hit by being written in an interpreted language (especially Lua), so you'd have one small interpreter and many shrunken drivers, which would make the kernel memory footprint smaller. Forget the fact that mutually exclusive access to shared variables could be made implicit in a majority of cases, eliminating a whole class of bugs in one shot. No. We've got our precious GPL to protect. (Oh, and forget the fact that nVidia basically gets a free pass on this.)
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the latest versions of the SMB protocol were a bit more asynchronous and high-performance. But using older versions, I found SMB (Samba on one end, CIFS on the other, in general), could not saturate a gigabit ethernet link, while NFS and AFP could. I kept using it because for compatibility but stuck with NFS or AFP for performance, AFP more now that Netatalk 3.x sucks so much less than Netatalk 2.x. (Netatalk 2.x suffered from various problems like random connection drops.)
Vaccinations are not a permanent cure (or prevention rather) for a given disease. Many require regular booster shots, and some are so ineffective (e.g. Hep-B) that the CDC and OSHA have made them optional. This relative lack of effectiveness is often cited by the anti-vaccine folks as evidence that they're not worth getting, although they convenient leave out that most vaccines are otherwise harmless, outbreaks can be contained by short-term and weak vaccines, and some vaccines are amazingly effective, like the rabies vaccine. In fact, the rabies vaccine is amusingly left unmentioned in all of the anti-vaccine literature I've seen, because it stands out as a paragon of long-term and high effectiveness in vaccines.
It's also amazing how polarized people get about this. Either it's the holy grail, and we should take them quickly, no matter what, or they're terrible and should never be taken. People don't seem to talk about picking and choosing based on risk and benefit factors, and none of them talk about spreading them out so as to avoid giving a poor kid the symptoms of too many diseases at once. Vaccines can be hard on the immune system and make kids feel miserable, and it makes me angry that doctors often want to give more than one at a time.
In principle, there's nothing wrong with GMOs. Then there's practice. It's hard to predict the effects of some new gene introduced, and it's hard to measure the impact and l. For one thing (and I'm not a nutritionist), but I understand that some GMOs (but presumably not all) are more allergenic than their unmodified versions. And we're only now starting to really understand (as a culture) the impact of food allergies, short-term and long-term.
Actually, as a scientist, I do see the value in testing the "obvious," because the obvious is often wrong, and what's right is often counter-intuitive (consider quantum physics). So let's not completely laugh this off.
That being said, the only people I know who put a huge amount of weight on IQ are those who think they're smart but haven't really accomplished much in life, so they fall back on this number to prop themselves up.
The fact is, IQ is a rough measure of SOME aspects of intelligence (some innate, some learned). If two people are apart by 20 points, one is VERY LIKELY smarter than the other in the areas tested and maybe some others. But there are loads of things that IQ doesn't test for that are certainly a function of intellectual capacity, like social ability.
If I lost a child, I think the last thing I'd want is a constant reminder of a tragedy. Maybe we'd have other kids. But making a clone is not the same as restoring a backup copy. It's NOT the same child! And just imagine being that clone. It's bad enough for younger children that live in the shadows of their older siblings. Now imagine being expected to show the same behaviors and knowledge as someone you've never met. This would be a totally unreasonable amount of pressure on the child. They'd be scarred for life.
This idea of "replacing" a child by cloning is the stupidest idea I've ever heard.
Now, there may be some narcissists out there who want to make clones of themselves, but that's altogether a different matter.
Also, say you have an animal that was spayed or neutered and you discover that they would have made good breeding stock, then you could produce a clone for that purpose. But no one is under the illusion that this is the SAME animal. It just shares approximately the same genes.
Those of us who are educated in science are aware of the studies showing no correlation between vaccines and autism. Those of us a little more informed are even aware of two (two, not hundreds!) court cases in the past 10 years where the court ruled that the vaccine was connected with the onset of autism. Ironically, most anti-vax people are unaware of these cases; they just operate on pure FUD. This is partly because the anti-vas people who ARE aware of these cases are also aware that they do not support THEIR case. For instance, in one case, the little girl had a pre-existing mitocondrial condition, and she would likely have developed autism sooner or later anyway; all the vaccine did was accelerate what was already going on.
The thing is, as long as the ruling turns out in favor of the science (cross your fingers), then debating it in Congress is a good thing because it will force the issue to be explored in a very public forum.
Still, no amount of debate or scientific numbers will convince some people.
Now, as a scientist myself, I have spent my own share of time being baffled by fields not my own. For instance, exactly how physicists predict an unobserved particle to exist according to the standard model is largely a mystery to me. I've read the wikipedia articles, and I understand a fair amount of what I'm reading, but none of it is answering the basic question about how you calculate that there's a missing slot. I did manage to find an interview with Murray Gell-Mann, where he mentioned that he developed the quark model because it greatly simplified modeling the properties of many exotic particles observed in cosmic radiation. So if you can postulate the existance of quarks from observed particles, then you can postulate combinations of quarks not yet observed. But how they predicted the Higgs is completely beyond me; I can't find an explanation anywhere, and I can't glean this from what I have read.
So now, imagine being of average intelligence with a U.S. high school education. Do you think most people will understand the intricacies of immune response? I've met nurses who didn't know what imunoglobulins are, so how can you expect most other people to get it? People aren't going to have the foundation for understanding the basis for any kind of immune response, and now you're introducting something "unnatural." Given all the obesity, linked with our horrible diets, we're been trained culturally to look for things that are "all natural" (even though that too is rather meaningless). Add to that general frustration with the medical system, which generates a resentment for doctors (even when the problems are not their fault).
Interestingly, it goes the other way. You can be TOO well informed about vaccines. We had one pediatrician send us away because we wanted to space our our kids' vaccinations. You see, regardless of any connection to autism, a vaccine does generate an immune response, which causes symptoms, making the patient feel generally pretty lousy for a few days. So we decided to space them out. We're not behind. We just come in more often, getting one at a time. But they have a policy of not accepting patients who won't do vaccines on THEIR schedule.
Finally, some doctors and nutritionists have postulated separately two things: (1) A connection between liver function and autism and also lots of other maladies. The liver filters toxins from your system, and if it can't do it fast enough, you get all kinds of problems. (2) Vaccines are hard on the liver. I'm not sure if that's directly or as a result of the immune response. If you put those together, you might want to consider limiting the rate at which vaccines are given, to avoid overloading the liver (and the immune system and anything else involved).
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Yes. Of all of the university HR systems on the planet, it's the one at YALE that won't work with anything other than IE.
Oh, man. That drove me crazy. I had gone out of my way to convert my resume to a very nice and organized and readable and attactable format using LaTeX. Maybe I could have done better if I'd paid one of those services $1000 to tell me how to subtly color and place things better. But this beat the hell out of my earlier Word version.
Then some head-hunter INSISTS that I give him a Word version because that's all his database will take. Sheesh. There's just no quick and easy way to do this, so I had to start with the original LaTeX source and make a new one that still looked lousy compared to the finished PDF.
I'd like to think that my 16 years of industry experience and excellent research record in grad school were deciding factors. But I can assure you that the appearance of my CV make a big impact. Mind you, part of appearance is making it pleasant to read and easy to interpret.
Your knowledge of basic psychology and a minimal familiarity with cognitive engineering IS TRULY an important factor in hiring and long-term job performance in many professions. Even if the employers don't realize they are considering this, they are considering it. You're screwing yourself if you don't consider the human factor in how your appearance on paper is going to be interpreted.
It's the effect I'm talking about. You KNOW that the TSA are going to be morons about it. Talking to a TSA agent about a bomb has a very high probability of grinding the airport to a halt for an hour or so. No one will get trampled, but lots of people will get held up. Who has the right to do that? Well, the TSA thinks they do, but you shouldn't a dick and antagonize them into closing the airport.
I believe in satire. If you're a comedian or writing a blog, joking about bombs may be off-color, but it's protected free speech. There are certain people you just don't threaten, like the president, for good reason, but otherwise say what you want. (Before you get all worked up, it's perfectly fine to say that you hate the president; it's not okay to make jokes about threatening his life. Besides, making death threats about anyone is a criminal act.)
On the other hand, joking about bombs while in the airport is just being a dick. You have the right to be a dick. You STILL have the right to say what you want. But you DON'T have the right to fly. And you don't have the right to adversely impact 1000 other people. If you get arrested for closing down an airport with your stupid bomb joke, it's not the joke that gets you in trouble; its the fact that your joke negatively impacted many other innocent people.
Does the TSA handle these jokes with common sense? No. The TSA itself is not common sense. Sure, we should have tightened security since 9/11, but we all know that the TSA is an elaborate show that does nothing but inconvenience earnest passengers and has no capacity to catch any real threats. The TSA is a fact that should go away, but it is nevertheless a fact. You know damn well what will happen if you make a bomb joke in an airport; the fact that you don't like the TSA doesn't give you the right to disrupt the lives of everyone else trying to travel that day.
They say that yelling "fire" is a crowded threater doesn't qualify as free speech. People can get hurt if you do that. It's not funny and accomplishes nothing useful. So why is yelling "bomb" in an airport any better?
I would never condone threatening messages to the prosecutors. Keep in mind that it is their job to prosecute, and they don't keep their jobs if they don't get convictions. It sounds sad, but there is in fact enough crime that there are plenty of real criminals to prosecute that they could do this job legitimately under those pressures. Unfortunately, many lesser criminals are easier targets. It's important to point out that regardless of what they did, threats of violence are inappropriate, simply because threats of violence are ALWAYS inappropriate. This is not a defensive military statement or action against someone with nukes; these people are just asshole attorneys who happen to be responsible for someone's death by gross neglegence. When someone is convicted of neglegent manslaughter, the sentence is lesser than when someone is convicted of premeditated murder and will involve jail time rather than lethal injection.
That being said, I think these prosecutors deserve a lot of flak for what they did, and they too should be the target of some heavy-handed prosecution.
Microsoft has no monopoly in this area, they're not acting aggressively or anticompetitively, and they're not doing a crappy job. They're also no more likely to be hacked than the competition. And Google isn't exactly saintly anymore. Sure, you can expect that there will be some security breach in the future; there always is in basically every system, and the competition isn't going to be any more immune.
Ok, sure, you don't want to give money to Microsoft. But this is a WEB SERVICE. It's not the same as installing Windows on your PC and letting Microsoft take control of what you can compute. It's email, and it does a good job for most people. If you need to meet some other requirements, you can set up your own email server. But that's you, not Joe User who wants to send photos to grandma.
Anyhow, so this ISP probably evaluated multiple solutions, including Google and Microsoft, and decided that Microsoft was going to give them the best value (them, not necessarily their customers). Sucks for Google, good for Telstra, basically indifferent for most of their users.
We don't have to like all the views of our favorite authors. Although I'm sure he's never acted on it, Piers Anthony has a bit of a pedo thing going on, with the worst being his book Firefly. You know what? I'm just not going to read that book. I read Xanth novels to help me go to sleep at night, and I enjoy them. (Although to be honest, if he did act on his drives and started molesting children, I don't think I could stand to read his stuff anymore.)
So, Card is a homophobe. I can both criticize him for this and still enjoy his books.
What is the deal with this binary reasoning people have? Why do you have to decide that a person is totally evil because they have one view you disagree with? I think it's possible to emit both praise and criticism for the same person on different topics.
Looks like someone hasn't heard of "college professor." At least in Engineering fields (which is what I'm familiar with), you're given startup money and the mandate to teach and do research and find funding for more research. You're your own little mini-business, where you get to do whatever you want, as long as it's productive. You get to hire as many students as you can afford, and you form groups with other faculty to do collaborative research. And don't forget that universities are for-profit businesses; sure, the state schools get public subsidies, but that's not anywhere near enough to run the school. The rest comes from tuitions, grands, and endowments. So it's not like this is all fun and games.
We've been hearing about stuck valves since the space program in the 1960's. Why hasn't anyone yet invented valves that don't stick?
If they do that, they won't get any more free SSDs to test, and that'll impact their ability to write papers criticizing SSDs. What would you prefer? A paper biased towards SSDs too small/cheap to be useful to you, or one that doesn't name names? Anonymity is VERY important in this kind of research.
As the summary mentions, employers are flooded with resumes and therefore need some sort of criteria for quickly filtering them down. They don't care if you have a degree in CS, French, or theater; if you have a bachelors degree, it tells the employer that you are capable of starting and finishing a long project, that you are responsible. It's "unfair" that perfectly capable and dependable people are overlooked by this approach, but it's also entirely unrealistic for employers to put an excessive number of candidates through a full interview process. Even with this filtering, the process is highly error-prone, because you get candidates bluffing through the interviews, and major portions of interviews are done by HR personel who don't have the technical knowledge to properly evaluate candidates. So, technical interviewers are an even MORE scarce resource. And then any employer who tries to get clever with this process (coding interviews, tournaments, etc.) can get into trouble for making people "do work" during interviews, which has some ethical issues. So what do you do?
It's getting to the point where even a BS isn't enough. Many jobs require Masters degrees. At that point, some employers won't give you the time of day unless you interned with them. Internships are a low-risk arrangement, because they get to pay students peanuts to work for them for 3 months. The duds are carefully noted, and the good ones are invited back when they graduate. Anyone else has an up-hill battle, because they can't distinguish you from any other idiot with a bunch of buzzwords on their resume.
Some professions have moved from Masters level to the Doctoral level. Right now, you can get a job as Physician's Assistant or Nurse Practitioner with a Masters in Nursing. But because there's an overabundance of people with those degrees, some employers are starting to require doctorate degrees. It's actually interesting, because there's more than one "Doctor of Nursing" type of degree. You can have a PhD in Nursing, where you did scientific research and wrote a dissertation. Then they've recently invented a another type of Doctor of Nursing degree, which is more like a medical doctor degree. One's academic, while the other is clinical, one has a research topic, while the other doesn't. But now nursing schools are scrambling to get their Doctor of Nursing curricula in order, because their Masters students are having a hard time finding jobs.
Let's keep going. The market in some fields is currently flooded with PhDs, like engineering degrees. Enter the Post-Doc, which is a pittance-pay, short-term job for people with PhDs. Getting a doctoral degree (medical or PhD) is no cake-walk. To get a PhD, you have to become a world-class expert in a field and contribute substantial new ideas. In academia and industry, many employers are now starting to consider only those with Post-docs. When I was finishing my PhD, I applied for nearly 150 different positions around the US, both in academia and in industry, a proproprtion of which were for more than one opening at different deparments within the same employer. It bothered me that my 15 years of prior industry experience didn't seem to count for much with many employers, but they're applying these filtering policies somewhat blindly within HR whose staff doesn't know how to evaluate this.
In the end, I got 8 interviews and 4 offers, which was relatively a LOT. I wasn't about to move my family for a 2-year post-doc then move them again when it was over, so I took an academic position in up-state NY, at a school that turns out to be a significant hot-spot for my particular specialization. Indicentally, IBM headquarters is on the other side of the river. I love it here, but I know that I'm truly one of the very fortunate ones, and there are many extremely accomplished people who are having a much harder time getting jobs.
Anyhow, a take-away principle when it comes to interviewing people is that to them, you are represented by a sheet of paper that the
Yeah, and damn the advantages of making a whole load of GPL drivers smaller, more portable, and safer. No, we wouldn't want to make it harder for a driver bug to crash the kernel! This isn't about either freedom or convenience. This is about software engineering.
Lua is compiled to a byte-code language that is sufficiently as obfuscated as x86 machine code as to make it "not hard" to write proprietary drivers. But my point was that putting an interpreter into the kernel would help make writing all kinds of drivers easier, including GPL drivers.
Oh, I'm not saying they don't taint the kernel. It just seems like they're one of a few hardware vendors who release binary-only drivers, and this is basically just tolerated. Why is it tolerated?
That's not the point. An interpreter in the kernel would also make GPL drivers easier to write.
I read the FAQ, and the only thing the whitehouse says they'll do if the petition reaches the threshold is "respond" to it, which so far seems to be little more than long-winded non-answers. I get the feeling that this is intended to keep us preoccupied with the hope they'll do something so we don't notice that they don't actually do anything.
With the BSD's, there no such thing as a tainted kernel. But with Linux, non-GPL drivers are actively discouraged. If they were to add scripting to the Linux kernel, it would actually make it easier to write proprietary drivers, so they'd never go for that. Forget the fact that it would make it a hell of a lot easier to sandbox drivers so they don't clobber other kernel memory. Forget the fact that code in a higher-level language is smaller; countless drivers would suffer no appreciable performance hit by being written in an interpreted language (especially Lua), so you'd have one small interpreter and many shrunken drivers, which would make the kernel memory footprint smaller. Forget the fact that mutually exclusive access to shared variables could be made implicit in a majority of cases, eliminating a whole class of bugs in one shot. No. We've got our precious GPL to protect. (Oh, and forget the fact that nVidia basically gets a free pass on this.)
I guess you might say they interpolated what a likely ancestor was probably like.
No. More like water-like sort of wind. :)
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the latest versions of the SMB protocol were a bit more asynchronous and high-performance. But using older versions, I found SMB (Samba on one end, CIFS on the other, in general), could not saturate a gigabit ethernet link, while NFS and AFP could. I kept using it because for compatibility but stuck with NFS or AFP for performance, AFP more now that Netatalk 3.x sucks so much less than Netatalk 2.x. (Netatalk 2.x suffered from various problems like random connection drops.)
Vaccinations are not a permanent cure (or prevention rather) for a given disease. Many require regular booster shots, and some are so ineffective (e.g. Hep-B) that the CDC and OSHA have made them optional. This relative lack of effectiveness is often cited by the anti-vaccine folks as evidence that they're not worth getting, although they convenient leave out that most vaccines are otherwise harmless, outbreaks can be contained by short-term and weak vaccines, and some vaccines are amazingly effective, like the rabies vaccine. In fact, the rabies vaccine is amusingly left unmentioned in all of the anti-vaccine literature I've seen, because it stands out as a paragon of long-term and high effectiveness in vaccines.
It's also amazing how polarized people get about this. Either it's the holy grail, and we should take them quickly, no matter what, or they're terrible and should never be taken. People don't seem to talk about picking and choosing based on risk and benefit factors, and none of them talk about spreading them out so as to avoid giving a poor kid the symptoms of too many diseases at once. Vaccines can be hard on the immune system and make kids feel miserable, and it makes me angry that doctors often want to give more than one at a time.
In principle, there's nothing wrong with GMOs. Then there's practice. It's hard to predict the effects of some new gene introduced, and it's hard to measure the impact and l. For one thing (and I'm not a nutritionist), but I understand that some GMOs (but presumably not all) are more allergenic than their unmodified versions. And we're only now starting to really understand (as a culture) the impact of food allergies, short-term and long-term.
Actually, as a scientist, I do see the value in testing the "obvious," because the obvious is often wrong, and what's right is often counter-intuitive (consider quantum physics). So let's not completely laugh this off.
That being said, the only people I know who put a huge amount of weight on IQ are those who think they're smart but haven't really accomplished much in life, so they fall back on this number to prop themselves up.
The fact is, IQ is a rough measure of SOME aspects of intelligence (some innate, some learned). If two people are apart by 20 points, one is VERY LIKELY smarter than the other in the areas tested and maybe some others. But there are loads of things that IQ doesn't test for that are certainly a function of intellectual capacity, like social ability.
If I lost a child, I think the last thing I'd want is a constant reminder of a tragedy. Maybe we'd have other kids. But making a clone is not the same as restoring a backup copy. It's NOT the same child! And just imagine being that clone. It's bad enough for younger children that live in the shadows of their older siblings. Now imagine being expected to show the same behaviors and knowledge as someone you've never met. This would be a totally unreasonable amount of pressure on the child. They'd be scarred for life.
This idea of "replacing" a child by cloning is the stupidest idea I've ever heard.
Now, there may be some narcissists out there who want to make clones of themselves, but that's altogether a different matter.
Also, say you have an animal that was spayed or neutered and you discover that they would have made good breeding stock, then you could produce a clone for that purpose. But no one is under the illusion that this is the SAME animal. It just shares approximately the same genes.
Those of us who are educated in science are aware of the studies showing no correlation between vaccines and autism. Those of us a little more informed are even aware of two (two, not hundreds!) court cases in the past 10 years where the court ruled that the vaccine was connected with the onset of autism. Ironically, most anti-vax people are unaware of these cases; they just operate on pure FUD. This is partly because the anti-vas people who ARE aware of these cases are also aware that they do not support THEIR case. For instance, in one case, the little girl had a pre-existing mitocondrial condition, and she would likely have developed autism sooner or later anyway; all the vaccine did was accelerate what was already going on.
The thing is, as long as the ruling turns out in favor of the science (cross your fingers), then debating it in Congress is a good thing because it will force the issue to be explored in a very public forum.
Still, no amount of debate or scientific numbers will convince some people.
Now, as a scientist myself, I have spent my own share of time being baffled by fields not my own. For instance, exactly how physicists predict an unobserved particle to exist according to the standard model is largely a mystery to me. I've read the wikipedia articles, and I understand a fair amount of what I'm reading, but none of it is answering the basic question about how you calculate that there's a missing slot. I did manage to find an interview with Murray Gell-Mann, where he mentioned that he developed the quark model because it greatly simplified modeling the properties of many exotic particles observed in cosmic radiation. So if you can postulate the existance of quarks from observed particles, then you can postulate combinations of quarks not yet observed. But how they predicted the Higgs is completely beyond me; I can't find an explanation anywhere, and I can't glean this from what I have read.
So now, imagine being of average intelligence with a U.S. high school education. Do you think most people will understand the intricacies of immune response? I've met nurses who didn't know what imunoglobulins are, so how can you expect most other people to get it? People aren't going to have the foundation for understanding the basis for any kind of immune response, and now you're introducting something "unnatural." Given all the obesity, linked with our horrible diets, we're been trained culturally to look for things that are "all natural" (even though that too is rather meaningless). Add to that general frustration with the medical system, which generates a resentment for doctors (even when the problems are not their fault).
Interestingly, it goes the other way. You can be TOO well informed about vaccines. We had one pediatrician send us away because we wanted to space our our kids' vaccinations. You see, regardless of any connection to autism, a vaccine does generate an immune response, which causes symptoms, making the patient feel generally pretty lousy for a few days. So we decided to space them out. We're not behind. We just come in more often, getting one at a time. But they have a policy of not accepting patients who won't do vaccines on THEIR schedule.
Finally, some doctors and nutritionists have postulated separately two things: (1) A connection between liver function and autism and also lots of other maladies. The liver filters toxins from your system, and if it can't do it fast enough, you get all kinds of problems. (2) Vaccines are hard on the liver. I'm not sure if that's directly or as a result of the immune response. If you put those together, you might want to consider limiting the rate at which vaccines are given, to avoid overloading the liver (and the immune system and anything else involved).