You're welcome to your opinion of me, but I don't see how that's relevant to the argument. Judging by the mods, though, I've clearly pissed off somebody.
My point was "distracted driving" is the problem, and that happens more with a cell phone conversation than with a passenger.
Then why never mention distraction at all? You focused exclusively on cell phones and their evils, touting a passenger's benefits.
you claim now to be in agreement with my point, even if disagreement with my example.
You'll have to forgive me, because I don't see anywhere that you actually made any point beyond the evil of cell phones.
In practice, everywhere I've lived, there has been a law against "distracted driving" but that is never applied except when other laws are in effect (DUI, cell phones), or after a crash. If the police just took the time and effort to enforce the law...
That's because it's usually a secondary offense. The police can't enforce it unless a primary offense was also committed. What would probably be beneficial are tighter rules regarding reckless driving, which would affect all distracted driving, regardless of the cause.
But that's too hard, so we get targeted laws, and the broad laws are ignored.
Ah, yes, targeted laws... which are great until the target moves. Laws against cell phones are ineffective against tablets, or in-car navigation systems, or hands-free headsets. Whatever the next distraction is, a few more people will die, and we'll get more laws, and the complaints will continue that existing laws are ineffective.
The other part is that you are wrong. Distractions can be good (or necessary). Feel free to argue that one.
I'll grant that information can be good, but it should be presented in such a way as to minimize disruption.
Yes, that's a large part of my point... Good judgement isn't about following nice simple rules like "no cell phones while driving". Rather, it's about forethought and consideration, like "Is this interaction going to impair my ability to safely operate this dangerous machine?"
Of course, the latter is a much more difficult thought process, so people routinely get it wrong. It doesn't matter whether it's a cellular call to a client, or talking to a kid about their day at school. If you as a driver allow anything to interfere with your focus on the road, you're a bad driver. No, you don't get to avoid fault by expecting your passenger to watch traffic, or calling your music "background noise". As a driver, part of your job is to understand and evaluate the risk of your entire situation.
It's easy to blame cell phones, but they're not the real problem. Drivers who allow distractions of any kind in their car are the problem.
The phone is my wife or family, and I can just drop it without offense if road conditions change. They understand the timing of the call and won't talk about anything too distracting. On the other hand, when I'm driving with a client in the car, he's focused on his exciting new business idea, and he doesn't really care that traffic is slowing up ahead. Being professional, I can't really just tell him to shut up for a few minutes.
If there's a phone call that's more important than driving, it can wait until I'm off the road.
There's a long list of reasons that a phone call is less distracting than a passenger. That you can't think of any indicates a problem with you, not those who are capable of managing their attention.
Sure I got the talking to when in a lecture I brought up using a GOTO to solve a problem. However that was about it.
Crappy professor.
GOTO is a perfectly reasonable solution for a very small set of problems. Dijkstra's famous essay has a less-famous rebuttal (that I'm far too lazy to find at the moment), with which Dijkstra agreed: Code should be readable first, well-formed second, and functional third.
Using a GOTO is usually only functional. It doesn't preserve the structure of the code like the two ends of a loop, and being one-ended, it's not easily followed when reading. Other mechanisms are usually better.
However, in the case of a 1% chance of re-running a section, or several long sets of conditions to trigger a block, I find that a GOTO is the most readable tool, and it preserves the most-used structure of the code as well. It's a tool, and like any other it should be used only where appropriate.
That rationalization doesn't require conspiracies, malevolence, or corruption. It passes Occam's razor, so it therefore is wholly unsuitable as a Slashdot story.
TL;DR: There are risks associated with all HUDs, but the likelihood of developing problems stems from having the eyes compete. A monocular display (or well-aligned binocular) should be fine, as long as the display is sufficiently different from the background view that the brain knows it's seeing something different.
Having worked in defense, I can tell you that Windows is also much easier to secure from a procedural standpoint. The auditing and policy tools are much easier to set up, and enjoy more third-party support.
It will indeed be "worthless", unless the company has a non-dividend profit-sharing plan, or produces a product the investor wants to see happen, or if the investor wants control over the company's management, or if any other reason holds true.
There are many reasons to invest, that some would consider to be quite valuable.
Thanks to the Browser Wars and the other various corporate battles of the 90's, and the ensuing minor triumphs of open-source (especially BSD-licensed) compatibility projects, compatibility is a growing expectation among consumers, whether they realize it or not.
Websites are now peppered with "log in with Facebook" buttons and "Tweet this" links. Consumer devices tout how they integrate with everything people already use. Customers expect that interoperability will be a standard feature, rather than just an add-on that might be nice. I suspect it's partly due to having widespread access to the Internet's vast supply of media: People understand that the world of caccessible resources is far larger than any single company will provide.
There are a few holdouts in this area (Microsoft, specifically, and anyone who thinks DRM is a good idea), but overall I think we're doing much better than we were in the bad old days of the 90's... Does anyone else remember having to install proprietary networking stacks?
Convince enough people that it makes sense for a company to be trading at a value equal to 100 years worth of income
Buy a stock at 100x income, hold on to it for five years, then sell it for 100x income. Assuming "income" scales with inflation, the net result is that you gained 5 years' worth of dividends. If the company does well, the sale price may be significantly higher than its purchase price.
Note that the actual numeric value of "income" is irrelevant to the net profit. Change matters and dividends matter, but the price of "one share" is largely immaterial. That's why people who actually understand the stock market will look at other metrics (usually change-related) rather than just the price.
In a previous job, I've worked directly with and for multi-millionaires, and this is pretty close to right. Perhaps it was just my employer's clientele, but I've rarely seen anyone as dedicated to their professions. It was not uncommon for our office to get calls from 7AM to 11PM from a single client working on a project. For many of our richest clients, the idea of "off the clock" was something that everyone else cared about.
It helps that most of our clients had enough money to choose their profession, so their work was usually their passion. Interestingly, that was partly what led me to quit that job, and move my career closer to the kind of work I would do for fun.
If you can look at a picture taken from a mountain's summit, then you don't need to climb it.
I wrote this comment to illustrate how shortsighted my contemporary's statement was. The opening sentence is a clear reworking of his own first sentence, highlighting the similarities between the underlying rationales. However, my choice of subjects is culturally identified as a personal triumph, where one's effort in the undertaking is valued more than the conclusion. With that brief and sarcastic introduction, I intend that the reader will experience a moment of mild awe at its wit, which is quickly lost in the following paragraph dissecting and deconstructing the comment in self-referential verbosity. There is a reference to explaining one's joke ruining the punchline. By the conclusion, the reader will hopefully understand that the sentiment of the entire comment was contained in that opening sentence, but the potential intensity was diluted by the explanation.
For historical art, yes. You'd need to approach that from an historic perspective, providing primary and secondary sources for your conclusions. Fail to do that, and you're just regurgitating the professor's work: B-grade (or worse) work in any class.
As a modern artist, you are free to express whatever you like, however you like... but you need to be aware of the existing theories to understand how your expression will likely be interpreted. If you make a sculpture today with enlarged hands, what does it mean? Are you indulging a head-and-hand fetish? If so, why even bother with the rest of the sculpture? Are you demonstrating a mastery of anatomy? If that's the case, then why did you not also master proportion?
As others have noted, that's the role of documentation. A modern artist has the ability to write about what a particular work is intended to mean. Much of what we know (and can verify) about older works comes from contemporary correspondence and explanations from the artists themselves.
we can hire you and make you take on the work of three to five people for the pay of a single position
Do you mean to say the work, or the roles?
If you're actually being as productive as several people, as though they had been working productively 100% of the time, then you should be paid more.
On the other hand, if you're just doing the same amount of productive work, but able to help with other tasks outside your primary discipline when you otherwise would be waiting on something, then you're doing exactly the work you're being paid for.
Art and philosophy do actually require rigorous thinking, for much the same reason as engineering.
When designing, the engineer must consider all possible scenarios in which his design will be used. Some scenarios may be assumed from the start, and others may be accounted for in the design. Regardless of how careful the engineer is, there are always people who will use the design in an unintended manner, perhaps better or worse than the original goal.
An artist, when creating a work, must consider the environment the work will be viewed in. Some aspects may be controlled through framing or instructions to curators, but there will always be different interpretations for different people. Philosophers, too, must consider every implication of their theory, and must understand the universe of discourse in which their theory holds. Another person may interpret a particular situation differently, so a comprehensive philosophical theory must account for that.
Consider, for example, Michelangelo's statue of David. Michelangelo designed the work to be placed high on a cathedral, so the hands and head are enlarged so they'll be noticeable from the ground. A modern viewer ignorant of David's history would see the statue as grotesque, obscuring the quality of the work.
I'm no expert in prothetics, but it seems the printed Cyborg Beast hand is a completely passive device, relying on wrist movements to control the fingers. On the other hand, the $42,000 device was a "myoelectric prosthetic device, which took signals from the muscle fibers in his forearm, translated those signal, and then used them to mechanically move the fingers of the prosthetic, which looks pretty close to an actual hand."
This guy prefers the less-realistic device. Good for him. A direct comparison is somewhat unreasonable, though.
Yahoo's directors MUST (not "should") do whatever maximizes profit for shareholders. This isn't an opinion, nor what's socially correct, but those are the rules
Which rules, exactly?
I've been hearing this silly "maximize profit" nonsense for decades, and I've never actually found any law requiring profit to be the main impetus. As lgw noted above, the real rules say that it's the corporation's charter that really matters.
I tend to type hard. I've broken a space bar or two. My Model M has put up with me for almost three decades now, and has almost no visible damage. Some of the key caps might be getting a bit worn, but I expect they'll last until I bother to print replacements.
You can't ever win a race with no finish line. Even if you maintain a constantly-increasing lead, your opponent will still eventually cover the same ground you do, so why even bother running?
There is literally nothing to be gained by splitting the company up except fictional paper valuations.
This is why the question posed by TFS is silly:
A fun question is, as fiduciaries for shareholders, should Yahoo's directors split into three separate companies to maximize value?
As Yahoo's directors, its directors should do whatever aligns with the company's goals. If that goal is "make numbers look happy", then sure, they can do that. If their goal is to (re)build a single strong business, they should keep it together. The common notion that financial "shareholder value" is all-important, or somehow a required priority, is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
you are an idiot jackass
You're welcome to your opinion of me, but I don't see how that's relevant to the argument. Judging by the mods, though, I've clearly pissed off somebody.
My point was "distracted driving" is the problem, and that happens more with a cell phone conversation than with a passenger.
Then why never mention distraction at all? You focused exclusively on cell phones and their evils, touting a passenger's benefits.
you claim now to be in agreement with my point, even if disagreement with my example.
You'll have to forgive me, because I don't see anywhere that you actually made any point beyond the evil of cell phones.
In practice, everywhere I've lived, there has been a law against "distracted driving" but that is never applied except when other laws are in effect (DUI, cell phones), or after a crash. If the police just took the time and effort to enforce the law...
That's because it's usually a secondary offense. The police can't enforce it unless a primary offense was also committed. What would probably be beneficial are tighter rules regarding reckless driving, which would affect all distracted driving, regardless of the cause.
But that's too hard, so we get targeted laws, and the broad laws are ignored.
Ah, yes, targeted laws... which are great until the target moves. Laws against cell phones are ineffective against tablets, or in-car navigation systems, or hands-free headsets. Whatever the next distraction is, a few more people will die, and we'll get more laws, and the complaints will continue that existing laws are ineffective.
The other part is that you are wrong. Distractions can be good (or necessary). Feel free to argue that one.
I'll grant that information can be good, but it should be presented in such a way as to minimize disruption.
*slow clap*
Yes, that's a large part of my point... Good judgement isn't about following nice simple rules like "no cell phones while driving". Rather, it's about forethought and consideration, like "Is this interaction going to impair my ability to safely operate this dangerous machine?"
Of course, the latter is a much more difficult thought process, so people routinely get it wrong. It doesn't matter whether it's a cellular call to a client, or talking to a kid about their day at school. If you as a driver allow anything to interfere with your focus on the road, you're a bad driver. No, you don't get to avoid fault by expecting your passenger to watch traffic, or calling your music "background noise". As a driver, part of your job is to understand and evaluate the risk of your entire situation.
It's easy to blame cell phones, but they're not the real problem. Drivers who allow distractions of any kind in their car are the problem.
Then Slashdot would be going ape-shit about the cop executing an unwarranted search.
Bullshit.
The phone is my wife or family, and I can just drop it without offense if road conditions change. They understand the timing of the call and won't talk about anything too distracting. On the other hand, when I'm driving with a client in the car, he's focused on his exciting new business idea, and he doesn't really care that traffic is slowing up ahead. Being professional, I can't really just tell him to shut up for a few minutes.
If there's a phone call that's more important than driving, it can wait until I'm off the road.
There's a long list of reasons that a phone call is less distracting than a passenger. That you can't think of any indicates a problem with you, not those who are capable of managing their attention.
Sure I got the talking to when in a lecture I brought up using a GOTO to solve a problem. However that was about it.
Crappy professor.
GOTO is a perfectly reasonable solution for a very small set of problems. Dijkstra's famous essay has a less-famous rebuttal (that I'm far too lazy to find at the moment), with which Dijkstra agreed: Code should be readable first, well-formed second, and functional third.
Using a GOTO is usually only functional. It doesn't preserve the structure of the code like the two ends of a loop, and being one-ended, it's not easily followed when reading. Other mechanisms are usually better.
However, in the case of a 1% chance of re-running a section, or several long sets of conditions to trigger a block, I find that a GOTO is the most readable tool, and it preserves the most-used structure of the code as well. It's a tool, and like any other it should be used only where appropriate.
Money buys you an audience. What you say to that audience gets you power.
That rationalization doesn't require conspiracies, malevolence, or corruption. It passes Occam's razor, so it therefore is wholly unsuitable as a Slashdot story.
Because it's a nice civilized thing to do, to support your fellow space-rock-travelers in times of need.
Ask and ye shall receive.
TL;DR: There are risks associated with all HUDs, but the likelihood of developing problems stems from having the eyes compete. A monocular display (or well-aligned binocular) should be fine, as long as the display is sufficiently different from the background view that the brain knows it's seeing something different.
Having worked in defense, I can tell you that Windows is also much easier to secure from a procedural standpoint. The auditing and policy tools are much easier to set up, and enjoy more third-party support.
It will indeed be "worthless", unless the company has a non-dividend profit-sharing plan, or produces a product the investor wants to see happen, or if the investor wants control over the company's management, or if any other reason holds true.
There are many reasons to invest, that some would consider to be quite valuable.
Pretty much.
Thanks to the Browser Wars and the other various corporate battles of the 90's, and the ensuing minor triumphs of open-source (especially BSD-licensed) compatibility projects, compatibility is a growing expectation among consumers, whether they realize it or not.
Websites are now peppered with "log in with Facebook" buttons and "Tweet this" links. Consumer devices tout how they integrate with everything people already use. Customers expect that interoperability will be a standard feature, rather than just an add-on that might be nice. I suspect it's partly due to having widespread access to the Internet's vast supply of media: People understand that the world of caccessible resources is far larger than any single company will provide.
There are a few holdouts in this area (Microsoft, specifically, and anyone who thinks DRM is a good idea), but overall I think we're doing much better than we were in the bad old days of the 90's... Does anyone else remember having to install proprietary networking stacks?
Convince enough people that it makes sense for a company to be trading at a value equal to 100 years worth of income
Buy a stock at 100x income, hold on to it for five years, then sell it for 100x income. Assuming "income" scales with inflation, the net result is that you gained 5 years' worth of dividends. If the company does well, the sale price may be significantly higher than its purchase price.
Note that the actual numeric value of "income" is irrelevant to the net profit. Change matters and dividends matter, but the price of "one share" is largely immaterial. That's why people who actually understand the stock market will look at other metrics (usually change-related) rather than just the price.
In a previous job, I've worked directly with and for multi-millionaires, and this is pretty close to right. Perhaps it was just my employer's clientele, but I've rarely seen anyone as dedicated to their professions. It was not uncommon for our office to get calls from 7AM to 11PM from a single client working on a project. For many of our richest clients, the idea of "off the clock" was something that everyone else cared about.
It helps that most of our clients had enough money to choose their profession, so their work was usually their passion. Interestingly, that was partly what led me to quit that job, and move my career closer to the kind of work I would do for fun.
If you can look at a picture taken from a mountain's summit, then you don't need to climb it.
I wrote this comment to illustrate how shortsighted my contemporary's statement was. The opening sentence is a clear reworking of his own first sentence, highlighting the similarities between the underlying rationales. However, my choice of subjects is culturally identified as a personal triumph, where one's effort in the undertaking is valued more than the conclusion. With that brief and sarcastic introduction, I intend that the reader will experience a moment of mild awe at its wit, which is quickly lost in the following paragraph dissecting and deconstructing the comment in self-referential verbosity. There is a reference to explaining one's joke ruining the punchline. By the conclusion, the reader will hopefully understand that the sentiment of the entire comment was contained in that opening sentence, but the potential intensity was diluted by the explanation.
For historical art, yes. You'd need to approach that from an historic perspective, providing primary and secondary sources for your conclusions. Fail to do that, and you're just regurgitating the professor's work: B-grade (or worse) work in any class.
As a modern artist, you are free to express whatever you like, however you like... but you need to be aware of the existing theories to understand how your expression will likely be interpreted. If you make a sculpture today with enlarged hands, what does it mean? Are you indulging a head-and-hand fetish? If so, why even bother with the rest of the sculpture? Are you demonstrating a mastery of anatomy? If that's the case, then why did you not also master proportion?
As others have noted, that's the role of documentation. A modern artist has the ability to write about what a particular work is intended to mean. Much of what we know (and can verify) about older works comes from contemporary correspondence and explanations from the artists themselves.
we can hire you and make you take on the work of three to five people for the pay of a single position
Do you mean to say the work, or the roles?
If you're actually being as productive as several people, as though they had been working productively 100% of the time, then you should be paid more.
On the other hand, if you're just doing the same amount of productive work, but able to help with other tasks outside your primary discipline when you otherwise would be waiting on something, then you're doing exactly the work you're being paid for.
Art and philosophy do actually require rigorous thinking, for much the same reason as engineering.
When designing, the engineer must consider all possible scenarios in which his design will be used. Some scenarios may be assumed from the start, and others may be accounted for in the design. Regardless of how careful the engineer is, there are always people who will use the design in an unintended manner, perhaps better or worse than the original goal.
An artist, when creating a work, must consider the environment the work will be viewed in. Some aspects may be controlled through framing or instructions to curators, but there will always be different interpretations for different people. Philosophers, too, must consider every implication of their theory, and must understand the universe of discourse in which their theory holds. Another person may interpret a particular situation differently, so a comprehensive philosophical theory must account for that.
Consider, for example, Michelangelo's statue of David. Michelangelo designed the work to be placed high on a cathedral, so the hands and head are enlarged so they'll be noticeable from the ground. A modern viewer ignorant of David's history would see the statue as grotesque, obscuring the quality of the work.
I'm no expert in prothetics, but it seems the printed Cyborg Beast hand is a completely passive device, relying on wrist movements to control the fingers. On the other hand, the $42,000 device was a "myoelectric prosthetic device, which took signals from the muscle fibers in his forearm, translated those signal, and then used them to mechanically move the fingers of the prosthetic, which looks pretty close to an actual hand."
This guy prefers the less-realistic device. Good for him. A direct comparison is somewhat unreasonable, though.
A race with no finish line doesn't have a single finish line, either.
Yahoo's directors MUST (not "should") do whatever maximizes profit for shareholders. This isn't an opinion, nor what's socially correct, but those are the rules
Which rules, exactly?
I've been hearing this silly "maximize profit" nonsense for decades, and I've never actually found any law requiring profit to be the main impetus. As lgw noted above, the real rules say that it's the corporation's charter that really matters.
Damned right.
I tend to type hard. I've broken a space bar or two. My Model M has put up with me for almost three decades now, and has almost no visible damage. Some of the key caps might be getting a bit worn, but I expect they'll last until I bother to print replacements.
You're arguing that I can't refer to a "race with no finish line" because all races have finish lines?
For that level of pedantry, I'd expect you to know that it really was a metaphor.
You can't ever win a race with no finish line. Even if you maintain a constantly-increasing lead, your opponent will still eventually cover the same ground you do, so why even bother running?
There is literally nothing to be gained by splitting the company up except fictional paper valuations.
This is why the question posed by TFS is silly:
A fun question is, as fiduciaries for shareholders, should Yahoo's directors split into three separate companies to maximize value?
As Yahoo's directors, its directors should do whatever aligns with the company's goals. If that goal is "make numbers look happy", then sure, they can do that. If their goal is to (re)build a single strong business, they should keep it together. The common notion that financial "shareholder value" is all-important, or somehow a required priority, is ridiculous.