If that's the policy you set for the class you teach, then so be it.
You are not a politician, you are a teacher. Try not to let you misguided self image interfere with teaching. Ask yourself this: are your students learning. Figure out how to measure that, not whether they are acting how you want them to act. You are making it hard on your students this way, but does your process put any more knowledge into their brains? Have you applied rigorous scientific method to measure your approach against others? No you haven't. Your techniques are like creationism, based on belief and bias.
I have all requisite degrees in the hard sciences (BS, MA, PhD)--all earned the hard way at some of the world's top universities by hard study and work. And I'll go toe-to-toe in publication record (quality+quantity, especially quality) with just about any one out there. But I think modern professors do not teach with students' learning in mind. It seems that the idea these days is to make it as hard on students as possible. I think this student's problems and the active discouraging of study groups does a huge disservice to education (we are defining education as the teaching of academic knowledge).
Professors, this note is for you: the goal is to get academic knowledge into the brain of your students--not to teach life's tough lessons. Let life do that and stop being so full of yourselves. If you want to make sure they are learning what you should be teaching them, give them tests. If they fail, re-evaluate how you teach. Your job is not to be a moralist, moralizer, philosopher (obvious exceptions noted), parent, policeman, or judge.
If that formula doesn't compute, this is second-best: Rule 1: Chin up, back straight, chest out, shoulders back. Other Rules: Smile. Walk with a purpose. Stand like a statue when you have to stand still. Pretend not to notice them noticing you. Ask "new haircut?" when you see it change. You ask polite questions to keep them talking, they talk. This is 90%. The rest is finesse and always remembering Rule 1.
I've already said too much, but I'm married so I guess its OK.
The use of these letters to identify potential terrorists has, according to the government audit, increased dramatically since the implementation of the Patriot Act.
I like the way that the Orwellian type language of the WOT infiltrates supposedly objective news. First, the phrasing suggests that more potential terrorists are identified from the use of the letters. Better, and more correct would be "attempt to identify potential terrorists". Second, the notion of "potential" terrorists bothers me to no end. Has any one done a ROC curve or the like on the use of these letters or any other method to identify "potential" terrorists? My guess is not. The lack of any scientific method in the identification of "potential" terrorists means we are dealing with an old fashioned witch hunt on a grand scale, full of suspicion, superstition, and prejudice.
Lets say you have a lot of sellers on Ebay. Lets say they have a lot of positives. Life is good. The ebay community looks good, and buyers have confidence going in to their shopping. Now, ebay turns on its sellers. Seller negatives go up and buyers begin to lose confidence in ebay because they feel like they can't trust the sellers and buy elsewhere, like amazon. Looks like a case of shooting yourself in the foot to spite your face--the bullet might give you a nice warm feeling, but its going to hurt like hell tomorrow.
If ebay is loosing money, its not because of feedback issues. Its because they need to expand into new markets and think about new services they can provide. This is how the great companies grow. Cannibalizing their source of income (sellers) is only going to hurt business and not help. They need a new CEO--I bet they'll figure that out in a couple of years after the damage has been done.
Many package managers could accommodate this (i.e. fink, debian, rpm). This would be a great answer. Who cares if people who want point and click installers have to see advertising. They would be getting advertising anyway if they used the AOL client.
My guess is that this person has no morals and he has thus been alloted $7500 to start another scam business.
Most people in prison are there not because of bad morals but because of factors relating to drug use. Unlike the vast, immoral fraud committed here, drug use is treated as a crime punishable by prison and is not treated as a health issue, as it should be. If these fraudsters were sent to prison, they might not reform, but they certainly would pay for their crime. When was the last time a judge said to a drug addict "spit it up and we'll let you go"?
I would argue that Mendel has had no impact on molecular genetics.. His model system was horribly simplified and, for the traits he studied, wasn't even perfectly accurate.
Mendel stopped doing genetics before epistasis and population genetics were even conceived of, much less understood.
Genetics succeeded after him not because of his influence in understanding heredity, but despite it. We all know that nonhomologous recombination plays an important role in the genotype of certain offspring and that random mutations can cause drastically new traits. (I'm ignoring the fact that such traits can result in selective advantage).
The reason genetics has succeeded as a field is because molecular geneticists have worked out a lot of the mechanisms of gene segregation on the molecular level. Mendelian inheritance has mostly played a peripheral role in this.
-- -1 offtopic = you admit you don't understand the sarcasm = you wasted your mod point
traveling anywhere near a miserable asshole like yourself is far, far worse
Yeah, the guy who wrote that is a real asshole sitting there watching his DVD with headphones or trying to sleep. Take it from me, the most annoyed people are the ones who sit there quietly wishing the plane would collide with a mountain to stop the agony. When was the last time someone made as much noise as the kid they wanted quiet? Pause now and answer honestly. Think about the flights you have been on. Perhaps you felt really, really bad when someone, 3.5 hours into a transcontinental, turned around in his or her seat and gave you a glare. How did that affect your darling little brat? Is it ruined for life or was it completely oblivious to the situation and continued to yelp as you egged it on?
...when education deviates from first principles. You start getting courses like "guerilla marketing" or "late Byzantine Women's Studies" or "Topics in Gay Poetry". Though these are probably worth someone's time to study, are they really right for undergraduates who need an education rich in basic skills? Disclaimer: Not against guerillas, late Byzantine Women, or Gay Poets. Just *for* learning basic skills first.
Pretty soon, everything is a potential topic and departments find they can be talked into anything. They are especially vulnerable when some industry group dangles a monetary carrot on the end.
Hunter said they now have a committee to review new industry sponsored courses. First, *now*? Why not before? Second, *all* new courses should submit to faculty review in the department that will teach the course. A proposed syllabus should be reviewed at the bare minimum with a discussion of the teaching approach.
I fly more or less a lot. The density of screaming kids decreases significantly near the back of the plane, especially on egalitarian airlines like Southwest where people get to pick their seats. Every once in a great while there is the outlier mom who makes it almost to the back. My suggestion is, if you are not in a hurry to "deplane" at your destination, is to sit just enough rows from the back that you don't smell the bathrooms. Also, kids and old people fly during the middle of the day. If you want quiet, schedule your flights after 8pm. You get tired business people and the frequency of babies is at its lowest.
Hell is the 8 am flight in the front of the plane when you have had no sleep the night before. This is the *real* reason they don't allow guns on airplanes.
You have to be kidding. For example. The problem with kids these days is that they are to young to remember when trackballs weighed 2.5 pounds and rolled on metal bearings.
I do a lot of molecular structure and I'd friggin' love to rig one of these as a replacement for the medieval SGI dial box. By the way, when are you gamers going to (1) demand gaming in stereo video and (2) demand a decent trackball? Don't you know that if a large consumer fragment wanted these things, games would be more fun and also science would benefit immeasurably? I mean, this couldn't be possibly be a fun controller, could it?
Read the/. comments and you'll get a fairly accurate picture of reality. I usually see both sides of every story represented more or less fairly (with an arguable slant towards liberalism--but then again, the demographic is educated). If you think TFAs are what the meat of./ is all about, then you are missing the point. TFAs are simply to introduce topics of discussion. You see a lot of redundancy in the comments, sure, but some are insightful and are usually modded as such. You can actually watch the evolution of thought on the scale of an international community if you strain your eyes.
Also see Ann Gibbons, "Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," Science, Vol. 297, 2 January 1998, p. 29 for evidence that our common female ancestor lived approximately 6500 years ago. I'm not making this stuff up; the sources cited are evolutionists.
First, you really should link to the articles in question, as that would be the polite thing to do: Cann | Gibbons (pdf).
Second, it is obvious that you have chosen a belief system and grasp at any evidence to support it, blatantly disregarding all other evidence. A google of those papers make them look to be two "classics" that creationists refer to again and again. The youngest is over 10 years old. Where are the more recent Science/Nature papers that confirm the conclusions of these papers? They don't exist.
Here is an acid test for good research: Does it stand the test of time? Is the field explosive in the scientific field 10 years later? Some examples of paradigm shifting fields are stem cells, apoptosis, and RNA catalysis. The papers you cite do not measure up to these standards and so are highly suspect. Good science gets confirmed by other scientists and not by conjecture or preachers who thumpin bibles. Where are the papers confirming the 6500 year old mitochondrial clock or have recent advances shown problems with the previous model? Do the research yourself if you are objective like you think you are--or you can remain blinded by your belief system. But if you wish to remain blinded by your belief system, don't burden others with your belief system like you are doing here.
When uninformed people have opinions on science that smell of belief and bias, my suggestion to them is to go spend five to seven years to get a PhD in a field of natural science. Don't cop-out and pick some religious school where you end up with a thesis full of bible quotes. Find a real state-run university without any allegiance to any religion. Do actual research out in the field (dig bones, sequence DNA, dissect plants, count the strata of geological formations, etc.), synthesize the data and write your thesis on what you have discovered. Don't lie and make up data to support your belief system! Even [insert your favorite religious prophet or diety here] wouldn't do that, right? Integrate the comments of your committee and defend your thesis in front of them. Once you have your PhD from the accredited state-run university without any religious affiliation, come back and examine your belief system from the perspective of a trained scientist. Until then, you are simply fooling yourself, discrediting the members of your faith, and annoying the knowledgeable.
The first part of this is going to sound antagonistic, but its meant to be helpful.
Are you a superstar company? Really? What product do you work on? Is it cutting edge/interesting/socially minded? Is it going to present a new challenge every day for your programmers?
How top-heavy is your company? Are the salaries of the managers 3x more than the programmers? How about the top-level execs? Are they getting $1.5M bonuses every year while solving no problems themselves? Do their salaries go up 12% every year while programmers get 2% raises? Do the execs get their own parking spaces while the programmers have to park on the street? Is the disparity noticeable and constantly rubbed in the face of your programmers? Do the execs act snooty and drive $60,000 dollar cars? If these qualities apply to your company, there is no hope. If not, read on.
People who can really solve tough problems (i.e. "superstars") know who they are. Their minds don't work linearly and they see patterns in everything. They make suggestions and observations only to get ridiculed because the small minds around them can't understand what they are saying. But they usually get vindicated:
People often ask me why I persisted in doing research on a subject that was so controversial. I frequently respond by telling them that only a few scientists are granted the great fortune to pursue topics that are so new and different that only a small number of people can grasp the meaning of such discoveries initially. I am one of those genuinely lucky scientists... --Stanley Prusiner
The unfortunate thing is that superstars, as you call them, experience this pattern again and again. You need to recognize that this pattern is common for them. You need to cater to their intellectual needs, make sure they are payed well, and, yes, appeal to their egos. This doesn't mean a constant suck-up, which is a common misconception. You need to give your damn best to understand what they are saying, to understand that their insight might be better than yours and to recognize that they have shown insight through a solid record of achievement. Superstars are players and not coaches (i.e. cheerleaders) and they can point to success, but you don't need to acknowledge it directly. If you want to employ them, you need to show that you can be student instead of master, because superstars are also teachers.
I know that that last one is going to hurt, especially in the hierarchical realm of corporate politics. However, your ability to be a student of your employees will separate you from mere mediocre employers and will get you those superstars you want so badly.
You are really whining here. You know what, I don't use office and I like the fact I don't use office. I don't even know if my OSS office suite looks like office and I don't care. Sorry if OSS is hurting your ability to afford your house in San Jose. How about this, find another job if you don't like how things are instead of whining all the time. Guess what? Whining doesn't change the way things are. If you want to change the world, start with the man in the mirror. We have a name for guys like you, "whiners". Hey, you know what else OSS does? It gives ME, LaskoVortex, a free office suite that I don't have to pay for. You know what else I like? Gimp. Gimp is awsome. And its free. Free! Free! Free! You like apples? How do you like them apples? Looks like there is a problem with OSS, but its yours and not mine! Sucks to be you.
I'm going to conjecture that no real scientists have commented here. I've read a few dozen comments and I've read a lot of "scientists use big words for their own egos". I want to dispel that notion. First, scientists do have big egos. I am a scientist and I am confident that mine is one of the biggest. However, with such big egos, we feel little need to find means to inflate them even further by gratuitously selecting big words. No, big words exist for a reason--namely, they are used to refer to complex concepts. We can not get around this necessity.
For example, let's examine the word "dideoxy chain terminator". This is a big word no doubt, but to understand it fully, we would need to know what DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is, its molecular composition, and its structure. We would need to understand how one might synthesize DNA in vitro using a template and how a dideoxy chain terminator would interfere with extension, and to complete the understanding, that we would want this extension terminated because we could glean valuable information from this termination. Since all of this explanation would be beyond your average person's patience to learn or even perhaps even beyond thier ability to understand, we might say something like "we want to sequence your genes". And then the person would say, "they are dockers" and think that you are an idiot for wasting their time.
There are enough IPv6 addresses to assign more than 1000 for each square foot of the Earth's surface (oceans included).
In terms of pure quantity, your statement is almost as absurd as mine was, but I doubt if you were attempting humor like me. So I'm going to have to respond (1) to show you that you how your statement is absurd, and (2) more importantly, because some humor-challenged moderator modded my original note down, probably because said moderator was also math challenged and couldn't identify the absurdity of my original comment, and hence missed the humor of it.
How absurd was my comment (how funny was it)?
Well, there are 2**128 ipv6 addresses, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (or more than 10**38). That's a lot! Now, how much surface area does the earth have? In the old days, I would calculate this, but these days, its easiest just to google "surface area of earth": 510,065,600 square kilometers, or 5,490,300,425,045,295 square feet. So, each square foot of earth's surface gets 61,978,824,577,369,303,539,367 ipv6 addresses. That's far more than 1000 (61,978,824,577,369,303,539 times more, to be correct). In fact, 61,978,824,577,369,303,539,367 is a number that is far too big for most people to even imagine.
So maybe I should put 2**128 in different terms, so that we may begin to understand what 2**128 means in terms of address allocation. First, let's assume that every person on earth is as fat as the average American male (arguably the fatest people on the planet) at 86 kg. Let's also assume that people are, on average, as dense as water, and so that 86 kg has about as many atoms as in an equivalent mass of water. So the average person is made probably no more than 2.27 * 10**27 atoms. Currently, the population of the earth is about 6,653,000,000. So, there are 6.81 * 10**37 atoms making up all of the people of the earth. So, 2**128 ipv6 addresses means that we could assign about 7 ipv6 addresses to each of the 6.81 * 10**27 atoms of each of the 6,653,000,000 people on earth.
So now it should be clear that I was trying to be absurd and thus humorous in my last post.
A defense of desparation is no worse than a prosecution of desparation. From what I understand of the article, the prosecution has (1) no dead body (2) no murder weapon (3) no suspects outside of "the usual supects" and (4) no evidence outside of peculiar behavior. So, if your evidence of a crime you can't prove even ever happened is peculiar behavior of a suspect for the hypothetical crime, don't feel short changed when the defence turns out to be the defending of said peculiar behavior.
The training video is to motivate law enforcement officers to imagine that people are out there downloading files while smoking crack, buying automatic rifles, and ordering their "gangstuh" enemies dead.
Here is the planned scenario: The video will first drive the cops into a rage, foaming at the mouth, ready to suspect anyone who uses a computer. The next step will be little bells and treats for the cops when they beat up someone using a computer or when they suspect of downloading files. The cops will need more backup and better cars. There will be a referendum, then a bond. It will become politically popular to be tough on downloaders. There will be worried moms and community meetings to discuss the problem of downloading. We will have now have a convenient scapegoat every time our children get in trouble or stop obeying us. The topic of downloading will be forbidden from the classroom except for the most Orwellian and shortest of all possible sentiments: "Just say No". We will Just Say No to downloading. Senators will pass legislation and presidents will run on the "crackdown" platform. We will call this phase the "crackdown" phase. Then we'll have a war: The War on Downloading. Our taxes will go up and we will borrow against the value of our currency fund the war. But we will be willing to pay with our freedoms and our future earnings because we will feel safer from the Threat of Downloading.
Um, if you have some dirt on somebody, post it to wikileaks! They may not be interested in how full someone's laundry basket is, or whether some guy skirted a subway fare 15 years ago, but if someone's actions affect a lot of people, then it will probably stay up on wikileaks. In this sense they are probably fair.
You operate under the paranoid belief that wikileaks has a political agenda. Perhaps you should identify said political agenda explicitly rather than just alluding to it vaguely. Otherwise your post has foul scent of propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
You are not a politician, you are a teacher. Try not to let you misguided self image interfere with teaching. Ask yourself this: are your students learning. Figure out how to measure that, not whether they are acting how you want them to act. You are making it hard on your students this way, but does your process put any more knowledge into their brains? Have you applied rigorous scientific method to measure your approach against others? No you haven't. Your techniques are like creationism, based on belief and bias.
I have all requisite degrees in the hard sciences (BS, MA, PhD)--all earned the hard way at some of the world's top universities by hard study and work. And I'll go toe-to-toe in publication record (quality+quantity, especially quality) with just about any one out there. But I think modern professors do not teach with students' learning in mind. It seems that the idea these days is to make it as hard on students as possible. I think this student's problems and the active discouraging of study groups does a huge disservice to education (we are defining education as the teaching of academic knowledge).
Professors, this note is for you: the goal is to get academic knowledge into the brain of your students--not to teach life's tough lessons. Let life do that and stop being so full of yourselves. If you want to make sure they are learning what you should be teaching them, give them tests. If they fail, re-evaluate how you teach. Your job is not to be a moralist, moralizer, philosopher (obvious exceptions noted), parent, policeman, or judge.
Again: knowledge => student brain. Focus on that.
Just kidding. But not really.
If that formula doesn't compute, this is second-best: Rule 1: Chin up, back straight, chest out, shoulders back. Other Rules: Smile. Walk with a purpose. Stand like a statue when you have to stand still. Pretend not to notice them noticing you. Ask "new haircut?" when you see it change. You ask polite questions to keep them talking, they talk. This is 90%. The rest is finesse and always remembering Rule 1.
I've already said too much, but I'm married so I guess its OK.
Good luck.
I like the way that the Orwellian type language of the WOT infiltrates supposedly objective news. First, the phrasing suggests that more potential terrorists are identified from the use of the letters. Better, and more correct would be "attempt to identify potential terrorists". Second, the notion of "potential" terrorists bothers me to no end. Has any one done a ROC curve or the like on the use of these letters or any other method to identify "potential" terrorists? My guess is not. The lack of any scientific method in the identification of "potential" terrorists means we are dealing with an old fashioned witch hunt on a grand scale, full of suspicion, superstition, and prejudice.
Lets say you have a lot of sellers on Ebay. Lets say they have a lot of positives. Life is good. The ebay community looks good, and buyers have confidence going in to their shopping. Now, ebay turns on its sellers. Seller negatives go up and buyers begin to lose confidence in ebay because they feel like they can't trust the sellers and buy elsewhere, like amazon. Looks like a case of shooting yourself in the foot to spite your face--the bullet might give you a nice warm feeling, but its going to hurt like hell tomorrow.
If ebay is loosing money, its not because of feedback issues. Its because they need to expand into new markets and think about new services they can provide. This is how the great companies grow. Cannibalizing their source of income (sellers) is only going to hurt business and not help. They need a new CEO--I bet they'll figure that out in a couple of years after the damage has been done.
Mod parent up, please.
Many package managers could accommodate this (i.e. fink, debian, rpm). This would be a great answer. Who cares if people who want point and click installers have to see advertising. They would be getting advertising anyway if they used the AOL client.
My guess is that this person has no morals and he has thus been alloted $7500 to start another scam business.
Most people in prison are there not because of bad morals but because of factors relating to drug use. Unlike the vast, immoral fraud committed here, drug use is treated as a crime punishable by prison and is not treated as a health issue, as it should be. If these fraudsters were sent to prison, they might not reform, but they certainly would pay for their crime. When was the last time a judge said to a drug addict "spit it up and we'll let you go"?
I would argue that Mendel has had no impact on molecular genetics.. His model system was horribly simplified and, for the traits he studied, wasn't even perfectly accurate.
Mendel stopped doing genetics before epistasis and population genetics were even conceived of, much less understood.
Genetics succeeded after him not because of his influence in understanding heredity, but despite it. We all know that nonhomologous recombination plays an important role in the genotype of certain offspring and that random mutations can cause drastically new traits. (I'm ignoring the fact that such traits can result in selective advantage).
The reason genetics has succeeded as a field is because molecular geneticists have worked out a lot of the mechanisms of gene segregation on the molecular level. Mendelian inheritance has mostly played a peripheral role in this.
--
-1 offtopic = you admit you don't understand the sarcasm = you wasted your mod point
Yeah, the guy who wrote that is a real asshole sitting there watching his DVD with headphones or trying to sleep. Take it from me, the most annoyed people are the ones who sit there quietly wishing the plane would collide with a mountain to stop the agony. When was the last time someone made as much noise as the kid they wanted quiet? Pause now and answer honestly. Think about the flights you have been on. Perhaps you felt really, really bad when someone, 3.5 hours into a transcontinental, turned around in his or her seat and gave you a glare. How did that affect your darling little brat? Is it ruined for life or was it completely oblivious to the situation and continued to yelp as you egged it on?
...when education deviates from first principles. You start getting courses like "guerilla marketing" or "late Byzantine Women's Studies" or "Topics in Gay Poetry". Though these are probably worth someone's time to study, are they really right for undergraduates who need an education rich in basic skills? Disclaimer: Not against guerillas, late Byzantine Women, or Gay Poets. Just *for* learning basic skills first.
Pretty soon, everything is a potential topic and departments find they can be talked into anything. They are especially vulnerable when some industry group dangles a monetary carrot on the end.
Hunter said they now have a committee to review new industry sponsored courses. First, *now*? Why not before? Second, *all* new courses should submit to faculty review in the department that will teach the course. A proposed syllabus should be reviewed at the bare minimum with a discussion of the teaching approach.
I fly more or less a lot. The density of screaming kids decreases significantly near the back of the plane, especially on egalitarian airlines like Southwest where people get to pick their seats. Every once in a great while there is the outlier mom who makes it almost to the back. My suggestion is, if you are not in a hurry to "deplane" at your destination, is to sit just enough rows from the back that you don't smell the bathrooms. Also, kids and old people fly during the middle of the day. If you want quiet, schedule your flights after 8pm. You get tired business people and the frequency of babies is at its lowest.
Hell is the 8 am flight in the front of the plane when you have had no sleep the night before. This is the *real* reason they don't allow guns on airplanes.
You have to be kidding. For example. The problem with kids these days is that they are to young to remember when trackballs weighed 2.5 pounds and rolled on metal bearings.
I do a lot of molecular structure and I'd friggin' love to rig one of these as a replacement for the medieval SGI dial box. By the way, when are you gamers going to (1) demand gaming in stereo video and (2) demand a decent trackball? Don't you know that if a large consumer fragment wanted these things, games would be more fun and also science would benefit immeasurably? I mean, this couldn't be possibly be a fun controller, could it?
MEMO FROM THE MANAGEMENT: You're out of excuses, now design that website!
Read the /. comments and you'll get a fairly accurate picture of reality. I usually see both sides of every story represented more or less fairly (with an arguable slant towards liberalism--but then again, the demographic is educated). If you think TFAs are what the meat of ./ is all about, then you are missing the point. TFAs are simply to introduce topics of discussion. You see a lot of redundancy in the comments, sure, but some are insightful and are usually modded as such. You can actually watch the evolution of thought on the scale of an international community if you strain your eyes.
First, you really should link to the articles in question, as that would be the polite thing to do: Cann | Gibbons (pdf).
Second, it is obvious that you have chosen a belief system and grasp at any evidence to support it, blatantly disregarding all other evidence. A google of those papers make them look to be two "classics" that creationists refer to again and again. The youngest is over 10 years old. Where are the more recent Science/Nature papers that confirm the conclusions of these papers? They don't exist.
Here is an acid test for good research: Does it stand the test of time? Is the field explosive in the scientific field 10 years later? Some examples of paradigm shifting fields are stem cells, apoptosis, and RNA catalysis. The papers you cite do not measure up to these standards and so are highly suspect. Good science gets confirmed by other scientists and not by conjecture or preachers who thumpin bibles. Where are the papers confirming the 6500 year old mitochondrial clock or have recent advances shown problems with the previous model? Do the research yourself if you are objective like you think you are--or you can remain blinded by your belief system. But if you wish to remain blinded by your belief system, don't burden others with your belief system like you are doing here.
When uninformed people have opinions on science that smell of belief and bias, my suggestion to them is to go spend five to seven years to get a PhD in a field of natural science. Don't cop-out and pick some religious school where you end up with a thesis full of bible quotes. Find a real state-run university without any allegiance to any religion. Do actual research out in the field (dig bones, sequence DNA, dissect plants, count the strata of geological formations, etc.), synthesize the data and write your thesis on what you have discovered. Don't lie and make up data to support your belief system! Even [insert your favorite religious prophet or diety here] wouldn't do that, right? Integrate the comments of your committee and defend your thesis in front of them. Once you have your PhD from the accredited state-run university without any religious affiliation, come back and examine your belief system from the perspective of a trained scientist. Until then, you are simply fooling yourself, discrediting the members of your faith, and annoying the knowledgeable.
The first part of this is going to sound antagonistic, but its meant to be helpful.
Are you a superstar company? Really? What product do you work on? Is it cutting edge/interesting/socially minded? Is it going to present a new challenge every day for your programmers?
How top-heavy is your company? Are the salaries of the managers 3x more than the programmers? How about the top-level execs? Are they getting $1.5M bonuses every year while solving no problems themselves? Do their salaries go up 12% every year while programmers get 2% raises? Do the execs get their own parking spaces while the programmers have to park on the street? Is the disparity noticeable and constantly rubbed in the face of your programmers? Do the execs act snooty and drive $60,000 dollar cars? If these qualities apply to your company, there is no hope. If not, read on.
People who can really solve tough problems (i.e. "superstars") know who they are. Their minds don't work linearly and they see patterns in everything. They make suggestions and observations only to get ridiculed because the small minds around them can't understand what they are saying. But they usually get vindicated:
The unfortunate thing is that superstars, as you call them, experience this pattern again and again. You need to recognize that this pattern is common for them. You need to cater to their intellectual needs, make sure they are payed well, and, yes, appeal to their egos. This doesn't mean a constant suck-up, which is a common misconception. You need to give your damn best to understand what they are saying, to understand that their insight might be better than yours and to recognize that they have shown insight through a solid record of achievement. Superstars are players and not coaches (i.e. cheerleaders) and they can point to success, but you don't need to acknowledge it directly. If you want to employ them, you need to show that you can be student instead of master, because superstars are also teachers.
I know that that last one is going to hurt, especially in the hierarchical realm of corporate politics. However, your ability to be a student of your employees will separate you from mere mediocre employers and will get you those superstars you want so badly.
You are really whining here. You know what, I don't use office and I like the fact I don't use office. I don't even know if my OSS office suite looks like office and I don't care. Sorry if OSS is hurting your ability to afford your house in San Jose. How about this, find another job if you don't like how things are instead of whining all the time. Guess what? Whining doesn't change the way things are. If you want to change the world, start with the man in the mirror. We have a name for guys like you, "whiners". Hey, you know what else OSS does? It gives ME, LaskoVortex, a free office suite that I don't have to pay for. You know what else I like? Gimp. Gimp is awsome. And its free. Free! Free! Free! You like apples? How do you like them apples? Looks like there is a problem with OSS, but its yours and not mine! Sucks to be you.
I'm going to conjecture that no real scientists have commented here. I've read a few dozen comments and I've read a lot of "scientists use big words for their own egos". I want to dispel that notion. First, scientists do have big egos. I am a scientist and I am confident that mine is one of the biggest. However, with such big egos, we feel little need to find means to inflate them even further by gratuitously selecting big words. No, big words exist for a reason--namely, they are used to refer to complex concepts. We can not get around this necessity.
For example, let's examine the word "dideoxy chain terminator". This is a big word no doubt, but to understand it fully, we would need to know what DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is, its molecular composition, and its structure. We would need to understand how one might synthesize DNA in vitro using a template and how a dideoxy chain terminator would interfere with extension, and to complete the understanding, that we would want this extension terminated because we could glean valuable information from this termination. Since all of this explanation would be beyond your average person's patience to learn or even perhaps even beyond thier ability to understand, we might say something like "we want to sequence your genes". And then the person would say, "they are dockers" and think that you are an idiot for wasting their time.
If you are ever put on trial for a murder you didn't commit, you might want to visit.
In terms of pure quantity, your statement is almost as absurd as mine was, but I doubt if you were attempting humor like me. So I'm going to have to respond (1) to show you that you how your statement is absurd, and (2) more importantly, because some humor-challenged moderator modded my original note down, probably because said moderator was also math challenged and couldn't identify the absurdity of my original comment, and hence missed the humor of it.
How absurd was my comment (how funny was it)?
Well, there are 2**128 ipv6 addresses, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (or more than 10**38). That's a lot! Now, how much surface area does the earth have? In the old days, I would calculate this, but these days, its easiest just to google "surface area of earth": 510,065,600 square kilometers, or 5,490,300,425,045,295 square feet. So, each square foot of earth's surface gets 61,978,824,577,369,303,539,367 ipv6 addresses. That's far more than 1000 (61,978,824,577,369,303,539 times more, to be correct). In fact, 61,978,824,577,369,303,539,367 is a number that is far too big for most people to even imagine.
So maybe I should put 2**128 in different terms, so that we may begin to understand what 2**128 means in terms of address allocation. First, let's assume that every person on earth is as fat as the average American male (arguably the fatest people on the planet) at 86 kg. Let's also assume that people are, on average, as dense as water, and so that 86 kg has about as many atoms as in an equivalent mass of water. So the average person is made probably no more than 2.27 * 10**27 atoms. Currently, the population of the earth is about 6,653,000,000. So, there are 6.81 * 10**37 atoms making up all of the people of the earth. So, 2**128 ipv6 addresses means that we could assign about 7 ipv6 addresses to each of the 6.81 * 10**27 atoms of each of the 6,653,000,000 people on earth.
So now it should be clear that I was trying to be absurd and thus humorous in my last post.
A defense of desparation is no worse than a prosecution of desparation. From what I understand of the article, the prosecution has (1) no dead body (2) no murder weapon (3) no suspects outside of "the usual supects" and (4) no evidence outside of peculiar behavior. So, if your evidence of a crime you can't prove even ever happened is peculiar behavior of a suspect for the hypothetical crime, don't feel short changed when the defence turns out to be the defending of said peculiar behavior.
That's what they were saying about IPv4 15 years ago.
The training video is to motivate law enforcement officers to imagine that people are out there downloading files while smoking crack, buying automatic rifles, and ordering their "gangstuh" enemies dead.
Here is the planned scenario: The video will first drive the cops into a rage, foaming at the mouth, ready to suspect anyone who uses a computer. The next step will be little bells and treats for the cops when they beat up someone using a computer or when they suspect of downloading files. The cops will need more backup and better cars. There will be a referendum, then a bond. It will become politically popular to be tough on downloaders. There will be worried moms and community meetings to discuss the problem of downloading. We will have now have a convenient scapegoat every time our children get in trouble or stop obeying us. The topic of downloading will be forbidden from the classroom except for the most Orwellian and shortest of all possible sentiments: "Just say No". We will Just Say No to downloading. Senators will pass legislation and presidents will run on the "crackdown" platform. We will call this phase the "crackdown" phase. Then we'll have a war: The War on Downloading. Our taxes will go up and we will borrow against the value of our currency fund the war. But we will be willing to pay with our freedoms and our future earnings because we will feel safer from the Threat of Downloading.
Um, if you have some dirt on somebody, post it to wikileaks! They may not be interested in how full someone's laundry basket is, or whether some guy skirted a subway fare 15 years ago, but if someone's actions affect a lot of people, then it will probably stay up on wikileaks. In this sense they are probably fair.
You operate under the paranoid belief that wikileaks has a political agenda. Perhaps you should identify said political agenda explicitly rather than just alluding to it vaguely. Otherwise your post has foul scent of propaganda.