"SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming" by Bill Karwin. If you design database schemata from scratch, it's well worth your time! For a lot of web applications, the database is the foundation upon which the rest of the app rests. You can have the best frontend and backend code in the world but if your database schema is a mess, you application will still be difficult to work with. This book saved me coworker and I at a previous job from making some serious errors that we definitely would have regretted, especially after years of data were accumulated.
When hiring, I often found the CS majors as having an inflated sense of their own abilities, and a general lack of knowledge of how programming is generally done in the real world - hacking on some other schmuck's broken legacy code that nobody can figure out. And a kid who started programming in high school and just kept working at it may have five years of real experience before they get their first job, and does it because he/she can't _stop_ doing it.
I'm really sick of how this seems to come up every time every time people debate the merits of a CS degree. Does it occur to nobody that maybe, just maybe, a fair chunk of the students who chose CS in college are also the kids who started programming in high school (or even earlier!) and have a fair amount of practical experience before they ever get hired because they work on their own projects? And that maybe their CS degree helped open their eyes to new ideas and furthered their learning? I don't understand why so many people on Slashdot insist on creating this false dichotomy, where either a person is passionate about programming and technology and learns a lot on their own or they have a CS degree and never pursue anything outside of their coursework.
Yes, it's true that some CS grads have an overinflated sense of their abilities and are clueless about the real world. But on the flip side of the coin, I've met some *amazingly* egotistical "self-taught" programmers who think they are geniuses because "I taught myself what those fancy pants CS kids *had* to go to school for!" I've seen people like that roll their eyes at "academic" concepts like database normalization and foreign key constraints because they "need to get the job done" and "don't have time for this crap".
All in all, I think I'm a much better developer for having gotten a CS degree. I think the most helpful way of thinking about my degree was understanding that it was a starting point, not an ending point. By the end of my degree, I had been exposed to broad enough range of stuff to be able to dive into subjects I found interesting without feeling like I was having to start at square one. It gave me the practical basis and theoretical problem solving skills to allow me to pick up new languages, technologies, and ideas.
This isn't an issue of freedom of speech or freedom of religion. Eich wasn't fired; he stepped down. To be fair, there was probably a lot of pressure on him to step down, but at the end of the day I think all the higher ups at Mozilla (Eich included) realized that the revelation of Eich's donation to Prop 8 was doing a huge amount of damage to the Mozilla brand.
In addition to managerial duties, a big part of being a CEO is being the face of a company. There's a reason why many companies vet potential CEOs the same way political parties vet candidates; if you do something that pisses people off, particularly people in your key demographic, you are hurting your company. A lot of young people use Mozilla products and young people in the United States overwhelmingly support gay marriage. Mozilla didn't want Firefox to become "the browser made by that guy who hates gay people" in the eyes of the public, so they made the call of getting rid of a very new CEO to avoid further public pressure.
I would imagine that there's still a job for Eich at Mozilla if he wants it, but probably a lot more behind the scenes.
Pretty much all metal music (regardless of subgenre) makes extensive use of the tritone. While other genres like blues and rock use the tritone interval as a passing tone, metal emphasizes it greatly. This is true of all real metal music (i.e. not the slick, glam-obsessed that happened to be marketed as "metal" in the 80s) from Black Sabbath to today's bands. Exhibit A: Cannibal Corpse - From Skin To Liquid, an instrumental Death Metal song. Alex Webster, the bassist of the band, hit the nail on the head when asked why Death Metal was not a mainstream genre of music:
The gory lyrics are probably not, as much as people say that’s what would keep us from being mainstream, like “death metal would never go into the mainstream because the lyrics are too gory”, I think it’s really the music, because violent entertainment is totally mainstream. Violent video games sell more than any death metal band ever will. Violent movies, like “Saw” and “Hostel” for example, those movies sell more than any death metal band probably ever will.
(source)
There's a particular aesthetic to metal that some people, like myself, absolutely love and the tritone and dissonance are huge parts of that.
A fit 6'2 17 year old who fist fought for sport could credibly get an out of shape heavier man afraid for his life.
The autopsy showed that Martin was 5'11" and weighed 158 pounds at the time of his death. When Zimmerman was arrested, he was recorded as being 5'8" and weighing 185 pounds. The has been a lot of misinformation about the height and weight of both Martin and Zimmerman, with Martin's defenders claiming that Zimmerman weighed over 200 pounds (which had previously, but lost weight later) and Zimmerman's defenders vastly exaggerating Martin's height.
First of all, thank you so much for all of the responses! I've seen some really good ideas and I appreciate all the input. It seems that I unfortunately wasn't quite clear enough in my initial post. The other developer and I have been trying to get the management to spring for an online service like Github or Kiln. To answer a few frequently asked questions:
Q: Why don't you just run git/svn/hg on your local machine?
A: I am running hg on my local machine currently for version control. While this is much better than no version control at all, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of collaborating with the other dev and managing deployment.
Q: Why not run your own server?
A: The other dev and I have talked about this, but there are a few problems. First and foremost, it takes time to setup and maintain such a server and the cost of many online services like Github are pretty modest. The other problem is that we're not really in control of the servers and equipment. That's handled by a separate IT group, so we would have to get them involved to make this happen. Then there's the fact that the IT guys at our work mostly deal with Windows servers while we're mostly *nix fans. Neither one of us has setup a Windows box as a VC server before, so I'm really not sure how well-supported that is.
What is really boils down to is the fact we could get a month of hosting at Github that would suit our needs for about the cost of an hour of work from on person. Therefore we kinda figured that it might just be easiest/cheapest to go with a service like Github.
The war on drugs, as well as all other wars, only profit the profiteers. The wars are a lost cause. The first casualties in any conflict are truth and innocence.
Michael Douglas, in his role as Judge Robert Wakefield in the film Traffic, said it best:
"If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don't know how you wage war on your own family."
Obviously they didn't teach reading at that school?
"Most of them are clueless..."
I'm not getting into specifics of your CS profs and that would be short sighted. I'll bet you found that quite a few used Macs, some used other things as well.
So yes, there are a lot of moo cows out there who follow the herd mentality.. Next point?
Typically you have to be able to read and write to go to college, so no, they didn't "teach reading":p
Back to the point of the discussion, Windows is generally accepted to have a market share of around 80-90% and Mac OS X is generally accepted to have a market share of 5-10%. If you were utterly clueless about computers, would you buy a computer that runs an operating system used by most of your friends, colleagues, relatives, etc and is generally cheaper or would you buy a computer that you knew most of your friends, colleagues, etc wouldn't be able to help you with and was generally more expensive? My guess is that you would go for the former (Windows) even if money was no object. This is why my father (who isn't a "computer guy" at all) sticks to Windows.
This also is why I resent the notion that Mac users are "clueless", even when prefaced by wavering modifiers like "most". You've probably guessed by now that I am a Mac user (well at home anyway). My main hobby is recording music and my decision to buy a Mac was greatly informed by positive experiences I had recording music on my brother's Mac, which was much more stable and adept at detecting and using my recording interface and midi controllers than my computer at the time, which ran Windows. I also really liked the fact that underneath it all, Mac OS X is Unix. So I saved up some money and when the time was right, I bought a Macbook Pro. That was four years ago and my computer is still running perfectly fine and doing all the things I want it to.
The thing about my story is that it's not terribly unique. I can honestly say that *everyone* I know who switched to using a Mac from Windows did so after researching their options and doing a cost-benefit analysis. Compare this to the majority of Windows users I know, who use Windows because "it's what everyone else uses".
1) MAC User may be more affluent. It's not always the case, but most of the time there's probably a lot of credit card debt associated with the individual as well.
2) Most of them are clueless about technology and just want to leave it to someone else. The mentality "it just works" comes to mind but these folks don't shop around. They see their friends with Apple stuff, they buy Apple stuff.
3) Like rounded corners a lot and need to have the latest fashion. Fondleslabs and Mac Books along with Iphones and Ipods are the new jewelry.. It's a status symbol.
So Why wouldn't they go to more expensive hotels where they can show off their bling? I mean honestly, it's not rare to see apple products "In Use" on multiple TV shows, so if the shallow actors are playing with a mac, why can't everybody else? It's really great marketing PR and hype and Orbitz picking up on this is just an astute observation on customer preference. No if you'll excuse me I'm going down to my local Apple store and speak Farsi and try to by a mac book.
Cool story bro! Never mind that no less than four of my CS professors used Macs! Clearly they too are clueless about technology, unlike an enlightened, discerning consumer who buys a Windows laptop because "it's what I have at work, so I'm used to it."
I think we do and we should continue to espouse sound eating principals and practices.
Why would you say that? The information is freely available. Your logic would seem to suggest that actively encouraging people to be healthier would also somehow circumvent natural selection, because we would be rewarding the people who were too lazy to figure it out for themselves. Of course, this is all a moot point since your understanding of natural selection (or at least the way you are trying to apply natural selection to this issue) is deeply flawed.
However, the article is talking about the govt. actually banning the USE of a food (in this case a beverage) that isn't really healthy for you.
No, it's about banning sodas larger than 16 fl. oz in restaurants. If you want to drink 32 fl. oz of soda (the size of a large at McDonald's), you still can do it, it'll probably just cost you a little bit more (if you buy two) or take a bit more time (if you get a refill). It is a very mild way to nudge people into drinking less soda by making them think a bit more about how much they're drinking.
It's pretty clear that you lack even a high school level understanding of natural selection and didn't read the article at all. How your comment relating the concept you don't understand to the article you didn't read was modded "+5 Insightful" is frankly beyond me.
You don't get it. This is a proposal that curbs the ability of Machiavellian vendors to profit because of people's misunderstanding of basic economics. It's a regulation of the vendors, not the buyers.
Here's how it works:
Most people don't really want the oversized cup. The theaters, stadiums, etc sell it because people will pay $1 more for a larger amount that has an incremental cost for the vendor that is significantly less than selling another cup.
In other words, the vendors sell it for no other reason that it's insanely profitable to get people to pay more for something they don't need at all (but feel as if they should want because it seems like a good price for the excess amount). People see that the second 16 ounces cost significantly less than the first 16 ounces, so they feel compelled to buy it in order to get "a good deal". However, most buyers don't consider that the value to them of the second 16 ounces is close to $0, but they're paying close to $1 for it.
Exactly! Soda is almost PERFECTLY engineered to exploit this mentality. It's cheap as hell to produce, it's carbonated (so you can't really save it for later without it becoming flat and gross), and (at least in the US) it's generally served over ice, so if you let it sit for too long, it will become diluted, warm and *really* gross. Every time you buy soda at a restaurant, vending machine, gas station, etc, you have to ask yourself "How much soda do I want to drink right now?" The price per ounces is basically irrelevant; you're never getting a "good deal".
As long as the government is intervening in their every day life by providing a safety net for their irresponsible decisions, how is this a bad thing?
Who is the government to tell people that they're being irresponsible? And, if they are but aren't harming anyone else, so what?
Do you really, seriously, truthfully believe that the Nanny State banning big sodas won't prevent soda addicts from... drum roll please... buying two of them?
All this really does is prove that politicians are stupider than people who drink ten liters of soda in a day.
So back in 1993 when the largest soda was say, 20 floz (I can't remember the exact numbers), did you go and buy two of them? Of course not! That would have seemed weird. But now, nobody bats an eye and someone getting a 40 floz soda, especially when it's the default size for a value meal. The fact is, serving sizes are normative. I don't think it's a coincidence that they correlate strongly with the rise on obesity in the US.
Here's a quick anecdote: my care is a '96 model. The cup holders can't fit any size bigger than a small from most fast food restaurants these days. Imagine the psychological impact of having all cup holders be this size. It would tend to stop and make you think, "Man, I'm drinking a *lot* of soda!".
why is it the govts responsibility to protect stupid people from their own stupid actions?
Because the government has a vested interest in keeping the population (at least somewhat) healthy. Try being an economic or military superpower when a significant percentage of your population are obese and suffering from diseases like type 2 diabetes. You won't get very far.
Seems like we're trying to circumvent natural selection.....let these people take themselves out of the gene pool....and maybe we'll have fewer stupid people in a couple of generations?
How on earth would they take themselves out of the gene pool? As long as they survive long enough to reproduce, they are still in the gene pool and they will have "won" the evolutionary contest. Eating junk food and drinking tons of soda will not kill you before you are old enough to reproduce, but it will make you unhealthy, unhappy and a burden on the heath care system.
I've honestly started to wonder, with all the problems we're seeing in modern kids, autism on the rise...so many of them with food allergies (I never heard of anyone almost dying from PB&J sandwiches at school when I grew up, and we ALL ate them)...etc.
People fail to understand that in biology, "fitness" has a very specific meaning, namely that you are fit enough (with respect to your environment) to survive long enough to reproduce. As long has you meet those criteria, you are, evolutionarily speaking, "fit". Thus the requirements for being "fit" in human society have essentially remained unchanged since you were a kid, barring perhaps a few vaccines.
As for the alleged rise in autism and food allergies, I think that's simply a case of parents have a greater awareness of these phenomena now. In earlier generations, children with allergies might simply be seen as not liking certain foods and children with autism would just be considered a bit "odd".
Saying that we shouldn't encourage people to eat healthier foods because they will "take themselves out of the gene pool" is almost as bad as saying that we should ban eye glasses. <sarcasm>After all, the people with poor vision will tend to get into fewer accidents! And if we're lucky, these accidents will kill them in childhood! Why, in a few generations we might cure all eye diseases! </sarcasm>
It seems like in a lot of national security matters, citizens would not have access to the same information that members of Congress would due to some or all of it being classified. However, this lack of access would not stop some citizens from forming a strong opinion. A perfect example of this is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There were people who were vehemently for and against it, but neither group had access to the same information that the members of Congress had. How would you weigh popular support against your own assessment of information that you *knew* your constituents did not have access to?
Actually, it looks like I'm wrong on this. MOSES is the one instructing the army officers to kill all the boys and non-virginal women and keep the virgins for themselves.
Every bigger religion has had bad apples, that's true. What's unique about Islam is that their leader Muhammed himself raped, enslaved, kidnapped, murdered and at least ordered people to stone in his name. This is pretty well documented in Hadith, an important source of Islamic knowledge for every interpretation of Islam as far as I know.
Unique? Have you read Numbers Chapter 31, in which Moses, the most important prophet in Judaism and the author of the Torah (at least according by tradition), is instructed by God to take vengeance on a rival tribe and:
...kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
(verses 17-18)
That's some pretty viciously evil stuff. People tend to have a blindspot when it comes to religions with which they are more familiar. They think of friends and family members who practice that faith and disregard the fact that centuries ago, people had vastly different ideas about what was and wasn't morally acceptable.
For the record, I had three CS professors in college that used Macs and at least two of them had been Apple enthusiasts for 20 odd years. It always baffles me when people act like Mac users are "too stupid" to use Windows (as if that's some kind of great intellectual task?) or "don't know about other options".
A graphic of the periodic table was displayed, with the elements Ar, Cl, He, N, and Zn highlighted. The text of the question asked which element would have chemical properties most similar to Ar. As long as you know that the table is arranged so that elements in vertical columns share similar chemical properties, you'll get it correct.
But that's exactly my point! We didn't even cover that much in my grade school and middle school science classes. It would have been just as easy for me in eighth grade to think "Well, it's right next to Chlorine, so it's probably similar to the one it's next to." And even if I had answered it correctly, it simply would have been dumb luck.
I'm not sure what experience everyone else had, but until my freshman year of high school, pretty much every science class I took was a complete joke. All of the assignments were essentially basic reading comprehension exercises that involved absolutely no use of any kind of critical thinking or experimentation. TFA said they were asking questions about the periodic table on the test. I can personally attest that the periodic tables in my grade school and middle school were nothing but decorations. We never used them or talked about them. All of the real effort was put into English and Math, because those were the two areas that the state (Arizona in this case) routinely tested us on. Science was virtually ignored.
It's things like this that make me hate the entire crooked system. The federal gov't wants more people to go to college, so they tell the financial institutions "Hey, lend these people all the money you want, we'll make sure they pay it back even if they declare bankruptcy." Meanwhile, the state gov't, elected on a platform of lowering taxes while providing all the same services (the essential contradiction of basically all elected governments), decides to slash education spending. The universities scramble to cut costs but immediate stop when they figure out that the banks are perfectly happy to lend $100,000 to 18 year-olds with no credit history and instead jack up their tuition. At the end of this wretched cycle, you've completely transferred all of the burden to people who took out loans because they couldn't pay for college in the first place and all the kids with rich parents can't seem to figure out what all the fuss is about. Even the kids who get scholarships are screwed because they generally don't scale to handle increasing tuition rates. My freshman year of college, my scholarship paid for an entire year's worth of tuition. By the end of my senior year, it covered less than one semester.
This just in, gas stations rolling out new chargers that will charge your vehicle for a whole week and it will only take 2 minutes. Please have your credit card handy.
That's a fair point, but I could still see this being very practical if it's the type of thing you could do at home. I really like the idea of not having to worry about whether or not my car has enough "juice" (be it gasoline or electricity) because it gets fully charged every night.
Citation needed. The correct per capita GDP figures are:
Norway: $53,300
Sweden: $40,600
Denmark: $40,200
Finland: $38,300
How the *hell* did the parent comment get modded "+5 Informative"?!?! It mentions some *very* specific and *very* dramatic figured with absolutely no attribution. At least give it a cursory google for fuck's sake!
Many credit unions support shared branching which lets allows you to cash checks, make deposits, etc at other credit union in the same network. I've lived in a city that has no branches of my actual credit union for 5 years now and honestly it doesn't bother me that much (although I will probably get a new account at one of the local credit unions soon).
Slashdot Mirror
"SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming" by Bill Karwin. If you design database schemata from scratch, it's well worth your time! For a lot of web applications, the database is the foundation upon which the rest of the app rests. You can have the best frontend and backend code in the world but if your database schema is a mess, you application will still be difficult to work with. This book saved me coworker and I at a previous job from making some serious errors that we definitely would have regretted, especially after years of data were accumulated.
When hiring, I often found the CS majors as having an inflated sense of their own abilities, and a general lack of knowledge of how programming is generally done in the real world - hacking on some other schmuck's broken legacy code that nobody can figure out. And a kid who started programming in high school and just kept working at it may have five years of real experience before they get their first job, and does it because he/she can't _stop_ doing it.
I'm really sick of how this seems to come up every time every time people debate the merits of a CS degree. Does it occur to nobody that maybe, just maybe, a fair chunk of the students who chose CS in college are also the kids who started programming in high school (or even earlier!) and have a fair amount of practical experience before they ever get hired because they work on their own projects? And that maybe their CS degree helped open their eyes to new ideas and furthered their learning? I don't understand why so many people on Slashdot insist on creating this false dichotomy, where either a person is passionate about programming and technology and learns a lot on their own or they have a CS degree and never pursue anything outside of their coursework.
Yes, it's true that some CS grads have an overinflated sense of their abilities and are clueless about the real world. But on the flip side of the coin, I've met some *amazingly* egotistical "self-taught" programmers who think they are geniuses because "I taught myself what those fancy pants CS kids *had* to go to school for!" I've seen people like that roll their eyes at "academic" concepts like database normalization and foreign key constraints because they "need to get the job done" and "don't have time for this crap".
All in all, I think I'm a much better developer for having gotten a CS degree. I think the most helpful way of thinking about my degree was understanding that it was a starting point, not an ending point. By the end of my degree, I had been exposed to broad enough range of stuff to be able to dive into subjects I found interesting without feeling like I was having to start at square one. It gave me the practical basis and theoretical problem solving skills to allow me to pick up new languages, technologies, and ideas.
This isn't an issue of freedom of speech or freedom of religion. Eich wasn't fired; he stepped down. To be fair, there was probably a lot of pressure on him to step down, but at the end of the day I think all the higher ups at Mozilla (Eich included) realized that the revelation of Eich's donation to Prop 8 was doing a huge amount of damage to the Mozilla brand. In addition to managerial duties, a big part of being a CEO is being the face of a company. There's a reason why many companies vet potential CEOs the same way political parties vet candidates; if you do something that pisses people off, particularly people in your key demographic, you are hurting your company. A lot of young people use Mozilla products and young people in the United States overwhelmingly support gay marriage. Mozilla didn't want Firefox to become "the browser made by that guy who hates gay people" in the eyes of the public, so they made the call of getting rid of a very new CEO to avoid further public pressure. I would imagine that there's still a job for Eich at Mozilla if he wants it, but probably a lot more behind the scenes.
(source) There's a particular aesthetic to metal that some people, like myself, absolutely love and the tritone and dissonance are huge parts of that.
The autopsy showed that Martin was 5'11" and weighed 158 pounds at the time of his death. When Zimmerman was arrested, he was recorded as being 5'8" and weighing 185 pounds. The has been a lot of misinformation about the height and weight of both Martin and Zimmerman, with Martin's defenders claiming that Zimmerman weighed over 200 pounds (which had previously, but lost weight later) and Zimmerman's defenders vastly exaggerating Martin's height.
Both of these lists are solid gold. Thank you so much!
I think this is a very good approach. Thanks for the suggestion!
First of all, thank you so much for all of the responses! I've seen some really good ideas and I appreciate all the input. It seems that I unfortunately wasn't quite clear enough in my initial post. The other developer and I have been trying to get the management to spring for an online service like Github or Kiln. To answer a few frequently asked questions:
Q: Why don't you just run git/svn/hg on your local machine? A: I am running hg on my local machine currently for version control. While this is much better than no version control at all, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of collaborating with the other dev and managing deployment.
Q: Why not run your own server? A: The other dev and I have talked about this, but there are a few problems. First and foremost, it takes time to setup and maintain such a server and the cost of many online services like Github are pretty modest. The other problem is that we're not really in control of the servers and equipment. That's handled by a separate IT group, so we would have to get them involved to make this happen. Then there's the fact that the IT guys at our work mostly deal with Windows servers while we're mostly *nix fans. Neither one of us has setup a Windows box as a VC server before, so I'm really not sure how well-supported that is. What is really boils down to is the fact we could get a month of hosting at Github that would suit our needs for about the cost of an hour of work from on person. Therefore we kinda figured that it might just be easiest/cheapest to go with a service like Github.
Anyway, thanks again for all the responses!
The war on drugs, as well as all other wars, only profit the profiteers. The wars are a lost cause. The first casualties in any conflict are truth and innocence.
Michael Douglas, in his role as Judge Robert Wakefield in the film Traffic , said it best:
"If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don't know how you wage war on your own family."
Very effectively, as a matter of fact.
Obviously they didn't teach reading at that school?
"Most of them are clueless..."
I'm not getting into specifics of your CS profs and that would be short sighted. I'll bet you found that quite a few used Macs, some used other things as well.
So yes, there are a lot of moo cows out there who follow the herd mentality.. Next point?
Typically you have to be able to read and write to go to college, so no, they didn't "teach reading" :p
Back to the point of the discussion, Windows is generally accepted to have a market share of around 80-90% and Mac OS X is generally accepted to have a market share of 5-10%. If you were utterly clueless about computers, would you buy a computer that runs an operating system used by most of your friends, colleagues, relatives, etc and is generally cheaper or would you buy a computer that you knew most of your friends, colleagues, etc wouldn't be able to help you with and was generally more expensive? My guess is that you would go for the former (Windows) even if money was no object. This is why my father (who isn't a "computer guy" at all) sticks to Windows.
This also is why I resent the notion that Mac users are "clueless", even when prefaced by wavering modifiers like "most". You've probably guessed by now that I am a Mac user (well at home anyway). My main hobby is recording music and my decision to buy a Mac was greatly informed by positive experiences I had recording music on my brother's Mac, which was much more stable and adept at detecting and using my recording interface and midi controllers than my computer at the time, which ran Windows. I also really liked the fact that underneath it all, Mac OS X is Unix. So I saved up some money and when the time was right, I bought a Macbook Pro. That was four years ago and my computer is still running perfectly fine and doing all the things I want it to.
The thing about my story is that it's not terribly unique. I can honestly say that *everyone* I know who switched to using a Mac from Windows did so after researching their options and doing a cost-benefit analysis. Compare this to the majority of Windows users I know, who use Windows because "it's what everyone else uses".
1) MAC User may be more affluent. It's not always the case, but most of the time there's probably a lot of credit card debt associated with the individual as well. 2) Most of them are clueless about technology and just want to leave it to someone else. The mentality "it just works" comes to mind but these folks don't shop around. They see their friends with Apple stuff, they buy Apple stuff. 3) Like rounded corners a lot and need to have the latest fashion. Fondleslabs and Mac Books along with Iphones and Ipods are the new jewelry.. It's a status symbol.
So Why wouldn't they go to more expensive hotels where they can show off their bling? I mean honestly, it's not rare to see apple products "In Use" on multiple TV shows, so if the shallow actors are playing with a mac, why can't everybody else? It's really great marketing PR and hype and Orbitz picking up on this is just an astute observation on customer preference. No if you'll excuse me I'm going down to my local Apple store and speak Farsi and try to by a mac book.
Cool story bro! Never mind that no less than four of my CS professors used Macs! Clearly they too are clueless about technology, unlike an enlightened, discerning consumer who buys a Windows laptop because "it's what I have at work, so I'm used to it."
Why would you say that? The information is freely available. Your logic would seem to suggest that actively encouraging people to be healthier would also somehow circumvent natural selection, because we would be rewarding the people who were too lazy to figure it out for themselves. Of course, this is all a moot point since your understanding of natural selection (or at least the way you are trying to apply natural selection to this issue) is deeply flawed.
No, it's about banning sodas larger than 16 fl. oz in restaurants. If you want to drink 32 fl. oz of soda (the size of a large at McDonald's), you still can do it, it'll probably just cost you a little bit more (if you buy two) or take a bit more time (if you get a refill). It is a very mild way to nudge people into drinking less soda by making them think a bit more about how much they're drinking.
It's pretty clear that you lack even a high school level understanding of natural selection and didn't read the article at all. How your comment relating the concept you don't understand to the article you didn't read was modded "+5 Insightful" is frankly beyond me.
You don't get it. This is a proposal that curbs the ability of Machiavellian vendors to profit because of people's misunderstanding of basic economics. It's a regulation of the vendors, not the buyers.
Here's how it works: Most people don't really want the oversized cup. The theaters, stadiums, etc sell it because people will pay $1 more for a larger amount that has an incremental cost for the vendor that is significantly less than selling another cup.
In other words, the vendors sell it for no other reason that it's insanely profitable to get people to pay more for something they don't need at all (but feel as if they should want because it seems like a good price for the excess amount). People see that the second 16 ounces cost significantly less than the first 16 ounces, so they feel compelled to buy it in order to get "a good deal". However, most buyers don't consider that the value to them of the second 16 ounces is close to $0, but they're paying close to $1 for it.
Exactly! Soda is almost PERFECTLY engineered to exploit this mentality. It's cheap as hell to produce, it's carbonated (so you can't really save it for later without it becoming flat and gross), and (at least in the US) it's generally served over ice, so if you let it sit for too long, it will become diluted, warm and *really* gross. Every time you buy soda at a restaurant, vending machine, gas station, etc, you have to ask yourself "How much soda do I want to drink right now?" The price per ounces is basically irrelevant; you're never getting a "good deal".
As long as the government is intervening in their every day life by providing a safety net for their irresponsible decisions, how is this a bad thing?
Who is the government to tell people that they're being irresponsible? And, if they are but aren't harming anyone else, so what?
Do you really, seriously, truthfully believe that the Nanny State banning big sodas won't prevent soda addicts from... drum roll please... buying two of them?
All this really does is prove that politicians are stupider than people who drink ten liters of soda in a day.
So back in 1993 when the largest soda was say, 20 floz (I can't remember the exact numbers), did you go and buy two of them? Of course not! That would have seemed weird. But now, nobody bats an eye and someone getting a 40 floz soda, especially when it's the default size for a value meal. The fact is, serving sizes are normative. I don't think it's a coincidence that they correlate strongly with the rise on obesity in the US.
Here's a quick anecdote: my care is a '96 model. The cup holders can't fit any size bigger than a small from most fast food restaurants these days. Imagine the psychological impact of having all cup holders be this size. It would tend to stop and make you think, "Man, I'm drinking a *lot* of soda!".
Because the government has a vested interest in keeping the population (at least somewhat) healthy. Try being an economic or military superpower when a significant percentage of your population are obese and suffering from diseases like type 2 diabetes. You won't get very far.
How on earth would they take themselves out of the gene pool? As long as they survive long enough to reproduce, they are still in the gene pool and they will have "won" the evolutionary contest. Eating junk food and drinking tons of soda will not kill you before you are old enough to reproduce, but it will make you unhealthy, unhappy and a burden on the heath care system.
People fail to understand that in biology, "fitness" has a very specific meaning, namely that you are fit enough (with respect to your environment) to survive long enough to reproduce. As long has you meet those criteria, you are, evolutionarily speaking, "fit". Thus the requirements for being "fit" in human society have essentially remained unchanged since you were a kid, barring perhaps a few vaccines.
As for the alleged rise in autism and food allergies, I think that's simply a case of parents have a greater awareness of these phenomena now. In earlier generations, children with allergies might simply be seen as not liking certain foods and children with autism would just be considered a bit "odd".
Saying that we shouldn't encourage people to eat healthier foods because they will "take themselves out of the gene pool" is almost as bad as saying that we should ban eye glasses. <sarcasm>After all, the people with poor vision will tend to get into fewer accidents! And if we're lucky, these accidents will kill them in childhood! Why, in a few generations we might cure all eye diseases! </sarcasm>
It seems like in a lot of national security matters, citizens would not have access to the same information that members of Congress would due to some or all of it being classified. However, this lack of access would not stop some citizens from forming a strong opinion. A perfect example of this is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There were people who were vehemently for and against it, but neither group had access to the same information that the members of Congress had. How would you weigh popular support against your own assessment of information that you *knew* your constituents did not have access to?
Actually, it looks like I'm wrong on this. MOSES is the one instructing the army officers to kill all the boys and non-virginal women and keep the virgins for themselves.
Every bigger religion has had bad apples, that's true. What's unique about Islam is that their leader Muhammed himself raped, enslaved, kidnapped, murdered and at least ordered people to stone in his name. This is pretty well documented in Hadith, an important source of Islamic knowledge for every interpretation of Islam as far as I know.
Unique? Have you read Numbers Chapter 31, in which Moses, the most important prophet in Judaism and the author of the Torah (at least according by tradition), is instructed by God to take vengeance on a rival tribe and:
(verses 17-18) That's some pretty viciously evil stuff. People tend to have a blindspot when it comes to religions with which they are more familiar. They think of friends and family members who practice that faith and disregard the fact that centuries ago, people had vastly different ideas about what was and wasn't morally acceptable.
For the record, I had three CS professors in college that used Macs and at least two of them had been Apple enthusiasts for 20 odd years. It always baffles me when people act like Mac users are "too stupid" to use Windows (as if that's some kind of great intellectual task?) or "don't know about other options".
It was a fairly basic, conceptual-level question.
A graphic of the periodic table was displayed, with the elements Ar, Cl, He, N, and Zn highlighted. The text of the question asked which element would have chemical properties most similar to Ar. As long as you know that the table is arranged so that elements in vertical columns share similar chemical properties, you'll get it correct.
link
But that's exactly my point! We didn't even cover that much in my grade school and middle school science classes. It would have been just as easy for me in eighth grade to think "Well, it's right next to Chlorine, so it's probably similar to the one it's next to." And even if I had answered it correctly, it simply would have been dumb luck.
I'm not sure what experience everyone else had, but until my freshman year of high school, pretty much every science class I took was a complete joke. All of the assignments were essentially basic reading comprehension exercises that involved absolutely no use of any kind of critical thinking or experimentation. TFA said they were asking questions about the periodic table on the test. I can personally attest that the periodic tables in my grade school and middle school were nothing but decorations. We never used them or talked about them. All of the real effort was put into English and Math, because those were the two areas that the state (Arizona in this case) routinely tested us on. Science was virtually ignored.
It's things like this that make me hate the entire crooked system. The federal gov't wants more people to go to college, so they tell the financial institutions "Hey, lend these people all the money you want, we'll make sure they pay it back even if they declare bankruptcy." Meanwhile, the state gov't, elected on a platform of lowering taxes while providing all the same services (the essential contradiction of basically all elected governments), decides to slash education spending. The universities scramble to cut costs but immediate stop when they figure out that the banks are perfectly happy to lend $100,000 to 18 year-olds with no credit history and instead jack up their tuition. At the end of this wretched cycle, you've completely transferred all of the burden to people who took out loans because they couldn't pay for college in the first place and all the kids with rich parents can't seem to figure out what all the fuss is about. Even the kids who get scholarships are screwed because they generally don't scale to handle increasing tuition rates. My freshman year of college, my scholarship paid for an entire year's worth of tuition. By the end of my senior year, it covered less than one semester.
This just in, gas stations rolling out new chargers that will charge your vehicle for a whole week and it will only take 2 minutes. Please have your credit card handy.
That's a fair point, but I could still see this being very practical if it's the type of thing you could do at home. I really like the idea of not having to worry about whether or not my car has enough "juice" (be it gasoline or electricity) because it gets fully charged every night.
Per Capita GDP of...
Finland: $34,585 Denmark: $37,585 Sweden: $47,934
Norway: $84,443
Citation needed. The correct per capita GDP figures are:
Norway: $53,300
Sweden: $40,600
Denmark: $40,200
Finland: $38,300
How the *hell* did the parent comment get modded "+5 Informative"?!?! It mentions some *very* specific and *very* dramatic figured with absolutely no attribution. At least give it a cursory google for fuck's sake!
Many credit unions support shared branching which lets allows you to cash checks, make deposits, etc at other credit union in the same network. I've lived in a city that has no branches of my actual credit union for 5 years now and honestly it doesn't bother me that much (although I will probably get a new account at one of the local credit unions soon).