It's not necessarily a matter of being careless. Some people tend to worry more and be more risk averse than others. So even if the probability is low, they would still buy insurance. This allows insurance to be cheaper for other people.
Insurance also allows expenditure to be "smoothened" out, you pay out more on average, but in event "stuff happens" you don't have to do a big pay out. This can be a good thing.
You might not be top notch talent, but on the flipside are they a top notch company that the _top_ people are fighting to get into? In most cases, no. So they're getting leftovers.
So if you're better than the average leftover, you can ask those questions and even haggle;). Do be pleasant, polite and professional.
I don't presume that at all. You're the one presuming much.
In fact, my question has a better chance of telling me something more about the company (stuff that I can't normally find out easily) than asking questions just to make myself look good to the interviewer - which was what the person replying to me said was a better thing to do.
If you are really desperate for a job, sure do whatever it takes to get the job, take the $$$ and then make escape plans if it goes really bad.
But remember - many people complain about CEOs etc doing something similar and ruining companies. So if you do that, you could be part of the problem too.
Silly? I don't see how that question makes me look bad in the eyes of an employer that I would want to be employed by. It only makes me look bad in the eyes of employers that I don't want to work for.
Better to find out the important things first with practical questions so that I don't waste the company's time and money, and they don't waste my time.
I don't need offers from many companies especially ones that are a poor match. I only need one offer from a company that I wouldn't mind working for.
Maybe if I'm really desperate I'd do that, but for now, I'm not.
While the unions were a problem, I believe the big problem was stuff like GM having to pay for retirees healthcare and pensions.
GM made promises it couldn't keep. It's basically a Ponzi scheme that blew up (only works as long as the company keeps growing).
While shifting that sort of thing to the Government isn't such a bad idea ( the present US system is below par for a developed nation- very expensive and mainly benefits the very rich), if you're not careful, it'll just be the politicians making unkeepable promises for yet another Ponzi scheme that just blows up later.
BTW if governments stopped being so stupid about making life hell for smokers, they'll find that smokers pay for themselves and more. In the UK while smokers cost the NHS 5 billion pounds a year, the tobacco tax revenue is 10 billion. My guess is if you tax stuff right the obese people will also pay for themselves and more too:).
In short, if you do it right it won't be a ponzi scheme - it'll actually be sustainable. While it's unfortunate that it involves the smokers and the obese dying for their country, someone has to make the sacrifices (and hey I'm not obese or a smoker;) ). I figure it's fine as long as they do it of their own informed free will. Discourage people (especially minors) from smoking, but hey if adults want to smoke in "smoking allowed" pubs/establishments (that should be taxed more;) ), let them fucking smoke.
> Because the profits, go back to a corporation that is headquartered in Japan.
So what? I thought the USA was having problems getting tax money from US corporations - so many of the big ones use tax havens. Even if the official HQ is in the USA, they can move the money in so many ways that they end up paying very little to anyone.
I like: "What's the staff turnover rate like? How about in the dept I'd be joining?"
If the staff turnover is high, it's often not a good sign. Poor management or hiring practices, and often you'd be picking up the pieces. This doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't join them, but if the turnover is high, the package better be better - haggle if necessary - esp if they know that now you know their environment "isn't better than industry average" based on the employee turnover rate.
In fact, the Bank Regulator in my country considers high staff turnover a significant negative when doing audits of banks.
1) If people get better than if they didn't get any treatment, then it works. The question is whether it works well enough compared to available treatments. I'd want the best possible treatment for my budget (taking into account side effects and quality of life) if placebo is it, then I hope the placebo works on me.
2) There are a fair number of conventional medicine/treatments that don't work much better than placebo. Worse, if Big Pharma conducts X studies and only shows Y studies to the FDA to make things pass, the passed drugs may not actually work better than placebo - they're just rolling the dice till they get the numbers they want. Don't think they do that? Just look at what they have done with the Hormone Therapy as per the topic.
3) If there is no better treatment possible then you might as well get a placebo (esp if you are susceptible) - doctors have injected saline into burn victims and lied to them telling them it's a pain killer and often it works (as well as a significant amount of morphine). Why do they do it? Because the real pain killers have a high chance of giving big problems to the burn victims.
4) The side effects of doing knee surgeries tend to be far worse than the side effects of sticking a single needle into someone. And conventional medicine has nothing better than acupuncture for the budget of "now discovered to be sham knee surgeries", so they might as well go the cheaper option. Of course nowadays maybe they could try the "inject your own blood that has been concentrated to have more platelets" treatment, but that's expensive and still considered experimental (who knows, the successes might still be due to the placebo effect again;) ).
Chemotherapy in too many cases only benefits a few percentage of people (esp if you look at a >= 5 year timeline).
Perhaps more research needs to be done on the placebo effect. Maybe it is possible to train patients to benefit from the placebo effect without having to be deceived or lied to. Or perhaps there could be a procedure or treatment that helps.
If you don't want patients to be lied to, maybe practitioners could tell patients that conventional studies have shown that acupuncture works no better than a placebo, but in practice it helps X% of people. A significant proportion of people still wouldn't understand the full implications when you tell them that (they are the ones who don't read anything and just "click-thru"). Perhaps these people are the ones which acupuncture might work better on;).
Lastly, the nocebo effect can also be rather strong, so if in studies, some people strongly believe that certain stuff won't work, that might skew the results too. Maybe the treatment actually works - just too many people believe it doesn't help. There are actually people who feel pain if you tell them there's a WiFi AP on;). If you do a scan of them the brain looks like its experiencing pain - even though there is no good reason for it.
That's nice. Since I am not a UK citizen, I think it is good for me if they continue to use such a broken system.
Because if my country becomes even crappier, it might make it easier for me to move to the UK, and get an ID that's "Entitled to benefits":).
Seriously though, I was just talking about the proper way of doing things, and how even the proper way won't work that well against the evil terrorists (which is what is often used as an excuse to introduce such systems).
Yeah I know, I'm just talking about the next step that they're probably going to suggest as a solution, and how that might not be so wonderful either;).
If I copy your DVD, the player doesn't care - it works.
The ID problem is different - just because I took your _genuine_ passport, doesn't mean I can use it to travel. The guy would notice that I look different from the photo.
If they digitally sign the ID, it doesn't make copying or reading harder, but it makes tampering and forgery harder.
A Dictatorship will find it very useful to be able to revoke certs of dissidents. Such things might be more useful against troublesome sheep, than renegade wolves.
So be careful, some solutions may be very good at solving rather different problems from what was "advertised".
Of course it can be copied. However if I try to show YOUR ID card "as is", to a guard it might not work - he might realize that I look a bit different from you.
If the ID contains a digital store of your photo and other biometrics on it that is digitally _signed_, even though it can be copied it'll be much harder to tamper with it. And you can only create a new ID if you can sign it with a valid signature.
Of course in the real world, the _printed_ photo might be all the guards check.
Also in the real world, creating fake IDs might not be that hard - you might be able to bribe/trick someone to create a new legit ID for you, or steal/borrow the signing machines + keys (or the backup certs+keys).
BUT, once they realize what has happened, they can revoke your certs (and maybe even those who were responsible for helping you). While this sort of thing might not be that effective against suicidal terrorists, it works well for oppressing your own citizens.
If they start tying these IDs to travel and payment, then it works even better for keeping the sheep in line...
> For example, people often feel better after acupuncture, but studies show that it doesn't actually matter where you put the needles, just that the patient thinks you know what you're doing. This means that acupuncture doesn't "work", for any reasonable definition of "work".
If the acupuncture is for reducing pain, and the people experience less pain (compared to not doing anything), then it works.
The question is whether it works comparably well with conventional medicine and with fewer side effects, or side effects that are not as bad.
Very often the placebo effect in a study is very significant. I wonder if anyone has done studies to see if the same bunch of people are consistently sensitive to the placebo effect, and if a consistent group of people are insensitive to it, or it's just random. If there's a consistent bunch of people then for certain stuff placebos might work much better for them than many conventional treatments/medication.
Maybe we'll have people carrying around medical cards that would indicate (secretly?) "placebo/nocebo sensitivity" in addition to their list of allergies etc;).
Yeah, and then when they get older we can allow them to go to Iraq to be blown to bits.
I very rarely use the word "fuck" (unlike some who use it as punctuation), but if I ever get shot and am still able to say something, I think "fuck" might be up there on my list of choice words to say.
Worse, when I tested on kubuntu 8.04 it's still the same behaviour, BUT with the addition that they've got it to sort by alphabetical order by default.
That's worse since if I have say 20 tasks, alphabetical would mean the new window is inserted in the middle of "somewhere". Close one window and open two new windows and it's hard for me to predict where the resulting tasks will be on the taskbar.
Maybe I've strange tastes, but I don't see how the addition of alphabetical sorting on top of "top-down-left-right sort" is an improvement in UI terms.
KDE used to be better than GNOME. This and other stupidity makes KDE a sad joke to me.
How does that help? That's still two clicks. One to select the correct desktop and one to select the window.
With my current method, I just click on the relevant taskbar item.
Here's an example of what would be more useful to me:
Currently most desktop environments already keep track of the existing windows in a stack sorted in the order of most recently active to last. This is for the "alt-tab" feature.
What I want is that the UI _automatically_ assign key strokes to the last "n" tasks/windows in the "last active/focused" stack.
winkey+0= renumber current stack from most recently used to oldest used (alt+r?), where:
winkey+1= current window
winkey+2= previous window
winkey+3= window before previous window
winkey+4=...
Say you clicked on tasks E, B, A , D, C on the taskbar (or selected them in some other ways), and then pressed winkey+0.
then winkey+1= C (for example: an ssh session to a machine X) winkey+2= D (ssh to a machine Y) winkey+3= A (some documentation?) winkey+4= B (notepad of stuff to be copied/pasted from/to machines) winkey+5= E (edit of source code) winkey+6= whatever was active before E and so on.
AND it _stays_ that way until you do winkey+0 again.
So even after you press winkey+4 to switch to B, winkey+1 still switches to C (until you "renumber" again).
With this feature, I do NOT have to spend minutes to custom bind keys to apps/windows. I just click on the bunch of windows I want to work with and then press: winkey+0.
After that, I can instantly switch amongst any of the windows by pressing winkey+<1-9>.
If winkey is not acceptable pick some other key or keycombo.
I've actually suggested this to KDE more than 3 years ago. But nobody seems interested. Maybe it's only be useful for me?
It's quite disappointing to me. There are so many ways of making things faster and more efficient but Microsoft just moves things around and caters for the naive users without adding stuff that allows skilled/trained users to be augmented dramatically.
As for "Linux Desktop", they're busy giving us silliness like "wobbly windows" and other "UI" equivalents of annoying cutscenes. The "cutscenes" (aka animations etc) might be cool the first time you see them, but after the 100th time, they're useless crap that gets in the way of what you want to do.
I'm one of those with double height taskbars in windows classic mode. I find it faster to be able to directly click on a taskbar item to select any of the 30+ windows open, than to click one of 6 items, then click again to select one of 5 items. I don't care how cluttered or messy it makes it look.
I've used KDE before and the problem with KDE was (is?) the sort order is wrong when you have a double/multi height taskbar - the items are organized from top to bottom then only left to right. This is bad because if one item is removed, everything to the right of it gets shuffled up or down. So you lose track of where stuff is. Windows does it right - right to left then only top to bottom. Perhaps I should put the taskbar on the side to sidestep the problem.
The other problem with KDE is "everything" is named starting with a "K" which makes it harder to scan to find stuff quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
No need to be so insulting.
It's not necessarily a matter of being careless. Some people tend to worry more and be more risk averse than others. So even if the probability is low, they would still buy insurance. This allows insurance to be cheaper for other people.
Insurance also allows expenditure to be "smoothened" out, you pay out more on average, but in event "stuff happens" you don't have to do a big pay out. This can be a good thing.
How about the relationship with Microsoft?
What are Microsoft's licensing terms and costs for 10" netbooks, 12" netbooks and >12" notebooks?
It's not that unequal.
;). Do be pleasant, polite and professional.
You might not be top notch talent, but on the flipside are they a top notch company that the _top_ people are fighting to get into? In most cases, no. So they're getting leftovers.
So if you're better than the average leftover, you can ask those questions and even haggle
I don't presume that at all. You're the one presuming much.
In fact, my question has a better chance of telling me something more about the company (stuff that I can't normally find out easily) than asking questions just to make myself look good to the interviewer - which was what the person replying to me said was a better thing to do.
If you are really desperate for a job, sure do whatever it takes to get the job, take the $$$ and then make escape plans if it goes really bad.
But remember - many people complain about CEOs etc doing something similar and ruining companies. So if you do that, you could be part of the problem too.
Silly? I don't see how that question makes me look bad in the eyes of an employer that I would want to be employed by. It only makes me look bad in the eyes of employers that I don't want to work for.
Better to find out the important things first with practical questions so that I don't waste the company's time and money, and they don't waste my time.
I don't need offers from many companies especially ones that are a poor match. I only need one offer from a company that I wouldn't mind working for.
Maybe if I'm really desperate I'd do that, but for now, I'm not.
While the unions were a problem, I believe the big problem was stuff like GM having to pay for retirees healthcare and pensions.
:).
;) ). I figure it's fine as long as they do it of their own informed free will. Discourage people (especially minors) from smoking, but hey if adults want to smoke in "smoking allowed" pubs/establishments (that should be taxed more ;) ), let them fucking smoke.
GM made promises it couldn't keep. It's basically a Ponzi scheme that blew up (only works as long as the company keeps growing).
While shifting that sort of thing to the Government isn't such a bad idea ( the present US system is below par for a developed nation- very expensive and mainly benefits the very rich), if you're not careful, it'll just be the politicians making unkeepable promises for yet another Ponzi scheme that just blows up later.
BTW if governments stopped being so stupid about making life hell for smokers, they'll find that smokers pay for themselves and more. In the UK while smokers cost the NHS 5 billion pounds a year, the tobacco tax revenue is 10 billion. My guess is if you tax stuff right the obese people will also pay for themselves and more too
In short, if you do it right it won't be a ponzi scheme - it'll actually be sustainable. While it's unfortunate that it involves the smokers and the obese dying for their country, someone has to make the sacrifices (and hey I'm not obese or a smoker
> Because the profits, go back to a corporation that is headquartered in Japan.
So what? I thought the USA was having problems getting tax money from US corporations - so many of the big ones use tax havens. Even if the official HQ is in the USA, they can move the money in so many ways that they end up paying very little to anyone.
Yeah euphemistic questions FTW.
I like: "What's the staff turnover rate like? How about in the dept I'd be joining?"
If the staff turnover is high, it's often not a good sign. Poor management or hiring practices, and often you'd be picking up the pieces. This doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't join them, but if the turnover is high, the package better be better - haggle if necessary - esp if they know that now you know their environment "isn't better than industry average" based on the employee turnover rate.
In fact, the Bank Regulator in my country considers high staff turnover a significant negative when doing audits of banks.
> They have a lot of neat tools to make the process easier and generally waste scammer time.
Does that include AI software?
You are evil you know that? ;)
1) If people get better than if they didn't get any treatment, then it works. The question is whether it works well enough compared to available treatments. I'd want the best possible treatment for my budget (taking into account side effects and quality of life) if placebo is it, then I hope the placebo works on me.
;) ).
;).
;). If you do a scan of them the brain looks like its experiencing pain - even though there is no good reason for it.
:)
2) There are a fair number of conventional medicine/treatments that don't work much better than placebo. Worse, if Big Pharma conducts X studies and only shows Y studies to the FDA to make things pass, the passed drugs may not actually work better than placebo - they're just rolling the dice till they get the numbers they want. Don't think they do that? Just look at what they have done with the Hormone Therapy as per the topic.
3) If there is no better treatment possible then you might as well get a placebo (esp if you are susceptible) - doctors have injected saline into burn victims and lied to them telling them it's a pain killer and often it works (as well as a significant amount of morphine). Why do they do it? Because the real pain killers have a high chance of giving big problems to the burn victims.
4) The side effects of doing knee surgeries tend to be far worse than the side effects of sticking a single needle into someone. And conventional medicine has nothing better than acupuncture for the budget of "now discovered to be sham knee surgeries", so they might as well go the cheaper option. Of course nowadays maybe they could try the "inject your own blood that has been concentrated to have more platelets" treatment, but that's expensive and still considered experimental (who knows, the successes might still be due to the placebo effect again
Chemotherapy in too many cases only benefits a few percentage of people (esp if you look at a >= 5 year timeline).
Perhaps more research needs to be done on the placebo effect. Maybe it is possible to train patients to benefit from the placebo effect without having to be deceived or lied to. Or perhaps there could be a procedure or treatment that helps.
If you don't want patients to be lied to, maybe practitioners could tell patients that conventional studies have shown that acupuncture works no better than a placebo, but in practice it helps X% of people. A significant proportion of people still wouldn't understand the full implications when you tell them that (they are the ones who don't read anything and just "click-thru"). Perhaps these people are the ones which acupuncture might work better on
Lastly, the nocebo effect can also be rather strong, so if in studies, some people strongly believe that certain stuff won't work, that might skew the results too. Maybe the treatment actually works - just too many people believe it doesn't help. There are actually people who feel pain if you tell them there's a WiFi AP on
<matrix>Your mind makes it real.</matrix>
That's nice. Since I am not a UK citizen, I think it is good for me if they continue to use such a broken system.
:).
Because if my country becomes even crappier, it might make it easier for me to move to the UK, and get an ID that's "Entitled to benefits"
Seriously though, I was just talking about the proper way of doing things, and how even the proper way won't work that well against the evil terrorists (which is what is often used as an excuse to introduce such systems).
Yeah I know, I'm just talking about the next step that they're probably going to suggest as a solution, and how that might not be so wonderful either ;).
DRM is a different thing from ID.
If I copy your DVD, the player doesn't care - it works.
The ID problem is different - just because I took your _genuine_ passport, doesn't mean I can use it to travel. The guy would notice that I look different from the photo.
If they digitally sign the ID, it doesn't make copying or reading harder, but it makes tampering and forgery harder.
A Dictatorship will find it very useful to be able to revoke certs of dissidents. Such things might be more useful against troublesome sheep, than renegade wolves.
So be careful, some solutions may be very good at solving rather different problems from what was "advertised".
Of course it can be copied. However if I try to show YOUR ID card "as is", to a guard it might not work - he might realize that I look a bit different from you.
If the ID contains a digital store of your photo and other biometrics on it that is digitally _signed_, even though it can be copied it'll be much harder to tamper with it. And you can only create a new ID if you can sign it with a valid signature.
Of course in the real world, the _printed_ photo might be all the guards check.
Also in the real world, creating fake IDs might not be that hard - you might be able to bribe/trick someone to create a new legit ID for you, or steal/borrow the signing machines + keys (or the backup certs+keys).
BUT, once they realize what has happened, they can revoke your certs (and maybe even those who were responsible for helping you). While this sort of thing might not be that effective against suicidal terrorists, it works well for oppressing your own citizens.
If they start tying these IDs to travel and payment, then it works even better for keeping the sheep in line...
Go figure.
Would this help?
http://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/eczema/news/20090427/bleach-baths-may-help-kids-with-ezcema
Remember - use a _dilute_ solution. And consult a doc about this - maybe your eczema is different.
I'm pretty sure that hooking up a car battery to your brain can cure you of AIDS.
The problems are the resulting side effects and reduced longevity.
> For example, people often feel better after acupuncture, but studies show that it doesn't actually matter where you put the needles, just that the patient thinks you know what you're doing. This means that acupuncture doesn't "work", for any reasonable definition of "work".
;).
If the acupuncture is for reducing pain, and the people experience less pain (compared to not doing anything), then it works.
The question is whether it works comparably well with conventional medicine and with fewer side effects, or side effects that are not as bad.
Very often the placebo effect in a study is very significant. I wonder if anyone has done studies to see if the same bunch of people are consistently sensitive to the placebo effect, and if a consistent group of people are insensitive to it, or it's just random. If there's a consistent bunch of people then for certain stuff placebos might work much better for them than many conventional treatments/medication.
Maybe we'll have people carrying around medical cards that would indicate (secretly?) "placebo/nocebo sensitivity" in addition to their list of allergies etc
What's so special about Twitter's architecture?
Is DDoSing the login servers difficult?
Yeah, and then when they get older we can allow them to go to Iraq to be blown to bits.
I very rarely use the word "fuck" (unlike some who use it as punctuation), but if I ever get shot and am still able to say something, I think "fuck" might be up there on my list of choice words to say.
> Because that's one of those things that would be instantly recognizable and universally agreed-upon as a UI fuck-up.
Not really. See:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99905
Worse, when I tested on kubuntu 8.04 it's still the same behaviour, BUT with the addition that they've got it to sort by alphabetical order by default.
That's worse since if I have say 20 tasks, alphabetical would mean the new window is inserted in the middle of "somewhere". Close one window and open two new windows and it's hard for me to predict where the resulting tasks will be on the taskbar.
Maybe I've strange tastes, but I don't see how the addition of alphabetical sorting on top of "top-down-left-right sort" is an improvement in UI terms.
KDE used to be better than GNOME. This and other stupidity makes KDE a sad joke to me.
How does that help? That's still two clicks. One to select the correct desktop and one to select the window.
...
With my current method, I just click on the relevant taskbar item.
Here's an example of what would be more useful to me:
Currently most desktop environments already keep track of the existing windows in a stack sorted in the order of most recently active to last. This is for the "alt-tab" feature.
What I want is that the UI _automatically_ assign key strokes to the last "n" tasks/windows in the "last active/focused" stack.
winkey+0= renumber current stack from most recently used to oldest used (alt+r?),
where:
winkey+1= current window
winkey+2= previous window
winkey+3= window before previous window
winkey+4=
Say you clicked on tasks E, B, A , D, C on the taskbar (or selected them in some other ways), and then pressed winkey+0.
then
winkey+1= C (for example: an ssh session to a machine X)
winkey+2= D (ssh to a machine Y)
winkey+3= A (some documentation?)
winkey+4= B (notepad of stuff to be copied/pasted from/to machines)
winkey+5= E (edit of source code)
winkey+6= whatever was active before E
and so on.
AND it _stays_ that way until you do winkey+0 again.
So even after you press winkey+4 to switch to B, winkey+1 still switches to C (until you "renumber" again).
With this feature, I do NOT have to spend minutes to custom bind keys to apps/windows. I just click on the bunch of windows I want to work with and then press: winkey+0.
After that, I can instantly switch amongst any of the windows by pressing winkey+<1-9>.
If winkey is not acceptable pick some other key or keycombo.
I've actually suggested this to KDE more than 3 years ago. But nobody seems interested. Maybe it's only be useful for me?
It's quite disappointing to me. There are so many ways of making things faster and more efficient but Microsoft just moves things around and caters for the naive users without adding stuff that allows skilled/trained users to be augmented dramatically.
As for "Linux Desktop", they're busy giving us silliness like "wobbly windows" and other "UI" equivalents of annoying cutscenes. The "cutscenes" (aka animations etc) might be cool the first time you see them, but after the 100th time, they're useless crap that gets in the way of what you want to do.
I'm one of those with double height taskbars in windows classic mode. I find it faster to be able to directly click on a taskbar item to select any of the 30+ windows open, than to click one of 6 items, then click again to select one of 5 items. I don't care how cluttered or messy it makes it look.
I've used KDE before and the problem with KDE was (is?) the sort order is wrong when you have a double/multi height taskbar - the items are organized from top to bottom then only left to right. This is bad because if one item is removed, everything to the right of it gets shuffled up or down. So you lose track of where stuff is. Windows does it right - right to left then only top to bottom. Perhaps I should put the taskbar on the side to sidestep the problem.
The other problem with KDE is "everything" is named starting with a "K" which makes it harder to scan to find stuff quickly.
"We only have well regulated markets."
You made an error too.
It might still be better to be treated as having free will but failing, than be defective machinery that failed.
A lot of criminals will pose a net cost to society even if they were rehabilitated successfully, but we still do not discard them lightly.
In contrast we tend to stop repairing machines soon after it stops making economic sense.
Illusion or not, it and other beliefs has produced our not so illusory society.